4
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
1 collections
    0
    shares
      Environment and Society is a collaborative, international project intent on foregrounding and rethinking the interactions of environments and societies from multidisciplinary and global perspectives. 
      Learn more about the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society or subscribe to White Horse Press' OA package Subscribe to Open - The White Horse Press
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found

      Oriental Democracy

      Global Environment
      White Horse Press

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisher
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Montesquieu, Hegel, Marx, Weber, and Wittfogel all employed the concept of Oriental despotism to describe forms of non-European politics. Although each of these thinkers used the idea in different ways for different purposes, they all accepted that one of its crucial aspects was the notion that irrigation produced forms of authoritarian politics. With the world's longest river and one of history's oldest civilisations, Egypt was seen as the quintessential example of Oriental despotism. This article uses the copious sources of the Ottoman period of rule in Egypt to tell quite a different story of irrigation and politics. It shows how peasant cultivators held much of the power in the cooperative arrangements of imperially-coordinated localism that characterised the management of irrigation in rural Egypt. Egyptian peasants had the autonomy and wherewithal to initiate and control repairs to the countryside's irrigation network from beginning to end. They - not the imperial state - were thus the most vital actors in the politics and economics of rural Ottoman Egypt.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Global Environment
          glb environ
          White Horse Press
          1973-3739
          October 01 2014
          October 01 2014
          : 7
          : 2
          : 381-404
          Article
          10.3197/ge.2014.070206
          41945277-cecd-4b27-81cb-0571fec3698b
          © 2014
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article