Samuel Dolbee, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. xvii + 316 pages.

Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East is a timely and significant contribution to Ottoman and Middle Eastern environmental history, particularly in its exploration of state violence and ecological transformation.By centering the Jazira region, stretching between Aleppo, Baghdad, Urfa, and Diyarbekir, Dolbee positions his study at the margins of state authority, where political ecology, imperial and colonial ambitions, and human and local agency intersected in complex and often violent ways.He presents Jazira's unique political ecology as a fragmented environment where humans and non-humans constantly moved, adapted, challenged, and evaded state control under both Ottoman rule and post-Ottoman colonial administrations in British Iraq and French Syria.This focus on political ecology sets Dolbee's work apart from previous scholarship on Ottoman and Middle Eastern environmental histories, which has often emphasized Ottoman imperial ecologies of harmony and cooperation.Throughout the book, the Moroccan locust (Dociostaurus marocannus) emerges both as a destructive pest and a powerful metaphor for expressing frustration and disdain.As a biological threat, locusts devastated staple grains and cash crops, prompting various control measures.These ranged from Sufi-blessed waters meant to attract starlings to consume locust eggs to incentivizing locals with monetary rewards for egg destruction, and, later, the introduction of zinc barriers and chemical insecticides in the early twentieth century.Beyond their ecological impact, locusts also carried deep symbolic weight.Ottoman statesmen and bureaucrats, driven by civilizational ambitions, likened the nomadic tribes of Jazira to locustsunruly and disruptive.At the same time, the region's inhabitants, including Armenian deportees, genocide survivors, and Assyrian refugees, used the same metaphor to describe Ottoman state violence, equating its devastation to that of a locust swarm.In this way, the locust functioned not only as an environmental force but also as a lens through which historical actors articulated their experiences of power, destruction, and survival.Dolbee frames Jazira as an ecological frontier, where rainfall-dependent agriculture met the unrealized potential of large-scale irrigation through the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.Often envisioned as a landscape that could rival Egypt in agricultural productivity, the region's economy was deeply tied to wool production, which became increasingly integrated into global marketsespecially during fluctuations in cotton and wool prices caused by the American Civil War.