Arid Empire: A Conversation with Natalie Koch

About the Book

The iconic deserts of the American Southwest could not have been colonized and settled without the help of desert experts from the Middle East. For example, in 1856, a caravan of 33 camels arrived in Indianola, Texas, led by a Syrian cameleer the Americans called “Hi Jolly.” This “camel corps,” the U.S. government hoped, could help the Army secure the new southwest swath of the country just wrested from Mexico. Though the dream of the camel corps—and sadly, the camels—died, the idea of drawing on expertise, knowledge, and practices from the desert countries of the Middle East did not. Learn More

About the Speakers

Natalie Koch is professor of geography at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She is a political geographer who works on geopolitics, empire, state power, and energy and environmental history, especially in the Arabian Peninsula. Her latest book, Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (Verso Books, 2022), examines U.S. empire-building domestically and overseas—focusing on how the arid lands “expertise” needed to establish settler control of the desert Southwest was built through ties with the Arabian Peninsula since the 1800s.

Bandar Alsaeed is a historian of the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula whose areas of research include the colonial genealogy of contemporary political practices in the Gulf, social histories of labor in the pearling and oil industries, and the role of migration in the making of the region. Alsaeed’s current book project studies how efforts by British imperial authorities, and later multinational oil firms, to govern the mobility of pearl divers and oil workers shaped the idea of the “foreigner” as a category of political subjectivity in the Gulf. He is currently a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the department of Middle East Studies at USC.

William Deverell is an American historian with a focus on the 19th- and 20th-century American West. Deverell has written works on political, social, ethnic, and environmental history. He is the founding director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

About the Moderator

Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani is the Farhang Foundation Early Career Chair in Iranian Studies and assistant professor of Middle East Studies and Environmental Studies at USC. Movahedi-Lankarani studies modern Iran, focusing on the country’s recent history through the interwoven perspectives of technology, development, and the environment.