[ Calls for Papers ]

The American Society of Environmental Historians invites abstracts for a proposed panel for its annual meeting entitled "Concentric Circles, Parallel Lines: modern technologies in Ottoman landscapes" at St. Paul, March 29-April 2, 2006. Deadline: June 25, 2005. Over the long nineteenth century of technical innovation, the Ottoman state
extended across geographical boundaries to rule a variety of landscapes from
the Mediterranean to the Gulf. While states can be defined by their legal
forms, territorial boundaries, coercive capacities, normative citizenship, or
public ideologies, this panel describes the Ottoman state by means of
technologies mobilized over and in landscapes.

While relations between urban technologies and landscapes during the late
Ottoman period are present no single, schematic type, nineteenth-century
technical innovations introduced new territorialities to Ottoman rule,
connecting local communities with urban centers, imperial capitals, and global
investors. Contemporary technologies reiterated roles for local notables,
introduced markets and innovated forms of governance, and consolidated state
and market control within the Empire and its borderlands.

New powers distinguished modernity in Ottoman landscapes from those outside
laws' protections. 'Concentric circles' looped individuals into modernist
citizenship and global markets; 'parallel lines' lead to regional centers and
the Ottoman capital. This panel considers 'concentric circles' (of census
takers' and epidemiologists' rounds, within irrigation circles, traced during
prisoners' leisure), and 'parallel lines' (railways' tracks, telegraph lines,
columns of print) during a long nineteenth century.

Further information on the ASEH is available on the web at http://www.h-net.org/~environ/ASEH/welcome_IE4.html. Kindly submit 250-word abstracts as an email message to Dr. Elizabeth Bishop
(Elizabeth_bishop@mail.utexas.edu) by 25 June.