Between the Global and the Planetary: Canal Projects, Marsh Ecologies, and the Making of Ottoman Iskenderun, 1833-1914

Date

2026-7-28

Author

Daloğlu, Feyza

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This dissertation explores the urban environmental history of Ottoman Iskenderun (Alexandretta) between 1833 and 1914 through a sequence of drainage projects undertaken to drain the town’s surrounding marshes, from the 1833 Ibrahim Pasha Canal to the 1897 Chartier scheme. Using historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s distinction between the global and the planetary as a theoretical framework, it presents Iskenderun’s built environment and urbanization as the co-production of these two forces. The global constitutes the human-centric domain of trade, Ottoman modernization efforts, and European imperial aspirations, whereas the planetary reflects the environmental conditions produced by the Amanus Mountains’ hydrological cycle – marsh formation and the dynamic seaward expansion of the shoreline through centuries of siltation. The dissertation weaves together Ottoman and European state and consular archives, among other sources, and argues that Iskenderun’s urbanization emerged from ongoing encounters between these two forces, through misalignments, frictions and occasional convergences rather than mere human aspirations and actions. Each canal scheme was rebuilt against planetary resistance – choked canals, breached embankments, flooding – even as seawater seepage into the marshes, from one failed drainage project, curbed the breeding grounds of malaria-bearing mosquitoes, making Iskenderun more habitable for humans in the 1870s. Trade, the European pursuit of a Mediterranean-Persian Gulf overland route, and Ottoman ideals for progress sustained an imaginary of Iskenderun as a future prosperous port town, keeping drainage on the agenda for eighty years. The dissertation shows how the environmental conditions of Iskenderun played a crucial part in shaping its urban formation, keeping the marshes embedded in its urban fabric until today.

Subject Keywords

Alexandretta, Nineteenth Century Urbanism, Drainage Projects, Environmental History, Anthropocene

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119987

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis