Suchergebnisse

AbstractDuring the late Ottoman period, a large influx of migrants and the expansion of cultivation created opportunities for new settlements in the countryside of Anatolia, Greater Syria, and Iraq. However, settlement often brought misery to newcomers in the form of malaria, especially when it occurred in the lowlands of the Mediterranean. This article traces the contours of the encounter with malaria that arose out of settlement, offering an overview of how Ottoman state and society confronted the conundrum of the swamp and examining the impact of this confrontation on local political economies. It demonstrates that swamps and malaria were a significant concern for late Ottoman state and society, and that policies adopted to address malaria sometimes facilitated the creation of large estates in the countryside of the Mediterranean littoral.

After multiple wars, Greece and the newly-founded Republic of Turkey made peace through the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and the 1930 Treaty of Ankara. A critical component of this rapprochement was the mutual exchange of population and property involving the transfer of some two million people. As part of the exchange, Greek Orthodox inhabitants of the Republic of Turkey – with the exception of those who remained in Istanbul as of the Treaty of Ankara – became Greek nationals. This article explores how the agreements between Turkey and Greece indirectly facilitated a 'second exchange' involving the deportation of Ottoman-born Greeks from the United States during the 1930s. As the American deportation state grew to deport upwards of 20,000 people at the outset of the Great Depression, groups targeted by stringent immigration quotas such as communities of the former Ottoman Empire were deported in large numbers. The exchange of populations provided a framework for resolving the ambiguous nationalities of Greeks in the US, allowing American diplomats to secure Greek passports for prospective deportees. As we further demonstrate, only the terms of this agreement – not national affinity nor diplomatic relations with the US – could be invoked to secure these passports in a number of cases. When it came to immigration enforcement, how people self-identified in racial, ethnic, religious, or national terms was virtually irrelevant. What mattered was how states identified them.

IDRF fellows discuss Alex Nading's book Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement, based on his International Dissertation Research Fellowship research on waste management and disease ecologies in urban Nicaragua.