In the last half century, theoretical claims have arisen from various academic fields attacking the meta-discourses of modernity and progress, the former viewed as the temporal endpoint of gradual social development and the latter regarded as the grand narrative of the process of human achievement. In the historical field, two sub-disciplines led this campaign: environmental history and the history of science. Environmental historians have shed light on the ways in which developmental projects since the industrial revolution have drained our natural environment of resources that are crucial for the maintenance of sustainable human life on earth and have dispossessed and destroyed the livelihood of indigenous communities through colonial undertakings. Historians of science, on the other hand, have developed non-positivist views of science, which reject the Enlightenment notion of accumulation of knowledge and enhancement of technical capacity, and instead place knowledge production in its capitalist, imperialist, and colonialist contexts. Chris Gratien’s recent book on the modern history of Cilicia is located at the intersection of those post-structuralist views of environment and science: The Unsettled Plain explains how modernization projects in Cilicia initiated by the Ottoman Tanzimat and continued by subsequent regimes endangered local communities through a transformation of the ecosystem of mountains, rivers, and swamps by unsustainable projects fatal to social existence.

Starting his history in 1856 – when Ottoman reorganization efforts were given a new life by the completion of the war against the Russians and the international endorsement of a new reform edict – Gratien divides the ensuing century into four intervals and allocates one chapter to each period: the Tanzimat reforms (1856–1878 in Chapter 2); the Hamidian regime (1878–1914 in Chapter 3); the wartime years (1914–1923 in Chapter 4); and, finally, the Republican era (1923–1956 in Chapter 5). In the background of this temporal scheme, Chapter 1 sets up the spatial parameters of the research that explains the geography of Cilicia as a contrast between its tropical lowlands, which served as winter pastures for Turkish pastoralists and permanent homes for Armenian and Greek town dwellers, and its highlands (i.e. the Taurus mountains) which offered a pleasant climate for summer pastures and a haven from mosquito and government incursion. The political history of the region is defined as this cyclical changing of jurisdiction where imperial center and local notables successively cooperated and clashed for power and resources. In that sense, the region is considered an imperial borderland – à la Eugene Rogan’s monograph on Transjordan, The Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire – where Ottoman control was weak and the government’s presence virtually non-existent.

Building on this regional background, Chapter 2 is where the author initiates the historical timeline beginning in 1856 when the reform efforts of the Istanbul government reached the provinces. As the title of this chapter, “The Stench of Progress,” suggests, Gratien brings a critical view of these reforms that were sometimes implemented using violence and were met with significant resistance. Chapter 3 moves onto the Hamidian period during which the violently settled nomads, pastoralists, and other immigrants meet with the realities of capitalist cotton production and the impact of malaria within this now disturbed natural environment of the Cilician lowlands. The wartime years of 1914 to 1923 investigated in Chapter 4 bring in a different kind of violence defined by forced mobilization and displacement. The book concludes with Chapter 5, which presents the early decades of the Republican era within a continuous history of transhumance. This chapter and the book overall further illustrate how the struggle against malaria – a primordial ailment in the Cilician lowlands – and the scientific approaches to defeating it not only failed to mitigate its harmful effects, but rather caused the disease to spread even further and rendered it more lethal than before, finally wiping it out of existence.

One way to interpret the history of Çukurova (the Turkish name for geographical Cilicia) would be as a miraculous transformation in the latter part of the twentieth century of the mosquito-ridden delta around the Seyhan and Ceyhan rivers into an agro-empire of cotton and rice freed from malaria with bustling cities of millions. Instead, Gratien presents a more complex story of exploitation and resistance in which the flow of history resists the image of a smooth journey of social progress. For Gratien, this is a story of “great derangement” rather than “a great transformation” (p. 11). In this sense, similar to E. P. Thompson’s attempt to rescue “the obsolete hand-loom weaver,” Gratien’s main purpose in this book is to recover the story of Ömer, a seasonal migrant and cotton worker whose mother in a far-away central Anatolian village begged him not to stay in Adana (the Ottoman province comprising Çukurova) as she knew about the danger of mosquitos in that city. But Ömer did stay in Adana and he did contract malaria and die, before his mother could arrive to retrieve him (pp. 1–2). The author informs us that it was Ömer and the likes of him whose “labor and loss built the modern world” (p. 22). On that account, Gratien’s purpose is to write the history of Çukurova’s common people and their long-forgotten, teeny-tiny stories, juxtaposed with a delicately balanced ecosystem battered and shaped by larger forces of bureaucratic state building and commercializing agriculture. According to the author, “it is the history of the unmaking of [Cilicians’] worlds and the making of ours” (p. 8).

Building his narrative around the notion of indigenous ecology (pp. 10–11), Gratien utilizes a rich theoretical vocabulary on environmental history, disease, and medicine. He brings in the experiences of other indigenous peoples, offering a broad, world-historical outlook. This is not to say that The Unsettled Plain is a global comparative study. While maintaining a comparative perspective and offering insights from the outside world, this is a monograph on modern Çukurova situated within the historiography of the late Ottoman empire and contemporary Turkey. The value of this research is found not only in its extensive conceptual framework described above, but also in its colorful presentation of abundant empirical data derived from archival material, Anatolian folklore and literature, and several other primary and secondary sources produced in more than half a dozen languages including Turkish, Armenian, and Greek.

Accordingly, the principal contribution of this book rests in its dialogue with late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish histories. To the probable frustrations of field-area-sensitive Ottomanists and Republican historians, Gratien’s study encompasses various continuities as well as ruptures that solidly remain outside the restrictions of Ottoman and Republican timelines. Much in the tradition of Erik Jan Zürcher, who observed a continuous Young Turk regime from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the beginning of the multi-party democracy, Gratien connects Çukurova’s Ottoman past with the Republican era until 1956, when the first hydroelectric dam was built on the Seyhan river. At this point, the conquest of nature envisioned by generations of Ottoman and Turkish bureaucrats was symbolically completed. The theme of historical continuity is a recurring element in this analysis – determined by the persistent flow of transhumance between the mountains and the lowlands and the emergent tensions between the people who moved and the ones who settled the land. This alludes to one of the oldest stories to be recorded, that which begins with Cain and Abel. A constant leitmotif in Gratien’s study of the region is the dynamic between mobile nomads/pastoralists and settled inhabitants. It defines the indigenous ecology that informs local knowledge of the environment preserved in the memories and practices of various Cilicians who understood that seasonal movement was needed to survive the tropical climate of the north-eastern Mediterranean delta.

One section that the present reviewer as an Ottomanist read with enthusiasm is Chapter 2, which depicts the attempts of the Ottoman government to penetrate the region with a civilizing mission and an army, which was not surprisingly called the Reform Division (Fırka-i Islahiye). Contrary to local peoples’ love for the mountains, the Ottoman ruling class, in the person of Ahmed Cevdet Pasha who led the troops into the region, saw the mountains as a barrier to reform and accordingly attempted the forced settlement of the region’s pastoralists. Armed with an Ibn Khaldunian view of history and social change, Cevdet Pasha hoped to transform this impenetrable region of swamps and mountains through popular education and administrative reform (pp. 75–7). The forced sedentarization of pastoralists was coupled with the influx of Muslim immigrants from Russian territories, which resulted in a series of newly built villages and towns in the area. Mostly originating from this disturbed ecosystem, thousands of these newcomers did not survive the malaria, cholera, and famine that struck the region in subsequent years. In this light, the chapter discusses the nature of Tanzimat’s implementation in the provinces in general and in Çukurova in particular, while examining how notions of Ottoman imperialism and colonialism can be compared with other exploitative and fatal projects from modern world history (pp. 91–3).

Viewing the Ottoman modernization project as an imperialist and colonialist venture fits well within the post-colonial theorizing that has swept the humanities since at least Edward Said’s Orientalism. Herein lies one criticism of the monograph, partly derived from the notion of continuity from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic in addition to its post-colonial perspectives. Gratien’s general approach to the analysis of the region during the Ottoman period suffers from the vantage point of Republican Turkey, which has cleared the region of its Armenian, Kurdish, Arab, and various other diverse identities. The multi-ethnic and relatively inclusive Ottoman Empire’s so-called incursion attempts into the region are inflated in the face of its Turkish nationalist endpoint. A modernizing imperial polity – in its efforts to reform and integrate regions that it had been ruling for several centuries – needs a more distinct theorization than what the European colonialist and imperialist projects of the nineteenth century receive.

Thus, Gratien is not shy about debating controversial aspects of Ottoman and Turkish history. The Unsettled Plain, as the pun in the title suggests, was a site for the sedentarization of pastoralists – an act that left them worried and uneasy, if not outright dead. It should be noted that the author does not have a romanticized view of nomads, pastoralists, or transhumants of the “pre-modern” era. Sometimes deemed a pejorative outlook, romanticism has been leveled against historians of antiquarian interests as well as anthropologists of pre-historic hunter–gatherers who have described the bygone age of foragers as one of contentment and “original affluence.” Gratien’s analysis, in contrast, is firmly drawn from material structures of geography, economy, and politics in addition to cultural heritage.

In sum, The Unsettled Plain is an ecological panorama of Cilician history through late Ottoman and early Republican periods. It is a story of struggle against the pitfalls of the natural environment during which that environment is transformed into a crowded commercial and urban landscape. In an effort to expand the actors of the historical narrative beyond the limits of the imperial and local ruling classes, the author incorporates defiant bards like Dadaloğlu and Karacaoğlan, dissenter novelists like Yaşar Kemal and Orhan Kemal, and other storytellers and protagonists born out of Çukurova realities. This makes Gratien’s work a multidisciplinary historical project enriched by clear theoretical and pleasant literary features that presents us with a broader comparative imagination across time and space.