Beekeeping in Late Ottoman Palestine | Tamar Novick

E317 | The history of late Ottoman Palestine and the changes in settlement, agriculture, economy and politics that occurred there remain a subject of great interest for historians of the Middle East. In this episode, our guest Tamar Novick introduces a new approach to that history using the lens of ecology. We explore changes in late Ottoman Palestine through environment and human-animal relations and in particular, the transformation of beekeeping practices that arrived with Europeans during the late 19th century. We learn about how the introduction of movable hives transformed the relationship between beekeepers, bees, and the landscape, and we consider how European settlers saw in the bees of the Holy Land a unique animal stock that could be developed and possibly exported elsewhere while simultaneously casting the bee and apiculture in Ottoman Palestine as a site of technological intervention. More at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/06/bees.html Tamar Novick is a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and the co-leader of "The Body of Animals" working group there. Her book manuscript, entitled Milk & Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land, examines how settlers in Palestine in the long 20th century attributed special qualities to their land, and used science and technology to reconstruct a plentiful mystical past – literally, "a land flowing with milk and honey." Chris Gratien holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University's Department of History and is currently an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region from the 1850s until the 1950s. CREDITS Episode No. 317 Release Date: 19 June 2017 Recording Location: Harvard University Audio editing by Chris Gratien Music: Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi; Katibim (Uskudar'a Gider iken) - Safiye Ayla Special thanks to Kara Günes for permission to use the composition "Istanbul" Images and bibliography courtesy of Tamar Novick available at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/06/bees.html