Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Ecology & History) [Hardcover]

Diana K. Davis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 11, 2007 | Series: Ecology & History

Tales of deforestation and desertification in North Africa have been told from the Roman period to the present. Such stories of environmental decline in the Maghreb are still recounted by experts and are widely accepted without question today. International organizations such as the United Nations frequently invoke these inaccurate stories to justify environmental conservation and development projects in the arid and semiarid lands in North Africa and around the Mediterranean basin. Recent research in arid lands ecology and new paleoecological evidence, however, do not support many claims of deforestation, overgrazing, and desertification in this region.

Diana K. Davis’s pioneering analysis reveals the critical influence of French scientists and administrators who established much of the purported scientific basis of these stories during the colonial period in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, illustrating the key role of environmental narratives in imperial expansion. The processes set in place by the use of this narrative not only systematically disadvantaged the majority of North Africans but also led to profound changes in the landscape, some of which produced the land degradation that continues to plague the Maghreb today.

Resurrecting the Granary of Rome exposes many of the political, economic, and ideological goals of the French colonial project in these arid lands and the resulting definition of desertification that continues to inform global environmental and development projects. The first book on the environmental history of the Maghreb, this volume reframes much conventional thinking about the North African environment. Davis’s book is essential reading for those interested in global environmental history.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Davis’s study has done more than any other previous work to place the Middle East on the agenda of environmental history. . . this pathbreaking book should be required reading for all those interested in the history of the Maghrib, environmental history, and the history of colonialism.”
Alan Mikhail, International Journal of Middle East Studies

“In carefully cataloging the troubling and troubled colonial past of North African ecology and ideas about that ecology, Diana Davis takes seriously the problem that history shapes both physical landscapes and the power-laden narratives through which we come to know them. A tremendous contribution!”
Paul Robbins — author of Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction

“Diana K. Davis’s rich and compelling book not only challenges the declensionist narrative on the basis of empirical evidence, but it also explains how and why that narrative came to be constructed in the context of French colonial rule.... Davis makes a powerful argument for exposing the means by which colonized peoples were exploited in the name of environmental protection....”
Caroline Ford—International History Review

About the Author

Diana K. Davis is an associate professor of history at the University of California at Davis. She has published in Environmental History, Geoforum, Cultural Geographies, the Journal of Arid Environments, and Secheresse.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Ohio University Press; 1 edition (September 11, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0821417517
• ISBN-13: 978-0821417515
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,882,934 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Important revisionist history, October 26, 2007

By 

E. Husman "ehusman" (Las Cruces, NM USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Ecology & History) (Paperback)

Having just completed The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, a book about farmers in the Dust Bowl, I found this to be a refreshing counterpoint. Dr. Davis' thesis in RtGoR is that the French colonists created a narrative in which Algeria was once a vast green sea of forests and grain, but that the nomads (read: barbaric Arabs) ruined it with their primitive farming and especially herding methods. This "declensionist narrative" was used to justify the result: the French were morally obligated to re-civilise Algeria and restore the region to its former glory.

The trouble was that it wasn't true.

There were several topics in the book that intrigued me. Dr. Davis discusses various types of property recognized by the indigenous Algerians, including communal property used to rotate grazing animals to allow some land to remain fallow. She also briefly explores the interrelationship between deforestation and dessicationist theories that instructed 19th century environmentalism and their foundation in Christian mythology. An important theme in the book is the idea of environmentalism as a means of social control (colonists over natives). Finally, she describes how the declensionist narrative worked its way into early 20th century botanical science, resulting in continuing negative consequences for the region.

The discussion of property interests me as an example of alternative social organization. Among other varieties of property, Davis describes briefly the concepts of melk, achaba, habous, and arsh: private property, "pasture contract" exchanging grazing rights for labor, land reserved for religious institutions, and communal property, respectively. Arsh (mostly pasture but some cultivation) is curious: if the system was stable, it challenges the Tragedy of the Commons meme. Under some circumstances -- perhaps only those of small, nomadic, strictly religious tribes -- communal property may be sustainable and productive.

At university, I had an environmentalist friend who preached that North America had once been entirely covered in forest. It's awfully hard to believe Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, Iowa, Kansas, etc. were "covered" in forest. On another occasion, I ran into a co-worker who believed the mirror image, that England had recently been completely barren of trees. It would have been awfully difficult to build half-timbered houses, hide in the Sherwood forest, build the world's most fearsome navy in the 19th century, or any number of other things if there were no trees on the island.

Indeed, both ideas are born of the same myth, the idea that the world was once covered in forests (Eden), but since man's fall from grace, the forest has gradually given way to deserts. In part, this narrative was used to demonize and justify the French treatment of the Algerian natives who used fire as an agricultural tool (North Americans did the same with our natives). Call them reservations, cantonments, or concentration camps, colonists claim that nomadic peoples must be controlled, "attached" to the land, and turned into farmers if possible and imprisoned if not. In Algeria, they also forced them to use money by forcing them to pay taxes in cash rather than in kind. Having deprived them of their traditional, nomadic, pastoral ways, and having also forced them out of barter and into the cash system, many had no choice but to enter the workforce as a laborer for the new French masters.

Algeria went from a land of traditional herding and farming to a colony of small farmers to a corporation-dominated extension of France. Likewise, the American Plains transitioned from the land of the buffalo to a land of small land-grant farmers to ADM's central production facility. Both changes happened under cover of conservationist narratives - as it happens, those providing moral cover with a Christian-fall-from-Eden myth were almost literally Baptists to the corporate-colonial Bootleggers. The temptation to force such narratives onto history is strong; Jared Diamond made similar claims about Rapa Nui (Easter Island) that have since been debunked, and for similar reasons (European colonial policies).

Other areas of interest included a review of art and literature of the 19th century. Dr. Davis shows how the narrative was created and propagated through various social, academic, political, and popular avenues.

The book concludes much stronger than it begins. The description of the route by which the declensionist narrative entered botanical science and thereby continues to influence policy is frightening. We think of science as being rational and above politics, but Dr. Davis shows persuasively -- in this case at least -- that the accepted science is built on an artificial, racist, state-capitalist scam. She notes that the UN and several North African countries have spent millions on misguided attempts to restore a forest that never existed. Can we think of other "science-based" environmental programs on which politicians are proposing to force social change and expend scarce resources on a massive scale? Just how sure of the science are we?