Geos and Empire: Mining, Environments, and State in the 18th-Century Ottoman Empire

This paper examines the eighteenth-century Ottoman mines of Keban and Ergani as environmental infrastructures that reorganized landscapes across the Upper Tigris-Euphrates Valley. I treat the mines not simply as sites of extraction, but as a system operating on local, regional, and imperial scales that reorganized land, labor, and administration. Mining required significant interventions on the lived environment: drainage canals carved through mountains to manage flooded galleries, immense quantities of charcoal that reshaped upland oak forests, and riverine and overland corridors that connected furnaces to the Imperial Mint. Drawing on petitions, court records, and accounting registers, I argue that silver production generated a regional extractive ecology in which ore bodies, forests, rivers, animals, and human labor were bound together in a single metabolic network. Declining ore quality, recurring flooding, and the rapid depletion of nearby forests continually reshaped the geography of production. As accessible fuel sources receded, entire districts were annexed to the mines’ provisioning regime. Agrarian communities were redirected into charcoal production, and fiscal boundaries were reorganized around the demands of smelting. Tracing these shifts, the paper shows that mining operated as a technology of environmental governance , materially reconfiguring landscape and state space in the early modern Middle East.