Environmental Crises at the End of Safavid History: The Collapse of Iran's Early Modern Imperial Ecology, 1666–1722

The 17th century was a period of transition in world history. It was marked globally by social movements emerging in response to widespread drought, famine, disease, warfare, and dislocation linked to climate change. Historians have yet to situate Safavid Iran (1501–1722) within the “General Crisis.” This article, coauthored by an environmental historian and a climate scientist, revisits primary sources and incorporates tree-ring evidence to argue that an ecological crisis beginning in the late 17th century contributed to the collapse of the imperial ecology of the Safavid Empire. A declining resource base and demographic decline conditioned the unraveling of imperial networks and the empire's eventual fall to a small band of Afghan raiders in 1722. Ultimately, this article makes a case for the connectedness of Iran to broader global environmental trends in this period, with local circumstances and human agency shaping a period of acute environmental crisis in Iran.

School Protests and the Making of the Post-Ottoman Mediterranean: Student Politicization as a Challenge to Italian Colonialism in Rhodes, 1915–1937

Student unrest under Italian rule in Rhodes reveals youth's contribution to the transformation of Mediterranean politics in the 20th century. A condition of possibility for this unrest was the precolonial infrastructure of Rhodes, where new schools emerged in the last decades of Ottoman rule. During the Italian military occupation (1912–23), schools reflected identifications such as Ottoman patriotism and Greek irredentism. Student activism expanded beyond school issues and intersected with Italy's uncertain attitude concerning Rhodes's future, the warfare ravaging the Eastern Mediterranean, and the unmaking of Ottoman authority. Italian governors considered youth politicization to be influenced by elder politicians and limited to communal factionalism. After a decade of reforms under Italian sovereignty following the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), unrest reappeared in the 1930s. Students sympathized with ideas like pro-fascist Zionism and anticolonial Greek nationalism. They addressed issues of loyalty and belonging linked to Italian rule's dilemmas of fascist assimilation and colonial separation. Contrary to the 1910s, the authorities repressed student unrest and admitted that youth politicization was autonomous from the influence of the elders, conflicting with the fascist colonial order. Discussing student activism during this imperial transformation goes beyond narratives centered on state policies or one exclusive confessional group, highlighting interconnections between communal affairs, colonial governance, and regional geopolitics.

The Agricultural Settlement of the Arabah and the Political Ecology of Zionism

Agricultural settlement geared to capitalist commodity production and accompanied by massive ecological interventions has historically been central to the Zionist colonial project of creating a permanent Jewish presence in the “Land of Israel.” The hyperarid southern region known as the Central Arabah is an instructive edge-case: in the 1960s, after the expulsion of the bedouin population, cooperative settlements were established here and vegetables produced through “Hebrew self-labor,” with generous assistance from the state. In the 1990s the region was again transformed as the importation of migrant workers from Thailand enabled farmers to expand cultivation of bell peppers for global markets. But today ecological destruction, depletion of water resources, and global warming cast doubt over the viability of settlement in this climatically extreme region. I locate the settlements of the Arabah within the historical political ecology of the Zionist movement, arguing that their current fragility exposes the essential precarity of capitalist colonization.

“Revolution is the Equality of Children and Adults”: Yaşar Kemal Interviews Street Children, 1975

In 1975, the world-famous novelist Yaşar Kemal (1923–2015) undertook a series of journalistic interviews with street children in Istanbul. The series, entitled “Children Are Human” (Çocuklar İnsandır), reflects the author's rebellious attitude as well as the revolutionary spirit of hope in the 1970s in Turkey. Kemal's ethnographic fieldwork with street children criticized the demotion of children to a less-than-human status when present among adults. He approached children's rights from a human rights angle, stressing the humanity of children and that children's rights are human rights. The methodological contribution of this research to the history of children and youth is its engagement with ethnography as historical source. His research provided children the opportunity to express their political subjectivities and their understanding of the major political questions of the time, specifically those of social justice, (in)equality, poverty, and ethnic violence encountered in their everyday interactions with politics in the country. Yaşar Kemal's fieldwork notes and transcribed interviews also bring to light immense injustices within an intersectional framework of age, class, ethnicity, and gender. The author emphasizes that children's political agency and their political protest is deeply rooted in their subordination and misery, but also in their dreams and hopes. Situating Yaşar Kemal's “Children Are Human” in the context of the 1970s in Turkey, I hope to contribute to childhood studies with regard to the political agency of children as well as to the history of public intellectuals and newspapers in Turkey and to progressive representations of urban marginalization.

The Anti-Aryan Moment: Decolonization, Diplomacy, and Race in Late Pahlavi Iran

In 1946, the entertainer and activist Paul Robeson pondered America's intentions in Iran. In what was to become one of the first major crises of the Cold War, Iran was fighting a Soviet aggressor that did not want to leave. Robeson posed the question, “Is our State Department concerned with protecting the rights of Iran and the welfare of the Iranian people, or is it concerned with protecting Anglo-American oil in that country and the Middle East in general?” This was a loaded question. The US was pressuring the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops after its occupation of the country during World War II. Robeson wondered why America cared so much about Soviet forces in Iranian territory, when it made no mention of Anglo-American troops “in countries far removed from the United States or Great Britain.” An editorial writer for a Black journal in St. Louis posed a different variant of the question: Why did the American secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, concern himself with elections in Iran, Arabia or Azerbaijan and yet not “interfere in his home state, South Carolina, which has not had a free election since Reconstruction?”