The sixteenth century signified the dawn of a new era in the long history of the Tigris and Euphrates when the Ottoman state extended its control over the twin rivers. The Ottoman state was engaged in an ambitious attempt to manage and modify the Tigris and Euphrates basin, more than any previous political entity ever had. Faisal Husain’s Rivers of the Sultan offers a critical reassessment of the early modern history of Ottoman Iraq, discussing how this unique environment presented new opportunities and challenges for the Ottomans in the region. Based on material primarily found in the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, the book reveals new insights into the political and environmental histories of Ottoman Iraq.

Rivers of the Sultan is organized into three parts. The first part, “Amphibious State,” includes two chapters that focus on the importance of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Ottoman military expansion eastward during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After the Ottomans brought the Tigris and Euphrates under their control, after a series of military campaigns between 1512 and 1534, they executed attempts to extend their authority over the drainage basin. Depending on the local geography and conditions and on available natural resources, they invested in the Tigris-Euphrates basin in different ways and forms. According to Husain, the Ottomans were very innovative and skillful in constructing and managing what he calls “fluvial infrastructure.” For example, they modified the kelek, an ancient raft made of timber, brushwood bundles, and goat- and sheep-skins, to better maneuver through the swift current of the upper Tigris. The keleks produced in Diyarbakır and Mosul enabled the Ottoman administrators to ship Anatolian and Syrian grain to docks and bridges, and guns and other military supplies to fortifications they built in the lower basin. Hence, the author argues in Chapter 1, “Fortresses,” the domestication of the Tigris and Euphrates from the mid-sixteenth century and the mobilization of technological, financial, and logistical resources helped the Ottomans extend their reach in the region. The twin rivers served as avenues for trade and, even more importantly, as military supply lines. “Without the Tigris and Euphrates,” Husain claims, “Ottoman rule in Iraq would have resembled its experience in the Arabian Peninsula or any other inland region that lacked useful transport rivers” (p. 38).

Like other gunpowder empires of the early modern world, how the Ottoman Empire modified its oared galleys and sailing ships into vessels carrying heavy guns, in the process commonly referred to as the Military Revolution, is well-known. However, what is less known is how the developments in military technology transformed naval military infrastructure in Ottoman rivers. Chapter 2, entitled “Shipyards,” investigates the Ottomans’ innovative ways and techniques that enabled them to benefit from naval artillery in the fluvial landscape of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It documents how the Ottoman imperial navy, based in two shipyards at both ends of the Tigris-Euphrates basin (Birecik in the north and Basra in the south), together with fortresses and other installations on land, helped the Ottoman state secure its foothold in the region. In other words, riverine infrastructures sustained Ottoman political control in the vast area between the Taurus Mountains and the Persian Gulf.

The book’s second part, “The Water Wide Web,” comprises three chapters, each focusing on a unique ecological zone shaped by the Tigris and Euphrates. The author uses the web concept as a framework to denominate “a hydraulic network connecting farmers, pastoralists, and marsh dwellers” (p. 60) in the alluvium. Chapter 3, “Arable Lands,” discusses the complexity of exploiting the two rivers for irrigation agriculture. Unlike the Nile, which interacted harmoniously with the needs of winter crops and had seasonal and predictable flooding, the flow cycle of the Tigris and Euphrates “was intrinsically counterclockwise” (p. 66). When the arable farmer needed water the most, the water level was at its lowest. Therefore, the Tigris and Euphrates needed to be tamed and modified. Centralized control, or intervention at the imperial level, through hydraulic and irrigation works was important, not only because of economic considerations but also because it enhanced the legitimacy of Ottoman rule. On the other hand, Ottoman control of the alluvium was not a top-down process imposed on a smooth landscape. Sedimentation divided the alluvial plain into two major agricultural landforms—the levee and the basin—and the Ottoman state “tailored its irrigation policy to the needs of different landforms” (p. 77). Thus, Hussain credits the Ottomans’ agrarian and fiscal success in the Tigris and Euphrates both to the constant intervention by the state and the involvement of local farmers, who brought expertise in lift irrigation structures to configure these landforms.

Chapter 4, “Grasslands,” examines how Ottoman bureaucrats collaborated with religious groups who shepherded their livestock along the Ottoman-Safavid frontier. It discusses the role of the alluvium in the organization of the pastoral economy that sustained nomadic life in Iraq. In this chapter, Husain convincingly challenges the dominant assumption that raising livestock was less significant than agriculture in a riverine environment. He shows that Iraq’s fluvial landscape enabled both crop and livestock farmers to share the bounty of arable lands and that the Ottoman states developed policies and strategies for the coexistence of the two groups. He suggests that what he calls “the triad of pastoralism, mobility, and tribalism…” and the agrarian system “went hand in hand and formed a coherent package able to conquer all but the harshest landscapes” (p. 93).

The last chapter of this part, “Wetlands,” challenges the assumption that the spread of pastoralism, the expansion of arid lands, and political crises are interconnected. The author shows that permanent and seasonal marshes played an essential role in the economic and ecological transformations in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. The Iraqi marsh complex, which was among the largest until the late twentieth century, he argues, “acted as a regulator flow” (p. 97), reducing the intensity of the annual flood during harvest time, serving as a form of protection from drought, and cleaning polluted waters. As much as it provided some advantages, marsh life had its constraints, risks, and limitations. For example, sanitary conditions were poor, and the threat of malaria was always lurking. Nevertheless, marsh dwellers made efforts to reduce risks and protect themselves, such as deploying buffalo dung to deter malaria-producing mosquitos (pp. 100–101).

Policy decisions related to navigation and irrigation were passed to the Pashalik of Baghdad, the most significant provincial actor. The third part of the book, “The Rumblings of Nature,” focuses on this policy shift and documents how it was translated into the alluvium. Chapter 6 discusses the formation of a new river channel, or what geologists and hydrologists call “avulsion,” in the Rumahiyya district in 1701–1702 when the Euphrates abruptly changed course and jeopardized political stability in Iraq. It combines paleoclimatic information from dendrochronological (tree-ring) and speleothem (icicle-like cave rock) analysis with archival material and argues that the course of the Tigris started to change at an earlier date, and that this change was related to drought in Central Anatolia in 1687 and 1688. Thus, one can see how bridging environmental history and natural sciences can help us to understand complex issues.

The book’s closing chapter, “After the Flood,” outlines the destruction of the balance between herders and cultivators, and the political changes that resulted from it. The eighteenth century witnessed the rise of the Pashalik of Baghdad, which came to resemble “a state within the Ottoman state” (p. 136). As Ottoman central control over the region declined, it grew in power and controlled taxation, finance, and policing in the Tigris-Euphrates basin (pp. 136, 143). The abandonment of the Birecik shipyard in 1780 marked the end of the Ottoman state’s direct influence over the twin rivers. From this date on, Istanbul “relied on the services of the Pashalik, rather than those of the Tigris and Euphrates, to bind Iraq to the imperial center” (p. 144).

In recent years, studies focusing on the place of waterways in Ottoman history have evidenced that rivers, streams, and canals played their part in the historical evolution of the Ottoman Empire. Despite growing interest in riverine environments in the Ottoman Empire, the multidimensional relationships between the Tigris and Euphrates and the farmers, nomadic pastoralists, animals, and microorganisms in the alluvium have so far been a blind spot. Faisal Husain’s Rivers of the Sultan fills this gap in the literature by highlighting the understudied role of the Tigris and Euphrates in political, military, and socio-economic changes in the early modern Ottoman Empire. It provides insights into how humans interacted with their natural environment, cooperated with and benefited from it, and coped with the problems and inconveniences it caused with limited technology and scientific understanding. In this respect, it offers a valuable and timely contribution to the growing body of literature on Ottoman and Middle Eastern environmental history. Moreover, Rivers of the Sultan appears at a moment when the news about the polluted Tigris and Euphrates and dams and other destructive megaprojects on the two rivers have hit the headlines, and it thus provides critical historical perspectives on contemporary problems. Rivers of the Sultan will engage Middle Eastern studies scholars, historians of the Ottoman Empire, and environmental historians.