Seeds of Power: Exploration in Ottoman Environmental History. Winwick: The White Horse Press

Abstract

In 2006, the late John F. Richards published The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. In this landmark book, Richards initiated the writing of the global environmental history of the early modern world. It was this world in which the Ottoman Empire expanded its territory from the northwestern Balkans to the shores of the Red Sea and from the slopes of Mount Ararat to the southwestern Mediterranean. Yet aside from brief references to the Ottoman environment and its inhabitants, Unending Frontier did not integrate the Ottoman Empire into the story of global environmental change in the early modern period. The possible reasons for this are beyond the scope of this review.