Thomas Kuehn, “Managing the Hazards of Yemen’s Nature: Military Violence, Governance, and the Environment in Ottoman Southwest Arabia, 1872-1914,” Arab Studies Journal XXXII, no. 1 (2024): 38-72.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article?

Thomas Kuehn (TK): I wrote this article because the case of Yemen during the four decades before the beginning of World War I highlights an important aspect of the environmental history of the late Ottoman frontier that earlier scholarship has not addressed, namely the intersection of military violence, governance, and the environment.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the article address?

TK: The article explores the Ottoman Empire's environmental management and military strategies in Yemen from the reconquest of much of the highlands in the 1870s to the onset of World War I. It situates Yemen, largely overlooked in the environmental historiography of the Ottoman Empire, into the broader context of the late Ottoman frontier, emphasizing the multiple ways in which military violence, governance, and environmental adaptation intersected. Unlike other frontier regions—where large-scale land reclamation transformed rural spaces into farmland, and infrastructural projects, such as the Hijaz railway, were meant to contain British imperial encroachments and local autonomy—Ottoman efforts in Yemen focused primarily on the survival and effectiveness of their military forces and on the logistical challenges posed by the region's harsh environment.

Ottoman environmental historians have examined settlement policies, land reclamation projects, and technopolitics in regions like Benghazi, Çukurova, Hijaz, Iraq, and Transjordan. I am thinking here of the work done by Nora Barakat, Camille Cole, Chris Gratien, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Fredrick Walther Lorenz, or Michael Christopher Low. By contrast, this article reveals a different dynamic in Yemen, where the rugged terrain and the geographical distance from the empire’s core provinces weakened the position of the Ottoman state and thus hindered large-scale development. The military's role was central, with officers learning from local practices to deploy their troops effectively in Yemen's coastal plain and mountainous highlands. Rather than imposing centralized environmental strategies, the Ottomans relied on local knowledge—for instance during their recruitment efforts for militia units, where Yemeni farmers and shepherds were seen as more resilient to local diseases and better suited to soldiering in the province's extreme climate.

One key argument of the article is that the Ottoman state adapted its governance strategies to Yemen’s environmental realities. Given the province's distance from the empire’s economic and political centers and the resource-heavy nature of military operations, Ottoman planners turned to local elites to help manage provisioning and recruitment. This contrasts with other regions, such as Hijaz, where Ottoman policies of environmental management tended to sideline local expertise. In Yemen, local knowledge of the terrain, animals, weather patterns, and battlefield tactics was vital for sustaining the empire’s military presence.

Despite ambitious plans to develop Yemen’s agricultural potential, Ottoman officials faced severe limitations. Yemen’s remote geographical location, frequent droughts, and the high costs of maintaining a military force made large-scale infrastructural projects unattainable. Instead, the military became the primary means of governance, particularly for tax collection and control of rebellious areas. The Zaydi imams of the Hamid al-Din line, especially Imam Yahya, mounted four major insurgencies between 1891 and 1911, highlighting the centrality of military violence in Ottoman rule in Yemen.

The article also sheds light on the environmental dimensions of these insurgencies, particularly during the 1904–05 and 1910–11 uprisings. Violent and often predatory forms of Ottoman revenue collection made the locals more vulnerable to drought and famine and increased their support for the uprisings led by the Zaydi imams. Both the Ottoman military and the imams weaponized these environmental disasters during the wars they waged against each other. Ottoman forces struggled with provisioning troops under extreme environmental conditions and were often forced to procure supplies from far-off regions like Anatolia, Egypt, and British India. These difficulties underscored the limits of Ottoman environmental management in Yemen, as logistical challenges and reliance on external supplies weakened their position. 

In a broader historical context, the case of Ottoman Yemen challenges dominant narratives of colonial warfare in the long nineteenth century. As historians like Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Jörn Leonhard have noted, European colonial armies often used their technical superiority and methods of ecological warfare to break local resistance. However, in Yemen, this dynamic played out differently. While the Ottomans initially had the upper hand with superior weapons technology in the 1870s, by the early 1900s Imam Yahya’s forces had reached parity with Ottoman troops in terms of firepower. Further, Yahya weaponized environmental factors like drought and famine more effectively than his Ottoman adversaries, especially during the 1904–05 war that brought Ottoman rule in Yemen to the brink of collapse.

Although new global technologies like the Suez Canal, steamships, and telegraphs helped the Ottomans bolster their forces, they were insufficient to fully suppress Imam Yahya or control all of Yemen’s highland regions. This experience reveals the limits of Ottoman imperial power and underscores Yemen’s significance in the context of global imperial history. Indeed, Ottoman Yemen did not follow the typical trajectory of European imperial expansion in the long nineteenth century. Instead, it highlighted the adaptability of local forces and the constraints of empire-building in regions marked by extreme environmental challenges.

In conclusion, this article highlights the unique environmental and military dynamics of Ottoman Yemen, offering fresh insights into the empire’s frontier experience. Yemen’s harsh geography and local resistance tested the limits of Ottoman governance, showing how environmental realities shaped military strategies and imperial ambitions. By examining the interplay of military violence, local knowledge, and environmental management, this study brings Yemen into the broader narrative of the Ottoman Empire’s transformation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

J: How does this article connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

TK: What connects the article to my previous work is the focus on Southwest Arabia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within the context of late Ottoman imperial expansion and governance. At the same time, the article is my first contribution to the field of environmental history. I also go beyond my earlier work on Ottoman Yemen in that I am more interested in bringing out the human, economic, and military ties that connected Yemen to other parts of the empire as well as to the Southern Red Sea Region and South Asia. For instance, military violence, famine, and epidemic diseases—often exacerbated by war—killed tens of thousands of Ottoman conscripts from different regions of the empire and probably many more locals, while prompting the first major wave of outward migration from Yemen, most notably to Eritrea and the Horn of Africa. The developments examined in the article thus affected people across the Ottoman Empire and beyond.

J: Who do you hope will read this article, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

TK: I hope that the article will be of interest to other environmental historians of the late Ottoman frontier and to historians of the long nineteenth century who study the environmental aspects of imperial conquest in different parts of the world in comparative perspective. Yemen has been largely absent from this scholarship. Hopefully, my article will help change that and, for instance, encourage research on the connections among military violence, governance, and the environment in other frontier zones of the Ottoman Empire. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

TK: This article is part of my current book project titled “Ottoman Yemen. A Connected History, 1830-1924.” I examine the movements of people, goods, ideas, and forms of knowledge as well as political, economic, and environmental developments that connected Southwest Arabia to other regions of the Ottoman Empire, the Red Sea Region, and the Western Indian Ocean World.

J: What were some of the long-term consequences of the developments you describe?

TK: The war of 1910–11 ended in a stalemate and led eventually led to a rapprochement between the Ottoman state and Imam Yahya in the form of the 1911 Da‘an Agreement that incorporated the imam into the Ottoman Empire as an autonomous yet dependent ruler who received financial and military support from Istanbul. The agreement allowed Yahya to ward off his local rivals, and was therefore one of the key factors that explain the creation of an independent, post-Ottoman Yemeni state in the aftermath of World War I. 

Excerpt from the article (from pages 49 to 52 and 53)

In Çukurova and Benghazi, officials pursued major, sustained efforts to further local agricultural development from the 1860s and 1890s, respectively. By contrast, I have found no evidence that the central government even discussed the plans presented by Raşid, Glaser, or Es‘ad Cabır, let alone develop them into concrete, state-funded projects. Similarly, it seems that nonstate investors and companies showed no interest in expanding cultivation in Yemen through irrigation projects. There are several reasons why not. From the 1870s onward, Ottoman policymakers in Istanbul and Yemen fashioned provincial governance in Southwest Arabia in ways that left little scope for long-term infrastructural projects of this kind. Soon after the new province’s creation, they realized that despite the swift reconquest of 1871–73, Ottoman state power was much more precarious in Yemen than in provinces, frontier zones included, closer to the empire’s centers of political and economic power. As a result, the state did not attempt the more intrusive practices of Tanzimat governance, such as population counts, cadastral surveys, and conscription, for fear of prompting large-scale local resistance. Instead, high-ranking bureaucrats and military officers sought to establish Ottoman control by adapting governmental practices to what they viewed as the local people’s “customs and dispositions” (‘adat ve emzice). A crucial aspect of this approach was the practice of incorporating local lords and tribal leaders—collectively known as shaykhs (mashayikh)—as well as merchants into provincial governance. They accomplished this end by delegating revenue collection in rural areas to these local leaders as tax farmers or as heads of tax districts under the new province’s fiscal apportionment (tevzi‘) system. This form of revenue collection lent itself to massive abuses that are amply described in Ottoman accounts from the late 1870s onward. These abuses suggest that administrators and military officers from outside the province and Yemeni Ottoman elites often cooperated to systematically coerce rural communities into paying significantly more taxes than the official government rates and diverted large portions of these revenues into their own pockets. There is evidence that some governors-general participated in these extortion schemes. Officials, local petitioners, and European observers sharply criticized these practices of predatory, illegal revenue collection, and the Ottoman judiciary occasionally prosecuted them. The Hamidian regime mostly tolerated these abuses, however. The regime was reluctant to take decisive countermeasures that might alienate key allies in a strategically important province where they faced increasingly intense competition from the Zaydi imams, as well as the British, the Italians, and, later, the Idrisi rulers of ‘Asir. 

It is mainly for this reason that throughout this period, military concerns tended to receive priority in the context of Ottoman imperial governance in Yemen. Ottoman troops played a key role in the excessive and violent extraction of revenue in rural areas. Military force was crucial to disempower the principal local rulers during the early 1870s, to suppress local revolts and, later, to suppress the Zaydi imams al-Mansur and Yahya’s major insurgencies, which these practices partly caused in the first place. It is thus not surprising that military expenses were the most important item of the province’s annual budgets. Klaus Kreiser has demonstrated that these amounted to an average of more than eighty-four percent for the fiscal years 1887–88 to 1910–11. As Jon Mandaville puts it, “since military expenses took precedence, very little money was left for school and other civilian expenses.” The provincial budgets that Kreiser studied did not feature any expenses for infrastructural projects, including roads, bridges, and irrigation. Ottoman policymakers and military planners were therefore concerned not so much with transforming Yemen’s natural environment but rather with minimizing the hazards it posed to the Ottoman troops deployed to Southwest Arabia.

Considering these financial constraints, a major undertaking like the rebuilding of the Ma’rib high dam must have appeared unrealistic to the central government. The rebuilding would have required the conquest and occupation of that region, as Ma’rib was outside the area controlled by the Ottomans. Without a provincial network of paved roads and railways, Yemen was also unattractive to individuals and companies who might have invested into the expansion of agriculture in the fertile regions of the Tihama and the highlands. As Chris Gratien shows in the case of Çukurova and Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky shows in Transjordan, nonstate actors, such as foreign capitalists, Ottoman merchants, entrepreneurs, and individual bureaucrats often drove land reclamation and the expansion of commercial agriculture, rather than the Ottoman state. But these investors were only drawn to these regions once they were connected to regional railway networks and the Ottoman state was able to guarantee the security of rural areas. 

To be sure, some Ottoman and European observers were dreaming about a future in which a modern road network and large-scale irrigation projects would significantly expand Yemen’s production of cash crops. As Samuel Dolbee notes, however, many others, including Glaser himself, “saw the region’s value as being independent of what it had been or might one day be. Rather, they saw it for what it was.” In marked contrast to many Ottoman frontier regions, Yemen’s rural spaces were not dominated by pastureland or swamp areas that needed to be turned into agricultural land through settlement policies and land reclamation projects. Rather, most people in Ottoman Yemen already made a living as sedentary farmers. Scholars and journalists like Glaser, Albert Deflers, and Walter B. Harris, who traveled across the province during the 1880s and early 1890s, commented enthusiastically on the lush countryside in the regions of Jabal Rayma and Jabal Haraz between Sanaa and the Tihama, in the mountains around Hajja, Kuhlan, and al-Suda in the northwest, and between Qa‘taba and Yarim in the southeast, where coffee and dhura were grown on well-maintained and carefully irrigated terraced fields. Coffee, Harris noted, was exported in large quantities via Hudayda and Aden, primarily to Britain and France. Indeed, one can argue that the Ottoman military, government officials, and their local allies pursued widespread extortion of illegal taxes in part because many of Yemen’s rural areas allowed for intensive cultivation. As Ottoman and European observers often noted, officials who forced local villagers to pay taxes beyond the official government rates wanted to get rich quickly, before the end of their postings in Yemen. Eager to collect revenue in cash, rather than in kind, they pressured local farmers to grow more cash crops, especially coffee, which contributed to the transformation of Yemen’s countryside and the commercialization of rural spaces. In the absence of cadastral surveys and land registration documents from this period, it is impossible to say to what extent these practices prompted efforts to bring more land under cultivation and whether they led to a concentration of landed property in the hands of local merchant capitalists, as farmers defaulted on the loans they had taken out to pay their taxes. For the central government, Ottoman governance in Yemen during this period failed to realize the province’s agricultural potential and turned into a significant burden on the state’s strained finances. For many officials and Yemeni Ottoman elites, however, the very same governmental practices allowed them to exploit the region’s agricultural riches to the fullest for their own benefit. 

Over the next two decades, as it became clear that military force would remain essential to ensure Ottoman government control of Southwest Arabia, policymakers in Sanaa and Istanbul put environmental management in the service of the military […]

High-ranking military officers and bureaucrats articulated—with much greater clarity than Raşid in 1874–75—the idea that the appropriation of local knowledge of Yemen’s environmental realities, including topography, climate, and animals, was essential to ensure Ottoman government control of Yemen. A good example is Colonel Es‘ad Cabır’s book Yemen. In a chapter that detailed the planning and execution of military operations against local insurgents in Yemen’s highland regions and coastal plain, the author insisted that “these types of wars are not directly pertaining to the art of warfare, and their execution is very difficult and dependent on the excellent gathering of information about the general conditions of the locality where they occur, because they differ as to the area’s geographical position and topographical conditions, the insurgent people’s customs and means of subsistence, the encouragement and support they receive from outside [the province] or whether [these uprisings] are about fanaticism, religion, and the obtaining of independence.” 

Unlike Raşid, Es‘ad Cabır sought to demonstrate that the very different environmental realities of the highlands, on one side, and the coastal plain with its stretches of desert, savanna, and forests, on the other, profoundly shaped local military tactics and styles of combat. Whereas in Yemen’s mountainous regions military encounters mostly centered on the siege and defense of fortified hilltop strongholds, the people of the Tihama preferred night attacks in the open country and ambushes in forested areas. Drawing on his own experience of service in Yemen, and especially his deployment against the Bani Marwan tribe in the Tihama, Es‘ad Cabır argued that Ottoman military commanders needed to learn about and adapt to these environmentally conditioned forms of warfare and provided detailed suggestions on how to do so.