Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt

The cultivation and movement of food – grown in earth irrigated through the social, ecological, and infrastructural mechanisms discussed in the previous chapter – was central to the Ottoman administration of Egypt in the long eighteenth century. Egypt was the breadbasket of the Ottoman Empire, producing more foodstuffs than any other single province in the Empire. The fertile soils of rural Egypt renewed every year by the sediment-rich waters of the Nile flood provided a steady supply of nutrients for the cultivation of all sorts of grains and vegetables in the Egyptian countryside. Rains in the Ethiopian highlands collected nutrients from the volcanic rock of the mountains on which they fell and from the Sudd swamps in the Sudan through which the floodwaters eventually traveled every year to Egypt. Once those waters covered the soil in Egypt, seemingly endless supplies of sunshine for photosynthesis produced vast quantities of chemical energy stored in the calories of food grown throughout southern Egypt and the Delta. As I discuss in detail in Chapter 4, a large peasant and animal population throughout the province provided the labor needed to harvest, pack, and move this food, which would eventually make its way to other parts of Egypt, to Istanbul, to the cities of Mecca and Medina, and to many other areas of the Empire. Egypt's surplus energy thus provided the caloric power necessary to maintain the political power of the Ottoman Empire.