2025 Theses Doctoral

Desert Developmentalism: Infrastructure, Agriculture, and the Colonization of Southern Palestine, 1850-1950

Bostock, Sahar Mor

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the desert of Southern Palestine—today the Negev/Naqab desert in Southern Israel—has been the focus of various developmental projects aimed at transforming its landscape and inhabitants. Palestinian desert dwellers, Ottoman and British imperial officials, and Jewish settlers have been advancing water canals, railways, urban centers, and agricultural schemes. Even so, the image of an empty desert continued to circulate, justifying the endeavor to “make the desert bloom” through modern science and technology.

Desert Developmentalism examines how developmental plans shaped the desert of Southern Palestine from the late Ottoman period, through the British Mandate, until the 1948 War, the Nakba, and the establishment of the State of Israel. Based on a historical analysis of archival materials, contemporary press, memoirs, and publications in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, English, and Hebrew, along with interviews with members of the Bedouin communities in Southern Israel; and drawing on insights from environmental history and science and technology studies, the study examines not only the construction and use of infrastructure but also their disassembly and disintegration.

By tracing the planning, execution, and failure of infrastructural and agricultural projects, this research highlights how local and imperial actors shaped the desert environment. At the same time, it shows how the process of desert development produced the desert as empty of particular forms of technological infrastructure that were conceived as the signifiers of progress and the preliminary condition for self-government and self-determination in the post-World War I international system. This image of an empty desert facilitated the displacement of the majority of the region's inhabitants during the 1948 War and the following decades. By excavating the conceptual and material foundations of the effort to “make the desert bloom,” Desert Developmentalism exposes the racialized power dynamics that shaped the desert of Southern Palestine and continue to influence the politics of the Negev/Naqab desert today.