Çelik, Semih

Koç University

An Agricultural and Environmental History of Western Anatolia: Biga and Saruhan Districts ca. 1830–189

Dr. Çelik completed his PhD at the European University Institute in 2017. His dissertation focuses on climate change, famines, and empire-building in Anatolia during the first half of the nineteenth century. In 2016 he spent 6 months as a visiting scholar at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Center on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS). Since March 2017, he has been working as a full-time post-doctoral research fellow at Koç University, as part of the ERC-funded Urbanoccupations-OETR project (directed by Prof. M. Erdem Kabadayı) at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. Dr. Çelik is invited to Vienna University to conduct research as Andreas Tietze Memorial Fellow in August-September 2019.

While at ANAMED, he is going to extend his research on the environmental and agricultural history of Anatolia during the long-nineteenth century, both geographically and temporally, and in collaboration with Gygaia projects (co-directed  by Prof. Chris Roosevelt and Prof. Christina Luke), and Urbanoccupations-OETR project. He intends to conduct a comparative study of the Biga and Saruhan districts in western Anatolia as two similar but equally distinct economic and administrative units. Both districts have similar (if not same) climatic and geographic attributes. On the other hand, the two districts demonstrate different patterns in landownership and scale of agricultural production. His project aims to find answers to the following questions by using hitherto unearthed archival resources, and digital humanities tools:

– Did the advent of çiftlik type agricultural production and large land ownership affect agricultural productivity or not?

-Did çiftlik type agricultural production and large land ownership create different socio-ecological cultures around agricultural production?