About

Brendan Haug is an Associate Professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability and is affiliated with the Program in the Environment (PitE) at the University of Michigan. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Washington, obtained in 2004, and completed his Master’s and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2005 and 2012 respectively. His academic and professional focus is centered on environmental issues, with a particular emphasis on sustainability and environmental justice. Further details about his specific research interests or contributions are not provided in the available page content.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Archaeology
• History
• Sociology
• Law
• Computer Science
• Economic history
• Classics
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Literature

Selected publications

• Civilizing the Past: Egyptian Irrigation in the Colonial Imagination

  Journal of Egyptian History · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Abstract Reviews of the historiography of irrigation regularly single out Karl August Wittfogel’s “hydraulic hypothesis” as a uniquely deleterious contribution to the study of ancient water management. His errors notwithstanding, this article argues that the ideological misshaping of Western scholarship on irrigation instead emerged from Egypt’s long colonial experience. First articulated in the Napoleonic Description de l’Égypte , the theory of a centralized, ancient Egyptian “hydraulic state” was crafted to justify French attempts to reshape Egypt’s irrigated landscape. British hydraulic engineers later received and refined this narrative during the British colonial period. Their popularizing discourse retrojected the technocratic character of modern irrigation into antiquity, defining the Egyptian “irrigation system” as a static and unchanging fusion of hydraulic expertise and state power. Widely disseminated in specialist and popular fora, this tendentious argument had become received wisdom by the beginning of the twentieth century and subtly shaped early Egyptological descriptions of irrigation in antiquity.

  PublisherDOI

• Water Sources, Northeast Africa

  The Encyclopedia of Ancient History · 2021-10-28

  other1st authorCorresponding

  This entry discusses various naturally occurring water resources in northeastern Africa: the Nile, the oases of Egypt's Western Desert, surface and subsurface water in Egypt's Eastern Desert, and irregular rainwater capture in Libya.

  PublisherDOI

• Agriculture in Roman Egypt

  2020-09-25 · 3 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Politics,<i>Partage</i>, and Papyri: Excavated Texts Between Cairo and Ann Arbor (1924–1953)

  American Journal of Archaeology · 2020 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Political Science

  Following its nominal independence from Britain in 1922, Egypt increasingly protested continued European control of the Service des antiquités de l'Égypte, the office that administered archaeology and the antiquities trade. Public conflicts were frequent, pitting Western researchers against Egyptian nationalists who advocated for the decolonization of the Service. Research in the University of Michigan's archives reveals the impact of these conflicts on the university's papyrus collection, specifically the papyri and ostraka excavated in the Fayyum between 1924 and 1935. Unlike other objects, excavated texts were not subjected to immediate partage but were instead loaned to Michigan on the understanding that they would be divided after publication. In response to Egyptian pressure in the 1930s, however, the Service began to assert its right to recall the loans and frequently urged Michigan to expedite their publication and return. By the early 1950s, the largely Egyptianized postwar Service finally issued a recall, thereby abrogating the promised partage. Some 1,900 excavated texts nonetheless still remain in Ann Arbor, Michigan, their ownership status uncertain. In view of the recent series of controversies involving papyri of uncertain ownership and provenance, this research is of considerable salience and represents a move toward full transparency at papyrus-holding institutions.1

  PublisherDOI

• Water and power: Reintegrating the state into the study of Egyptian irrigation

  History Compass · 2017-10-01 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The study of irrigation in ancient Egypt has swung between two poles. Early environmental‐determinist scholarship stressed the imperative of state control while the most recent work denies the state any significant role and instead emphasizes the agency of local communities. This article briefly explores the historiography of Egyptian irrigation, critiquing both its colonialist roots and the extreme reaction against colonialist preconceptions that marks current scholarship. A case study of Roman state coordination is then presented as an argument for reintegrating the state into the history of Egyptian water management.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Triangular Landscapes: Environment, Society, and the State in the Nile Delta under Roman Rule by Katherine Blouin (review)

  The American Journal of Philology · 2015-09-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Triangular Landscapes: Environment, Society, and the State in the Nile Delta under Roman Rule by Katherine Blouin Brendan Haug Katherine Blouin. Triangular Landscapes: Environment, Society, and the State in the Nile Delta under Roman Rule. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. xxvi + 429 pp. 14 halftones, 28 tables, 5 maps. Cloth, $150.00. American journalist Hal Boyle is often said to have remarked, “What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.” Restful, perhaps. But the single-mindedness of a river’s flow can also be a source of anxiety. In contemporary America, the Lower Mississippi’s steady westward shift is a prominent example. Were its floodgates removed and the river allowed to “get where it is going,” it would soon abandon the cities of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, decimating their port-dependent economies. An awareness of such fluvial hazards has percolated into the study of ancient history over the last decade and a half, and works on the ancient Mediterranean’s riverine environments have been appearing with frequency. As in ancient environmental [End Page 528] history more broadly, Francophone scholars have led the way; Philippe Leveau’s work on the Rhône and the multiple colloquia spearheaded by Ella Hermon are particularly notable (e.g., Philippe Leveau, ed. “Le Rhône romain,” Gallia 56 [1999]; Ella Hermon, ed. Riparia dans l’Empire romain [2010]). On the Anglophone side, Gregory Aldrete’s Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome 2007, Peter Thonemann’s The Maeander Valley 2011, and Brian Campbell’s Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome 2012 are essential. Katherine Blouin’s new study of the Mendesian nome (administrative division) in Egypt’s northeastern Nile Delta unites these twin streams. The book, an updated version of a French dissertation supervised by Hermon, focuses on the changing course and eventual extinction of the Nile’s Mendesian branch, documenting the effects of a shifting fluvial landscape, environmental stressors, and Roman agro-fiscal policy on the society and economy of the Delta during the first few centuries c.e. By merging Francophone scholarship on rivers, theoretical perspectives drawn from American environmental history, and a thorough command of the papyrological evidence, Blouin has made a significant contribution to the emerging field of ancient environmental history. In her introduction, Blouin grounds herself in what Hermon dubs “l’approche écosystémique” to environmental history. Casting aside environmental determinism and lachrymose tales of pristine nature violated (“l’approche égologique”), ecosystems thinking characterizes environments as “dynamic, multidimensional entities made up of a complex amalgam of continuities and ruptures” (7). While humanity is regarded as a constituent element of the natural world, human beings nonetheless possess the ability to adapt natural phenomena in significant ways. Thus, nature’s impacts upon society are never predetermined, for they are always mediated by human decision-making at multiple levels. The rest of the book is divided into four thematic sections. Part I situates the reader within the geomorphological and hydrological contexts of the Mendesian nome and reviews the surviving evidence. Parts II and III reconstruct the landscape and investigate agricultural diversification. Part IV offers environmental perspectives on a fiscal crisis in the late second century c.e. and the famous revolt of the Boukoloi. Synthesizing previous geomorphological and archaeological scholarship, chapter 1 traces the evolution of the Nile Delta from at least seven major branches to the modern two—the Rosetta and Damietta—by the early Arab period, a process significantly abetted by large-scale canalization projects (35). (See also John P. Cooper, The Medieval Nile [2014], who carries the story forward.) In chapter 2, Blouin surveys the archaeological and papyrological evidence for the Mendesian nome. Although excavations at its two ancient metropoleis of Mendes (Tell al-Rub’a) and Thmuis (Tell al-Timai) are ongoing—the latter partly under Blouin’s own direction—their evidence is secondary to her arguments, which depend primarily upon the papyri. This corpus is comprised of some ninety texts spanning the fourth century b.c.e. to the sixth century c.e., the majority...

  PublisherDOI

• Environment, Adaptation, and Administration in the Roman Fayyūm

  2015-09-01 · 6 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Labor

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2014-04-24

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter is concerned with the contractual relationship between laborers and employers. As it was elsewhere in the ancient world, the economic form that labor took ranged from fully free labor in the household, to paid wage labor, to slavery (Chapter 9). As such, the texts that are presented here are generally concerned with free labor subject to certain contractual restrictions. Those restrictions, documented for example in the paramonê contracts (for which see also 5.5.2–3), included the stipulation to remain in a particular place to work during the length of the contract. The use of contracts to hire labor has an earlier history in the Ancient Near East. There was of course dependent labor particularly in agricultural work and domestic service (Chapter 9). In the periods covered by this volume, most labor arrangements were oral and therefore escape us entirely.

  PublisherDOI

• Law and Legal Practice in Egypt from Alexander to the Arab Conquest

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2014-04-24 · 79 citations

  book

  The study of ancient law has blossomed in recent years. In English alone there have been dozens of studies devoted to classical Greek and Roman law, to the Roman legal codes, and to the legal traditions of the ancient Near East among many other topics. Legal documents written on papyrus began to be published in some abundance by the end of the nineteenth century; but even after substantial publication history, legal papyri have not received due attention from legal historians. This book blends the two usually distinct juristic scholarly traditions, classical and Egyptological, into a coherent presentation of the legal documents from Egypt from the Ptolemaic to the late Byzantine periods, all translated and accompanied by expert commentary. The volume will serve as an introduction to the rich legal sources from Egypt in the later phases of its ancient history as well as a tool to compare legal documents from other cultures.

  PublisherDOI

• Watering the Desert: Environment, Irrigation, and Society in the Premodern Fayyum, Egypt

  eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2012-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Through a study of its natural environment and irrigation system, this dissertation investigates the evolution of the landscape of Egypt's Fayyum depression across sixteen centuries, from the third century BCE to the thirteenth century CE. From the evidence of Greek papyri, Arabic fiscal documentation, early modern travel literature, archaeology, and contemporary scientific work, I chart the changes in human relationships with earth and water over time, changes which constantly altered the inhabited and cultivated regions of the Fayyum. My main argument throughout is that it was local agency and not state governments that continuously remade the landscape.The history of the Fayyum after the fourth century CE has long been viewed by ancient historians as one of decline from its ancient heights due to the failure of the late Roman and Muslim successor states to properly manage its irrigation system. I locate the genesis of this narrative within nineteenth century perceptions of the docility of nature and the belief that ancient governments had achieved centralized control over the Nile and the Egyptian environment. This anachronistic retrojection of the characteristics of the modern irrigation system has had a considerable afterlife in historical scholarship on Egyptian irrigation.\tEschewing a narrow focus on the state, this dissertation argues that that nature is a potent agent in its own right. Ancient farmers could not control nature so they adapted to it, creating four distinct irrigated sub-regions in the Graeco-Roman Fayyum, each tailored to the particulars of the local environment. Our papyri stem from only one of these sub-regions, the water-scarce margins, which lay at the tail end of the irrigation system. Here, inadequate irrigation and fertilization progressively led to soil salinization and degradation, which helped to spur the eventual abandonment of these areas. By the medieval period, only the central floodplain remained inhabited. Only here was sustainable agriculture under the regime of premodern technology possible.\tAlthough the Roman state coordinated local labor on the canals, nothing could bind Fayyum villagers to the degrading margins in perpetuity. Fourth century papyri hint that some cultivators had moved to other nomes and were prospering. Still later documents of the sixth to eighth centuries CE reveal greatly increased settlement density in the central Fayyum. Thus, it was local cultivators who made and remade the landscape of the Fayyum over the centuries according to their own needs. Government could both guide and benefit from this local labor but it could never fully control it.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• James G Keenan

  5 shared

• Youval Rotman

  1 shared

• Sitta von Reden

  1 shared

• Andrea Jördens

  1 shared

• Mark Depauw

  1 shared

• Barbara Anagnostou-Cañas

  1 shared

• Cary J. Martin

  1 shared

• Claudia Kreuzsaler

  1 shared