Onur Inal: The Imperial Gateway: An Environmental History of Late Ottoman Izmir

This talk will focus on the development of the port-city of Izmir on the eastern Mediterranean coast, from a small coastal town to a transport hub and a gateway linking the river valleys of Western Anatolia to worldwide markets in the late nineteenth century. It will demonstrate how the city and the countryside reshaped each other, and the spatial and temporal distance between the two entities gradually faded during the late Ottoman Empire through an environmental historical lens. It will introduce a cast of both human and non-human historical actors, including camels, horses and micro-organisms, to demonstrate the transformative impact of their interaction on the city and its hinterlands.

Onur Inal is a senior post-doc researcher based at the University of Vienna. His research interests center on environmental history, the history of technology, and human-animal encounters, with a regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa. He is a board member and secretary of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) and the founder of the Network for the Study of Environmental History of Turkey (NEHT). He is the author of Gateway to the Mediterranean: An Environmental History of Late Ottoman Izmir and several other edited collections.