Agriculture, Animal Husbandry, and Trade: Political Economy of Ottoman Kurdistan

Lecture by Zozan Pehlivan, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Historically, Ottoman Kurdistan, located at the intersection of major trade routes linking the Black Sea with the Persian Gulf, and Iran and Iraq with Syria and Anatolia, served as a crossroads of population, raw materials, and commodity flows. Based on Ottoman and British archival sources, this talk aims to examine what made Ottoman Kurdistan a cohesive economic region in the nineteenth century. By focusing on the historical compatibility and collaboration between peasants, pastoralists, and urban dwellers and using available statistical and qualitative information, this talk will describe products ––plant, mineral, and animal––and changing production levels during the nineteenth century. Long regarded as the “breadbasket” of the East, Diyarbekir province lay at the center of this region and furnished the state, merchants, and urban consumers with food stuffs, raw materials, and livestock. Inter-regional (as well as long-distance) trade and the adoption of new cash crops enhanced the cohesion and integration of Kurdistan in the Ottoman economic system. An understanding of the region’s past and changing economy points to the historic inter-dependency and socio-economic collaboration between peasants, pastoralists, and urban dwellers.

Zozan Pehlivan is an Assistant Professor of History and McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her research focuses mostly on the history of environments, comparative empires, and pastoral nomads. She received her Ph.D. from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 2016. Before joining the University of Minnesota in 2018, she held a two-year fellowship at the Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC) of McGill University, Montréal, Québec.

The event will be held on zoom. Please register at registration@zmo.de.