The Street Dogs of Kurtuluş and Paths to Animal History of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa

What might an animal history of the modern Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa look like? This essay begins to answer this question by considering the influences of more recent attention to the environment generally and animals specifically in regional historiography and its relationship to animal history more broadly. The essay explores the dimensions of these histories by synthesizing some of the research on a number of non-human animals, among them camels, mosquitoes, locusts, sheep (and a few goats), water buffalo (and a few cattle), and dogs amid capitalist and colonial transformations of the world. In different ways and in different places, these creatures helped shape the nature of Orientalism, racialization, and colonial hierarchies; they helped determine urban design, transport infrastructure, and commodity flows; and they helped influence the fate of the Zionist project, the nature of the Armenian genocide, and the reality of Ottoman legal reforms. In sum, the essay presents animals as both material forces acting beyond human control and as cultural objects onto and through whom humans articulated visions of order and difference.