Resurrecting the Granary of Rome — 2007 ·

“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.”

African Studies Review

“Davis’s study is engagingly written, free of scientific jargon and fully documented. Forty percent of the text consists of maps, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index, and an appendix on the geography and ecology of the Maghreb which should be a reader’s first stop.”

Canadian Journal of African Studies

“Davis’s study has done more than any other previous work to place the Middle East on the agenda of environmental history … this pathbreaking book should be required reading for all those interested in the history of the Maghrib, environmental history, and the history of colonialism.”

International Journal of Middle East Studies

“Relying on available paleoecological and other scientific evidence, Davis has punched holes into the declensionist narrative. Davis forcefully argues that the existing data proffers a totally different and oppositional view of the environmental history of the Mediterranean basin and immediate regions to ones constructed by the French in the eighteenth century.”

Environment and History

“Diana K. Davis’s rich and compelling book not only challenges the declensionist narrative on the basis of empirical evidence, but it also explains how and why that narrative came to be constructed in the context of French colonial rule.... Davis makes a powerful argument for exposing the means by which colonized peoples were exploited in the name of environmental protection....”

International History Review

“Davis deftly shows how snippets of ‘history’ sifted upward to inform science, legislation, and administrative practice.”

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

“Resurrecting the Granary of Rome carefully reconstructs demographic consequences of [the 19th century French regime’s] violent and coercive application of political power.”

International Journal of African Historical Studies

“In this superbly documented, tightly argued study, Diana Davis reveals how French foresters and ecologists supplied the spurious ‘scientific’ justification for the transfer of North Africa’s most valuable real estate from local populations to French colonists. The price is still being paid for a rapacious colonialism legitimated by a biased, unreflective, and complicit science, and will continue to be paid so long as we keep telling unfounded stories about deforestation, desertification, and other alleged mismanagement of land by non-Europeans.”

Douglas Weiner—author of A Little Corner of Freedom

“Resurrecting the Granary of Rome integrates the local knowledge of the social scientist with a historian’s examination of the colonial archives to provide a remarkably sure-handed reinterpretation of the ecohistorical aims of French colonialism in North Africa and its lasting legacy.”

Edmund Burke III—coeditor of Orientalism’s Histories