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

Diana Davis has provided an outstanding contribution to the field of comparative environmental history. Informed by history, political philosophy, anthropology, forestry, and, strikingly, art history—as well as Davis's own field of geography—Resurrecting the Granary of Rome will provide a crucial touchstone for comparison to works on sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

The central argument is that in the aftermath of the conquest of Algiers in 1830, French colonial ideology created a narrative of decline in which Arabs (and, to a lesser extent, Berbers) had squandered the natural patrimony and abundance of the Roman era. Such a declensionist narrative delegitimized traditional modes of production and justified the colonial agenda of moving Algerians (and subsequently Moroccans and Tunisians) off the land, controlling nomadism, and rationalizing French settler land usurpation.

The declensionist narrative emerged from several different quarters. Drawing on the ancient Greeks and on Roman historians such as Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, and Ptolemy, Europeans of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries envisioned a North Africa that was formerly fecund, fertile, and teeming with forested wildlife. Ironically, many of the ancients had not traveled themselves to the region, instead using information from other sources. Even at the dawn of French colonialism—the 1820s and 1830s—American, British, and French authors did not cast North Africa as degraded or ruined by the indigenous population; to the contrary, they provided accounts of an abundant land.

In short order, however, arguments emerged that emphasized a decline from the heyday of Roman rule, beginning with the Arab conquest of the Maghreb in the seventh century. To her credit, Davis eschews a monocausal explanation for the transformation, offering a more complicated explanation. First, the French military needed, quite literally, to fuel its pacification efforts of the 1830s and 1840s with forested timber. In turn, the colonial administration needed to provide land to encourage the immigration of French settlers. Therefore, as early as 1834 the indigenous population began to be cited as responsible for ruining the land, providing the ecological hook on which to hang the argument for a mission civilisatrice. As one French cavalry officer noted, all that needed to be said to the Algerians to justify taking land was, "During all the time that you have occupied the soil, it has been destroyed because you are nomads" (33). By the establishment of the Second Republic in 1848, and the official declaration of Algeria as "French territory," the declensionist story was well entrenched; it would only deepen through the establishment of the Tunisian (1881) and Moroccan (1912) protectorates.

In addition to Davis's erudition and careful documentation, one of the most refreshing aspects of the book is the inclusion of stunning color plates. Featuring paintings by Huguet, Fromentin, Leleux, and Guillaumet, the plates vividly illustrate orientalist assumptions held about the Maghreb. Davis deftly weaves in an analysis of the illustrations, allowing her to round out her argument and make it even more persuasive.

The contemporary implications of the declensionist narrative are also well elaborated. Obviously, the transformation of nomadic modes of life and forestry development has informed the colonial legacy and postcolonial political economy of the region. Marshal Lyautey's assertion that Morocco had once been filled with lush gardens led to the emphasis in the 1920s on the development of Morocco's citrus and irrigated vegetables—a production profile that persists, even as it straps Morocco's hydrological resources and confronts European and North American agricultural protectionism. Moreover, the economic and political disenfranchisement of the vast bulk of Maghrebis during colonialism led to the enrichment of settlers and a few indigenous elites, establishing a pattern of impoverishment that continues to this day. Finally, postcolonial development ideology often points to long-term environmental decline in the Maghreb as a justification for conservation and development projects, evading the...