Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pftt2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-30T14:42:37.526Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Climate and the Chronology of Iranian History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Alan Mikhail
Alan Mikhail*
Affiliation:
Yale University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article offers a chronology of climate events in Iran over the last millennium to challenge traditional chronologies of the Iranian past based on politics, war, and economics. Using insights gleaned from the historiography of climate in Iran, and from neighboring regions, especially the Ottoman Empire, four episodes of climate cooling show how climate-induced environmental processes affected more people for longer in Iran than did the policies of the empires ostensibly ruling over them. Thus, the article aims to put climate more squarely on the agenda of historians of Iran so that the conjectures advanced here can be confirmed, revised, or discarded through future empirical research. Moreover, the article seeks to bring Iran into wider conversations in environmental and global history.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 6: Special Issue: Environment in Iran: Changes and Challenges , November 2016 , pp. 963 - 972
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society For Iranian Studies 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Alan Mikhail is the author of Nature and Environment in Ottoman Egypt (2011) and The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (2014).

References

Brooke, John L. Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bulliet, Richard W. Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Carey, Mark, Garone, Philip, Howkins, Adrian, Endfield, Georgina H., Culver, Lawrence, White, Sam, Johnson, Sherry, and Fleming, James Rodger. “Forum: Climate Change and Environmental History.” Environmental History 19 (2014): 281–364. doi: 10.1093/envhis/emu004Google Scholar
Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso, 2001.Google Scholar
Erler, Mehmet Yavuz. Osmanlı Devleti’nde Kuraklık ve Kıtlık Olayları, 1800–1880. Istanbul: Libra Kitap, 2010.Google Scholar
Fagan, Brian. The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization. New York: Basic Books, 2004.Google Scholar
Griswold, William. “Climatic Change: A Possible Factor in the Social Unrest of Seventeenth Century Anatolia.” In Humanist and Scholar: Essays in Honor of Andreas Tietze, edited by Lowry, Heath W. and Quataert, Donald, 37–57. Istanbul: Isis Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Kazemi, Ranin. “‘Neither Indians, Nor Egyptians’: Social Protest and Islamic Populism in the Making of the Tobacco Movement in Iran, 1850–1891.” PhD diss., Yale University, 2012.Google Scholar
Kazemi, Ranin. “Of Diet and Profit: On the Question of Subsistence Crises in Nineteenth-Century Iran.” Middle Eastern Studies 51 (2015): 1–24. doi: 10.1080/00263206.2014.951038Google Scholar
Kelly, Morgan, Ó Gráda, Cormac, White, Sam, Büntgen, Ulf, Hellmann, Lena, and de Vries, Jan. “The Little Ice Age: Climate and History Reconsidered.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 44 (2014): 301–377. doi: 10.1162/JINH_a_00573CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Larsen, Guðrún. “Katla: Tephrochronology and Eruption History.” Developments in Quaternary Sciences 13 (2010): 23–49. doi: 10.1016/S1571-0866(09)01303-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000. Trans. Barbara Bray. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971.Google Scholar
Linden, Eugene. The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006.Google Scholar
Matthee, Rudi. “The Decline of Safavid Iran in Comparative Perspective.” Journal of Persianate Studies 8 (2015): 276–308. doi: 10.1163/18747167-12341286Google Scholar
Mikhail, Alan. “Ottoman Iceland: A Climate History.” Environmental History 20 (2015): 262–284. doi: 10.1093/envhis/emv006CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mikhail, Alan. “Unleashing the Beast: Animals, Energy, and the Economy of Labor in Ottoman Egypt.” American Historical Review 118 (2013): 317–348. doi: 10.1093/ahr/118.2.317Google Scholar
Oman, Luke, Robock, Alan, Stenchikov, Georgiy, Schmidt, Gavin A., and Ruedy, Reto. “Climatic Response to High-Latitude Volcanic Eruptions.” Journal of Geophysical Research 110 (2005): D13103. doi: 10.1029/2004JD005487CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oman, Luke, Robock, Alan, Stenchikov, Georgiy L., and Thordarson, Thorvaldur. “High-Latitude Eruptions Cast Shadow over the African Monsoon and the Flow of the Nile.” Geophysical Research Letters 33 (2006): L18711. doi: 10.1029/2006GL027665Google Scholar
Parker, Geoffrey. Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Pehlivan, Zozan. “Beyond ‘The Desert and the Sown’: Peasants, Pastoralists, and Climate Crises in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1840–1890.” PhD diss., Queen’s University, 2016.Google Scholar
Pehlivan, Zozan. “El Niño Cycles and the Crises of the Nomadic Economy in the Late Ottoman Empire (1840–1890).” Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Ruddiman, William F. Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Thordarson, Thorvaldur, and Self, Stephen. “Atmospheric and Environmental Effects of the 1783–1784 Laki Eruption: A Review and Reassessment.” Journal of Geophysical Research 108 (2003): 1–29. doi: 10.1029/2001JD002042CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, Sam. The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Google Scholar