Unleashing the Beast: Animals, Energy, and the Economy of Labor in Ottoman Egypt

For the vast majority of human history, until at least the early nineteenth century, the chief concern of human communities was their multiple relationships with animals--how to use them, eat them, avoid them, and wear them. Here, Mikhail focuses on the history of this relationship as a means of ana...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American historical review 2013-04, Vol.118 (2), p.317-348
Main Author: Mikhail, Alan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
19th century
Agriculture
Animal domestication
Animals
Economic history
Egypt
Historical analysis
Humanities
Imperialism
Labour economics
Modernization
Ottoman Empire
Rural areas
Rural economics
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Summary:For the vast majority of human history, until at least the early nineteenth century, the chief concern of human communities was their multiple relationships with animals--how to use them, eat them, avoid them, and wear them. Here, Mikhail focuses on the history of this relationship as a means of analyzing the global transition of early modern rural societies from subsistence to commercialized agriculture. Using Ottoman Egypt as a case study, he offers a template for understanding how rural economies based on both animal wealth and the shared labor of humans and animals changed at the end of the eighteenth century, making possible the formation of large landed estates characterized by human labor. For him, this transition represented a fundamental change in the energy regime of Ottoman Egypt--from animal power to human power--that set Egypt on a wholly new political and economic course in the early nineteenth century. To explain what is often termed a society's "transition to modernity" is a challenge faced by historians of many parts of the world. Combining the study of human-animal relations, early modern agriculture, and Ottoman economic and social history, he argues for the importance of nonhuman histories in understanding global economic, energetic, and political transformations.
ISSN:0002-8762
1937-5239
DOI:10.1093/ahr/118.2.317