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...
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