Book review: "Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: environmental history and French Colonial expansion in North Africa" by Diana K. Davis

In this rigorously researched book, Davis argues that French colonisation of the Maghreb (the three North African countries of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) was motivated and rationalised by a ‘declensionist environmental narrative’; a narrative that attributed environmental decline to the land use practices of the ‘native’ people of North Africa. Davis begins by questioning the often unquestioned environmental history of North Africa: the ‘sad tale of deforestation and desertification that has spanned much of the past two millennia’. She asserts that this environmental history has been constructed and reworked over time by ‘French colonial scientists, administrators, military men and settlers’.