This panel centers plants in a number of different ways: as commodities, as objects of knowledge, and as living beings that do not always abide by human plans for them. With roots in the Ottoman world but with rings of analysis stretching outward, the panel examines grapevines outside of Izmir, the forests of Bosnia, a balsam orchard outside of Cairo, and the pictorial representations of Ottoman nature studies all as part of an effort to think of trees and plants as historical objects and beings that open up a number of questions related to both space and knowledge.

On a spatial level, how did plants materialize mobility or disconnection during processes of commerce and acclimatization? The panel explores how geographies of plants and botanical knowledge underscore connections between the Ottoman and Atlantic worlds, as well as how emerging customs regimes related to plant matter and disease helped to underpin the emerging post-Ottoman state system in the Eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, how did plants become implicated in the marking of intercommunal boundaries? The panel also traces how in Ottoman Bosnia, religious communal boundaries appeared in many cases with respect to questions related to forests, whether in relation to the usage of the environment and its resources or in terms of trees being used as boundary markers. Meanwhile, the labor of depicting indigenous Ottoman plants involved a great deal of translation and collaboration between European and Ottoman scholars. In late Ottoman Izmir, the grapevine disease of phylloxera threw into relief a political economy of both tension and collaboration between Greek Orthodox and Muslim tenders of grapevines and producers of raisins.

With respect to knowledge, how did understandings of plants facilitate imperial projects? In Ottoman Egypt, balsam oil production and its description represented a dynamic response to the shifting grounds of production catalyzed by the transatlantic economy. In late Ottoman Izmir, the importation of American-root stock offered respite from the phylloxera that destroyed the region’s native stocks. And how was knowledge produced in the first place? The early modern phenomenon of Ottoman nature studies involved painstaking labor of botanical translation between European naturalists and Ottoman scholars.

Stretching between the early modern and late Ottoman worlds, the panel thus emphasizes the shifting ways that empire branched out into the lives of imperial subjects and beyond. With an emphasis on space and knowledge, the panel reveals the dynamic relationship between human and non-human worlds in terms of mobility, intercommunal boundaries, and knowledge production, altogether turning a new leaf on enduring questions related to the empire and its broader context.