ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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. She is the author of Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa.

REVIEWS

“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.”—African Studies Review

“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

“(I)f one had to pick a single great book early this summer, it would have to be that of American historian Diana K. Davis, LesMythes environnementaux de la colonisation française au Maghreb.”—Le Monde

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
List of Illustrations	000
Preface and Acknowledgments	000
Chapter 1. Imperial Stories and Empirical Evidence	000
Chapter 2. Nature, Empire, and Narrative Origins, 1830-48	000
Chapter 3. Idealism, Capitalism, and the Development of the Narrative, 1848-70	000
Chapter 4. Triumph of the Narrative, 1871-1918	000
Chapter 5. Narrative, Science, Policy, and Practice, 1919 to Independence	000
Chapter 6. Decolonization, the Colonial Narrative, and Environmental Policy Today	000
Appendix: A Note on the Geography and Ecology of the Maghreb	000
Notes	000
Bibliography	000
Index	000