How Locust Swarms Reshaped Empire & Human Movement | Prof. Samuel Dolbee

Ottoman agricultural officials once warned that local locust invasions posed a greater threat to the empire than the Allied powers during World War I. Dr. Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, talks about his book Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East. He explores how shifting environmental dynamics reshaped human history across the Jazira borderlands, from the bizarre Ottoman reliance on Sufi-blessed water to attract locust-eating starlings to the conscription of hundreds of thousands of women and children for pest control. The conversation also delves into how agricultural expansion eliminated native habitats to alter pest ecology.

00:00 Introduction
01:25 Environmental History Disconnection
07:38 The Setting of Locust of Power
16:46 Impact of the Moroccan Locust
26:49 Ottoman State Control and Borders
31:09 Uncovering Personal Histories
36:22 Historical Context and Control Efforts
40:24 Agriculture, Plant Diseases and Movement
51:12 Reflecting on History and Storytelling

Samuel Dolbee is an environmental historian of the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He is Assistant Professor of History and D Family Dean's Faculty Fellow in Studies of the Middle East at Vanderbilt University. His book Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2023) sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts across the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War, revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations. Drawing on archival research in multiple languages, Dolbee traces environmental, political, and spatial transformations in the Jazira — the borderlands of today's Iraq, Syria, and Turkey — by following locusts and their relationship to people in motion: Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, Assyrian refugees. The book co-won the 2024 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Book Prize. He completed his PhD at New York University and MA at Georgetown, and is editor-in-chief of the Ottoman History Podcast.

Connect with Samuel Dolbee 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-dolbee-9a44834/?isSelfProfile=false
 

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