Empire of Mountains: Environmental Racialization & Colonial Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire & Modern Turkey

This talk explores the historical evolution of the racialization of the Kizilbash inhabitants in the Dersim region of Eastern Anatolia, popularly known as the “province inside four mountains.” It examines how the perception of the late imperial Ottoman and early republican Turkish state elites regarding this community transformed from being “Muslim sons of Muslims” in the 1890s of the Hamidian period to becoming “Kurdified Turks” in the 1910s of the Young Turks period and eventually “Turkish sons of Turks” by the late 1930s of the republican period. The analysis highlights the role of mountains, comprising three quarters of the central provinces of the Ottoman Empire, in this racialization process and argues that such epistemic violence served to legitimize the accompanying colonial violence. Join us as we explore the intricate interplay between geography, identity, and power in this historical context.
 

Cevat Dargın is a historian of the modern Middle East and North Africa. He explores intersectional historical processes among race, territory, and technology that reinvented governance in these regions and the larger world during the Age of High Imperialism, from the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s to the aftermath of World War I and into the interwar period. This is the period during which governance in many parts of the world transitioned from indirect imperial to centralized nation-state rule, with profound implications for today. 

He earned his PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2021. Following that, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor during the 2022-23 academic year. Beginning in January 2024, he will join Columbia University's Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies as a Visiting Assistant Professor. His article titled “Anticipatory Historical Geographies of Violence: Imagining, Mapping and Integrating Dersim into the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish State, 1866–1939” was recently published by the Journal of Historical Geography. He is currently working on his book manuscript, which explores the formation of the modern state at the intersection of race, territory, and technology in the late Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman territories.