Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (review)

The subtitle of Diana K. Davis’s book suggests the linking of two distinct fields – environmental history and colonial studies. Attention to North Africa and the Middle East by environmental historians is long overdue, and Davis has written a work that should begin to anchor that sub-field. Largely centered on Algeria, her book also gives adequate comparative coverage to Tunisia and Morocco. Specialists in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent will want to follow up her claim that environmental thinking and related colonial policies may have had deeper roots in Algeria than in their respective regions of study.

Davis writes about environmental history in a more fundamental sense. Her protagonist in this study of nature and French colonial expansion in the Maghreb is a narrative itself, what she terms the “declensionist environmental narrative” that informed literary, scientific, and ultimately official understandings of North Africa. These understandings abetted the colonial project in distinct ways and have retained their power in the postcolonial era.

The narrative emerged piecemeal over the nineteenth century from the pens of geographers, agronomists, and other scientific writers. A succinct version of the narrative begins with a luxuriantly fertile North Africa, populous and prosperous under the Romans, for whom it became the imperial granary. The seventh-century Arab invasion then precipitated North Africa into environmental decline, but true devastation was wrought during the eleventh-century invasion of the Beni Hillal. Still according to the narrative, the environmentally profligate practices of nomadic herdsmen brought deforestation and desertification (though the latter term was not used until 1927), wrecking a civilization and a set of ecological relationships. The sedentary, agricultural Kabyles proved the exception to the rule; here Davis unveils the environmental dimension of the myth of the good Kabyle (as opposed to the inferior and destructive Arab) so often deployed by French colonial writers.

Like a rumor spread too far and too thin, this was history run amok. The narrative rested on a pedestal of selective, misused, yet oft-quoted passages from medieval writers, namely those of the fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldoun. In meticulous fashion Davis traces the most abused quotations to their original context, discovering not only that many of them referred to sites specific to modern-day Libya, but also that Khaldoun reserved some measure of praise for Arab pastoralists. That nineteenth-century writers fudged their primary sources was not simply a matter of careless scholarship: their selective quotations conformed to their most deeply held values, namely private property and agricultural productivity according to western European models. Furthermore, they spun the declensionist narrative within a broader cultural context that included scientific theories of desiccation, a moralizing environmental vision that associated drought and deforestation with moral turpitude, and orientalist themes in the visual arts that saw deserts as ruined landscapes.

Above all, the declensionist narrative acquired resonance through application. The analytical core of this book demonstrates the connections between the narrative and the laws and regulations which responded to its “lessons” while furthering colonialism. History apparently justified expropriating land from, and otherwise curtailing traditional uses of the land by, the nomads who were causing the Sahara to creep northward, a process supposedly inaugurated by their seventh-century ancestors. The account is convincing: Davis deftly shows how snippets of “history” sifted upward to inform science, legislation, and administrative practice. Thus were familiar tools of conquest devised in part to respond to a convincing narrative of environmental decline; in Algeria these included anti-fire ordinances and collective punishment for forest fires, the declaration of forests as state property, cantonment and concessions, and a major law of 1885 regulating use rights and allowing expropriation for reforestation. In this climate reforestation functioned as ideology, for it was touted by some as the panacea to heal environmental ills and to sedentarize nomads – two sides of the same colonial coin that would create an environment both healthy and secure for European settlers.

Rounding out a multi-disciplinary analysis is...