Reforestation, Landscape Conservation, and the Anxieties of Empire in French Colonial Algeria

Abstract

Since the beginning of time, on the dry earth of this limitless land scraped to the bone, a few men had been ceaselessly trudging, possessing nothing but serving no one, poverty-stricken but free lords of a strange kingdom. The historical literature on the construction of European empires and on the ways in which colonial relationships insinuated themselves into European metropolitan life has abounded in recent years. Some of this renewed interest, which can be observed among Anglo-American scholars and historians of European colonialism, has focused on how non-European landscapes were construed, conserved, and transformed by both European travelers and colonizers from the sixteenth century to the end of colonial rule in the twentieth century. In a pathbreaking study of these questions, Richard H. Grove traces the beginnings of modern Western environmentalism to the European encounter with the non-European tropical island Edens in the Indian Ocean at the end of the seventeenth century. Diana K. Davis has recently examined European narratives of environmental decline in North Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while David Arnold and Paul Carter have assessed European responses to unfamiliar landscapes and how such landscapes became objects of desire, fear, and mastery in India and Australia respectively. To a lesser extent, historians have also addressed indigenous responses to these European initiatives and perceptions.1

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