Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa

ISBN-13: 9780199768660 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 352 str.

Alan Mikhail

Opis

From Morocco to Iran and the Black Sea to the Red, Water on Sand rewrites the history of the Middle East and North Africa from the Little Ice Age to the Cold War era. As the first holistic environmental history of the region, it shows the intimate connections between peoples and environments and how these relationships shaped political, economic, and social history in startling and unforeseen ways. Nearly all political powers in the region based their rule on the management and control of natural resources, and nearly all individuals were in constant communion with the natural world. To grasp how these multiple histories were central to the pasts of the Middle East and North Africa, the chapters in this book evidence the power of environmental history to open up new avenues of scholarly inquiry.

Recenzje

Water on Sand, edited by Alan Mikhail, is a diverse and engaging collection of works that bring environmental history to the forefront of the study of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in a compelling way. The essays that compose the book cover a significant swath of time-from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries-as well as a vast geographic space, and they deliver a persuasive call to utilize environmental history as a tool to understand the history of this region better.

O autorze

Alan Mikhail is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History, which won the Roger Owen Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association and the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication from Yale University.