Description
Book SynopsisBetween 1865 and 1872 widespread death and disease unfolded amid the most severe ecological disaster in modern North African history: a plague of locusts destroyed crops during a disastrous drought that left many Algerians landless and starving. The famine induced migration that concentrated vulnerable people in unsanitary camps where typhus and cholera ran rampant. Before the rains returned and harvests normalized, some eight hundred thousand Algerians had died.
In
Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria Brock Cutler explores how repeated ecosocial divisions across an expansive ecosystem produced modern imperialism in nineteenth-century Algeria. Massive ecological crises—cultural as well as natural—cleaved communities from their homes, individuals from those communities, and society from its typical ecological relations. At the same time, the relentless, albeit slow-moving crises of ongoing settler colonialism and extractive imperial capitalism cleaved Alger
Trade Review“Theoretically sophisticated and written with startling clarity, Brock Cutler’s
Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria examines the history of French Empire and the performance of modernity in North Africa as stories of the flux and interplay of diverse human actors and nonhuman elements within transnational ecosystems and Maghrebian microclimates. An important book and a great read!”—Spencer Segalla, author of
Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954“
Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria provides insight into a critical period of the French colonial occupation of Algeria. It offers a nuanced and comprehensive examination of Algeria’s 1860s environmental crisis years, and it engages themes of labor and colonial identity in interesting and novel ways.”—Andrea E. Duffy, author of
Nomad’s Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World
