Research Catalog

States of cultivation : imperial transition and scientific agriculture in the eastern Mediterranean

Title: States of cultivation : imperial transition and scientific agriculture in the eastern Mediterranean / Elizabeth R. Williams.
Author: Williams, Elizabeth R. (Elizabeth Rachel)
Publication: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2023]

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Not available - Please for assistance.	Text	Use in library	HD2057.5.Z8 W54 2023	Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 425 pages : illustrations, maps; 24 cm.

Summary

"The final decades of the Ottoman Empire and the period of the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon coincided with a critical period of transformation in agricultural technologies and administration. Chemical fertilizers and mechanized equipment inspired model farms while government officials and technocratic elites pursued new land tenure, credit-lending, and tax collection policies to maximize revenue. These policies transformed rural communities and environments and were central to projects of reform and colonial control--as well as to resistance of that control. States of Cultivation examines the processes and effects of agrarian transformation over more than a century as Ottoman, Syrian, Lebanese, and French officials grappled with these new technologies, albeit with different end goals. Elizabeth Williams investigates the increasingly fragmented natures produced by these contrasting priorities and the results of their intersection with regional environmental limits. Not only did post-World War I policies realign the economic space of the mandate states, but they shaped an agricultural legacy that continued to impact Syria and Lebanon post-independence. With this book, Williams offers the first comprehensive account of the shared technocratic ideals that animated these policies and the divergent imperial goals that not only reshaped the region's agrarian institutions, but produced representations of the region with repercussions well beyond the mandate's end"--

Series Statement

Stanford Ottoman world series

Uniform Title

Stanford Ottoman world series

Subject

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Provincial legibility and ecologies of extraction : agrarian networks and the making of late Ottoman rural state space -- "Agriculture from a book" : "scientific" agriculture in the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean -- The trials and tribulations of tractors : from Ottoman provinces to French mandate states -- The politics of agricultural expertise and education : exerting rural influence under the French mandate -- Of mice, Sunn bugs, drought, and taxation : the pests of mandate rural administration and the crisis of the 1930s.

ISBN

9781503634688
150363468X
9781503635937 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

2022043708

OCLC

on1374134053
SCSB-14560596

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library