The plague. An inscrutable curse cast down from the heavens? Drawing upon his 2008 article “The Nature of Plague in Late Eighteenth-Century Egypt” and his 2011 book Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History, Alan Mikhail invites us, instead, to consider plague as part of Ottoman Egypt’s regular biophysical pathology. Described as an ‘icy gale of death’ by the eighteenth-century Egyptian chronicler ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabartī, the plague struck Egypt approximately every nine years during the period from 1337 to 1894. Egypt suffered 59 separate plague epidemics between 1701 and 1844 alone. Viewing these epidemics collectively and taking the 1791 plague epidemic as a case study, Mikhail’s work has explored how the disease functioned alongside a regular set of environmental processes in Egypt, such as the annual flood, food shortages, famine, and sometimes drought. In adapting to this environmental cycle, Egyptians not only survived the plague, but built productive, generative and constructive aspects of society around the disease, from the devolution of property to funerary processions and burial rites.

“Part of plague being embedded in Egyptian society is understanding that it’s not singular, that it has a whole set of other forces, processes, occurrences around it that we have to understand as a kind of bundle.”

This bundle was disrupted with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, which ushered in a new, stringent, European-style of quarantine whereby the healthy and the sick were suddenly and utterly separated. The subsequent resistance of Egyptians to these new quarantine measures, which threatened their established rituals of death and dying, signifies how integral natural cycles were to Ottoman Egyptian society, and in turn, demonstrates the importance of environmental history as an essential tool for understanding this society.

As a historian who helped establish the field of Middle East environmental history, Mikhail explains its key tenets. In treating the historical relationship between humans and other parts of nature as the central motor force of any given society (but particularly the rural and agrarian) we can appreciate the environment differently:

It’s not simply a kind of setting in which society takes place or politics takes place, but an actual dynamic force in which humans are in a kind of push-and-pull relationship with environmental processes that shapes everything around them.

In this episode, Mikhail also recounts his archival experiences in Egypt and how environmental history, on a methodological level, enables us to transcend urban biases, to get into the countryside and to locate Ottoman Egypt’s majority rural population beyond Alexandria and Cairo. He ends by offering us a glimpse into his current research on the intertwined histories of Islam and colonial America.

Episode 73 – The Icy Gale of Death

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.