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

Series in Ecology and History

by Diana K. Davis

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.

Genres: History, France, Nonfiction, Algeria, School

312 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2007

About the author

Diana K. Davis is a geographer and veterinarian who specializes in environmental history and political ecology with a special emphasis on the arid lands of the globe, and is Professor of History and Geography at the University of California, Davis.

Reviews

[JJ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Davis makes an interesting argument about the power of declensionist narratives in shaping colonial and postcolonial environmental policy, and I'm glad that she chose to write about an understudied region (the African Maghreb), but her book is somewhat of a slog to read. She appears to make the same arguments over and over, and questionably dismisses desertification altogether as a colonial construct. Also, while she heavily critiques ecology throughout the book, she also uncritically employs ecological evidence (specifically, pollen-core data) in support of her thesis, which makes her point...somewhat confusing, to say the least.

[Lloyd Farley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book that engages with the archival colonial record influenced clearly by Davis' time in the field. In order to upset the longstanding colonial narratives that continue to inform environmental policies today Davis provides compelling arguments that environmental change (real and imaginary) is rarely the result of individual landholders who have been routinely held responsible for these changes. In the context of a changing climate on the global level, it is important to read work, such as this monograph, that depathologize land users and allow for a more thorough analysis of landscape change without resorting to mystified accusations of those closest to the land.

[Erin]

summer 24 - GSRM

[Roy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a polemical work, it alleges, with considerable fairness that North African Environmental History is based upon a self serving colonial narrative. However, it never escapes its polemical tone. It is a history of environmental historical theory almost devoid of science. It's scientific sources are both scarce and poorly chosen, and it places this in one of the crudest of all postcolonial narratives of French history.

In this work, the nomads and pastoralists are all good, Algerian indigenous agriculturalists, both Arab and Berber are only here as victims (especially the Arab as the Kabyle are pronounced to be favored) and the pied noirs are all les grand colons, with huge estates, when in fact the vast portion of European settlers lived in considerable poverty at what could be charitably described as a petit bourgeouis level.. The very long and tortured history of the various North African forestry services is a rendered into a manichean fight between pro and anti native, and even this is reduced to acceptance of a narrative of desertification. Those who believe that Algeria can be made more agriculturally productive are the villains while those who believe that marginal semi nomadic stock raising is the best use of the land are the angels. This combine with a dramatic conflation of the Mahgreb's many ecological regions into one in polemic, no matter how carefully they are seperated in the authors geographical essay, and one gets a grossly distorted view.

An excellent example of this is that the Algerian Forest Service and those involved in the reforestation campaign were often in long drawn out conflicts with the Grand Colons, both private and corporate throughout the entire period. A situation only barely hinted at in the text. Similar things can be seen with the treatment of eucalyptus, whose widespread planting across the Mediteranean and role in malaria control is completely elided. The author spends a considerable amount of time condemming "Capitalist Production" and the monetary economy, and obliquely attacking the modern post colonial states for their continuation if these policies, but in the more fertile areas this just means an opposition to modernity itself.

But of all my objections, the one that I feel most strongly is her very confused discussion of the effects of forestation on water. Admittedly my background in in hydrogeology, but to claim that forest do not reduce runoff and flooding in one passage and then claim that reduce the water table and dry out wells in another is both incoherent and crude. Cork Oak are not Eucalyptus, and these are controversial matters that can not be understood from one or two heavily politicized sources, as Davis does. Devotion to tree planting and forestry are hardly unique to European culture, and the subject is quite complicated, a fact that has been recognized since the 19th century, particularily in France.

But if I feel so strongly about these defects, why give the boom four stars? Well it is because in spite of all of the above the author makes a very compelling argument about how environmental rhetoric is used in an Imperialist context to dispossess the poorest and most disadvanteged, how many of our environmental theories, especially those related to land use, are based on the most naked predjudice, not just the predjudice of racism but also of class. And she gives a compelling suggestion that in light of what we now know about concepts such as climax forests, that the entire basis for our mediterranean climate may be fundamentally flawed. Of course others have addressed these issues before, but not in English. As a final aside, I would point out that much of Southern Europe has a climate and environment quite similar to that of the more fertile regions of the Maghreb, and this includes parts of he south of France. The French foresters and botanist who tried to reconconstruct paleloandscapes were not so ignorant as she suggests, and the classical sources, if read carefully have often been confirmed by modern work, in Northrn Algeria in particular.

[LauriAnn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book tends to be highly redundant in trying to decry the "declensionist environmental narrative" that Davis believes greatly influenced French policy in the Mahgreb.