Since the 1960s, historians have worked to expand the boundaries of their discipline, recovering the voices and perspectives of those long excluded from the historical record. Yet for all this effort, one fundamental assumption persisted across even the most innovative approaches: anthropocentrism – the treatment of the past as an exclusively human affair, interpreted solely through human values and experiences. Animal history emerged as a challenge to this bias, much as labor history arose in response to capitalism’s exploitation of the working class and women’s history in response to patriarchy’s devaluation of the female experience. In Ottoman and Middle Eastern studies, the animal turn arrived belatedly, roughly two decades after Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World (1983) and Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate (1987) had opened the field in the Anglo-American world. Ottoman and Middle East historians visibly entered the animal studies conversation around 2009–2010, with the publication of books such as Donna Landry’s Noble Brutes (2009) and Suraiya Faroqhi’s Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire (2010). From 2016 onward, that engagement became more sustained, helped in part by Alan Mikhail’s The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (2014). Yonca Köksal Özyaşar and Can Nacar’s Anatolian Livestock Trade in the Late Ottoman Empire is a product of this maturing field, but also a significant advance within it. Taking sheep and cattle seriously, not merely as commodities to be counted and taxed but as living beings that shaped and were shaped by Ottoman history, the authors challenge anthropocentrism in the two ways that define animal history at its best: by placing animals at the center of historical analysis, and by re-evaluating the past through their experiences.
The book consists of seven chapters organized regionally and covering the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After an introduction that situates the Ottoman case within global changes in meat consumption, urbanization, and transportation technology, the chapters move across four major zones of livestock commerce throughout Anatolia: Ankara and Konya in the center; Erzurum in the northeast; Hüdavendigar in the northwest; and the eastern Mediterranean ports of İzmir, İskenderun, Mersin, and Antalya. A subsequent chapter turns to Istanbul as the empire’s “stomach city” and principal provisioning center, before the conclusion draws the regional studies together to reflect on the possibilities and limits of late Ottoman meat industrialization.
The book’s regional structure reveals how Anatolia’s diverse geography contributed to the rise of different livestock economies. The authors contrast the arid, open steppes of the interior with the dense woodlands of Hüdavendigar and the rugged alpine pastures of Erzurum, a highland zone defined by its vital trade links to the Caucasus. The regional lens also reveals how each zone generated its own patterns of cooperation and conflict between state and non-state actors – patterns that a purely chronological or thematic treatment might have obscured. Despite this regional architecture, the book’s chronology is crystal clear. Across all chapters, the Ottoman-Russian War of 1877–1878 emerges as a decisive turning point. The war cost the empire vast stretches of European territory that had long supplied Istanbul with livestock, forcing the capital to turn increasingly to Anatolia for its meat. At the same time, tens of thousands of refugees from the lost provinces poured into Anatolia, intensifying competition over land and pasture in provinces such as Hüdavendigar. The reader always knows where the story stands in time, even as the narrative moves across space.
Though framed primarily as an animal history, this book makes an important intervention in Middle Eastern economic history. During the 1980s and 1990s, much of Middle Eastern economic history was written under the influence of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, which framed the empire’s economic transformation primarily in terms of its incorporation into the capitalist world economy. This framework naturally privileged port cities, export commodities such as cotton and silk, and commercial ties with European metropoles. What it left in the shadows were the empire’s interior regions, commodities that circulated domestically and regionally, and commercial relationships with non-European partners. Köksal Özyaşar and Nacar recover precisely what this framework obscured. By following sheep and cattle rather than cotton bales or silk cocoons, they reveal a commercially dynamic Anatolian hinterland sustained by robust interregional trade networks that operated largely independently of European demand. Erzurum merchants sold livestock southward overland to Aleppo and Damascus and westward by land and through the Black Sea to Istanbul. Likewise, the port cities of İskenderun and İzmir appear in the book as gateways not just to Manchester or Marseille but also to Alexandria and Port Said. The geography of exchange that emerges is overwhelmingly intra-Ottoman and intraregional, linking Anatolia to the Caucasus, Syria, and Egypt rather than to Europe. This reorientation matters not only for Ottoman studies but also for broader debates in global economic history, where the economic vitality of domestic and South-South commercial circuits has too often been overshadowed by the drama of incorporation into European-centered world markets.
As an animal history, the book succeeds on its own terms. The protagonist of this story is not a reforming pasha but the sheep, with cattle as the indispensable supporting actor. Human actors enter the narrative not in their own right but as what the authors evocatively call the animals’ “human guardians”, the diverse cast of people whose lives were bound up with the livestock trade. These human guardians are strikingly varied, including Christaki Zografos, a powerful Greek banker in Istanbul; Çayırlızade Hilmi, a notable from Beypazarı; Süleyman Ağa, a merchant in Damascus; and Zahide Hanım of the Karaosmanzade family. They are men and women, Turks, Greeks, Arabs, and others, united not by ethnicity or confession but by their connection to animals. Even Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) appears in these pages less as the autocratic sultan of conventional historiography than as another human guardian: an investor in northwestern Anatolian sheep farms who rewarded merchants for keeping Istanbul’s meat prices stable.
This recentering of animals has consequences well beyond the confines of animal history. The book demonstrates that late Ottoman administrative and economic modernization was shaped in part by the needs and vulnerabilities of livestock. Conventional accounts of Ottoman modernization are crowded with reforming statesmen and literary intellectuals whose gaze was fixed on Europe. In Köksal Özyaşar and Nacar’s book, by contrast, the agents of change are sheep and cattle. It is their diseases – such as cattle plague, anthrax, and foot-and-mouth – and the seasonal pressures of feeding and moving them across vast distances that compelled the Hamidian state to introduce vaccination campaigns, quarantine regulations, and new veterinary bureaucracies. The result is an Ottoman modernization story whose center of gravity shifts from the capital’s administrative chambers to Anatolia’s rural hinterlands: a genuinely fresh perspective on an old subject.
Methodologically, the book draws on an impressive range of sources, including Ottoman state documents, sharia court registers, provincial yearbooks, British consular trade reports, Ottoman and foreign-language newspapers, memoirs, and travel accounts. Particularly valuable is the authors’ practice of reading Ottoman and British records against one another, which lends greater confidence to their rich quantitative data on livestock, commodity prices, and taxes. If the book occasionally leaves the reader wanting more sustained attention paid to the experience of human laborers at the lowest levels of the trade, that is less a flaw than a sign of how much terrain this study has opened for future research.
Köksal Özyaşar and Nacar have written a book that demonstrates with admirable clarity that animal history is not a niche subfield, but a powerful lens for understanding some of the largest questions in modern Ottoman history. Readers of this journal will find in this book a compelling case that the social history of work and the history of animals are not separate enterprises but deeply entangled ones, and that following the sheep may lead us to places that men in power never intended us to see.
