This chapter demonstrates the crucial role of geographic proximity in shaping agrarian and herding relations in the history of late Ottoman Kurdistan, including regional political economy, socioeconomic structures, and intercommunal relations. It argues that the region is marked by three distinct ecological zones, which differ from each other in terms of elevation, climate, vegetation, and both human and animal habitation. The chapter then shows the encroachment of the Ottoman state through the arrival of Tanzimat reforms and the multifaceted consequences this had in the region. Next, it illustrates a demographic portrait of the region, depicting how human beings brought different ecosystems into conversation with one another. It argues that pastoralism sustained the conversation between geographic zones into the nineteenth century, creating linkages and slippages between mountains, pastures, and plains, and defining the interaction between the three zones until these links began to weaken in the face of a series of environmental crises. The chapter concludes with a glimpse into five villages from different parts of the region.

In this chapter, I first document the great agrarian famine of 1879–80, followed by a detailed analysis of peasants’ livelihood circumstances in the countryside of Diyarbekir, Erzurum and Van, and the politics of food and water scarcity as it impacted agricultural production and the agrarian economy. Next, I turn to the appearance of new environmental disasters in the 1880s and 1890s. These crises exacerbated conflict between local powerbrokers and peasants, and radically transformed settlement patterns within Ottoman Kurdistan. The second major section of the chapter depicts how climatic factors and the periodicity of environmental change impacted pastoralists and it includes a discussion of how climatic fluctuations affect the physiology of herd animals. I conclude this section by examining pastoralist survival strategies, and how these contributed to the growth of intercommunal tension in Kurdistan in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

The Introduction provides a theoretical and conceptual framework of the book by defining ecological disequilibrium and slow violence. It also provides a historiographical discussion on collective violence against Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire.

This chapter demonstrates the importance of viewing socioeconomic and political relationships between sedentary and herding societies from the perspective of long-term shifts in climate. Such a perspective offers the possibility of reconsidering the socioeconomic features of conflicts that appeared between similar communities in South Asia, the American West, Africa, Australia, and the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

By examining transportation, agriculture, animal husbandry, industry, and commerce, this chapter explores the regional division of labor among residents of the landscape trilogy.

The central question of this chapter is how a region like Ottoman Kurdistan comes to explode in violence. I suggest that violence manifests in a cumulative way. To make this argument, I adopt an expanded conception of violence that moves beyond physical encounters or bloodshed between groups to also incorporate smaller acts of property violation, such as animal theft, as well as violence on a larger canvas, such as through state-building strategies and environmental change. Thus, I argue that to understand the roots of the Armenian massacres of 1894–96 requires understanding decades of environmental degradation and the various forms of violence produced.

This chapter makes four historical interventions. First, It argues that the relief program of the Ottoman central state during the continuum of crisis aimed to maintain agriculture, cities, and the army, but not pastoralists. Although pastoralists lost millions of herd animals, their source of food, financial capital, and sociopolitical power, available historical documents indicate that the Hamidian government did not distribute grain or flocks to pastoralists, and neither did they lend money to rebuild their herds, as they did for peasants. It is unclear whether this was a deliberate policy of the state in order to turn pastoralists into taxable agriculturalists. What is clear is that the traditional Ottoman famine relief policies contributed to mounting ecological and economic disequilibrium between peasants and pastoralists in times of crises and to irreversibly expanding this imbalance in the political ecology of Kurdistan in the post-crises period by triggering displacement, migration, and proletarianization among pastoralist communities.