West of Eden: Race and the Ottoman Armenian roots of California agriculture

Abstract This article links the transnational environmental history of agriculture with the history of racial formation and immigration in the United States. Focusing on the San Joaquin Valley of California and its global connections, the account explains how the region’s nascent late-nineteenth-century bounty derived in part from both crops and people with origins in the Ottoman empire. Seeds for figs, grapes, and melons all made their way from the Ottoman empire to the United States, and so, too, did Armenians. The article thus first offers historical and spatial precision to the oft-repeated description of California as ‘Mediterranean’, rooting it in the people and plants that made it so rather than taking it for granted as a climatic descriptor. Second, it accounts for the varied racial formations of Armenians. They were at once settlers redeeming a desert land but also, in the eyes of their detractors, they dangerously hailed from Asia. Compared at different times to African Americans, Native Americans, Turks, and others, Armenians occupied a precarious place in the American racial hierarchy.