Resurrecting the Granary of Rome — 2007

Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa

By Diana K. Davis

"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

“In this superbly documented, tightly argued study, Diana Davis reveals how French foresters and ecologists supplied the spurious ‘scientific’ justification for the transfer of North Africa’s most valuable real estate from local populations to French colonists. The price is still being paid for a rapacious colonialism legitimated by a biased, unreflective, and complicit science, and will continue to be paid so long as we keep telling unfounded stories about deforestation, desertification, and other alleged mismanagement of land by non-Europeans.”

Douglas Weiner—author of A Little Corner of Freedom

“Resurrecting the Granary of Rome integrates the local knowledge of the social scientist with a historian’s examination of the colonial archives to provide a remarkably sure-handed reinterpretation of the ecohistorical aims of French colonialism in North Africa and its lasting legacy.”

Edmund Burke III—coeditor of Orientalism’s Histories

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.

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.