Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East

Some years ago, scholars rightly criticized the neglect of the Middle East in global environmental history and the neglect of environmental perspectives in history writing about the Middle East. These gaps are fortunately being filled, and Samuel Dolbee's book Locusts of Power is a highly welcome building block in this endeavor. An environmental and political history of the remaking of the Middle East in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, the book's setting is the historical landscape of the Jazira, an area between the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the modern Turkish province of Diyarbakır that ceased to exist as a political entity between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Divided today between Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, the Jazira has long been sidelined in scholarship because its sources are dispersed into national archives of several modern states, and its phantom borders harbor uneasy memories of violence, flight, and resettlement, a reminder of which is today's ethnic and environmental makeup of the region. Samuel Dolbee cannot be lauded enough for having taken up this task, working through an array of different sources in many languages.Locusts of Power is divided into four chronologically ordered chapters, each of which focuses on a group of mobile populations in and around the Jazira: the Al-Shammar Arab nomads, Millî Kurdish pastoralists, Armenian genocide survivors, and war refugees in the aftermath of World War I. In each chapter, the author seeks to establish real-life or metaphorical connections between the specific group of people and the locusts whose gluttonousness destroyed fields and pastures. The insects even availed themselves of human infrastructure.Next to the book's obvious merits, there are some tensions. Reading for a while through the intriguing tableau that Dolbee lays out, a sense of slight irritation creeps up. This is partly caused by Dolbee's fascination with his idea of an entangled mobile geography or ecology (both words are used interchangeably) of the Jazira that encompasses humans and locusts alike. This could indeed be a great vantage point from which to explore human-nonhuman encounters in the region. His fascination with the idea, however, repeatedly seems to get the upper hand over a thick description of profound human-nonhuman interrelatedness, to the point that Dolbee restates this connectedness throughout his chapters but does not make the reader actually see the entangled history of mobile people and insects. Besides the real-life locusts, the book works with a second layer of metaphorical human-locust comparisons. Dolbee shows how a variety of human groups were time and again compared to locusts in a derogatory manner. One of the book's many strengths is this reflection on the conflation between locust infestations and dehumanizing parlance. Unfortunately, neither the deeper layers of locust semantics nor the complexities of how and why certain groups of humans would be compared to them—nor whose definition would eventually come to count as valid—are well developed. Dolbee's interest in showing the locust comparison as a trope used against nomads (and by extension other mobile populations) comes at the expense of analyzing their symbolic potential in moments of counterpower, such as when describing the army or tax collectors. The associations that Dolbee evokes are compelling when argumentatively connecting locust extermination by pesticides and its health risks for nomads to the trope of nomads as locusts, thus foreshadowing the many genocides to come. Yet one wonders if this is too neat, whereas the story should probably be more one of ignorance, technocratic blindness, and deliberately looking the other way. The book hovers a bit uneasily between truly following the locusts through their mundane seasonal movements across the Jazira and a metaphorical, often polemical use of the locusts as a symbol of despised groups of people as they appear in Dolbee's rich and diverse sources. The locusts as “insect overlords” of the Jazira—even if this phrasing is perhaps too strong—play an active, if not decisive, role in agriculture, settlement and resettlement, and other politics of the region, until they are finally wiped out by pesticides in the early twentieth century (21). Unfortunately, the book does not provide a historical background to the moment when its narrative begins. This makes it difficult to assess the book's central claim: that the Jazira was a “space of locusts” whose reign ended with border delimitations, pesticides, and agricultural development schemes (23).All this said, Dolbee has written a fascinating and compelling book that takes seriously both the neglected space of the Jazira and the locusts as actors, even as each of his chapters poses questions about the deeper layers of discourse and practice in around the Jazira.