Much of the material the collection presents is interesting, and its range is impressive, from considerations of the environment's effect on the longevity of empires to estimates of the size of the typical daily catch enjoyed by fishermen in medieval Istanbul.
Foreign Affairs
Well-sourced, well-written, well-argued, and often quite interesting. The scholars, editor, and publishers are to be ... Read morecommended.
Middle East Media and Book Reviews
A readable and widely sourced text that can be used with confidence by anyone eager to teach the subject at the high school or college level. The overall standard is so high, so thought provoking and drawn so much from recent research as to resist most of the usual types of criticism directed towards edited works.
Roger Owen, International Journal of Turkish Studies
In many ways the book provides a refreshing look from a rather new vantage point at a topic that this reviewer had thought was fairly well known and understood. The histories of many of the areas or countries within MENA have clearly been shaped through the power and control of their environmental histories and these studies will open up many new avenues of academic research which have been neglected in the past or even hidden from view altogether.
Stephen Upex, Landscape History
Water on Sand, edited by Alan Mikhail, is a diverse and engaging collection of works that bring environmental history to the forefront of the study of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in a compelling way. The essays that compose the book cover a significant swath of time-from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries-as well as a vast geographic space, and they deliver a persuasive call to utilize environmental history as a tool to understand the history of this region better.
Teaching History
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