Chapter 1 focuses on locusts and the Arabic-speaking Shammar nomadic group between 1858 and 1890. It explains how locusts foiled Ottoman attempts to transform the Jazira into a cotton-growing heartland in the midst of the American Civil War. As locusts challenged the designs of certain humans, they also ensured that the Jazira landscape remained productive depending on how one moved within it. It was in part the landscape created by locusts that undermined Ottoman attempts to forcibly settle the Shammar during the 1860s, and made far more difficult the settlement of Chechen refugees at Ras al-Ayn this same period. And it was this same landscape of locusts that incubated a revolt in 1871, as the Shammar protested the formation of the special administrative district of Zor, created in an effort to match the desert with administrative borders with the help of the empire’s foremost reformers, Cevdet Pasha and Midhat Pasha. The revolt was crushed and ended with different branches of the Shammar attached to separate districts of the Jazira. But it did not end the power of locusts and mobility, and so people continued to imagine how to close the gap between Ottoman provinces and the environment it divided up.

Chapter 4 examines the Jazira’s divided connection from 1918 to 1939 as the region was divided between the Republic of Turkey, French Syria, and British Iraq. It does so through a focus on locusts, refugees, and various interwar state-making projects. While all of the different states in the Jazira endeavored to differentiate themselves from the Ottomans, they undertook strikingly similar projects based on refugee resettlement and sodium arsenite, the new insecticide that each state wielded to kill locusts. The substance did not altogether end the reign of locusts in the region, but it marked a shift in envisioning the land without the insects. The change also coincided with an unprecedented autonomist movement advocating for a French protectorate of the Jazira, and the ensuing conflict encompassed all of the protagonists of Locusts of Power, from the Shammar and the Millî to Armenian genocide survivors and Assyrian refugees. The autonomist effort failed, and the Jazira became the foremost space of Syrian agricultural development, Ottoman dreams of prosperity finally coming to fruition.

Chapter 3 examines Armenian deportees and locusts in the Jazira between 1908 and 1918. It places the Armenian genocide within the longer history of efforts to control the Jazira, as the district created for the settlement of nomads in 1871 transformed into the final destination for many of the empire’s Armenian citizens. The chapter exposes the complicated ways the violence affected and was affected by the environment. One German locust expert even suggested that the deportations of the genocide coupled with war mobilization to make the locust invasions worse because so much land was left fallow. But the environment also managed to help some escape, whether children who survived by working as shepherds for pastoralists or the Armenian who, while concealing his identity, worked as the locust-control officer of the Jazira. In a mark of the enduring challenge of the Jazira and its provincial division, Ottoman officials discussed how to draw better borders in the region throughout, from the lead-up to deportations in 1915 all the way to the end of the war in 1918.

Chapter 2 foregrounds locusts and the seminomadic Kurdish group known as the Millî between 1890 and 1908. In a shift from the policies of previous years, the Ottoman state created light cavalries known as the Hamidiye Brigades. Typically seen as co-opting Kurdish groups in defense against Russian invasion or Armenian rebellion, the Hamidiye also encompassed the Millî under the leadership of Ibrahim Pasha, who actually pushed south into the Jazira. The chapter traces how provincial borders became invoked alongside the environmental border of the desert in clashes between the Millî and the Shammar. All the while, locusts created conditions favorable to pastoralists. Locusts also forced people to move and, in other cases, offered a plausible justification for nomadic encroachment on the landholdings of urban notables. The chapter concludes with the death of Ibrahim Pasha, and the new political era it seemed to portend, even as locusts continued their work on the edge.

In 1953, a Syrian entomologist by the name of Rafeq Skaf ventured about fifty kilometers (thirty-one miles) east of the Syrian city of Raqqa. There, on “an ancient hill with ruins,” he saw “the population … copulating and lying.” They were locusts. And the site at which they procreated was a tall, the ancient human infrastructure that gave life to swarm after swarm of insects in the Jazira. Skaf’s observation of locusts belied any facile narrative of the total annihilation of the insects. But his report also attested to change. For so long, locusts had appeared as if out of nowhere. Yet in Skaf’s view, by 1953 there was a pattern to their range. Where there were nomads, there were locusts. As he put it, the locusts may as well have been considered a “permanent citizen” anywhere there was “grazing” or “almost permanent tents.” The humans and insects had been metaphorically linked by the denigration of state officials and corporeally linked by arsenic compounds. Skaf connected them in terms of ecology and also, significantly, permanence, anathema to the mobility that haunted state efforts at control in the Jazira for so long.

“The desert journey continues very boringly,” wrote a reporter for the Istanbul newspaper Akşam in the summer of 1928. The train was headed eastward from the outskirts of the Syrian city of Aleppo (see Figure 1 for a map of the route). “To pass for hours in the middle of a brown expanse amid suffocating heat in a train car that is always shaking is,” the reporter complained, “unpleasant.” It would get worse. Suddenly, a droning insect flew into the train car. And then another. They were locusts. Someone closed the windows. But the insects continued to collide into the side of the train “incessantly.” In their percussive onslaught, the reporter might have heard the rhythm of the region’s recent history. After all, it was these creatures that had helped make a landscape that witnessed nomadic sedentarization campaigns, the Armenian genocide, and interwar refugee resettlement. The train hurtled onward.