The framework of a COE facilitates diachronic and synchronic studies in environmental history across a wide area stretching from Mongolia and Central Asia to the Caucasus, the Middle East and Southeast Europe. These regions include a high variety of topographies, landscapes and social constellations, accessible through a great diversity of sources. For Ottoman / Turkish studies this topic allows a rereading of a rich collection of texts, not yet systematically investigated, that often contain information related to nature, environment, human – nature, human – animal as well as human – nature relations.

The importance of print media in shaping ideas of modernity, nationalism, reform, progress and identity has long been acknowledged for various regions of the world (e.g. Anderson 1991, Erhard and Haoran 2018, Galvin and Green 2014, Glaß 2004, Pistor-Hatam 1999, Qosimov 1996, Reese 2015). Inspired, among others, by the “provincializing Europe” debate (Chakrabarty 2000), engagement with translocal (or what is conventionally called “south-south”) conversations is increasingly gaining traction (see Freitag and van Oppen 2010, Dagyeli et al. 2021), looking into alternative epistemologies and how these fed into the profound global changes between the late 19th century and today (Wennberg 2010). A narrow understanding of Central Asian modernism modelled on historical European experiences and positioned against putatively “traditionalist” opponents has rightly been criticised (Eden et al. 2016). In a broader and more open approach, modernism, modernity and progress could better be defined as tensions between the generation and disintegration of possible futures (Bromber et al. 2015). Any just assessment of these epistemologies requires, however, a close reading of original sources, open to unexpected findings that might not fit conventional expectations of what modern-ness or progress means. Modernist, reformist and similar intellectual enterprises in the immediate pre-revolutionary era in Central Asia have attracted scholars ever since research in this area has become easier following the breakup of the Soviet Union (e.g. Baldauf 1993, 1998a, 1998b, 2000, 2006a, 2006b, Khalid 1994, 1998); the exact nature of these topics still remains highly controversial, though (Brophy 2016, Eden et al. 2016). While vernacular newspapers are generally acknowledged for their role in shaping Central Asian intellectual history of the early twentieth century, the actual research done is astonishingly scarce (Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay 1964). The present case study will look at these little-studied newspapers in a comprehensive manner, trace their main authors and their exchanges, the political and cultural tensions that become apparent, and assess their particular brand of cautious modernism in all its variety.