For over a decade, Onur İnal has played a key role in consolidating the field of Ottoman environmental history.Footnote ¹ We are now fortunate to have his vivid Gateway to the Mediterranean, which traces how the port city of Izmir and its hinterland were transformed in the late nineteenth century. İnal argues that earlier accounts that utilized a core-periphery approach “failed to grasp connectivity and mutuality between the city and the hinterland” (p. 3). Taking inspiration from Burghardt’s notion of the “gateway city” and Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis, İnal convincingly shows how the Aegean city’s rise was predicated on the transformation of its Western Anatolian countryside.

İnal tells the story over the course of eight chapters. Though he considers “foreign textual sources […] the backbone” of his account – including materials in Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, and Italian – he also draws on Ottoman archival collections as well as extensive secondary sources in modern Turkish (p. 15). The opening chapter accounts for some of the natural and unnatural restraints on Izmir’s growth in the early modern period, including earthquakes, disease, and fire. The remaining seven chapters are thematic rather than chronological; they overlap in time, offering different glimpses of the region’s transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Together, they form a chorus of sorts: labor migration, camels, and railways facilitated the expanded cultivation of wheat, cotton, figs, and grapes that simultaneously connected the hinterland and the city and reshaped both. İnal’s explanations are nuanced. The absence of earthquakes, the cotton famine of the American Civil War, and the end of the Little Ice Age, among many other macro- and micro-level factors, all contributed to the regional efflorescence, often in mutually constitutive ways. But perhaps the most significant catalyst for shifts in cultivation and trade was the railway. The eighty-one-mile Izmir–Aydın line and the 57.8-mile Izmir–Kasaba line (both controlled by British concessionaires) and their subsequent elongations ended once and for all “the fictitious border between the city and the country” (p. 86). As the very first railway lines in Anatolia, they made it profitable not only to ship low-volume high-cost items like silk (as had long been the case), but also to add bulkier items to the freight such as grain.

Readers are perhaps familiar with some aspects of Izmir’s role in exporting commodities to the wider world from the work of Reşat Kasaba and others.Footnote ² İnal nevertheless brings together interesting material in this regard, from the desirability of Izmir barley for European alcohol production to the attempts by California growers to wean the US market off of Izmir figs by cultivating the so-called Calimyrna tree in Fresno – only possible after both fig saplings and the crucial fig wasp were successfully transported across the Atlantic. İnal is also to be commended for his meticulous attention to rural history. His encyclopedic account offers everything from the types of trees felled to build railway tracks to the use of animal dung as fertilizer (pp. 105, 126).

Conceiving of Izmir as the “center of an hourglass”, İnal skillfully shows how commodities of the hinterland found their way into global markets (p. 10). What is especially striking about Gateway to the Mediterranean, however, is the extent to which exports from Izmir required motion in the opposite direction as well. The late nineteenth-century export boom in wheat, cotton, and fruits required a wide array of inputs, many of which arrived from far away. Alongside foreign capital came British coal, Sea Island cotton seed, Chicago-manufactured McCormick harvesters, and horse hoes (able to do “the work of twenty man-hoes”, as one 1852 writer unaware of the term’s future implications put it) (p. 146). By 1878, a staggering half of agricultural land around Izmir was owned by foreign investors (p. 120).

People, too, moved over long distances toward Izmir rather than away from it. It was not only muhacirs – Muslim refugees fleeing violence in the Balkans, Crete, or the Russian Empire – who transformed the area, but also migrant laborers from central Anatolia and the roughly 200,000 Greek-speaking emigrants who crossed the Aegean between 1840 and 1880 (p. 49). While workers left few written traces of their daily lives, İnal writes, “the energy they expended from dawn to dusk while working the soil is inscribed on the very earth” (p. 50). They also brought much more than labor. With Crimean Tatars and Circassians came technological innovations like the horse-drawn iron plow, while islanders from Naxos who settled in the mainland town of Urla contributed viticultural knowledge (pp. 55–56). The book clearly situates Izmir’s hinterland within the countryside of Western Anatolia, but from the perspective of labor migration, we might well think of the hinterland as extending into the Aegean Sea and beyond.

As befits an environmental history, and one whose acknowledgements include an expression of gratitude to “all nonhuman actors involved in this book”, İnal involves numerous creatures in his choreography of regional transformation (p. xiii). The most noteworthy is the one-humped “Turcoman” camel, a product of sophisticated crossbreeding between Bactrian and dromedary camels overseen by the region’s nomadic pastoralists. With their strength, endurance, and ability to weather difficult conditions, these camels played a key role in knitting together countryside and city. They continued to do so even after the construction of the railway, reinforcing Donald Quataert’s insistence that seemingly modern technology does not simply displace animal power.Footnote ³ In addition to camels, İnal also attends to fig wasps and the plague-inducing Yersinia pestis. The grapevine louse phylloxera receives two passing references, but probably merits more attention given its devastating impact on regional viticulture.

In comparison with other works on late Ottoman environmental history, İnal’s account of change is rather harmonious. For example, studies such as Zozan Pehlivan’s The Political Ecology of Violence or Chris Gratien’s The Unsettled Plain situate violence and conflict over resources at the center of their stories of environmental and social transformation. İnal’s periodization, however, predates World War I, the Armenian genocide, the Greco-Turkish War, and the fire of 1922. To be sure, he does acknowledge moments of tension, such as textile manufacturers’ exploitation of immigrant labor and land disputes surrounding the resettlement of muhacirs (pp. 46, 58–61). Even so, I suspect some readers may quibble with İnal’s concluding statement that “many people throughout the Ottoman Empire worked together” to bring about what he calls “city-hinterland symbiosis” (pp. 164, 191). Many certainly labored, but it is hard to imagine that all experienced this process as cooperative. Among the fig growers in the Menderes Valley, the camel drivers transporting the loads to and from the railway, the coal heavers who powered the train, and the workers in the sweltering packing houses – to cite but one intricate supply chain that İnal adeptly reconstructs – some likely felt less confident that they were working “together” with their bosses.

This critique, however, does not take away from the usefulness of the work, which richly and lucidly captures the transformation of Izmir and its hinterland. It will be of interest to environmental historians and those thinking more broadly about the relationship between port cities and their hinterlands around the world.