CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Arslan, Alperen |
|---|---|
| Title | Measuring Empire: The Emergence of Climate Science in the Ottoman Empire |
| Summary | This thesis explores how the study of global climatology flourished in the Ottoman Empire and became a mutually-reinforcing metaphor of the rational order of nineteenth-century Ottoman society. In the first chapter of this thesis, I examine the reasons behind the Imperial Observatory’s (Raṣad-hâne-i Âmire) initiation for the meticulous and precise observation of weather patterns in Istanbul and disparate geographies of the empire. In this chapter, I also explore how does this systematic recording of climate data had an impact on the emergence of climatology as a nascent popular science in the Ottoman Empire. Contra previous historiography on Ottoman science, this thesis attempts to show that the Ottoman Empire invested in this nascent science to delineate the climatic zones of the empire as well as to integrate its diverse populations. Moreover, one of the crucial departing points of my work is that it attempts to contextualize the proliferation of climate science in the Ottoman Empire as one of the ramifications of global scientific knowledge production. In the second chapter of this thesis I explore the emergence of forest climatology and environmental protectionism in the late Ottoman Empire. Through the 1858 Land Code, and 1870 Forest Regulation as well as the implementation of scientific forestry the Ottoman government attempted to extend its control over the forests. Unlike the previous historiography, I offer a completely novel reading of the legal sources as well as the scientific treatises of imperial scientists, and I explore how this legal problem regarding the usufruct rights of forests was deeply interconnected with the emergence of climate science. In the second part of this chapter, I investigate the mutually constitutive relationship between climate science and agriculture. I explore how the attempts of imperial scientists to document plant geography, the implementation of phenology, and implementation of large-scale scientific agriculture led to a recognition of the miscellaneously diverse geography of difference in the late Ottoman period. I argue that this climatic difference was also a useful discourse for imperial elites to imagine multifarious geographies as part of one Ottoman universe as well as to consolidate its power on its subjects. Linking history of science and environmental history, and drawing on a wide a range of overlooked sources in Ottoman-Turkish, French, German, and English, this thesis offers a novel reading of late Ottoman environmental history. |
| Supervisor | Esmer Tolga Ugur |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/arslan_alperen.pdf |
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