Research Information System
METU Architectural History Graduate Symposium XIII, Ankara, Turkey, 22 December 2023, (Summary Text)
Environmental history is a discipline that aims understanding the effects of the natural environment on the humans, as well as the effects of humans on the natural environment. It examines both living and non-living systems of Earth through a broad range of subjects including diseases, natural disasters, and public health infrastructures, and their relation to the environmental factors such as climate, urbanization, agricultural practices, sanitation, and food security. Within the Ottoman historiography, the study of environmental history starts to appear in the late 2000s. Due to the diversity of geography, climate, and the ecology of the empire, the agricultural productions, epidemics, natural disasters, and urban-rural interactions become subjects to the studies from different disciplines and perspectives. Part of these studies examines the diseases (such as malaria, cholera, and plague), epidemics, microbes, infections with interdisciplinary tools in relation to the political, social, and environmental conditions, and the Ottoman demography. The regulations, precautions, and organizations about the natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, draughts, and famines constitute another focus of the narrative within the field. Public health infrastructures including water lines, sewage system, and waste management besides medical schools and quarantine spaces in different parts of the empire are discussed in other studies. Supply, control, and distribution of the goods, and discussions related to the environmental injustice define another important part of the literature. This review-based study aims to investigate the current literature on the environmental history of the Ottoman Empire from a critical perspective for its themes, approaches, and tools as well as its scope of time and geography. It also tries to reveal the gaps and constraints in this newly emerging field to open dialogues around potential discussions.