German “Test Farms” and the Roots of Landscape Conservation in Late Ottoman Anatolia

The Ottoman Empire, once a vast global power encompassing most of the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeastern Europe, saw its frontier rapidly diminish throughout the nineteenth century as revolts and foreign wars peeled away its territories piece by piece. For many Ottoman elites experiencing these losses, the paramount objective of their careers was to maintain the Ottoman project of empire by turning attention to the last viable space of territorial consolidation – the frontier of the central and east Anatolian steppe. Beginning in 1903, as part of its efforts to build a railway across Anatolia to distant Baghdad, Germany’s largest financial firm, Deutsche Bank, established a set of agricultural and horticultural test colonies along the path of the proposed construction. These test farms sought to establish which varieties of flora would grow well in Anatolia and, ideally, boost freight for the railroad. In addition to verifying for both Deutsche Bank and the Ottoman state which plants were profitable, the test farms also established for late Ottoman elites a politics of environmental management rooted partly in German theories of bioregionalism, or the harmony of ecological, social, and political systems according to the environmental features of a defined territory. In this way, Deutsche Bank’s test farms helped express and center a budding discourse of ecological conservation among Ottoman elites for whom the future of the Ottoman imperial project depended on proper husbanding of those natural resources that could uniquely thrive on the Anatolian frontier.