Biography

Chris Gratien is an Associate Professor of History at UVA who specializes in environmental history, the Middle East, Ottoman Empire, social history, and migration. He is currently preparing a book manuscript entitled The Book and the Sword: A Microhistory of Empire in Late Ottoman Syria. This book is the “prequel” to his first book The Unsettled Plain. The narrative hinges on the partially-unsolved murder of an American missionary in 1862, a presumed assassination. This murder has been depicted as a relatively minor crisis in the historiography of American diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire. Using previously unexamined archival sources from the US and Turkey as well as an array of published sources, Gratein shows that in fact the American diplomatic pressure over this incident indirectly led to a large Ottoman military campaign against the nomadic populations of the region. In the process, Gratien examines the transformation of “empire” during the mid-19th century, not focusing on one specific imperial system but rather the overlapping actions of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Great Britain, France, the Russian Empire, and the United States. The book attempts to further an uncommon approach to the global history of empire rooted in social history focused on the texture of local daily life. Using detailed context of the local conditions in the region based on sources in Ottoman Turkish, Armenian, and Arabic not often consulted by historians of Western empires, the narrative continually returns to the ways in which empire was and is a work of fiction produced and reproduced through the archives.

Gratien's other ongoing book-length research project is an environmental history of the modern Middle East from the 1850s to 1950s with an emphasis on understudied regions of the former Ottoman world. Each chapter revolves around a particular ecological transformation in a different environmental setting in the provinces of the late Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman states of Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and the Italian Dodecanese. The chapters employ primary source material from the Ottoman archives as well as additional primary and secondary material in Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Italian, and French. Chapter topics include sponge diving in the Aegean, the potato in Adapazarı, irrigation of the Konya plain, forestry in the Taurus Mountains, frontier settlement near Ras al-Ayn, and the Jaffa orange. Building on the methodology of his first book, this work emphasizes the centrality of the would-be margins in the remaking of societies in the Middle East as well as the importance of drawing on history and memory as reflected in the works of local authors. The book is intended as a companion to courses on the modern Middle East with an emphasis on environment, socal history, migration, and capitalism. Gratien is currently presenting dimenions of this project at various venues.