Supervening Crises and Social Order in Early Modern Ottoman Aleppo, 1697–1786

The study of crisis in the Ottoman Empire has yielded productive answers on the reproduction of social order, transformations in governance, the evolution of institutions and polity, and connections to the world economy. In Ottoman historiography, the seventeenth-century crisis occupies an important place in the history of the early modern empire. Economic and social historians have sought its causes in political, economic, and ecological forces. Other scholars, making use of the advances of world historical approaches, have utilized comparative perspectives to reveal the crisis’ multifaceted and global nature. Significantly, the debate has provided answers to the puzzling question of the empire’s longevity. Examining the state’s responses to the seventeenth-century crisis, scholars have shown the flexibility and pragmatism of the Ottoman administrative apparatus. They revealed that, in response to existential crises, institutional change within the empire, even where it remained selective, helped phase out disintegration up until the nineteenth century. The approaches cited above merge in their focus on structural issues, be they internal or external, such as revenues crisis, inflation, and population growth.

Plenty, then, is said in the seventeenth-century crisis debate. Less, however, is written about supervening crises, which occur mostly over shorter periods of time and out of the immediate control of those experiencing them. These include environmentally spurred ones, taking place at the limit of the social formation. Additionally, where studies on them exist, they are mainly concerned with the Balkans, Anatolia, and Egypt, leaving a sizeable region of the Ottoman Empire unexamined. This becomes significant when recognizing that the Ottomans ruled with “zones of varying degrees of administrative control”: as they moved away from the center, administrative practices operated under different dynamics of rule. This differential rule was no less true in Syria. Given that they reflect a different kind of relation between the government and local communities, crises in Syria merit a separate study.

In Aleppo, supervening events were recurring, unexpected, and varied. Between 1109 and 1201 Hijri alone, no less than twenty instances of environment-related social strains were recorded in Aleppo. These included draughts, crop failure and low agricultural yield, locusts, extreme weather conditions such as heavy rain and ice, and earthquakes. What were the social and political consequences of supervening crises in early modern Ottoman Aleppo? What do these types of crises reveal about the interactions between the environment and the social order, and between the state and governed? Further, what was their place in the seventeenth-century structural crisis? Revealing the limits of imperial governance, supervening crises bring out the complexity of processes and relations to the surface – that is, the complex relationship between the state, people, and environment. Methodologically, this research will use public works records, legal records, and local narrative accounts, and will be along the lines of a growing body of work on Middle East environmental history that pays equal attention to environmental limits and historical contingency.