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

Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa. By Diana K. Davis. Ohio University Press Series in Ecology and History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 296; 19 figures; 2 appendices; 3 maps; 8 illustrations. $59.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Environmental history is replete with specious tales of decline. In Resurrecting the Granary of Rome, Diana Davis examines an enduring and powerful example that has influenced ecological change in North Africa. The story has ended badly, we find, not so much for the region's resilient environment, but for the region's indigenous inhabitants who have faced violence, impoverishment, and disenfranchisement for more than a century.

Early nineteenth-century European observers began to fashion what Davis refers to as "the declensionist environmental narrative," which covers more than a thousand years and begins with the era when, according to classical sources, the Maghreb's fertile plateaus produced enough grain to feed the Roman Empire. Rome's decline and fall, so the story goes, followed centuries later by the eleventh-century Hillalian Arab...