Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria

Brock Cutler's book is a welcome addition to the still relatively small field of environmental and ecological history of Algeria under French rule. Building in interesting ways on the work of Diana K. Davis in Resurrecting the Granary of Rome (2007), which traces the elaboration and political instrumentalization of colonial narratives of desertification in North Africa, Cutler explores the historical emergence of a more expansive “imperial ecosystem” (2) in Algeria between 1860 and 1881. These “two decades of climate crisis in North Africa” (9) were characterized by failed harvests, famine, epidemic disease, and the displacement or death of hundreds of thousands of Algerians. These overlapping crises, Cutler argues, cannot be understood as either the products of environmental forces or the consequences of imperial violence, but rather must be understood as the result of the new “total ecosystem” (9) engendered by radical changes in land use.In the period examined by Cutler, French military activity and settler colonial expansion forced Algerians from their land, disrupting the “active and continuous engagement with the important elements of the ecosystem [that had] made it possible for human communities to thrive even within the stochastic climate region of the Maghrib” (26). As the dynamic interplay of political, social, and environmental factors was reconfigured under French rule, an imperial ecosystem was established, which favored the health and prosperity of French metropolitan and European settler populations over those of Algerians, whose lives and livelihoods were threatened by new legal regimes of land ownership and the introduction of European crops and farming methods. The demographic and economic impact on Algerians reinforced French and settler perceptions of indigenous backwardness in contrast to their own supposed modernity. This opposition and other intersecting binaries, Cutler argues, continued to underpin the extractivist logic of imperialism throughout the period of French rule and left lasting legacies in Algeria long after independence, in the form of food insecurity and differential access to water.One of the challenges inherent in studying the binaries which constituted an imperial ecosystem is that, as Cutler himself notes, “they are potentially everywhere” (128). The structure of the book works well to provide narrative form to an expansive inquiry, and Cutler moves from a broad overview of how changes in land use laid the foundations of an imperial ecosystem, through a series of studies of ever-decreasing scale that illustrate, in turn, the territorial, social, and embodied divisions established by its operation. The wide purview of the book is reflected in the range of source materials drawn on by the author, which include the archives of the French military authorities and civilian administration as well as settler newspapers and the “arboreal archives” of fluctuating climate conditions (69). These disparate materials are effectively marshaled to explain not only colonial policy and its effects but also the ways in which political processes and social experiences were actively conditioned by nonhuman elements, from the devastating hunger of locusts to the distribution of rainfall.In the analysis of the source materials, Cutler draws on the concept of performativity to argue that it was the repeated performance of binary oppositions inherent in the practice of modern governmentality that constituted the imperial ecosystem. “The central division of modern imperialism,” he argues, is that “some people count as people and others do not” (92). European claims to civilization were thus claims to humanity; European perceptions of Algerians as trapped in a state of nature were dehumanizing and legitimized both the settler colonial logic of elimination and the colonial logic of extraction. The theoretical apparatus of the book is not worn lightly but has the benefit of being clearly explained, making the work a useful teaching resource for students of colonial, environmental, and agricultural history. Although the works of Gavin Murray-Miller on trans-Mediterranean modernity (The Cult of the Modern, 2017), Judith Surkis on land requisition and gender (Sex, Law and Sovereignty, 2019), and Abdelmajid Hannoum on the colonial construction of North Africa as a distinct geographical region (The Invention of the Maghreb, 2021) are not directly engaged with here, Cutler's work is similarly focused on the historical production of discursive categories that are politically and socially operative in tangible, often violent ways. His conceptualization of the imperial ecosystem provides an interesting framework for reflecting further on these processes and for highlighting the particular influence of nonhuman and environmental factors

Climate change · Colonialism · Desertification · Livelihood · Metropolitan area · Narrative · Politics · Prosperity · Threatened species · African Studies and Geopolitics · North African History and Literature · Water management and technologies