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

HISTORY Diana K. Davis. Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Series in Ecology and History, xv + 296 pp. Photographs. Figures. Maps. Color plates. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $59.95. Cloth. $26.95. Paper.

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 subsequendy 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...