Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and Their Environmental Legacies 9780896802827

Table of contents :
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Getting Our Hands Dirty
Part 1: Perceiving the Colonial Environment
1: The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments
2: Carved Out of Nature
3: The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science in the Spanish and American Philippines
4: Aerial Photography and Colonial Discourse on the Agricultural Crisis in Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930–1945
Part 2:Managing the Colonial Environment
5: Wetland Colonies
6: Colonization of the Russian North
7: Recasting Disease and Its Environment
8: Changing Times, Changing Palates
Part 3: The Legacy of Colonialism
9: State Rationality, Development, and the Making of State Territory
10: Ecological Communication at the Oxford Imperial Forestry Institute
11: Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines, and the Legacies of Late British Colonialism
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Cultivating

the Colonies

Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies

Edited by

Christina Folke Ax, Niels Brimnes Niklas Thode Jensen, and Karen Oslund

Cultivating The Colonies

This series of publications on Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Global and Comparative Studies is designed to present significant research, translation, and opinion to area specialists and to a wide community of persons interested in world affairs. The editor seeks manuscripts of quality on any subject and can usually make a decision regarding publication within three months of receipt of the original work. Production methods generally permit a work to appear within one year of acceptance. The editor works closely with authors to produce a high-quality book. The series appears in a paperback format and is distributed worldwide. For more information, contact the executive editor at Ohio University Press, 19 Circle Drive, The Ridges, Athens, Ohio 45701. Executive editor: Gillian Berchowitz AREA CONSULTANTS Africa: Gillian Berchowitz Latin America: Brad Jokisch, Patrick Barr-Melej, and Rafael Obregon Southeast Asia: William H. Frederick The Ohio University Research in International Studies series is published for the Center for International Studies by Ohio University Press. The views expressed in individual volumes are those of the authors and should not be considered to represent the policies or beliefs of the Center for International Studies, Ohio University Press, or Ohio University.

Cultivating The Colonies C olonial S tates and T heir E n v ironmental L egacies

Edited by Christina Folke Ax, Niels Brimnes, Niklas Thode Jensen, and Karen Oslund

Ohio University Research in International Studies Global and Comparative Studies Series No. 12 Ohio University Press Athens

© 2011 by the Center for International Studies Ohio University All rights reserved To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax). www.ohioswallow.com Printed in the United States of America The books in the Ohio University Research in International Studies Series are printed on acid-free paper. 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cultivating the colonies : colonial states and their environmental legacies / edited by Christina Folke Ax ... [et al.]. p. cm. — (Ohio University Research in international studies. Global and comparative studies series ; no. 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-89680-282-7 (pbk.) 1. Imperialism—Environmental aspects. 2. Imperialism—Health aspects. 3. Human ecology—History. 4. Nature—Effect of human beings on—History. 5. Environmental policy—History. I. Ax, Christina Folke. GF13.C85 2011 363.7—dc23 2011021056

To Richard Grove, for his pioneering work in the study of colonialism and the environment

Contents

List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xiii int ro duc t ion

Getting Our Hands Dirty Karen Oslund 1 part 1

Perceiving the Colonial Environment 17 chap ter one

The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments: Advice on Health and Prosperity Andrew Wear 19 chap ter t wo Carved Out of Nature: Identity and Environment in German Colonial Africa Daniel Rouven Steinbach 47

chap ter thre e The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science in the Spanish and American Philippines Greg Bankoff 78 chap ter four Aerial Photography and Colonial Discourse on the Agricultural Crisis in Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930–1945 David Biggs 109

part 2 Managing the Colonial Environment 133 chap ter five Wetland Colonies: Louisiana, Guangzhou, Pondicherry, and Senegal Christopher Morris 135 chap ter six Colonization of the Russian North: A Frozen Frontier Julia Lajus 164 chap ter seven

Recasting Disease and Its Environment: Indigenous Medical Practitioners, the Plague, and Politics in Colonial India, 1898–1910 Kavita Sivaramakrishnan 191 chap ter eig ht Changing Times, Changing Palates: The Dietary Impacts of Basuto Adaptation to New Rulers, Crops, and Markets, 1830s–1966 Phia Steyn 214

viii | Contents

part 3 The Legacy of Colonialism 237 chap ter nine State Rationality, Development, and the Making of State Territory: From Colonial Extraction to Postcolonial Conservation in Southern Mozambique Elizabeth Lunstrum 239 chap ter ten

Ecological Communication at the Oxford Imperial Forestry Institute Peder Anker 275 chap ter e leven Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines, and the Legacies of Late British Colonialism Joseph M. Hodge 300

List of Contributors 327 Index 331

Contents | ix

Illustrations Figures 4.1 Casier landscape 6.1 View of Aleksandrovsk 6.2 Local fishermen of Gavrilovo 9.1 Covane Community Lodge 10.1 Imperial Forestry Institute, entrance hall 10.2 Imperial Forestry Institute, ground floor 10.3 Imperial Forestry Institute, first floor Maps 4.1 Red River and Mekong River deltas in Vietnam 6.1 Russian North railway colonization 9.1 Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) 9.2 Mozambique’s Massingir District and southern Limpopo National Park 9.3 Mozambique’s Massingir District in relation to Colonato do Limpopo

114 172 175 263 285 287 289

111 176 240 242 246

Acknowledgments

Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies is a selection of papers presented in a conference held in one of the global centers of power (as least as far as environmental history is concerned): the German Historical Institute, Washington D.C. We would like to thank the Institute for support, and especially its former director, Christof Mauch, who promoted the study of environmental history in multitudinous ways and with conferences too numerous to mention during his years there. The staff at the GHI-DC, especially Christa Brown, Bärbel Thomas, Sabine Fix, and Christoph Bottin, made sure all the travel and technology for our conference ran as smoothly as it always did in the Mauch era. We also thank the present GHI-DC director, Hartmut Berghoff, for continuing to support the environmental history series. Phillipp Gassert, the former deputy director of the GHI-DC, assisted us in bringing the volume to the Ohio University Press. We also appreciated the chance to work with Mary Tonkinson, the former environmental history editor at the Institute, who suggested the present organization of Cultivating the Colonies. To the contributing authors, we have the greatest debt: without their participation at the conference, their stimulating discussions, and the quality of their ultimate articles, we would not have a book. At Ohio University Press, we thank Gillian Berchowitz, the series editor, for assisting us in shaping the book into its final form, especially the introduction. Beth Pratt, the production manager, steered the book xiii

efficiently through the production process, with the help of Charles Sutherland and Deborah Wiseman, the copy editor. We also acknowledge the History Department at Towson University and its chairperson, Robert Rook, for financial assistance for the cover of Cultivating the Colonies. After three days of stimulating discussion in Washington, Richard Grove offered the final comments at our conference. As was so typical of Richard, many of the single remarks that he made about individual papers was the seed of an idea for how the chronological and geographical spread of these essays could best be seen in comparative and analytical perspective, and we referred back to his insights many times during the preparation of this volume. Our final thanks—and the dedication of this volume—goes to Richard for his participation in the conference and for his work that continuously inspires new contributions to environmental history.

 | Acknowledgments

Introduction Getting Our Hands Dirty Karen Oslund

One of the chief aims of this volume is to address one of the most persistent and troublesome questions in colonial studies, namely, what specifically is colonial about the colonial state? What distinguishes its actions from those of other states? How does power change in the process of being exported overseas? This question has been traditionally discussed in highly theoretical terms and has produced elaborate schema of the many varieties of colonialism and colonial power.1 In recent decades it has inspired groundbreaking studies of neocolonialism, internal colonialism, informal empire, the colonial gaze, and decolonization; it also informs many foundational texts of the broad intellectual movement known as postcolonialism.2 And yet, partly because colonialism has been so vigorously theorized, defining it has become increasingly complicated. The essays presented here demonstrate how analyses of environmental practices in colonial contexts can clarify the nature of colonialism by showing how colonialism worked on the ground and in practice. In Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and Their Environmental Legacies, we examine how states translated ideas about the management of exotic nature and foreign people into practice, how they literally “got their hands dirty” in the 1

business of empire. The relationship between power and nature can reveal much about the nature of power. As Richard Grove, one of the leading figures in the study of the environmental history of colonial empires, pointed out more than ten years ago, there are two reasons why the history of colonialism is important to understanding the global history of the environment. First, European rule in the tropical colonies showed the extraordinary impact of humans on the environment and the speed at which they could destroy nature through deforestation, agricultural projects, and building new settlements. Second—and as a reaction to the first impact—it was under colonialism that states first began to take a scientific interest in nature protection through soil and forest conservation.3 One of the contributors to this volume, Peder Anker, has demonstrated elsewhere how ecology as a discipline developed in the context of British imperialism and how its principles were influenced by the language of colonialism. Managing plants and managing people were not, after all, very different from each other, according to the views of men like Jan Christian Smuts, who supported a holistic and Romantic version of botany during his political career in South Africa and as chancellor of Cambridge University.4 Other environmental historians who have turned their attention to empire agree that “European imperialism was . . . inseparable from the history of global environmental change” (Beinart and Hughes 2007, 1).5 We might therefore think of the colonial milieu as the generator of extreme human reactions to the environment, expressed as both positive and negative forces. When Europeans were not clearing the tropical forests, they were discussing how to manage them at meetings of the Royal Geographic Society in London and l’École nationale des eaux et forêts in Nancy. By choosing to focus on colonial states’ treatment of nature in this volume, we have selected a fertile field that shows us an impressive array of examples of colonial power and its workings. The diversity of cases presented here of the colonial treatment of nature lead us to a deeper understanding of the nature of the state itself. The contributors to this volume offer no easy answers to the question of what is colonial about the colonial state. Some emphasize similarities between colonial states and other regimes, arguing that  | Karen Oslund

colonizers exported domestic policies to foreign locales, or demonstrating profound continuities between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial attitudes toward the environment. Others contend that colonial policies represented departures both from the domestic agenda and from precolonial practices. As Peter Marshall (2003) has put it, the colonial state can be understood as both an evolution from its predecessor states and a revolutionary new development. Which of the two it was appears to be contingent and dependent on time, place, and the circumstances of the environmental transformation. We have therefore chosen to present a variety of answers in the case studies in this volume. Our general conclusion, based on the studies in Cultivating the Colonies, is that, owing to their global scope and perspective, at least some colonial states had the potential to configure power differently than their precolonial predecessors did, but this potential was not always realized in practice. The organization of the essays in Cultivating the Colonies is based on the idea that colonial perceptions of the environment generally preceded colonial management of the environment. The first section, “Perceiving the Colonial Environment,” includes four essays, by Andrew Wear, Daniel Steinbach, Greg Bankoff, and David Biggs, on subjects ranging from health in the colonies to the use of aerial photography in managing farming. The second section, “Managing the Colonial Environment,” contains essays by Christopher Morris, Julia Lajus, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, and Phia Steyn on the colonial manipulation of nature, including of wetlands, fisheries, medical practice, and the diet of indigenous people. The third section, “The Legacy of Colonialism,” concludes with essays by Elizabeth Lunstrum, Peder Anker, and Joseph Hodge that cover the postcolonial period and demonstrate how the experience of colonialism changed nature and the human relationship to nature profoundly, not only in colonial territories like Mozambique, but also in centers of knowledge production such as Oxford. We have chosen this principle of organizing the book by the stages of colonialism and its interaction with the environment in order to deal effectively with essays ranging over a time period and geographical scope that are enormous. For example, Julia Lajus’s essay, Introduction | 

“Colonization of the Russian North: A Frozen Frontier,” begins in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with the settlement of a cultural group, the Pomor, in the Arctic and subarctic regions enclosed by the Barents and the White Seas. At the other chronological end of the scale, Elizabeth Lunstrum’s essay, “State Rationality, Development, and the Making of State Territory: From Colonial Extraction to Postcolonial Conservation in Southern Mozambique,” places us in a more conventional colonial environment, the southern part of Africa, and brings us to the latter half of the twentieth century, ending with the present-day debate over the design of an international park, the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park on the borders of Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Within the three sections of Cultivating the Colonies, these authors debate and disagree with one another over our chief question: Is colonial management of the environment unique, or are its fundamental aspects common to all modern states? Or, to put this more directly with respect to the environment: Is there any evidence that colonial states were more destructive toward or transformative of the environment in larger ways than other modern states were? As the concept of colonialism evokes mostly negative connotations for the twenty-firstcentury reader, perhaps the immediate response would be in the affirmative: Colonial states must have been more destructive and more callous toward the environment than other states were. One need only think of what they did to people—who had agency; who could protest, run away, take up arms, and so on—in order to imagine what the colonial state and its agents would do to trees, which could not. Yet, as these authors reveal to us in their case studies, the answer is not so simple. Before summarizing the contribution of Cultivating the Colonies to this messy issue, we turn to some of the current scholarship on this question.

Colonialism and “High Modernism” Many scholars have studied colonialism by paying specific attention to its most obvious manifestation: the violent territorial aggression of  | Karen Oslund

European states against the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Other scholars, however, have chosen to focus on the study of colonialism as ideology. They investigate the colonial relationship not by examining the oppression of and abuses perpetrated against specific populations and regions by foreign powers, but by exploring modes of thought that permitted and even promoted these activities. Among the most influential of such works is James C. Scott’s (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Scott’s seminal book, while frequently cited in discussions of colonialism, is not explicitly about colonialism at all but rather about a type of state ideology that he calls “high modernism.” Through a study of government-sponsored projects in early modern Europe, Soviet Russia, and elsewhere, Scott demonstrates a correlation between each state’s political objectives and its preference for scientific theories and statistical data over folk knowledge and local practices. According to Scott, the theories and data deployed by technocratic authorities frequently minimized the complexities of local production, and development planners exploited science to transform these complexities into a simpler and more manageable reality. For example, a single-minded drive to increase agricultural yields in Britishruled Tanzania was rationalized by experts who proposed systems of monocropping, while discouraging efforts to understand the value of polycropping and ignoring local justifications for such an approach.6 Science became a tool of the high-modernist state. Colonial and postcolonial history certainly provide many examples of high modernism at work and of this ideology’s disastrous effects on the environment.7 However, as other scholars have argued in response to Scott, high modernism does not account for all aspects of colonial practices. Detailed, empirical knowledge of a region’s ecological conditions could also be enrolled in the political and bureaucratic operations of the colonial state. Suzanne Moon (2004, 2007), for example, has focused on the case of early twentieth-century Netherlands East Indies, where a controversy over the sustainability of sugar and rice production offers insight into the political and economic motivations that spurred agricultural experts to seek ever-more-detailed empirical knowledge, the ultimate effect of which was to create an Introduction | 

unwieldy bureaucracy that made the colony harder rather than easier to manage. This technocratic approach became a crucial factor in consolidating the authority and credibility of the Netherlands East Indies Department of Agriculture as a producer of scientific knowledge, and in establishing this knowledge as the privileged basis for policies of colonial development.8 Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which is referenced by many contributors to this collection, provides an important context for the case studies presented here by reminding us that much about colonial power was not unique to colonialism. There was often considerable continuity between the exercise of power in the colonial state and in the states that preceded and succeeded it. Furthermore, the picture of power is complicated by the fact that colonial states also often included dependencies and semicolonial areas. In early nineteenth-century Madras, for example, most minor court cases were heard by people whom the British referred to as “village headmen.” This was part of the philosophy of “native agency” formulated by Thomas Munro, then governor of Madras, which also directed the colonizers to incorporate indigenous systems of land tenure and tax collection into their administrative policies. Although a chief obstacle in this respect was determining how these traditional systems actually functioned, “native agency” was viewed as an effective method of state-building during this early stage of colonial rule. After the crisis of the Sepoy Rebellion, and the establishment of the British India Office in the mid-nineteenth century, however, British-ruled India began to change and resembled the Mughal Empire less closely than it had before.9 Some of the answers offered in Cultivating the Colonies challenge the notion that the colonial state had such a deep and profoundly destructive effect on the environment as we might assume. For example, Phia Steyn’s essay, “Changing Times, Changing Palates: The Dietary Impacts of Basuto Adaptation to New Rulers, Crops, and Markets, 1830s–1966,” finds “very limited evidence that British colonial rule had any direct impact on Basuto food consumption.”10 European foodstuffs, such as tea and sugar, were instead introduced by French missionaries, who also created a market for wheat and maize that ultimately led to a regional shift from a sorghum-based diet to one based  | Karen Oslund

on maize. Changes in the agricultural practices and environment of the Basuto people had thus already taken place by the time British indirect rule commenced in 1868, Steyn concludes. In “The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science in the Spanish and American Philippines” Greg Bankoff examines how one colonial state perceived another. Bankoff sees the Spanish achievements in the fields of acclimatization and meteorology as the product of local knowledge that was discounted by the Americans when their occupation of the Philippines began in 1899. This dismissal, he claims, was part of the American strategy of colonial dominance and bore no relation to the actual merits of Spanish accomplishments. Little about the practices of these sciences in the Philippines changed in the transition from one colonial regime to another, even though the Americans declared that great scientific “progress” was made under their administration from the previous regime of unenlightened “darkness.” In fact, as Bankoff convincingly argues, the differences between Northern European and Southern European scientific traditions made it impossible for the Americans to appreciate the Spanish scientific contributions properly. Kavita Sivaramakrishnan’s study, “Recasting Disease and Its Environment: Indigenous Medical Practitioners, the Plague, and Politics in Colonial India, 1898–1910,” analyzes how indigenous medical practitioners responded to the crisis in colonial relations precipitated by an outbreak of plague in urban Punjab at the turn of the twentieth century. Sivaramakrishnan’s essay avoids simple notions of a homogeneously hostile reaction to colonial directives from Punjabi physicians and instead highlights the sophisticated strategies they adopted to preserve their authority as healers. If anything, these physicians seemed more in agreement with colonial administrators than with the general population, and the distinction between elite and popular concepts of disease was probably as significant as differences between “Western” and “Indian” concepts. In some instances Punjabi physicians collaborated with British authorities and emerged as crucial links between the people of the region and the colonial administration. Turning to a very different area of the world, Julia Lajus’s “Colonization of the Russian North: A Frozen Frontier” reminds us that the Introduction | 

reach of colonialism extended not just to the temperate and tropical regions but northward to the Arctic and subarctic ones as well. Her survey of the Russian colonization of the area between the Barents Sea and the White Sea from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries brings an unexpected part of the globe under the consideration of colonial history. The Russian state, throughout its various transformations, was a colonial power as well as a modernizing one, and Lajus demonstrates the effects of both these ideologies on the local people of the Russian North. From the final section of the volume, Lunstrum’s essay traces the history of state intervention in the environment of Massingir in southern Mozambique through three successive governments: the building of the Massingir Dam under the colonial Portuguese state; the reorganization of countryside into collective villages under the post-independence socialist government; and the creation, now in progress, of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park on the borders of Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. In her analysis, Lunstrum notes similarities among the three governments from the viewpoint of the local inhabitants of Massingir. Because the establishment of the park has displaced local residents for the third time in thirty years, many see the park as yet another attempt by the government to steal their land, even though Limpopo, located on the borders of previously hostile nations, was intended as a “Peace Park” that would turn the area into a neutral wilderness and help to heal old wounds. However, Lunstrum goes beyond this simple perception of an African nation in which nothing ever changes for the people over three successive governments. In fact, the socialist policies of the postcolonial government were an explicit rejection of Portuguese colonial exploitation and aimed to address the poverty of the inhabitants of Massingir. Thus—at least in the early days, before state promises of improvements failed to materialize—the socialist government enjoyed much more cooperation with the relocation from the residents than the colonial government had. The third section of Cultivating the Colonies also includes Peder Anker’s “Ecological Communication at the Oxford Imperial Forestry Institute,” an analysis of a building that was constructed as a show | Karen Oslund

case for many varieties of wood from throughout the British Empire. Anker contends that the architecture of this building mirrors British colonial policies and imperial values, creating a visual analog of the principles by which Occidental colonizers once ruled Oriental nature. Continuities between colonial and postcolonial environmental policies is also the theme of the essay that concludes the volume, Joseph Hodge’s “Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines, and the Legacies of Late British Colonialism.” Instead of relying on interviews with local inhabitants, as Lunstrum does, Hodge examines the issue from a top-down perspective, looking at the careers of key British colonial officials to show how these individuals shaped the doctrine of development in the 1950s. The professional experience these men gained in the colonial service established them as credible authorities on now-independent states, enabling the perpetuation of their ideals and practices in the postcolonial world. Collectively the case studies discussed so far offer a mostly negative answer to the question posed at the beginning of this introduction, asserting that there is little, if anything, specifically colonial about the power that the colonial state exercised over nature. By emphasizing the stability of African food ways and the careers of British agricultural experts who transitioned from a colonial to postcolonial world without missing a step on the ladder of promotion, the findings of these authors would suggest that there is little difference between a colonial use of power and how other states exercised their will. The significant aspect of state power is neither the use of a navy for overseas governance nor even the racial characteristics of colonizer and colonized, but the all-encompassing view of the state and its tools of cadastral maps and urban-planning commissions. These examples lead toward the conclusion that no specific environmental practices were unique to colonialism and that colonizers adapted rather than replaced existing strategies and mechanisms for managing both environmental resources and hazards. While this is an important finding of several studies in this volume, other authors look to different colonial milieu, suggesting that the colonial and modern states are similar but not equivalent to each other. For example, in his essay, “Wetland Colonies: Louisiana, Guangzhou, Introduction | 

Pondicherry, and Senegal,” Christopher Morris argues that none of these river deltas in the United States, China, India, and West Africa were pristine when colonized by Europeans, certainly not China and Asia, but not even relatively lightly touched North America. Nevertheless, the environmental transformations linked to colonialism were profoundly different, if not in scale, certainly in type, than any that preceded them. . . . It was the ideology of European colonialism, perpetuated by the modern state, rooted in Enlightenment science, economics, and political philosophy that made modern colonial environments different, because that ideology positioned Europeans, and Euro-Americans, as outside observers of the natural world and the people who inhabited it.11

In his comparison of four French colonies with similar natural environments, Morris shows that the colonizers not only acted upon the landscapes they found but also used their experiences in one region as a pattern for their activities in other ecologically comparable environments. If river deltas appeared familiar to European eyes, they probably had the same economic potential. It was the detached scientific gaze—described by Morris as the “ideology of European colonialism”—that could most readily recognize these commercial possibilities. Ideas about how to exploit this potential most efficiently for the benefit of the colonizers could be transferred from one river delta (or other natural phenomenon) to any other such location, including those back in Europe. Perhaps this potential was all the more apparent in places such as Guangzhou and Senegal because the scientist/colonial manager did not inhabit one colony only but circulated among several colonies throughout his career.12 The astonishing sweep of the global colonial gaze is also the subject of Andrew Wear’s essay, “The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments: Advice on Health and Prosperity,” which explores the European discourse that flourished from the seventeenth to the twentieth century on prospective settlers’ health in foreign environments. Wear analyzes advice literature on how settlers could create healthier  | Karen Oslund

environments by Europeanizing local agriculture. While temperate colonies were much more amenable to this process than tropical ones, Europeans also tried to find tropical landscapes that could be Europeanized, such as the hill stations in India and the highlands in East Africa. Daniel Steinbach’s essay, “Carved Out of Nature: Identity and Environment in German Colonial Africa,” deals with a theme very similar to Wear’s. It applies the much-studied and controversial concept of Heimat to an examination of how German colonizers understood nature in Africa.13 Steinbach argues that German settlers dealt with the “strangeness” of their surroundings by reimagining African nature as identical with that of the Reich, as nature suitable to the development of the German national character. The barren deserts of Namibia, then a part of German Southwest Africa, were therefore regarded as an inhospitable climate in which the strong German character would be nurtured. At the opposite extreme were colonists who believed that the tropical climate of Tanzania, in what was at that time German East Africa, would weaken the German character, and that new settlers should therefore be routinely brought from the fatherland in order to safeguard the colonists’ moral virtue as well as to promote the transformation of the African landscape through hunting and park regulations. Morris’s, Wear’s, and Steinbach’s contributions to this volume thus produce a slightly different answer to our question, which might be summed up as follows: The colonial state is one with a global and comparative perspective. Whatever a modern state did, the colonial state did in a bigger way, on a grander scale, involving more sites of contact and a more diverse range of people. Colonialism gave the French expertise in reengineering any riverine environment, not just that of the Rhône River. English colonists could speak with undisputed authority about temperate lands around the globe and the wealth and opportunity they offered to the potential settler, likening the climate of Tasmania to that of the French Riviera. This global perspective had local applications. According to David Biggs in his essay, “Aerial Photography and Colonial Discourse on the Agricultural Crisis in Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930–1945,” aerial Introduction | 

photography of the Red and Mekong river deltas conducted by the Service géographique de l’Indochine produced an Orientalist reading of human nature. It compared the methods used by northern and southern farmers to manage water, and supported the French belief that the genius of the intricate landscapes in the Red River delta was resident within northern peasants, and that the failure of flood dikes and canals in the Mekong Delta was due to southern peasants’ inherent “laziness.” While creating stereotypes, both negative and positive, about indigenous populations might appear to be a distinct feature of colonialism, one might also argue, in light of Eugen Weber’s (1976) classic study, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914, that the French state had employed this strategy at home before putting it into practice in Asia. But what is remarkable about this particular instance of such mythmaking is its technology: the panoptic eye of the camera aimed from the heavens. Aerial photography was, as Biggs explains, pioneered by the French colonial military, as pilots, photographers, and camera technicians sought to prolong their employment within the military after World War I by transferring their skills abroad. These colonial practices were thus an outgrowth of military technologies, not merely an expansion of domestic cultural politics. The view of Vietnamese peasants created by the “God-eye” in the sky intensified the process of objectifying them beyond the methods available to nineteenth-century folklorists and linguists in Europe.14 Our question about the nature of colonial power escapes definitive answers. But the contributors to Cultivating the Colonies establish beyond all possible doubt the importance of the environment as a locus for studying the power of the colonial state. If this power was at times scarcely distinguishable from that of precolonial states, postcolonial successors, and other modern states, this may not have made a great deal of difference for the trees and the animals that fell under its domain. Grove demonstrated that colonialism provided a powerful impetus toward nature conservation after having recognized its own profoundly destructive capacities. In a recent study, Jacob Tropp (2006) takes Grove’s analysis one step further, pointing out that nature conservation under colonialism was also a means of exercising power  | Karen Oslund

over native populations. Conservation, as practiced by the colonial state, was a form of Western knowledge produced in European centers, and could be used to discount indigenous knowledge and use of the environment in the Transkei, as well as in other regions governed by remote technocrats. African use of sticks and tree saplings in hutbuilding was labeled “vandalism” and “thieving” by forest officials, who attempted to discipline it through the issuing of permits and by surveillance of the African use of forests. Not all colonial administrations were equally dismissive toward indigenous practices, but they could use the tools of science and conservation to consider other forms of knowledge only at their own prerogative. We learn through the case studies in Cultivating the Colonies that it is not possible to speak of a single, homogeneous colonial management of the environment. Rather, through an examination of British, French, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Russian, and American colonies, we see that there were different ways in which these states governed nature. Some of these methods were not distinguishable from those that these states had used to govern nature and people at home, but others were. Especially in the later stages of colonialism, the ability to manage nature on a global scale, surveying landscapes as different as Germany and Southwest Africa, Senegal and French Indochina from the privileged viewpoint of a single metropolitan center, produced more grandiose visions and transformations than those that had come before them. And, as Lunstrum’s essay, and the story of postcolonial Africa in general, amply demonstrates, these visions and their traces on the landscape did not end with the end of colonialism. The legacy of colonialism and of its coconspirators—such as “developmental policy” and “scientific management”—is still part of the global landscape in which the authors of this book situate their stories.

Notes 1. Some examples of this theoretical work on colonialism and postcolonialism are Osterhammel, Colonialism; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; and Cooper, Colonialism in Question.

Introduction | 

2. Some examples of the expansion of the use of the term “colonialism” to apply to regions and developments other than those covered by traditional studies of imperialism include Hechter, Internal Colonialism; Schneider, Italy’s “Southern Question”; Johnston, “Hetroglossia and Linguistic Neocolonialism”; and Aguirre, Informal Empire. 3. Grove, Ecology, Climate, and Empire, p. 1. See also Grove’s masterly Green Imperialism, one of the seminal books in the field of colonialism and the environment. 4. Anker, Imperial Ecology. 5. Another work that makes a strong connection between colonialism and the environment is Griffiths and Robin, Ecology and Empire. 6. Scott cites Richards, Indigenous Agricultural Revolution. See also Beinart, “African History and Environmental History.” 7. In addition to Scott’s case studies in Seeing Like a State, see, for example, Conte, “Colonial Science and Ecological Change”; and Bonneuil, “Development as Experiment.” 8. Bhattacharya, Harrison, and Worboys point out in Fractured States how internally divided the colonial state in India was, and in practice very far from high modernism. 9. See Stein, A History of India; and Stein, Thomas Munro, 10. See Steyn’s essay in chapter 8 of this volume; the quoted passage appears on page 231. 11. See Morris’s essay in chapter 5 of this volume; the quoted passage appears on page 155. 12. For some examples of this circulation of experts and expert knowledge, see Drayton, Nature’s Government; Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion; and McClellan, Colonialism and Science. 13. For discussions of this notion of Heimat, see Applegate, A Nation of Provincials; and Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home. 14. For some examples of their methods, see Hoyt, “Dialects of Modernization in France and Italy.”

Works Cited Aguirre, Robert D. 2005. Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Anker, Peder. 2001. Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Applegate, Celia. 1990. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. Berkeley: University of California Press. Beinart, William. 2000. “African History and Environmental History.” African Affairs 99:269–302. Beinart, William, and Lotte Hughes. 2007. Environment and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bhattacharya, Sanjoy, Mark Harrison, and Michael Worboys. 2005. Fractured States: Smallpox, Public Health and Vaccination Policy in British India, 1800–1947. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Bonneuil, Christophe. 2001. “Development as Experiment: Science and State Building in Late Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa, 1930–1970.” Osiris 15:258–81. Brockway, Lucile H. 1979. Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Conte, Chris. 1999. “Colonial Science and Ecological Change: Tanzania’s Mlalo Basin, 1888–1946.” Environmental History 4 (2): 220–44. Cooper, Frederick. 2005. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Drayton, Richard. 2000. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press. Griffiths, Tom, and Libby Robin, eds. 1997. Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Grove, Richard H. 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Ecology, Climate, and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400–1940. Cambridge: White Horse. Hechter, Michael. 1975. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hoyt, David L. 2006. “Dialects of Modernization in France and Italy, 1865–1900.” In The Study of Language and the Politics of Community in Global Context, 1740–1940, edited by David L. Hoyt and Karen Oslund, 85–118. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Johnston, Bill. 2004. “Hetroglossia and Linguistic Neocolonialism: English Teaching in Post-1989 Poland.” In Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures through an East-West Gaze, edited by Sibelan Forrester, Magdalena J. Zaborowska, and Elena Gapova, 126–45. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Marshall, Peter, ed. 2003. Introduction to The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution?, 28–36. Delhi: Oxford University Press. McClellan, James E. 1992. Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Moon, Suzanne. 2004. “Empirical Knowledge, Scientific Authority, and Native Development: The Controversy over Sugar/Rice Ecology in the Netherlands East Indies, 1905–1914.” Environment and History 10 (2):59–81. ———. 2007. Technology and Ethical Idealism: A History of Development in the Netherlands East Indies. Leiden: CNWS. Osterhammel, Jürgen. 1997. Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Translated by Shelley Frisch. Princeton: Marcus Wiener. Richards, Paul. 1985. Indigenous Agricultural Revolution: Ecology and Food Production in West Africa. London: Hutchinson. Rollins, William H. 1997. A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschultz Movement, 1904–1918. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Schneider, Jane, ed. 1998. Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country. New York: Berg. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stein, Burton. 1989. Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire. Delhi: Oxford. ———. 1998. A History of India. Oxford: Blackwell. Tropp, Jacob A. 2006. Natures of Colonial Change: Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei. Athens: Ohio University Press. Weber, Eugen. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

 | Karen Oslund

Part 1 Perceiving the Colonial Environment

1 The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments: Advice on Health and Prosperity

Andrew Wear Agriculture must be the foundation of every settlement. —New Zealand Company settler

Prosperity and health were, if we believe the literature produced for potential settlers, on the wish list of anyone who was thinking of migrating and settling in strange new environments. This conjunction of wealth and health, usually ignored by historians of medicine, lasted across the whole period of British colonization. If a colony was to survive, both wealth (or at least a prosperous subsistence) and health were essential and were also factors likely to shape how the environment was envisaged. In this chapter I will be arguing for stability or continuity in the discourse about health and wealth. Whether this discourse was as applicable to tropical as to temperate areas is discussed in the last part of the chapter.

Places, People, and Health In the early years of a colony, the way its environment produced health and wealth was to a greater or lesser extent perceived as comparable to 19

England’s, especially if the colony was in a temperate area. (In the rest of the chapter I will refer more often to “England” rather than to “Britain,” as England was usually the “home” model, analogy, or metaphor in descriptions of new settler environments.) There were a number of reasons for the almost universal impulse in this literature to portray a colony as a home away from home for people, plants, and animals. There was the perceived need for English bodies—and likewise, English plants and animals, given the agricultural nature of most colonies from the seventeenth to the twentieth century—to fit their new place. More generally, prospective settlers were believed to need the psychological reassurance that there was something of the mother country in the new country. Set against this was the growing realization that new colonies were different both in their environments and in their developments of increasingly distinct identities. The idea of the fit between people and places was often expressed through a discourse that linked health and climate. It is important to note at this point that climate and health were set out together along with the economic resources of a place in geography books, and in the accounts and letters that urged people to come to a new settlement. This conjunction of health with resources made up the prospectus for a colony and is something that I will discuss further in the chapter. As is well known, health was seen as being affected by a place and, in particular, by its climate. This belief was long-lasting. It is found in Hippocratic writings and was only starting to end by the beginning of the twentieth century, after the bacteriological revolution and then the development of scientific tropical medicine. It was based on the humoral and qualitative view of the body developed by Greek medicine and philosophy. The body, being composed of four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile), which in turn were each made from pairs of the four primary qualities of hot, cold, dry, and wet, was shaped and influenced by the external force of climate that essentially consisted of the same four qualities. This also had a cultural significance. It was believed that people’s countries of birth shaped their constitution, and that there was a fit between people and their home country. This was a popular view among lay as well as medi | Andrew Wear

cal writers. It was also a belief that echoed the English nationalism of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries along the lines that England had the most equable or temperate climate and so produced the best people.1 In the nineteenth century that nationalism took on an explicitly racial character. Such perceptions helped to produce the desire to find or create something of the mother country in a new colony. What was alien in a colony could be threatening, while the familiar spelled safety and provided a sense of reassurance about one’s identity in body, character, and race. The attempted re-creation of a home environment, whether in tropical niches or enclaves or wholesale in the temperate new “white land,” became an imperative for British colonists. Ideas of health fed into this imperative, and as we shall see later in the chapter, they were allied to an agricultural economy that transformed alien places into home-type environments or at least environments that had European characteristics. Initially, fear was often present in the minds of those intending to settle. One aspect of fear was the belief that going to a strange place that differed constitutionally from one’s own country was dangerous to health. For instance, William Bradford reported the debate among the Pilgrim Fathers in 1617 as to “What perticuler place to pitch upon” in America. They rejected “Guiana or some of those fertill places in those hott climats.” Although some saw Guiana as “rich frutfull and blessed with a perpetuall spring, and a florishing greenes [greenness], where vigorous nature brought forth all things in abundance and plenty without any great labour or art of man,” others concluded, “It would not be so fitt for them.” This was an early example of the British fear and suspicions of hot climates that lasted into the early twentieth century. Specifically, the Pilgrim Fathers believed that “such hot countries are subject to greevuos diseases and many noysome [unwholesome] impediments, which other more temperate places are freer from, and would not so well agree with our English bodys.”2 Nevertheless, the more temperate areas still posed dangers in English minds. Moving their bodies from the home environment that had shaped their nature to a strange one was feared. The Pilgrim Fathers, Bradford noted, believed that in North America, “the chang of aire [here also meaning climate], diate, and The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments

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drinking of water, would infecte their bodies with sore sickneses and greevous diseases” (W.T. Davis 1982, 47).

Health, Prosperity, and Agriculture One response to such concerns was to assert that a new colony was even more like home than the home country and so was healthier. Evidence of healthy people, animals, and plants indicated prosperity, and likewise a prosperous community was often a healthy one. Moreover, the ability of the land to allow agriculture to flourish was closely allied to health, for starvation could result when agriculture failed. Thomas Welde, writing to his former parishioners at Tarling in England in 1632 about Massachusetts, urged them to “come, see and taste” the new country.3 He declared: Here I find three great blessings, peace, plenty and health, in a comfortable measure. The place well agreeth with our English bodies that they were never so healthy in their native country. Generally all here as never could be rid of the headache, toothache, cough and the like are now better and freed here, and those that were weak are now well long since.

Health, in accounts of a new colony, was often joined with plenty and wealth, or at least a comfortable living, and Welde immediately went on to report: “Here is plenty of corn and that the poorest have enough. Corn is here five shillings six pence a bushel” (Emerson 1976, 96). Health, agriculture (in the form of plants and animals), markets, and wealth were linked. For instance, the Reverend Francis Higginson, in his letter to his “Friends at Leicester” of 1629, published as New-Englands Plantation. Or, a Short and True Description of the Commodities and Discommodities of That Countrey (1630), stressed as Welde how healthy New England was.4 He also emphasized that a healthy environment had economic consequences. Higginson noted how the “fertility of the soil is to be admired at, as appeareth in the abundance of grass that growth everywhere both very thick, very long  | Andrew Wear

and very high.” Agriculture was the central economic activity that the English transported to America and reproduced, thus changing the environment. But the original environment had to be favorable to agriculture. Hence the mention of the fertility of the soil and Higginson’s following comment: “It is scarce to be believed how our kine and goats, horses and hogs do thrive and prosper here and like well of this country” (Emerson 1976, 31). The end results of agriculture (apart from subsistence) were trade, markets, and profit, and without them the motive for large-scale rapid transformation of the environment would have been largely absent. Big outputs and crop yields were always good for profit, and Higginson took care to point out how: In our plantation we already have a quart of milk for a penny, but the abundant increase of corn proves this country to be a wonderment. Thirty, forty, fifty, sixty [fold] are ordinary here. . . . Our planters hope to have more than a hundred fold this year. . . . It is almost incredible what great gain some of our English planters have had by our Indian corn. (Emerson 1976, 31)

The more land cleared for planting, the greater the trade and the profit. In a similar vein, the natural products of a place were praised. The fruit trees, the timber trees, and the abundant fish were all viewed by Higginson as natural resources to be used at will (Emerson 1976, 32–33, 35–36). The nineteenth-century settler literature likewise emphasized the presence of land and the opportunities for trade. In other words, the reports being sent back to England declared that the environment was right for exploitation and change, and the economic conditions were favorable for such a transformation. This type of discourse continued into and throughout the nineteenth century. Despite wide differences in climates and environments, the new white lands of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were presented as healthy and not so different from home as to be completely alien and frightening. The discourse about new colonies also gave the sense that settlers’ bodies and the environment were being incorporated into a familiar economic system. The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments

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For instance, settlers reading about nineteenth-century Canada found health linked to climate and, as in the seventeenth century, to the agricultural products of the place. The numerous guides providing “Information for Intending Settlers” published by the Canadian government and provinces set out to provide reassurance that Canada’s climate, despite misconceptions, was good for health and agriculture. As the Guide . . . for Intending Settlers of 1887 declared: There is no more important question for an intending emigrant than the nature of the climate to which he proposed to go. The climate of Canada . . . is more misconceived abroad than any other fact pertaining to the country. Perfectly absurd impressions prevail respecting the rigours of Canadian winters.

The Guide pointed out that the “dry winter atmosphere is bracing and pleasant,” dryness being an accepted marker of health compared to dampness and humidity. It also declared that “besides being pleasant, there is no healthier climate under the sun. There are no endemic diseases in Canada.” The Guide stressed that snow, far from being a hindrance, helped in communications and played a role in agriculture: Canada’s snow, it stated, “is perfectly dry and packs under foot, making the best roads, and forming a warm covering for the earth” and “has an important manurial influence on the ground” (Dominion of Canada 1887, 10). The agricultural perspective was never far away from the settler literature. The Guide emphasized, like early seventeenth-century writings, the link between climate and agriculture, fertility and productivity. The “warm and bright” summers meant that fruits and vegetables which cannot be ripened in the open air in England, such as the grape and tomato will here ripen to perfection. The summers are much more favourable for the horticulturalist and agriculturalist than those in England, with the single exception of length of time in which outdoor work can be done.

An independent observer was reported as witnessing to the fine growth of wheat, barley, oats, and maize. Extraordinary plant growth  | Andrew Wear

was continually cited as evidence of a country’s fertility. The observer saw a field-grown squash of eight feet three inches weighing 150 pounds. The Guide added: “We have seen them 350lbs; open air growth. No better illustration could be given of a summer, semi-tropical in heat of great duration, than the maturing of the pumpkins and squash of such great size” (1887, 10–11). In other new white lands a similar discourse was being used to entice migrants to the colonies. Behind it lay the economic impulse to take and transform vast areas of land into “fields,” as the nineteenth century expressed the immigration and agricultural enterprise. Tasmania was presented in Godwin’s Emigrant’s Guide of 1823 as having “perhaps, the most salubrious and congenial climate of any in the known world for a European constitution . . . similar to that of the south of France.” “This luxuriant island” (1, 12) was depicted at the same time as both beautiful and rich in agricultural potential. Scenery that appealed to European notions of pastoral beauty was often part of a package that advertised a place’s healthiness for Europeans and the wealth to be got by farming its land. Godwin’s Guide pointed to the “luxuriance” of the grass on pastureland, while the cinquefoil and trefoil, with which the valleys abound, intermixed with wild flowers, give a brilliancy to the scene which is truly delightful. The soil is every where rich, and the plains plentifully watered with streams and ponds; the whole forming a picture no less captivating to the eye of a farmer than to that of the painter: indeed, any farmer ascending one of these hills must acknowledge, that nothing can be more inviting to the hand of the cultivator than the beautiful plains of rich and valuable land exposed to his view; each, perhaps, of 50,000 acres in extent. (1–2)

Good health, beautiful scenery, and rich, profitable farmland effectively empty of previous owners were brought together to create a tempting picture of Tasmania for prospective immigrants. What accounts like Godwin’s Guide were doing was directing prospective settlers toward what seemed at the time to be an unarguable direction: The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments

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changing the land into an agricultural environment. Its exotic products (emu birds and aborigines) were depicted, but the stress was on how British occupation was transforming the place by land clearance, by farming, and by the production of familiar goods such as cheese, wheat, barley, oats, peas, and meat; and by global products suited to the place such as cattle: “a cross breed, between the Bengal cow and the English bull; the sheep between the Teeswater and the Merino; the horse between the Arab stallion and the English mare.” In a land of plenty, a land recently created by the British, where “all the Fruits of England or France attain perfection in the open air,”5 it would have been surprising if either the health or the pockets of the newcomers would suffer. Exotic, but not too exotic, French fruits such as “grapes, peaches, nectarines” flourished, as well as the more familiar “apples, pears, plums.” In what was a standard trope, yields and sizes of plants were often emphasized, suggesting that if plants did well, so would people as well as profits. Parsnips, turnips, and potatoes often weighed “one to two, and sometimes five pounds weight each, and averaging at 350 bushels per acre.” Moreover, wheat, barley, oats, beans, and peas all flourished.6 In other words, and this is the main point I want to make here, prospective settlers were seen as being attracted to a country that was being changed to a white land and, by being presented with pictures of a place already partially transformed into agricultural country, they were being urged to buy into the project. We can also note that, from the point of view of health, it was emphasized that since English settlement, “the harvest has never once failed.”7 Good harvests meant profits, but failures for isolated colonies led not only to poverty but also to ill health and starvation, whether in early seventeenth-century America or early nineteenth-century Australia. At this point a note of realism should be introduced. Contemporaries were aware that new colonies wanted positive reports to be given to potential migrants. Few perhaps went as far as early Virginia, where settlers were prohibited by law from writing negatively about the colony, its leaders, and the “intentions of the whole body of Adventurers.” More specifically, it was forbidden “to detract” or “calumniate” against any encomia of the colony published by its enterprisers  | Andrew Wear

or adventurers, including “any publique booke, or bookes, which by their nature, advise and grave wisdoms, shall be thought fit, to be set foorth and publisht, for the advancement of the good of this colony.” A first offense merited a whipping and a public act of contrition. A third offense was punishable by death.8 The early settlers to North America sent many very positive letters home to England, but disasters in the shape of famine and disease acted as a corrective to unbridled optimism. After the brutal winter of 1630, Thomas Dudley, deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote: In a word, we yet enjoy little to be envied but endure much to be pitied in the sickness and mortality of our people. And I do the more willingly use this open and plain dealing, lest other men should fall short of their expectations when they come hither, as we to our great prejudice did, by means of letters sent us from hence in England, wherein honest men out of a desire to draw over others to them wrote somewhat hyperbolically of many things here.9

“Hyperbolic” descriptions of new colonies and new lands continued to be sent back. Three hundred years later a visitor to Canada noted that “winter is a touchy topic with the Canadian[;] he never talks about it himself. He will tell you about the peaches grown in Ontario, he will become rather pink with enthusiasm describing the wheat regions of the West. . . . Canada has a long and severe winter.” The Canadian government was also joined in the conspiracy of silence. “The Dominion Government sends out millions of publications each year about the suitability of Canada for settlers; but the winter season—certainly the hardship of winter—is practically ignored.”10 Across the centuries, during the whole extent of colonization those concerned with encouraging migration to colonies selectively created images of colonies that represented them as favorable for colonists’ bodies and wallets. As The Settlers’ Guide: Greater Britain in 1914, a publication very favorable to British colonial migration, pointed out, a prospective settler when choosing where to go had either to rely on the reports of friends in a particular country, The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments

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or he must seek his solution from literature—and here comes the rub. He will obtain an amazing quantity of well got-up booklets, most of which are admirably written and illustrated, from the various State Agencies in London or elsewhere . . . [he] will be led to ponder why there is not a general exodus from this old isle of many imperfections to those blissful lands which appear to be free from any. He will, in fact, have been reading through rose-coloured glasses and may have obtained much knowledge of the golden wheat-belt of the West [Canada] without happening on any mention of mosquitoes, and perhaps his study of Australia will not have disclosed any mention of the word “drought.” (Brown and Brown 1914, 1–2)

The way in which the settler literature sought to counter such skepticism was to emphasize eyesight/eyewitness knowledge and then later statistics, the new criteria for truth from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries onward. But that is another paper.

Perfect and Imperfect Environments Tasmania’s climate was not as extreme in terms of heat and drought as the rest of Australia. In the coastal areas of continental Australia, where settlement largely occurred, there were enough “good” climates (i.e., livable and productive) for a positive picture to be drawn, yet other realities such as drought were also present. In some places the type of agriculture—extraordinary large sheep runs—reflected the marginal climatic and soil conditions. In other words, it was not so easy to be completely positive about conditions in Australia, though for early settlers without a knowledge of past Australian climate changes it was easy to be misled by the apparent greenness of a place that could in a short time turn into an arid dustbowl, as with Captain Cook’s Botany Bay. Parts of Australia notoriously proved a disappointment. Its center did not provide agriculturally productive and healthy places for white settlement. If one turns for a moment from the discourse of the literature for prospective settlers to that of exploration, it is clear that  | Andrew Wear

they had much in common. Explorers, like propagandists for settlement, were constantly assessing places for health and wealth—both positively and negatively. For health they used criteria that are found in Greek medical thought and were to be repeated in lay and medical thinking up through the early twentieth century. Prominent were the beliefs that high ground was healthy while low, damp, or swampy ground generated miasma and was unhealthy. For instance, Jefferson Pickerman Stow set out on the voyage of the Forlorn Hope from the Northern Territory to Perth in 1865 because he did not believe that Palmerston, the projected city on Adam Bay, the outlet of the Adelaide River, was viable. As well as having no fresh drinking water, stone for building, or easy access to the hinterland, it was surrounded by swamps and had “an elevation” of only thirty feet; “no healthy spot on the bank [of the Adelaide] could be found, unless at a very great distance from the coast” (Stow 1981, 9, 12, 13–15). Moreover: The moist heat was incessant and debilitating . . . of course sultry heat and mosquitoes must be looked for in the tropics, but it is no necessary part of life in the tropics to live among swamps, mudflats and scrub, without any occupation or outlook to make such an abode tolerable. There was no redeeming feature in the locality. The grass was rank, but possessed no nourishing qualities. . . . The well water was bad and produced daily sickness. . . . There was no escape to better country. (16)

An ill-making environment was rarely pleasant or beautiful in European eyes, though the exotic vibrancy of a tropical jungle might be an exception. Aesthetic descriptions of landscape were often fused together with topographies of health. When Stow arrived in Perth, he saw the opposite of the unhealthy desolation of the northern shore. He saw Perth and its surroundings as it had been depicted in the settler literature: a healthy, beautiful, and English type of land: The landscape was lovely; there were frequent views of the river, hill and dale, fine stately timber, long reaches of water and trees with dense foliage overhanging the banks; extended flats, The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments

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stretches of undulating park-like scenery, and in the distance the blue range of the Darling. (86)

The people of this environment were flourishing; as Stow observed, it shaped them: “That the climate is on the whole temperate is sufficiently proved by the blooming complexions one sees in the metropolis. . . . Whites born in the colony are commonly tall” (96). The pleasant and beautiful characteristics in the environment were English characteristics, expressed in the language of the pastoral and gentlemanly landscape of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Nathaniel Ogle cited a description of the coastal landscape around Perth in his (1839) The Colony of Western Australia: A Manual for Emigrants: It had an “undulating and very pleasant appearance like gentlemen’s parks.” Such a pleasant landscape, declared Ogle, possessed “an invigorating and healthful air,” in which “the exhausted European” could recover “from the enervating climate of Hindostan” (18–19). The optimism of the accounts for settlers to the less-hot colonies was tempered by the reality of Australian conditions. Rather than declaring that the whole country was healthy, fertile, and profitable, the settler literature picked out for praise limited areas and introduced a degree, but only a degree, of caution. Ogle pointed out that irrigation would need to be practiced in Australia rather than drainage as in England, and only in moist grounds was there soil of vegetable origin (i.e., fertile soil); otherwise, “the dryness of the climate, the summer conflagrations, and the total want of the aid and skill of man, prevent that accumulation of soil which constitutes richness.” Yet Ogle, like others, saw positive aspects. The dry climate compensated “for that want of richness which too often is attended with insalubrity”—in other words, a rich soil was the product of a humidity that often led to ill health. Both plants and people prospered in the dry conditions. There was no mildew or worries that rain would saturate crops before they were gathered (1839, 25–26), while a whole list of human diseases were absent, children were healthy, no women had died in childbirth, “and the general health of women is improved by the dry and elastic air” (27). Ogle did admit that some places were not suitable for settlement. He wrote that “the Darling range, with few ex | Andrew Wear

ceptions, is a great sterile belt, the surface consisting in great measure of hard red sand-stone; in some places the granite appears in masses. There is a profusion of coarse herbage on it, some of which is injurious to cattle” (34). Clearly the criteria, the characteristics by which a place was being described, were agricultural in nature. In contrast, the original environment, if it already possessed the pastoral attributes associated with agriculture, lent itself to be turned in the imagination and in reality into productive land. Aesthetic as well as agricultural qualities became markers of a future agricultural environment and of profit. Even when the land had already been put to agricultural use, there could still be a sense that the land had the potential for further occupation in the future—an important consideration for would-be settlers. William Wentworth, the explorer, radical politician, and landowner, in his (1819) Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales, described how after sixteen miles from the coast “the aspect of the country rapidly begins to improve. The forest is less thick.” Four miles farther, the scene became idyllic: You are at length gratified with the appearance of a country truly beautiful. An endless variety of hill and dale, clothed in the most luxuriant herbage, and covered with bleating flocks and lowing herds, at length indicate that you are in regions fit to be inhabited by civilized man. The soil has no longer the stamp of barrenness. A rich loam resting on a substratum of fat red clay, several feet in depth, is found even on the tops of the highest hills. (47)

The model again is that of a home landscape with an English type of farming, though on a larger scale. The environment as depicted is naturally fitted for this role. This obviously applied most to sheep and cattle, but it was claimed that arable farming could also take place without improvement, if the soil was rich enough and its “richness” could be naturally replenished without the need of manuring (Wentworth 1819, 48–49; Ogle 1839, 26). The settler was being presented with a picture of niches of agricultural-type land amid areas of The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments

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“barrenness.” Nevertheless, “improvement” was seen as both the necessary and the natural consequence of colonial settlement.

Improvement, Labor, Capital, and Readers “Improvement” of the land, the clearing of trees, the erection of fencing, plowing land, and manuring, involved hard work and some money. The settler literature, as well as advertising healthy idyllic landscapes ready to be appropriated and occupied, gave advice on how a settler could improve and shape the land. This advice ranged from the equipment that a settler should bring, such as the type of axes best suited for clearing land and tools needed for building houses, to quantity of seed needed for planting. As long as land was cheap and the farming envisaged was arable rather than pastoral (for the latter, stock could be expensive), the costs for the potential settler were not high. The equipment required was relatively cheap. It was personal to the settler, as it was manual rather than mechanized. In contrast to cattle rearing, “a stock of provisions with a few axes and hoes and a good pair of hands to wield them, were the principal requisites for an agricultural establishment” (Wentworth 1819, 180). Here Wentworth is implying that with little expenditure the settler can set up as an independent farmer, and thus establish himself as an independent man. The element of material advice for settlers tells us two things important for this chapter. First, it provided detailed information as to how an individual could personally change the environment and in the process become independent. For instance, Charles Hursthouse, in the 1849 publication An Account of the Settlement of New Plymouth in New Zealand, described how fences were made, their cost, the best type of plows for ‘“breaking-up” fresh land, and how wheat was cut—“in the manner generally practiced in Devonshire, called long and round-hewing” (107–9). If land was not improved then the settler would often be in danger of losing his or (less frequently) her claim to it, as land laws from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Southern Africa made clear. The impulse toward improvement that the settler  | Andrew Wear

literature encouraged was fueled not only by the need to make a living but also by the colonial state’s desire to transform land. Second, the material advice to settlers on how to live in a new land and how to improve it may help to solve the puzzle of to whom the settler literature was aimed at. Much of the settler literature might on the face of it appear too sophisticated for the working-class men who were at the forefront of the colonization of North America, Australia, and New Zealand. How many of them were literate is a moot point, though by the nineteenth century levels of literacy had risen and were rising through the century for the poorer sections of society (Richards 1999). The intended readership was, on the whole, male. While women were sometimes mentioned as desirable immigrants to rectify the male-female imbalance, only later did they become part of the targeted reading audience. As Mrs. Catherine Parr Traill put it in her Canadian Settler’s Guide: “Among the many books that have been written for the instruction of the Canadian immigrant, there are none exclusively devoted for the wives and daughters of the future settler” (1855, ix). There were differentiations between readers in the settlement readership. A broadsheet for the settlement of early New England gave different levels of equipment and provisions for the wealthy and the poor as well as what was absolutely essential for both (British Library 1630). In the nineteenth-century literature there was often mention of capitalists and laborers or capital and labor. These are unfashionable terms today, redolent of older historiographies and politics, but in the nineteenth century they were common terms of analysis and description for the theorists of colonial settlements like Wakefield, and they were also part of the parlance of the settler literature. What lay behind the guides, accounts, letters, and statistics was the need, as one letter writer from New Zealand put it, for “labour and capital” to help develop a colony. The collection of letters published by the New Zealand Company (1843, 192) made it clear that both were needed for agriculture. Laborers and capitalists alike were encouraged to come to the new colonies, and though at times they were seen as distinct groups, at other times, and they were frequent, the literature suggested a gradation between labor and capital, thus holding out the carrot that a laborer could become a landowner. As another New Zealand letter The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments

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pointed out: “Several labourers, who have bought from five to twenty five acres are living on their land and making good progress” (202, italics in original). In a capitalist system, holding out the possibility that a laborer could change status and become a capitalist by owning land and by selling it to get a return on his investment was a strong inducement to immigrate to a country where this might happen. Published by the Province of Ontario (1911) in a collection of letters from settlers that loudly proclaimed Canada’s egalitarianism, one writer put it this way: “A great advantage from my point of view, it has over the Old Country, is that a man can start for himself on a very small capital, or if he has none, can soon earn enough to make him his own master” (21). Given the picture that was being constructed of the potential immigrant-reader of settler literature, it becomes understandable why it is often not clear whether the intended readership was composed of the well-to-do or the poor. Both were appealed to without distinction as a single whole, for instance, when the natural resources of a place or extraordinary farming yields were being touted. It also becomes understandable why the landscape was expressed using metaphors familiar to the gentry, when millions of immigrants were poor. Certainly, the authors of the settler literature may have shared a common set of aesthetic values with the well-to-do classes. It is also true that an appeal to the sense of emulation on the part of workingmen may have played a role, but the loosened structures of social class in the colonial situation as depicted in the settler literature also made such landscape images a natural choice; for everyone there was a potential future as a landowner. In turn, the recognition and acceptance of such images across a broad social spectrum helped to ensure that they would be reproduced, or at best borne in mind, when colonists began transforming and “improving” their new environments—for this was being done by those who would improve themselves.

Unity between the Tropical and Temperate Areas It is rare that historians bring together the history of colonization in temperate areas with that of colonization in the tropics, unless it is  | Andrew Wear

in general histories of the British Empire. There are good and wellknown reasons for this separation. Places like India were not permanently settled, and did not become new white lands or fields for immigration. As mentioned earlier, it was believed that the heat and moisture of the sultry tropics, with their attendant diseases and high white mortality, were unsuitable for European settlement. One did not have to be an extreme racist like Robert Knox in his Races of Men ([1850] 1862) to believe that in the equatorial regions, the white races “can neither labour nor live” (225–26). Many medical and lay writers would have agreed, and, certainly, there was not much literature aimed at getting British workingmen to settle in the tropics. Mark Harrison argues that this negative view became prevalent for India between the 1820s and the 1830s. In the eighteenth century there was a more positive approach, as the English did not then envisage long-term occupation. Although Harrison points out how a racial element became linked to climate in the nineteenth century, it is, I believe, wrong to argue that the tropics before then were viewed positively in terms of health. As we have seen with the fears of the Plymouth Brethren, from the earliest period of English colonization, heat, moisture, and ill health were closely associated.11 Yet structurally, perceptions and advice concerning the environment present in the settlement literature for temperate colonies can also be found in the wider literature of government publications, accounts of the British in India, and medical texts that discussed how the British might live in the tropics. The link between climate and health was no less because a place might be in the tropics. It was merely that the difference between the English climate and the tropics was too great to bridge by propaganda. Even gradual seasoning to acclimatize an English body to a new climate, although often advocated, was thought by some to be ineffective in the long run. The conclusions were different as to settlement, but the theory associating climate/place and health was the same for tropical as for temperate areas. This can be seen in a number of ways. Because India’s climate was perceived as being too hot for the British, permanent settlement was seen as impossible, yet imperial rule remained possible.12 Part of the The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments

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ideology of empire held that as long as the British remained British in character and constitution, they would remain racially superior to Indians, and thus their rule was legitimized. An elaborate way of life that kept the excesses of the Indian climate and environment at bay was instituted and socially reproduced in the nineteenth century to ensure that British constitutions remained British (times of the day when inside and outside houses; times for social gatherings, clothing, bungalows, verandas, palanquins, hill stations, etc.).13 “Going native” in hot countries led to the lassitude, torpor, lack of go, the absence of a desire for “improvement” and then for “modernity,” which the British associated with Indians. For instance, the practice of sending children to England partly arose from the fear that they would not be properly English and that they might culturally “go native,” not only by being looked after by Indians but also because they would physically and psychologically become native, or rather degenerate.14 In the nineteenth century, racial bodies and the culture of different races were often believed to result from environmental and climatic determinism. The environment was viewed as capable of being manipulated but ultimately hostile to the British. The search for niches in the tropics where Europeans could live also illustrates the universality of the link between climate, place, and people, whether in temperate or tropical areas. Medical theorists and medical geographers believed such places existed. James Lind of scurvy fame declared that “there is hardly to be found any island, or any large extent of continent, that does not contain some places where Europeans may enjoy an uninterrupted state of health during all seasons of the year” (Lind 1771, 212–13). David Livingstone famously devoted much of his life in Africa to the search for places free of malaria that would allow for white settlement. He thought he had found such a place in the Shire highlands of what is now Malawi (Livingstone 1863). Many of the expeditions into the center of Australia searched for habitable niches. The hill stations in India were seen as healthy, or at least more healthy, niches for those British who could afford the time and the money that would allow them to escape from the heat of the plains (Kennedy 1996). The perception of a tropical barrier was lessened not only by the existence of climatic  | Andrew Wear

and environmental niches for Europeans but also by the fact that places that were not strictly tropical, such as parts of southern North America, were settled. Yet they mimicked the heat of the tropics in the summer; hence the saying “Carolina is in spring a paradise, in the summer a hell and in the autumn a hospital” (Dobson 1989, 272). The British often lived for many years in India, and only some could escape for a time to a hill station. Nevertheless, even though settlement of semitropical areas and long-term occupation of the tropics took place, the mortality levels were often high and reinforced the belief that the tropics were deadly to Europeans. Apart from the search for healthy niches, another strategy considered, if not often put into practice by Europeans to mitigate the destructive power of the tropics, was to alter the environment. As Alan Bewell (1999) has pointed out, it was believed that the large-scale environment could be “improved” for agriculture and also for health, an improvement in the one leading to an improvement in the other (36–41). Health was often used to justify the creation of an agricultural environment. Lind (1771), for instance, wrote disapprovingly of “such an uncultivated swampy country as Guinea” in West Africa, and promoted the idea of “improvement,” which he associated with the introduction of European systems of cultivation. He argued that “if any tract of land in Guinea . . . was as well improved as the island of Barbadoes, and as perfectly freed from trees, shrubs, marshes, etc the air would be rendered equally healthful there, as in that pleasant West Indian island” (quoted in Bewell 1999, 38). Changing the environment to make it healthy for Europeans was by way of the agricultural “improvement” of the settler literature, and it had potentially the same effect of Europeanizing the environment and making it, as it were, properly belong to its new owners. The medical theory underlying changing the original environment and “improving” it thus helped to encourage and legitimate the process of colonization. Such justification was used across continents from North America to Africa to Australia, and also in India after around 1820, as the British settled there into the role of occupiers. For instance, William Howitt, the writer, former apothecary, and amateur gold digger, in a much quoted passage, wrote in 1855 of Australia: The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments

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It is yet, with very trivial exception, one huge unclaimed forest. Now, I do not believe that any country, under any climate in the world, can be pronounced a thoroughly healthy country, while it is in this state. The immense quantity of vegetable matter rotting on the surface of the earth, and still more of that rotting in the waters, which the new visitants must drink, cannot be very healthy. The choked-up valleys, dense with scrub and rank grass and weeds, and the equally rank vegetation of swamps, cannot tend to health. All these evils, the axe and the plough, and the fire of settlers, will gradually and eventually remove; and when that is done here, I do not believe that there will be a more healthy country on the globe. (vol. 1,231)

In India, the presidency surgeon of Bengal, James Ranald Martin, joined health, European agricultural development, and progress in a racialist discourse justifying European change and denigrating Indian attempts to change the environment. He wrote in his (1837) Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta: “Without cultivation, few climates would be salubrious or agreeable, and it is by its means that man exercises so powerful an influence upon the temperature of the air.” Martin described the unhealthiness of uncultivated nature: “pestilential marshes,” impenetrable forests, where “no wind disperses the putrid exhalations of the trees which have fallen under the pressure of age; the soil, excluded from genial and purifying warmth of the air, exhales nothing but poison and an atmosphere of death gathers over all the country.” Human “industry and perseverance” can change all this: “The marshes are drained; the axe and fire clear away the forests; the earth furrowed by the plough is opened to the rays of the sun and the influence of the wind; the soil, and the waters acquire by degrees a character of salubrity; and vanquished nature yields its empire to man who thus creates a country for himself.” This might have been primeval nature as it was before and after the arrival of humankind, but although such a general picture was probably in the background of Martin’s mind—it was a standard cultural trope—his focus was on the presence of the British in India. He believed that settlement involved making new environments, which,  | Andrew Wear

by being the creation of the new occupants, would belong and “fit” in terms of health more to them than to the original people: “Agriculture must be much improved in Bengal before the European . . . can be said to have created a country for himself.” Martin then went on to castigate the poor quality of Indian agriculture and the lack of “ingenuity” and of good “sense” in “the agriculture of the Hindoos.”15 Certainly, the belief that the British could engineer the environment to make it healthy and that the means to do so was by clearing and agriculture—the central activities of colonial settlers—was a view that was to be found in both temperate and tropical areas. But in India opinions such as Martin’s were programmatic and hopeful. In practice, the British did not settle and work the land themselves. For instance, Daniel Henry Cullimore, a surgeon in the Indian army, wrote in his (1891) Book of Climates that the greater vigor of the races from temperate Europe and America allowed them to conquer “the natives of tropical regions enervated as they are by the influence of a debilitating climate and generous soil.” Yet, Cullimore, like many of his contemporaries, believed the climate of the tropics meant that the races from “the cooler temperate zone” . . . “have been unable to form within the tropics, without racial admixture, permanent agricultural colonies” (2–3). Or, as Sir Harry H. Johnson wrote in his 1901 report as special commissioner on the protectorate of Uganda, tropical African countries could be governed like India but “were wholly unsuited as future fields for European settlement: the white man might go there as a planter and capitalist, but could never hope to make it the home for himself and his descendants as he would do in the self governing Colonies of the Empire” (Mungeam 1978, 321). In practice and in most people’s minds, the difference between tropical and temperate colonies remained despite the possibility of improving the environment. Though, certainly, the immensely detailed statistics, topographies, ethnologies, and monetary assessments that comprised the imperial censuses of India and the district reports represent the oversight and power of the occupier not only to classify and to tax but also at times to alter land and population. Such a power relation applied also to colonial settlers, despite an ideology of independence. The colonial state taxed settlers and had ultimate control over land allocation and The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments

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improvement, even when it had devolved them. Knowledge and control of the environment at the level of assertion and through the enumeration of data was common to both temperate and tropical areas. In the end, despite structural similarities in the discourses of climate, health, agriculture, and the environment, the brute facts of British settlement in the temperate areas of the world and of occupation in the tropical act as a barrier to a synthetic view. Nevertheless, I hope to have pointed out in this more general and speculative section that there are possible ways to argue for such a view; especially as the distinction between settlement and long-term stay as occupiers is porous if we consider the ways in which the British created domestic microenvironments of health and of social cohesion into which every newcomer to India and other tropical colonies was educated and socialized, so that the way of life, as with that of settlers, was reproduced. But, on the whole, the British in the tropics did not labor as farmers and transform the environment, which was what being a settler was reckoned to be—at least initially.

Conclusion Whether in reports, letters, or guides, the accounts presented a positive picture of health and wealth creation that appealed to the self-interest of would-be settlers. They created pictures of healthy and transformed environments in which agriculture would flourish, and this in turn helped to transform them into reality. They also told potential settlers what to expect of the material and social culture of a colony or dominion. The pro-settlement literature gave advice on what to bring to a colony such as clothes, equipment, money, and food, as well as setting out what kind of settler would be welcomed. The life of country and town areas was described, as was the political and social nature of the colonial community. Such accounts frequently represented an official or establishment view of the colony. The potential settler was presented with statements of economic fact and with moral, social, and political norms operating in a colony, and was invited to share in the identity that was being constructed for it. By reading such accounts  | Andrew Wear

the potential immigrant was in the first stages of being socialized and fitted into a colony. The letters, accounts, reports, and guides were often means of instilling into prospective settlers an understanding of the values and the economic and social order of the colony. Their writers seemed to be implicitly saying: “If you decide to come after reading this, then it is understood that you accept what this colony is about.” To some degree we could argue that the pro-settlement literature was subtly and not so subtly involved in the process of selfselection on the part of immigrants. Immigrants came to transform the environment, by clearing the land of forests and scrub and establishing agriculture and trade. The settlement literature advised how this could be done and gave encouragement to the enterprise. Indeed, it assumed that new settlements would inevitably follow this process of transformation. Despite the fact that in Australia, for instance, the majority of immigrants went to urban centers, the agricultural paradigm of settlement still dominated the settler literature. The sense of the environment belonging to settlers was strongly present in the literature. A good deal of information was given on the technicalities of the ownership of land, such as the need to survey the land before it was parceled out and sold, as well as providing guidance on land prices. In the settlement literature we can often see how indigenous land was being incorporated into the English legal and economic system before being sold to settlers. This also meant that immigrants were presented with a system of land ownership that, though it was not identical with that in England, had many familiar components. By giving reassurance to immigrants that a place was healthy, the settler literature also gave the assurance that immigrants’ bodies would fit the new environment in terms of health as well as law; that they would belong to it and, as it were, could rightfully own it, in the biological sense of the connection between places and bodies. Likewise, the literature emphasized that plants and animals would flourish in a new settlement and would make profits for their owners. Such reassurance served to increase the Europeanization of new lands, and where an area did not have the natural potential to be changed into profitable land, it could be “improved” by hard work and capital. The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments

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In the tropics the environment was often assessed by criteria that shared the same logic as those employed in temperate areas. The conclusion was that permanent self-reproducing settler colonies were not as feasible, but still could be lived in by the British. In India especially, new arrivals were socialized into a way of life that was obviously conditioned in many places by the environment. And, at different levels, the Indian environments were seen as potentially transformable, whether domestically as with bungalows, or on the macro scale by the building of new cities, by forestry, or by agriculture. But such transformations in the tropics were never wholesale. However, the images presented to potential settlers in the new white lands were those of a complete “belonging” in which they and the environment fitted each other, and where there was wholesale transformation of the environment.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Niels Brimnes and Erin Sullivan for their helpful suggestions on this chapter.

Notes Epigraph: New Zealand Company, Letters from Settlers and Labouring Migrants, 202, italics in original. 1. See Harrison, The Description of England, 428–29, 444–48; and Camden, Britannia, 2. The belief that climate shaped national and regional constitutions and character was transcultural. See Hanson, “Robust Northerners and Delicate Southerners.” 2. W. T. Davis, Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, 49–50. 3. “Thomas Welde to His Former Parishioners at Tarling, June/July 1632,” in Emerson, Letters from New England, 97. 4. Higginson, “New-Englands Plantation,” in Emerson, Letters from New England, 34–35. 5. Godwin, Godwin’s Emigrant’s Guide,16–18, 14, 20–21. 6. Ibid., 20–21. 7. Ibid., 21.

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8. Strachey, “For the Colony in Virginia Britannia,” in Force, Tracts and Other Papers. 9. “Thomas Dudley to the Lady Bridget, Countess of Lincoln, March 28, 1631,” in Emerson, Letters from New England, 75. 10. Fraser, Canada As It Is, 3–4. 11. Harrison, Climates and Constitutions, 10, 18–19. Harrison’s view against those of Alfred Crosby in Ecological Imperialism and David Arnold in his introduction to Warm Climates and Western Medicine that “the perception that the tropics are especially pathogenic is a comparatively recent view” (10), is unsustainable given the qualitative evidence clearly present from the early seventeenth century onward. Harrison rightly notices the racialist turn in environmental/health discourse in the nineteenth century, but it did not take away from the basic structure of the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places tradition and mark a new beginning. He also believes, wrongly in my view, that only modern-style statistics are necessary for a perception to arise that a place is unhealthy—in which case the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century beliefs (which as it turns out were correct) that the Essex and Thames marshes were deadly could never have arisen. Crude qualitative and simple arithmetically based perceptions associating places with death were sufficient to produce strong beliefs linking types of places with ill health and death. 12. On climate, race, and India, see Harrison, Climates and Constitutions. 13. Some of these mechanisms are discussed in Collingham, Imperial Bodies. The sadly neglected study by King, Colonial Urban Development, has much useful material on the social/cultural and material forms produced within colonial spaces. 14. See, for instance, Birch, The Management and Medical Treatment of Children in India, 3–11, 15–18. 15. Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta, 86–87; see also Bewell, Diseases, 39–40.

Works Cited Aickin, D. 2001. “From Plantation Medicine to Public Health: The State and Medicine in British Guiana, 1836–1914.” Ph.D. diss., University of London. Bewell, A. 1999. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Birch, E. A. 1902. The Management and Medical Treatment of Children in India. 4th ed. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink. Bowman, I., ed. 1937. Limits of Land Settlement: A Report on Presentday Possibilities. New York: Council on Foreign Relations. British Library (816.m.18. [13]). 1630. A Proposition of Provisions Needfull for Such as Intended to Plant Themselves in New England for One Whole Yeare: Collected by the Adventurers with the Advice of the Planters. London. Brown, G. Gordon, and G. Noel Brown, eds. 1914. The Settlers’ Guide: Greater Britain in 1914. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton. Camden, W. 1637. Britannia, Or A Chorographicall Description of . . . England, Scotland and Ireland. Translated by Philemon Holland. London: F. K[ingston], R. Y[oung] and I. L[egatt] for Ioyce Norton and Richard Whitaker. Collingham, E. M. 2001. Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj c. r1800–1947. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cullimore, D. H. 1891. The Book of Climates. 2nd ed. London: Baillière, Tindall, and Cox. Davis, R. C., ed. 2002. The Central Australian Expedition 1844–1846. The Journals of Charles Sturt. Series 3, vol. 10. London: Hakluyt Society. Davis, W. T., ed. 1982. Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation 1606– 1646. New Jersey: Barnes and Noble. Dobson, M. J. 1989. “Mortality Gradients and Disease Exchanges: Comparisons from Old England and Colonial America.” Social History of Medicine 2 (3): 259–97. Dominion of Canada. 1887. A Guide Book Containing Information for Intending Settlers. Ottawa: Government of Canada, Department of Agriculture. Dudley, Thomas. 1976. “Thomas Dudley to the Lady Bridget, Countess of Lincoln, March 28, 1631.” In Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony 1629–1638, edited by E. Emerson, 67–83. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Eburne, John. (1624) 1962. A Plain Pathway to Plantations. Edited by Louis B Wright. For the Folger Shakespeare Library. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Emerson, E., ed.. 1976. Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony 1629–1638. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Fraser, J. Foster. 1911. Canada As It Is. London: Cassell. Glacken, C. J. 1990. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Godwin, Thomas. 1823. Godwin’s Emigrant’s Guide to Van Diemen’s Land, More Properly Called Tasmania, Containing a Description of Its Climate, Soil and Productions. London: Sherwood, Jones. Government of Quebec. 1870. The Province of Quebec and European Migration. Quebec: Government of Quebec. Gribble, J. D. B. 1875. Manual of the District of Cuddapah in the Presidency of Madras. Madras: R. Keys, Government Office. Hanson, Marta. 2001. “Robust Northerners and Delicate Southerners: The Nineteenth-Century Invention of a Southern Medical Tradition.” In Innovation in Chinese Medicine, edited by Elizabeth Hsu, 262–91. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Mark. 1999. Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Harrison, William. (1577) 1994. The Description of England. Edited by George Edelen. New York: Dover Publications. Higginson, Francis. 1630. New-Englands Plantation. Or A Short and True Description of the Commodities and Discommodities of That Countrey. 3rd ed. In Emerson, Letters from New England, 34–35. Howitt, William. 1855. Land, Labour and Gold; Or Two Years In Victoria. 2 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans. Hursthouse, Charles. 1849. An Account of the Settlement of New Plymouth in New Zealand. London: Smith, Elder. Kennedy, Dane. 1996. The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj. Berkeley: University of California Press. King, Anthony. 1976. Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Knox, R. (1850) 1862. The Races of Men: A Fragment. 2nd ed. London: H. Renshaw. Lind, James. 1771. Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates. 2nd ed. London: T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt. Livingstone, D. 1863. “Letter to the Editor of the Medical Times and Gazette.” Medical Times and Gazette, 127–28. Lodewyckx, A. 1956. People for Australia: A Study in Population Problems. London: Angus and Robertson. Martin, J. R. 1837. Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta. Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann. Mungeam, G. H., ed. 1978. “Report by His Majesty’s Special Commissioner on the Protectorate of Uganda.” (1901, Cd.671, Parliament, Great Britain). In Kenya Select Historical Documents 1884–1923. Nairobi: East African Publishing House.

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New Zealand Company. 1843. Letters from Settlers and Labouring Migrants in the New Zealand Company’s Settlements. London: Smith, Elder. Ogle, N. 1839. The Colony of Western Australia: A Manual for Emigrants. London: J. Fraser. Province of Ontario. 1911. Ontario The Premier Province of Canada: Settlers’ Opinions. Toronto: L. K. Cameron, King’s Printer. Richards, E. 1999. “An Australian Map of British and Irish Literacy in 1841.” Population Studies 53 (3): 345–59. Strachey, William. (1844) 1947. “For the Colony in Virginia Britannia. Lawes Divine, Moral and Martiall” (London, 1612). In Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement and Progress of the Colonies in North America. From Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776, vol. 3, edited by Peter Force, 1–68. New York: Peter Smith. Stow, J. P. 1981. The Voyage of the Forlorn Hope from Escape Cliffs to Champion Bay 1865. With the Author’s Account of the First Northern Territory Settlement and of the Condition of Western Australia. Adelaide: Sullivan’s Cove. Traill, Mrs. C. P. 1855. The Canadian Settler’s Guide. 5th ed. Toronto: Old Countryman Office. Wentworth, W. C. 1819. A Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales. London: G. and W. B. Whittaker.

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2 Carved Out of Nature Identity and Environment in German Colonial Africa

Daniel Rouven Steinbach Southwest Africa, we praise you as our new homeland Because with German heroes’ blood your yellow sand is baptized. From the Orange to the Kunene, from the Zambezi to the sea: Sacred may your soil be to us, sacred may your defense be. —“Lied der Deutschen”

An inhabitant of German Southwest Africa composed these lines to the melody of the patriotic song “Lied der Deutschen” at the beginning of the twentieth century. It functioned for several decades as an unofficial hymn of the colony and was used by the remaining Germans there after the First World War as their song of identification. The leitmotif of the song is Southwest Africa’s nature and the environment: its natural boundaries, its beautiful landscape, its rich resources and the reasons for living there. But nature here is not “natural”; it has been transformed into the constructed notion of Heimat.1 This chapter examines how the German colonials used African nature to create a Heimat in Africa. The central focus of this examination is the two German colonies with the largest European population: German Southwest Africa (now Namibia) and German East Africa (now mainly Tanzania). The primary sources for this survey are newspapers that were published between the turn of the century 47

and the First World War in the major cities of Windhoek, Swakopmund, and Lüderitzbucht in German Southwest Africa, as well as Dar es Salaam and Tanga in German East Africa.2 Additionally, writings of Germans living in the colonies have been analyzed separately from colonial publications written in Germany, since the opinions of the colonialists in Africa and those in Europe usually differed. My central thesis is that the colonial context challenged the identity of the colonials in many ways, and that transforming African nature into the concept of Heimat provided them with both a basis for meaningful identification and a means of demarcating those who belonged to the group of colonials and those who did not. Although no exact synonym exists in English for the word Heimat, it can be roughly described as an emotionally encoded environment or homeland including its nature, folk culture, and history.

The Idea of Heimat in Germany The idea of Heimat was arguably the most successful, most flexible, and longest-living German ideology.3 It originated in the second half of the nineteenth century in response to fundamental structural changes occurring in society, in the economy, and in politics after the unification and foundation of the German national state in 1871. The increasingly rapid development of industry and technology, which created a new kind of physical and social mobility, was perceived as a threat by some members of the middle class in particular. The rise of a large, increasingly confident working class and a commercial mass culture threatened the economic basis and the cultural superiority of the educated classes who until then had dominated the control of state and society.4 Initially, Heimat was understood as a conservative concept of society, revolving around the sedentariness and security of rural life. The idea of living off one’s own land was held up as a worthy and desirable alternative to life in the city, where the expansion of social democracy and modern mass culture was most visible (Bergmann 1970, 88). As such, nature assumed a central position in  | Daniel Rouven Steinbach

this particular notion of Heimat. Of central importance was the “German forest,” which provided a link to the ancient Germans and was regarded as quintessential to the German character (Lehmann 2002, 189–90). Hence, time spent in nature, exploring and protecting it, was not only leisure time, but a means to reassert one’s Germanness. Yet this vision of nature was not only that of a nice area for a stroll (schöne Spazierwelt), but also that of a place where people lived and worked in a historical landscape that shaped its inhabitants’ folklore, culture, and character (Bausinger 1980, 15). Rural life became a metaphor for a lifestyle that followed the cycles of nature and was not slave to the rhythm of civilization. Heimat could therefore be described as a “mentally soothing environment” (mentale Besänftigungslandschaft) and a “place of compensation, where amends were made for the failures and uncertainties of one’s own life” (Bausinger 1984, 15–16). This conception of Heimat led to the founding of several associations whose members were mostly high-ranking civil servants, academics, artists, or publicists whose interests were broad, but who all shared the belief in a renewal and in “conservative progress” of the arts, the environment, and ultimately the German state and society.5 Although their expressed interests were different, including the protection of birds, the building of garden cities, and the conservation of traditional craftsmanship, their overall aim was the protection of the Heimat—that is, the preservation or the re-creation of nature, folklore, and ultimately of an intact hierarchical social order. By the turn of the century, the idea of Heimat had spread to the extent that nearly every town and region had several Heimat associations. Its activists were usually the local educated lower notables like schoolteachers or parish ministers, and they spread the idea among the local middle classes. Their activities were numerous, but centered on the building of Heimat museums displaying local exhibits, the construction of rambling infrastructure with watchtowers, and the academic exploration of local history, folklore, and nature. Though these activities can be regarded as a beginning of the environmental movement that was engaged in the preservation of the natural world, it was in no way hostile to technological advancement as long as railway tracks or factories were embedded in the countryside aesthetically (Rollins Carved Out of Nature | 

1997). Rather, its members were concerned with preserving the environment as an “inhabited, historical landscape,” including the natural and cultural relicts of the past, which should be accessible for locals and visitors alike. Most important was that their constructed Heimat be free of any economic, social, or political conflict and tension; hence it was different from the present, where social mobility, urbanization, and homogenization challenged the social and economic position of the middle classes. Contrary to the propagated image, Heimat was by no means something natural, but was instead an idea whose realization needed considerable effort and energy. In their research on German identity, Celia Applegate (1990) and Alon Confino (1997) have established that people’s identification with the Heimat was the basis for the creation of a German national identity.6 Given the diversity of the different German states and territories that comprised the Reich, the new federal nation-state, Heimat was a successful way to create an overall German identity without discarding one’s old identity. As Celia Applegate puts it, “Heimat was both the beloved local places and the beloved nation; it was a comfortable flexible and inclusive homeland, embracing all localities alike” (1990, 11). When the supporters of Heimat presented their region’s unique features, this was not a form of particularism or separatism. In their understanding, the strong new Fatherland was built of many Heimats with their own history and traditions, which all together created the German national history and the German national character. Consequently, it was argued that those who did not have a Heimat could not have a Fatherland either, and a German without Heimat was not a true German.

Constructing an African Heimat Unlike the other major European powers, Germany never succeeded in establishing a territorially connected formal colonial empire. But by 1884 it had set up four “protectorates” around the coast of Africa that provided secure harbors for the imperial navy and promised rich natural resources.7 However, only German Southwest Africa, due to  | Daniel Rouven Steinbach

its milder climate, and a few parts of German East Africa were regarded as suitable for Europeans to survive there permanently. German Southwest Africa was particularly promoted as a “settler colony” and attracted more than ten thousand Germans. Over the years the colonies received a growing number of immigrants with a middleclass background, mostly teachers, pastors, or civil servants. It was they who—as in the Reich—felt the strongest need to remodel the colonies as German Heimat. The motivations to create a Heimat in Africa can be divided into two categories: “external” and “internal.” The first were rooted in the colonials’ permanent feeling of neglect by the metropolis and insecurity regarding their legal and economic position. This was mainly caused by the fact that the “protectorates” were formally not a full part of Germany, and their future existence was dependent on governmental decisions based on Realpolitik, like diplomatic negotiations with other European colonial powers or the financial costs of the colonies. Much of the scholarship dealing with the German colonial empire underlines the insignificance of the overseas possessions for the German economy.8 The exchange of goods between Germany and its colonies was never more than 1 percent of the foreign trade (i.e., less than the exchange with Luxembourg or Romania). Nonetheless a few companies, typically those holding monopolies on raw materials, gained huge profits, which was regularly criticized by the anti-imperial movement. In particular the “settlement colonies” of German Southwest Africa and German East Africa proved enormously costly, as these required the maintenance of a permanent army there and the development of European infrastructure. However, even German Southwest Africa, the colony with the largest European population, failed to absorb a significant number of the many emigrants leaving Germany, contrary to expectations; most still settled in North America. Even at the end of German rule in 1915, only 12,500 Germans lived there, of whom 1,100 worked as farmers.9 At the same time Togo, an African colony without permanent settlers, was the only German colony with an active trade balance and supporting itself financially. Ultimately, something more than economic arguments was needed to keep and maintain expensive colonial possessions. To this end, the Germans in Africa wanted Carved Out of Nature | 

to ensure that the colonies were thought of not only as part of a global German economic territory, but as established, permanent parts belonging to the German Reich. By declaring the colonies to be a Heimat, this sense of being part of Germany was reinforced. The second, more important, reason for declaring the colonies a Heimat lies in the social aspect of the notion of Heimat. Those Germans living in the colonies were in no way a homogeneous group. The colonial society included settlers, missionaries, traders, and civil and military officials, each of whom had differing and often opposing ideas about how the colony and its people should be governed. Colonial societies have generally been described as forms of “imagined communities,” both diverse and fragile (Stoler 1989, 136–37). Not only did accustomed social roles and hierarchies fail under the exceptional situation posed by colonial life, but the ever-present opposition of colonizer and colonized made it necessary to build a strong “white identity” in reaction to the African population. Thus, increasing racism in the colonies was not only an instrument to oppress the indigenous people, but it also served to create an atmosphere of solidarity among the colonials. The Heimat ideology enabled the colonials to cover the harshness and brutality of everyday racist practice in a more familiar and more “gentle” way. In the African colonies the German immigrants were confronted with an environment that from their perspective had neither history nor culture (das wilde und geschichtslose Stück Afrika) (Rohrbach 1909, 54). The traditions and customs of the African population were regarded as inferior, and it was only in the last decade of German rule that these were incorporated into the colonial folklore (Speitkamp 1996, 312–13; Ranger 1992, 247–48). This left African nature as the basis for creating a feeling of belonging and identity with the colony (Kundrus 2003, 145–62). It has been argued that the Europeans in Africa were unable to feel at home there because the natural environment was too foreign, and that they subsequently tried to “Europeanize” this environment.10 Following Rollins and others, however, I argue here that the African environment was perceived positively by most colonials and became the most important basis for creating a connection with the land (Rollins 1999, 211; Rüdiger 1993, 46–47).  | Daniel Rouven Steinbach

Despite the monumental size of the colonies and their differing landscapes and areas of vegetation, the colonials reduced the natural environment of each colony down to a few attributes that were used to represent the country as a whole. The inhabitants of German Southwest Africa stressed the barrenness of the “rough, stubborn, passionate and capricious nature” and the breadth and loneliness of the country.11 By contrast, the German East Africans focused on the lushness of the tropics with its “solemn vigorous forests and dark romantic groves” and depth and richness of the land.12 This simplification and stereotyping of a vague and general environment made it possible for many colonials to identify themselves with the colony as a whole. Based on these images of the two colonies, a typical German Southwest or East African regional character was constructed. Since it was believed that the German national character was built up by the different regional characters within Germany, the colonials felt the need to create a Volkscharakter (regionally based national character) of the colonies’ white inhabitants to underline their Germanness. The idea of Heimat assumed that people were shaped by the landscape in which they lived. This postulation became the basis in the colonies as well, and Germans in Southwest and East Africa followed the image they created of the country to form an image of themselves. The “rawness” of nature in German Southwest Africa, in which even plants were replete “with thorns and barbs,” was transferred to the character of its new inhabitants, who “by their nature were a somewhat raw people.”13 Dr. Kuhn, surgeon major in the colonial force and district commissioner of Grootfontein, declared that the supposed weaknesses of the country—deserts, aridity, and lack of water—were actually its strengths. This was because “raw countries make for energetic, virtuous people,” just as the province of Brandenburg, widely known for its barrenness and sandy soil, brought forth rough-andready people, from whom the Hohenzollern dynasty and Chancellor Bismarck were descended: In Southwest Africa there is a strong energy. It lies in its inhospitality; that is the best aspect of this area. It is the soil for a strong, healthy people. The land is bad enough that the Germans can Carved Out of Nature | 

stay German here. It can become the March [Mark] of Brandenburg of the greater Germany. (Kuhn 1907)

The German Southwest Africans assumed that in the future, the country would allow a “healthy, robust generation to ripen” and concluded that their “youths would be different boys than those soft and anxious ones back at home” (Brockmann 1912, 7). The question of whether the tropical environment of German East Africa had a similar positive effect on the colonialists there produced two opposing views, revealing a political dimension to the theme. The crux of the debate was whether the tropical climate and strength of the African sun was detrimental to the physical and, in particular, the mental health of the European inhabitants. In his study of a similar climate debate among the British colonials, Dane Kennedy shows that economic, social, and political thinking, not scientific reasoning, was behind the arguments on the issue (1981, 50–51).14 By the turn of the century, medical studies had established that living in a tropical environment had no influence on human character, and, most important, that there was no link between race and the ability to cope in a certain climate. Groups of doctors, anthropologists, and other scientists did not agree with these findings, however, and many colonists shared this opinion. By asserting the formative influence of climate, they were able to legitimate their system of racial superiority. For them it was a foregone conclusion that the African peoples were culturally and intellectually less developed owing to the “softening and soporific influence” of the tropics, and hence that they were more suited for physical labor than Europeans. The argument that Africans through their “racial condition” were able to carry out physical work in the hot climate for long hours was most vehemently put forward by the planters who actually settled in the East African hinterland, whose massive plantations were entirely dependent on African labor. By stressing the delicateness of the European body and creating a distinct colonial lifestyle by dressing in white clothing, wearing big hats or spine protectors, and resting in shady verandas, “the colonizers set themselves apart from the world of the colonized . . . and set the Western imperial experience in the  | Daniel Rouven Steinbach

context of a world unalterably bound by the imperatives of race, evolution, and climate” (Kennedy 1990, 136–37). In German East Africa, the debate about the suitability of Europeans for the tropics intensified after 1910, when the colonial administration changed its settler policy (Söldenwagner 2006, 21–52). To increase the number of Germans living permanently in the colony and consequently to stabilize the colonial rule, individual settlers (known as Kleinsiedler) with families were encouraged to run small farms themselves with only a few indigenous laborers. Although before 1914 not more than one hundred of these settlers moved to German East Africa, even the idea caused great concern among the plantation owners, since it undermined their arguments for the exploitation system of African workers. If Europeans were able to cultivate and farm their own land successfully, this would not only symbolically damage the status of the “white master race,” but also prove that their avoidance of physical work was based on reasons other than health. The pros and cons of the new settlement policy were publicly and intensely discussed among colonial officials and civilians who used the colony’s newspaper to persuade their opponents. In a lengthy article published in the Dar es Salaam newspaper in 1911, the plantation owner Dr. Förster from Moshi discussed whether Germans should permanently settle in East Africa.15 He argued that “people grow and evolve according to the conditions of their surroundings” and that politicians should not attempt to “populate the tropics with our own seed.” Förster was convinced that German East Africa could not become a permanent homeland for the Germans, because “the world of the Negroes degrades the colonists and destroys their character as Germans.” Another planter from the hinterland argued that German children in particular would soon “show a striking tendency towards the customs and ways of thought of the Negroes.”16 Both called on German settlers to send their children to Europe to be brought up, so that they could be “nourished at the breasts of the Nordic Mother, to gain the strength to rule.”17 They suggested that planters themselves should also avoid physical exertion and should restrict themselves solely to being masters and ruling the African workers. In addition, they should travel regularly back to Germany to recover and to find a spouse, in order to ensure the “replenishment of the bloodlines” Carved Out of Nature | 

of the German East Africans. These requirements could be met by only the few wealthy plantation owners—like Förster himself—and not by the newly arriving individual settlers from Germany who belonged to the working class with only modest financial resources.18 It is not surprising that the supporters of the Kleinsiedler policy drew the attention to the strengthening properties of African nature, which made “the new generation that is born and grows in our colonies tough and a bit redneck-like, a little difficult to handle, but independent and freedom loving.”19 These “real German East Africans” would, like the Afrikaner in South Africa, regard the country as their true Heimat and, in case of the anticipated war, would defend it, and struggle for the reunification of “Old and New Germany” if it were to be occupied by a foreign power.20

Controlling the African Environment Colonial debates about the environment, and its construction as a stereotypical landscape, show that the actual appearance of the natural surroundings was almost irrelevant. Instead, views about the African environment depended on the political and economic aims of different groups using nature for their agenda. This way of thinking was expressed even more concretely in the environmental protection movement that appeared in the colonies in the decade before the First World War. These movements were led mostly by teachers who maintained a few scientific collections for the local schools.21 The initiatives in the colonies should not be confused with the “Movement for Parks” (Naturparkbewegung) in Germany. This movement, made up mostly of scientists and other academics, campaigned for the creation of large areas of national parklands in the colonies, particularly in German East Africa, to preserve the threatened flora and fauna.22 They received support from individual colonial politicians both in the metropolis and in the colonies (Gißibl 2006, 121–43), but, especially on the question of game hunting, the colonials on the spot had a divergent attitude. They did not categorically oppose the creation of nature reserves, but rather the “Fatherland’s interfering in the fash | Daniel Rouven Steinbach

ionable issue of wildlife protection,” which they thought the colonies should regulate themselves.23 The colonials contested the right of the colonial administration in the metropolis to govern their Heimat and demanded that all laws for the preservation of flora and fauna be made in the colonies, because nature “was closer to our hearts than to Germans at home.”24 Colonials did not reject environmental protection in principle, but rather they linked this noble aim with a pragmatic agenda that Rollins terms “imperial chauvinism” (1999, 187). He argues that the environment movement in the colonies was part of the general exploitation and domination of the indigenous populations. Significantly it was the colonization of nature, and not its protection, that was the foremost aim of the most significant environmental organization in the colony. In 1913 the above-mentioned Dr. Förster founded the Kilimanjaro Mountain Association in Moshi with sixteen other members. Its charter laid out the principal aim of the organization: “the acquisition and construction of huts, the building of paths in the Kilimanjaro area, publicity about the mountain world, firstly about Mount Kilimanjaro, and then about the entire East African colony.”25 Its members did not want to protect the environment by closing off the region. Instead their intention was the attraction of tourists from the capital, Dar es Salaam, and other coastal towns,26 so that they could develop a stronger connection with the colony through the natural world: May Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest German and African mountain, become a meeting place, around which—as a sign of unity—all Germans assemble themselves, and through whose symbol more and more commerce may be drawn into our colony. May it soon be for our colonists a perfect place for recreation and aesthetic pleasure.27

Mount Kilimanjaro should be regarded not only as a uniting symbol of German East Africa, but also as cementing the bond between colony and metropolis. The peak of Kibo, Mount Kilimanjaro’s highest summit, was named after the German emperor Kaiser-WilhelmSpitze and it was officially listed and acclaimed as the highest German mountain. Just as the Kilimanjaro would build a bridge between the Carved Out of Nature | 

new Heimat and the old Fatherland, the Kilimanjaro Mountain Association tried to become the official German East African section of the German Alpine Association.28 In contrast to the big debates about nature preservation parks, the actual realm of activity of the colonial environmental protectors was much more local. This was evident in the call in 1910 to establish a “Nature Preservation Society” (Verein zur Erhaltung der Naturdenkmäler) for German Southwest Africa: The greatest natural monument in Southwest is the untouched seclusion, which is sadly spoilt through many scattered tins. If everyone who travels through the country would join the society and would—instead of paying a contribution—encourage his [African] boys to bury the empty tins, bottles, etc., before leaving his campsite, the country would gain a great deal of charm.29

A further example is a letter to the editor written by an “animal lover from Windhoek” who—under the heading “Protect the natives, but also the animals!”—demanded the foundation of an “Animal Protection Association” to combat cruelty against working animals: The animals also need protection which is lacking here completely. In Windhoek one can often observe how some mercilessly beat their draught animals in the blazing heat of the midday sun. . . . When you talk to somebody about the ill treatment of the animals, one usually hears: Those are the natives [who do this]. That may often be true. But I ask you: Who has the responsibility and last, if not least, the damage? In my opinion it is the owner of the animals.30

Although the writer does not dismiss the “protection of the natives,” the role of environmental protection is implied as an instrument in the actual oppression of the indigenous population. Environmental protection arguments were used as an instrument to enforce sociopolitical interests. By making demands about environmental protection, the position of the colonials as masters of the land was strengthened. They  | Daniel Rouven Steinbach

saw themselves as protectors of the African natural world and accused the African population of desecrating it, as they lacked an appreciation of and love for the beauty of nature. In another letter to the editor, a planter from West Usambara in German East Africa demanded in 1908 the establishment of local nature preservations to protect the rain forests from the “pillaging” by the African population: Such a splendid high forest one does not find nearly anywhere else in Usambara. . . . Amidst this forest the natives begin to chop down these great, tall trees and—in response to the question of why they have felled the timber forest at this spot—they give the naive answer: “Here the bananas grow best.”31

Again the indigenous population is described as naive and careless and too “uncivilized” to love and appreciate the natural environment. By contrast, the German colonials are presented as the protectors of the African forestry, with both a clearer understanding and a deeper affection for the African nature (Sunseri 2003, 437). Since the agricultural economy of African people provided a considerable competition for the German planters, the demand to protect vast areas of forest was connected with the political aim of suppressing the “native economy” (Neumann 1995, 163–64). The colonials therefore held up the ideal of the “natural” or “original” Africans, who were not “spoilt” by a European civilization and who did not pose any economic competition. Those African groups— like the Damara in German Southwest Africa—who followed their “traditional ways of life” and lived in small permanent settlements, were even granted the right to keep their homes in the newly established natural parks. Africans who were considered “too civilized,” on the other hand, were driven out of these areas and often forced to work as agricultural or industrial laborers. In the view of the colonials, “civilization” had given these “natives” skills and tools that were previously unknown to them, but in spite of them they had not become “elevated” either culturally or ethically. While the African men now even possessed rifles and the knowledge to use them, they were yet too primitive in character to Carved Out of Nature | 

respect nature and animals, which they shot in large numbers. Hence it was argued that they should be forbidden to hunt with firearms altogether.32 The right to hunt in the colonies was a sign of the higher cultural status of the Europeans. It served to reinforce the claims of the Germans over the African soil and to suppress Africans upon it. When the colonials wanted to stage themselves as the masters or even kings of the country, they presented the right to hunt as an aristocratic privilege, and hence as an expression of their mastery visualized through the trophies, which decorated nearly every living room in the colonies:33 Much more than a Heimat I found here, I found a kingdom, In which I am king myself, no other is like it. . . . The game in my realm, I hunt it on horse and on foot, And when I have shot something, then with a huntsman’s salute.34

In particular, it is important to note that the right to hunt in the colonies was not understood as an individual right, but rather in the broader sense of the legal order of the Heimat ideology as a right of the community (Hartung and Hartung 1991, 159–60). The colonials regarded only Europeans as members of this community, and more specifically only Germans who lived permanently in the colony. While the indigenous population could be neatly excluded with this argumentation, the Afrikaner as the main opponents in the debate about hunting rights and nature conservation in German Southwest Africa could not be dealt with as easily since they had been experienced hunters for generations (Rollins 1999, 200). However, they were regarded as economic competitors in terms of hunting and ownership of the land and were to be ousted. Consequently, the Afrikaner were accused of not having developed any love for their natural surroundings, on the grounds that they had not settled there, but rather like nomads only traveled on the land without connecting to it. Therefore, it was believed that they lacked respect for nature and animals and were happy to “shoot anything that appeared in front of their gun,” and thus contributed significantly to the extermination of the African game (Kuntze 1907, 9–10). Following this argument the German  | Daniel Rouven Steinbach

colonials ought to “protect the land, as is expected from an advanced people with a deep love for nature and respectful way of hunting.”35 However, the colonials agreed that there had to be limits placed on which Germans should be allowed to hunt in the colonies. They regarded a connection to the country as a prerequisite to being able to treat the African natural environment respectfully, hence the right to hunt was regarded as an “outcome of the ownership of the land.”36 They required the imposition of strict conditions and shooting quotas for rich tourist hunters and “commercial trophy hunters,” and also forbade them to take the trophies they had gained out of the country and to sell them.37 In a poem by Ernst Engel from German Southwest Africa, the idea is evident that the colonial Germans were the defenders of the “natural treasures” of the new Heimat against the foreign, African, and Afrikaner hunters: Shame on all the wild game hunters, Who for the filthy lucre’s greed Shoot down the wildlife Which are the adornments of the land. Curse on you Wogs, curse on you Boers That destroy our peace, And the poor creatures’ Fearful sighs never heard! (Engel 1912, 46–47)

The love for and protection of nature gave the colonials arguments to legitimize the oppression of the African population and served as an instrument of power by denying the indigenous people the use of their environment by claiming that they had no understanding of it. By turning this love of nature into a distinct German characteristic, they were also able to deny their main European competitors, the Afrikaner, a claim on the land and its animals. Thus, this love of nature had on the one hand an exclusionary function, but it is also evident that, on the other hand, it played an important role in creating a sense of community among the Germans. The foreign and threatening aspects of the African natural surroundings became familiar and distinct hallmarks Carved Out of Nature | 

of the idea of the African Heimat. Love and understanding for this kind of nature became a prerequisite for belonging to the colonial community. Here, too, a supposedly apolitical idea of nature became a useful instrument to determine and control social norms and processes. Nature was not supposed to remain “untouched,” but rather be used as a resource for the development of the colony. Thus the colonials’ criticism of progress was not aimed at the infrastructural colonization of the country, as only this combination of the African environment and European cultural development brought about a landscape that was worth protecting.

Improving the African Environment For many of the Germans who were interested in colonial affairs, the colonial possessions in Africa and the South Seas were distant utopias, far away from civilization and free from technology, which should be kept in as much of an untouched state as possible. Yet, the colonials themselves wanted to be proud of their new Heimat not just in terms of its natural beauty, but also in terms of its progress of economy and civilization, since these were the factors that changed Africa from a savage country to a European colony (Noyes 2002, 128). Noteworthy in this regard is the article “Let’s Go to Lake Victoria!” which appeared in the Dar es Salaam newspaper in 1900 and reported on the area around Lake Victoria as a tourist destination.38 This region had at that time no railway connections and lay far away from the coastal towns where most Europeans lived. However, the writer does not focus on the area’s remoteness when he describes the beautiful natural environment, but rather stresses its “tourist infrastructure”: The nice shady Mombo River offers a lovely resting area and, since a Greek has opened a restaurant here, nothing is missing from what a German garden café has to offer the traveler.

When he describes a hiking trip, his point of comparison seems to be a Sunday stroll in Germany and not an expedition in Africa:  | Daniel Rouven Steinbach

Now the path goes permanently through occupied and developed land. Countless herds of cattle give joy to the eye of the wanderer and cross the widespread fields.

The wanderer should not only enjoy the beautiful environment, but take pleasure in the economic potential of the area and imagine himself as a possible planter there: Many wonderful river valleys in the area around Mount Kilimanjaro are still waiting for a developing and seeding hand, a rich and thankful field of occupation for the hard-working Wapare [a local ethnic group] under European instruction! . . . And since the area has no swampland and is located high, it is healthy, too. Partly like our East Prussia, partly like the Hungarian Puszta, these regions are made for colonization.

This connection between a belief in progress and pleasure derived from the African environment is also apparent in the colonials’ requests for a large and comprehensive network of railways. Railways remained a symbol of progress and modernity after the turn of the century. Not only were they linked to hope of an economic boom, but their construction was regarded as a measure of how much attention the Reich paid to the demands of their colonials, since their costly financing was publicly debated and decided upon by the German federal parliament. Furthermore, the colonials—as seen with the Kilimanjaro Mountain Association or any other local Heimat association in Germany— hoped that an extensive rail network would provide the prospect for opening up the colony and its vast hinterland for tourism from inside the colony and from Europe. Despite the emphasis they placed on their love of nature, the colonials were open to technological innovations as the natural beauty of Africa could become accessible only through modern European infrastructure. The fascination with this contrast can repeatedly be found in descriptions of train travelers observing the African countryside through the window of a railway carriage.39 The effect was even starker when taking a scenic flight organized by Carved Out of Nature | 

the aviation association of Keetmanshoop, which was founded in 1912 for the major regional exhibition.40 As well as observing the splendor of the Southwest African landscape, one can assume that surveying the colony from above must have also appealed to many colonials in that it made them feel in total control of the land and its indigenous people. Alongside this praise of development of the colonies, in the last years of the German rule, especially in German Southwest Africa, an increasing transfiguration of the early years of colonization developed. An article from 1914 lamented that the “old Africa” had died through technology and progress. Primarily this was caused by the railroads, which had been important for developing the colony, but due to their speed had alienated the people from the land and made them careless of the beauty of its nature.41 Although the long and strenuous journeys with ox-drawn wagons through the hinterland had always been a great cause of complaints before, they were now idealized as “pad romance” (Eckenbrecher 1907, 1–5).42 The experience of being on the “pad” (i.e., crossing the country with an ox wagon) was now regarded as a necessary rite of passage. Through the pad, each newcomer to the colony had become accustomed to its environment (Landesnatur) and turned into a “real African.”43 The established colonials ensured through this argument their higher social status toward the increasing number of immigrants who of course used the trains after their arrival. From their point of view, the “old Africans” had higher status through a better understanding and a deeper connection with the African Heimat, and consequently more rights than the “newcomers” to decide on the colonies’ future. Konrad Köstlin has argued that “each folkorization is proud to have overcome the past” (1996, 324). Through declaring the onceordinary ox wagon journey as something special, the colonials were indirectly celebrating their effort in “civilizing” the colony. Just as the Germans in the Reich looked back to a simple peasant lifestyle close to nature while at the same time commemorating their own progress, the colonials now underlined the former roughness of their life in a harsh environment to elevate their achievements in civilization and technical progress.  | Daniel Rouven Steinbach

War, Blood, and Soil The Europeans who lived in the colonies found themselves in a permanent situation of crisis, since their rule and power were spread neither over the whole land nor over the whole indigenous population. From 1904 to 1908, the position of the Germans was especially challenged when the Herero and Nama in Southwest Africa revolted against colonial rule. In the following “Herero War,” the German colonial army waged a genocidal war against the African population, killing tens of thousands of civilians by shooting or systematic starvation.44 In the beginning, the war seriously threatened German rule and only through massive military force sent from the Reich and the use of a brutal military strategy could the war finally be “won” (Hull 2005, 5–90). The military command—followed later by the civilian power— was taken away from the governor and transferred to the head of the colonial force, who received orders directly from the general staff in Berlin. This shift of power increased the sense of helplessness among the colonials, who fled the colony in the hundreds. Those who stayed had to observe how their economic basis was eroded, since they lost not only their farms and cattle, but through the policy of destruction, their African laborers, too. Furthermore, although the majority of the German parliament supported the war, it did not go entirely unquestioned, especially after its costs exploded and the cruelty of the colonial force toward African women and children became apparent.45 Thus many colonials felt that the metropolis was not doing enough or not doing the right thing to defend its colony. In this disastrous situation the colonials sought reassurance in the idea that the colonies were and would continue to be their Heimat. The idea of permanence not only comforted the minds of the colonials, but underlined their claim that the colony was not merely a negligible outpost, but an essential part of Germany with a German population living there. On the one hand, the colonials glorified the time before the uprising and stressed their connection with the colony and their deep roots in the African land. On the other hand, by portraying the colony as a weak and humble place, they appealed to the image of the strong Fatherland that has to protect its weaker limbs. By referring to the noCarved Out of Nature | 

tion of Heimat the colonials not only soothed themselves, but also provided a familiar idea for the Germans in the Reich. An important aspect was the African nature and environment, since they symbolized not only the connection with the land, but were also a “neutral” ground, onto which all the different ideas could be projected. An article in the Windhoek newspaper, written twelve months after the start of the uprising, begins with this notion of Heimat that was to be replicated in the years to come, with a description of the “idyll of 1904”: Wonderful rain had changed the land into a lush green meadow, scattered with the dark green of bush and forest, the nature was bursting, action and joyful hope everywhere, through work and doing went a draught of deep satisfaction.46

The described environment is not only beautiful but the source of income, since people lived in and off it as the “historical landscape” mentioned above. The smallest unit of Heimat, the home (Heim) itself, became the symbol for the unexpected and unprovoked attack: Incited through betrayal and malice, the war fury lit its torch and threw the fire in the quiet hut of the settler who lived alone and scattered over the country.

Moreover, this “barbarism” not only destroyed individual homes, but since these were seen as the basis of the colony, civilization, order, and culture were all together threatened The oases of civilization were splashed with blood and the innocence was strangled. The peaceful nature was filled with the cries by the pillaged; the places where people’s happiness used to live were turned into ruins of destruction.

These stereotypic symbols of Heimat made it easy for different social groups both within and outside the colony to identify with the national cause to win the first war of the German Reich (Bley 1971,  | Daniel Rouven Steinbach

155–56). Time and again did the colonials emphasize that the German soldiers fought and died for both: for the honor of the national Fatherland and, equally important, for the protection of their Heimat, German Southwest Africa. The commander of the colonial force, Major General von Deimling, expressed this view explicitly in 1907: These 100 officers and 1,400 men did not give their lives for nothing. A wonderful seed has flourished from their graves, which is the knowledge of the German people that a land, in which so many German sons have fallen and are buried, is not a foreign land anymore, but a piece of homeland which it is our holy duty to care for.47

Paradoxically the soldiers—most of them shipped in from Germany— gave their lives for a country that without those deaths would not be German. These victims were frequently described as “the payment we had to make for our colony,”48 a financial image that was somewhat out of step with the natural-organic notion of a Heimat that could definitely not be bought. This dilemma was resolved by declaring the blood of the German soldiers a currency that was not cold and artificial like money, but a warm and organic currency that “soaked” and “fertilized” the soil.49 The final challenge to German rule in Africa was the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Within months Allied troops had almost entirely defeated the German colonial forces and swiftly occupied the different territories (Strachan 2004). Although most colonials were aware that the future of the German colonies was dependent on the outcome of the war in Europe, in German East Africa and German Southwest Africa civilians joined the colonial force to defend the colonies. In the propaganda justifying this step, the conceptions of Heimat and Fatherland were crucial (Steinbach 2008, 179–208). Since the colonials were in a defensive position, geographic boundaries and symbolic locations were important for defining the land they were going to protect: In the sand at Lüderitzbucht, near Sandfontein, at the Orange River, under the palms and baobabs at Naulila, in the British Carved Out of Nature | 

areas near Kakamas, near Felseneck at the Swakop River . . . they are buried those for eternal peace, the brave, the honest, those who scarified their young, flourishing hopeful lives for the Fatherland.50

The well-worn natural stereotypes of the colony were still intangible enough for the colonials to identify with. This can be seen in the reinterpretation of the hymn “Die Wacht am Rhein” as the “War Song of the East Africans,” which called Germans “from the Lake Tanganyika to the ocean, from the Speke Gulf to Ruvuma River bank,” to defend the new Heimat against the enemy: It roars a call from the palm trees’ beach To the Kibo’s glacier wall: German East, it is for the treasure of yours! Who wants to be the mountain’s protector? As long as the palm tree greets the sea, The Kibo shimmers in the Heimat’s snow, A bullet stills waits in the barrel Let us crush the mercenary force!51

As the symbol of German East Africa, and German colonialism in general, Mount Kilimanjaro, with its highest peak Kibo, was declared a “sacred mountain,” and through its location directly at the border to British East Africa it functioned as a symbol similar to the Rhine as the border river to France. Although of no military importance, the mountain should under no circumstances fall into the hand of the enemy, who was supposed to be keen to conquer it: Mount Kilimanjaro is a prize that is worth the sweat of the noblest men. . . . The enormously vaulted snow hilltop glows in the morning sun for hundreds of kilometers over in the English country, when the far visible soft Alpen glow puts in the evening dusk the glance of the snow in a balmy crimson, then this king of African mountains must have—so near, but so far—aroused  | Daniel Rouven Steinbach

the senses, aroused the greed of the English. (Arning 1919, 59–60)

As in the previous colonial wars, “the soil that was bought with expensive German blood” was the most important metaphor for rationalizing the fighting.52 After Germany lost the war and consequently its overseas possessions in the Treaty of Versailles, the German colonials reassured themselves that these colonies were still German territory that had been “freshly re-soaked” with German blood.53 The question of regaining the colonies became a recurring demand of rightwing pressure groups during the 1920s and 1930s and was often closely linked to the ideology of “Blood and Soil”.54 Furthermore, for the Germans who were allowed to stay in Southwest Africa after it became a South African mandate territory in 1919, the African environment grew even more important as a source of identity after the formal connection to Germany was cut and nature provided an apolitical and “neutral” source of identification (Schmidt-Lauber 1993, 46–47).

Conclusion The Germans who immigrated to the African colonies imagined the nature and the environment in ways that created a Heimat for themselves. The image of Heimat provided colonials with not only an aesthetic frame within which to cope with African nature, but also a basis on which to construct a feeling of belonging, grounded in nature. Love for the environment became representative of the emotional connection between each colony and its German society. In contrast to this inclusive use of nature, the colonials also used their idea of African nature to reject the right of other peoples to occupy and use the environment—above all the African population, but also other Europeans. These groups were represented as neither understanding nor loving the African natural world. In declaring the colony as their Heimat, the Germans claimed the right of exclusive rule over this Heimat. This was shown explicitly in the debates about the protection of the environment and the right to hunt, which were Carved Out of Nature | 

used to suppress the indigenous population and hold off economic competitors. In situations of crisis, the African Heimat functioned for the colonials as a compensation and reassurance. The African environment was thus an essential element for the Germans in constructing their identity as German colonials.

Notes Epigraph: Freimut, Gedanken am Wege, 107; Thomson, Deutsches Land in Afrika, 140. 1. The expressions Reich (the German federal state) and Heimat (homeland) will not be translated. All other translations are the author’s. 2. See Pöppinghege, “Mit mittelmaessigen Geistesgaben und Vorkenntnissen ausgerüstet”; and Dresler, Die deutschen Kolonien und die Presse. 3. For an overview on different aspects, compare Hermand and Steakley, Heimat, Nation, Fatherland; and Boa and Palfreyman, Heimat: A German Dream. 4. See Bruch, Graf, and Hübinger, Kultur und Kulturwissenschaften um 1900, 9–24; and Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins. 5. See Rohkrämer, Eine andere Moderne?, 15–16; Bergmann, Agrarromantik, 145–55; and Kratzsch, Kunstwart und Dürerbund, 210–26. 6. Compare more recently Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature. 7. For an overview on German colonialism, see Gründer, Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien. 8. See Gann, “Marginal Colonialism,” 7–8. 9. See Weigend, “German Settlement Patterns in Namibia,” 161–62. The total German population for German East Africa was 5,000, of whom 900 were farmers or planters. 10. Compare, for example, Warmbold, Germania in Africa. 11. Südwestbote (Windhoek), May 29, 1914, no. 64. 12. Deutschostafrikanische Zeitung (Dar es Salaam), July 28, 1900, no. 29. 13. Speech by Forkel, mayor of Keetmanshoop, in Lüderitzbuchter Zeitung, April 2, 1910, no. 14. 14. Compare for the academic debate in Germany: Grosse, Kolonialismus, 53–95. 15. Deutschostafrikanische Zeitung (Dar es Salaam), September 13, 1911, no. 73.

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16. Ibid., November 18, 1911, no. 92. 17. Ibid. 18. Compare Kennedy, “Climatic Theories and Culture,” 50–51. 19. Deutschostafrikanische Zeitung (Dar es Salaam), May 4, 1912, no. 36. Compare additionally ibid., February 3, 1909, no. 9. 20. The same idea was prevalent in German Southwest Africa. See Lüderitzbuchter Zeitung, July 4, 1913, no. 27. 21. See Walther, “Creating Germans Abroad.” 22. Compare Behm, “Naturschutz im Ausland und in unseren Kolonien,” 161–67. 23. Deutschostafrikanische Zeitung (Dar es Salaam), April 18, 1914, no. 31/32. 24. Ibid., May 18, 1907, no. 20. 25. Deutschostafrikanische Zeitung (Dar es Salaam), September 13, 1913, no. 74. 26. Indisputably Förster had economical reasons behind his engagement as well, since he ran a sanatorium and a restaurant there. Compare Föllmer, Zehn, Augenblicksbilder aus Neudeutschland, 38. 27. Deutschostafrikanische Zeitung (Dar es Salaam), September 13, 1913, no. 74. 28. For its history and ideology during the German Empire, see Amstädter, Der Alpinismus, 91–214. 29. Windhuker Nachrichten (Windhoek), November 26, 1910, no. 95. 30. Südwestbote (Windhoek), November 28, 1913, no. 143. Also compare Deutschostafrikanische Zeitung (Dar es Salaam), March 14, 1903, no. 11; and Südwestbote (Windhoek), March 29, 1914, no. 38. 31. Letter to the editor, Usambara Post (Tanga), April 11, 1908, no. 15. 32. Südwest (Windhoek), January 20, 1914, no. 6; and Deutschostafrikanische Zeitung (Dar es Salaam), December 20, 1911, no. 101. 33. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, 28–32 and 85–166. Compare Wilhelm Föllmer, “Die Kunst im Farmerheim,” in Lüderitzbuchter Zeitung, April 18, 1913, no. 16. 34. A. Hermkes, “Der deutsche Farmer in Südwest!” in Südwestbote (Windhoek), September 7, 1913, no. 108. 35. Hans Paasche, “Massenmord in Ostafrika,” in Deutschostafrikanische Zeitung (Dar es Salaam), May 13, 1911, no. 38. 36. Deutschostafrikanische Zeitung (Dar es Salaam), May 9, 1908, no. 34. 37. Ibid., August 12, 1911, no. 64. 38. Ibid., January 20, 1900, no. 3.

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39. Deutsch-Südwestafrikanische Zeitung (Swakopmund), July 3, 1902, no. 27. 40. Ibid., May 27, 1914, no. 42. 41. Südwestbote (Windhoek), May 29, 1914, no. 64. 42. The word “pad” is the Afrikaans expression for “path” or “trail.” 43. The expression “African” (Afrikaner) was like Deutschostafrikaner or Deutschsüdwestafrikaner—used by the colonials to refer to themselves comparatively, like “Bavarian” or “Westphalian.” 44. Compare to different aspects of the war: Zimmerer and Zeller, Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. 45. Smith, “The Talk of Genocide, the Rhetoric of Miscegenation.” 46. And for the following: Windhuker Nachrichten (Windhoek), January 14, 1905, no. 2. 47. Windhuker Nachrichten (Windhoek), April 11, 1907, no. 15. 48. “Rede von Rechtsanwalt Erdmann,” in Windhuker Nachrichten (Windhoek), April 11, 1907, no. 15. 49. Compare Lüderitzbuchter Zeitung, November 25, 1911, no. 47; and Südwestbote (Windhoek), December 25, 1912, no. 154/155. 50. Südwest (Windhoek), March 11, 1915, no. 21. 51. Usambara Post (Tanga), January 1, 1916, no. 1. 52. Deutschostafrikanische Zeitung (Dar es Salaam), August 19, 1914, no. 67. 53. Südwest (Windhoek), May 6, 1915, no. 37. 54. This connection between the identification with the African nature and more specifically the soil cannot be discussed any further here. Compare Schmokel, Dream of Empire; Klotz, “The Weimar Republic”; and Poley, Decolonization in Germany.

Works Cited Newspapers Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung, Dar es Salaam. Deutsch-Südwestafrikanische Zeitung, Swakopmund. Lüderitzerbuchter Zeitung, Lüderitzbucht. Südwest, Windhoek. Südwestbote, Windhoek. Usambara Post, Tanga. Windhuker Nachrichten, Windhoek.

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Books and Articles Amstädter, Rainer. 1996. Der Alpinismus: Kultur, Organisation, Politik. Vienna: Wiener Universitätsverlag. Applegate, Celia. 1990. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. Berkeley: University of California Press. Arning, Wilhelm. 1919. Vier Jahre Weltkrieg in Deutsch-Ostafrika. Hanover: Jänecke. Bausinger, Hermann. 1980. “Heimat und Identität.” In Heimat: Sehnsucht nach Identität, edited by Elisabeth Moosmann, 9–24. Berlin: Ästhetik und Kommunikation. ———. 1984. “Auf dem Wege zu einem neuen, aktiven Heimatverständnis: Begriffsgeschichte als Problemgeschichte.” In Heimat heute, edited by Hermann Bausigner, 11–27. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Behm, Hans Wolfgang. 1914. “Naturschutz im Ausland und in unseren Kolonien.” Heimat und Welt 6:161–67. Bergmann, Klaus. 1970. Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft. Meisenheim am Glan: Hain. Bley, Helmut. 1971. South-West Africa under German Rule, 1894–1914. London: Heinemann. Boa, Elizabeth, and Rachel Palfreyman. 2000. Heimat: A German Dream. Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture, 1890– 1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brockmann, Clara. 1912. Briefe eines deutschen Mädchens aus Südwest. Berlin: Mittler. Bruch, Rüdiger vom, Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, and Gangolf Hübinger, eds. 1989. Kultur und Kulturwissenschaften um 1900: Krise der Moderne und Glaube an die Wissenschaft. Stuttgart: Steiner. Confino, Alon. 1997. The Nation as Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dresler, Adolf. 1942. Die deutschen Kolonien und die Presse. Forschungen zur Kolonialfrage 11. Würzburg: Triltsch. Eckenbrecher, Margarethe von. 1907. “Padleben in Südwest-Afrika.” In Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Kriegs- und Friedensbilder, 1–20. Leipzig: Weicher. Engel, Ernst (Demokritos africanus). 1912. “Waidmanns Traum.” In Im Affenland: Reimereien aus Südwest. Berlin: Kolonie und Heimat. Föllmer, Wilhelm. 1913. Zehn Augenblicksbilder aus Neudeutschland. Berlin: Süsserott.

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Freimut, Ernst. 1909. Gedanken am Wege: Reiseplaudereien aus Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Berlin: Deutscher Kolonialverlag. Gann, Lewis H. 1987. “Marginal Colonialism: The German Case.” In Germans in the Tropics: Essays in German Colonial History, edited by Arthur J. Knoll and Lewis H. Gann, 1–17. New York: Greenwood Press. Gißibl, Bernhard. 2006. “German Colonialism and the Beginning of International Wildlife Preservation in Africa.” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Supplement 3:121–43. Grosse, Pascal. 2000. Kolonialismus, Eugenik und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland, 1850–1918. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Gründer, Horst. 2004. Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien. Paderborn: Schöningh. Hartung, Barbara, and Werner Hartung. 1991. “Heimat: Rechtsort und Gemütswert. Anmerkungen zu einer Wechselbeziehung.” In Antimodernismus und Reform: Zur Geschichte der deutschen Heimatbewegung, edited by Edeltraud Klueting, 157–70. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Hermand, Jost, and James Steakley, eds. 1996. Heimat, Nation, Fatherland: The German Sense of Belonging. German Life and Civilization 22. New York: Lang. Hull, Isabel V. 2005. Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practice of War in Imperial Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kennedy, Dane. 1981. “Climatic Theories and Culture in Colonial Kenya and Rhodesia.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 10:50–66. ———. 1990. “The Perils of the Midday Sun: Climatic Anxities in the Colonial Tropics.” In Imperialism and the Natural World, edited by John M. MacKenzie, 118–40. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Klotz, Marcia. 2005. “The Weimar Republic: A Postcolonial State in a Still-Colonial World.” In Germany’s Colonial Past, edited by Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal, 135–48. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Köstlin, Konrad. 1996. “Heimat als Identitätsfabrik.” Österreichische Zeitung für Volkskunde 99:321–38. Kratzsch, Gerhard. 1969. Kunstwart und Dürerbund: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Kuhn, Philalethes. 1907. “Ein Ritt ins Sandfeld von Südwestafrika.“ In Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Kriegs- und Friedensbilder, 34–46. Leipzig: Weicher.

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Kundrus, Birthe. 2003. Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien. Cologne: Böhlau. Kuntze, Friedrich. 1907. Gedanken eines langjährigen Tropenpraktikers über Deutsch-Ostafrika. Berlin: Süsserott. Lehmann, Albrecht. 2002. “Der deutsche Wald.“ In Deutsche Erinnerungsorte. Vol. 3, edited by Etienne François, and Hagen Schulze, 187–200. Munich: Beck. Lekan, Thomas M. 2004. Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. MacKenzie, John M. 1990. The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Neumann, Roderick P. 1995. “Ways of Seeing Africa: Colonial Recasting of African Society and Landscape in Serengeti National Park.” Ecumene 2:149–69. Noyes, John K. 2002. “Landschaftsschilderung, Kultur und Geographie: Von den Aporien der poetischen Sprache im Zeitalter der politischen Geographie.“ In Kolonialismus als Kultur: Literatur, Medien, Wissenschaft in der deutschen Gründerzeit des Fremden, edited by Alexander Honold and Oliver Simons, 127–42. Tübingen: Francke. Poley, Jared. 2005. Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation. Studies in Modern German Literature 99. Oxford: Peter Lang. Pöppinghege, Rainer. 2003. “Mit mittelmaessigen Geistesgaben und Vorkenntnissen ausgerüstet: Über das Verhältnis von kaiserlichen Behörden und Presse in den deutschen Kolonien 1898 bis 1914.“ Jahrbuch für Kommunikationsgeschichte 3:157–69. Ranger, Terence. 1992. “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 211–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ringer, Fritz K. 1969. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rohkrämer, Thomas. 1999. Eine andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur und Technik in Deutschland, 1880–1933. Paderborn: Schöningh. Rohrbach, Paul. 1909. Aus Südwest-Afrikas schweren Tagen. Berlin: Weicher. Rollins, William H. 1997. A Greener Version of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904–1918. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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———. 1999. “Imperial Shades of Green: Conservation and Environmental Chauvinism in the German Colonial Project.” German Studies Review 22:187–213. Rüdiger, Klaus H. 1993. Die Namibia-Deutschen: Geschichte einer Nation im Werden. Beiträge zur Kolonial- und Überseegeschichte 56. Stuttgart: Steiner. Schmidt-Lauber, Brigitta. 1993. Die abhängigen Herren: Deutsche Identität in Namibia. Interethnische Beziehungen und Kulturwandel 9. Münster: Lit. Schmokel, Wolfe W. 1964. Dream of Empire: German Colonialism, 1919–1945. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, Helmut Walser. 1998. “The Talk of Genocide, the Rhetoric of Miscegenation: Notes on Debates in the German Reichstag Concerning Southwest Africa, 1904–1914.” In The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, edited by Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, 107–24. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Söldenwagner, Philippa. 2006. Spaces of Negotiation: European Settlement and Settlers in German East Africa, 1900–1914. Munich: Martin Meidenbauer. Speitkamp, Winfried. 1996. “Kolonialpolitik und Tribalismus in Afrika.” In Mythos und Nation: Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewußtseins in der Neuzeit, edited by Helmut Berding, 303–25. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Steinbach, Daniel R. 2008. “Defending the Heimat: The Germans in Southwest Africa and East Africa during the First World War.” In Untold War: New Perspectives in First World War Studies, edited by Heather Jones, Jennifer O’Brien, and Christoph Schmidt-Supprian, 179–208. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Stoler, Ann Laura. 1989. “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule.” Comparative Studies of Society and History 31:134–61. Strachan, Hew. 2004. The First World War in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sunseri, Thaddeus. 2003. “Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion: Forestry and Social Control in German East Africa, 1874–1915.” Environmental History 8:430–51. Thomson, Hermann. 1911. Deutsches Land in Afrika. Illustrated by Ernst Vollbehr. Munich: Verlag der Deutschen Alpenzeitung. Walther, Daniel. 2001. “Creating Germans Abroad: White Education in German Southwest Africa, 1894–1914.” German Studies Review 24:325–51.

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Warmbold, Joachim. 1989. Germania in Africa: Germany’s Colonial Literature. Studies in Modern German Literature 22. New York: Lang. Weigend, Guido G. 1985. “German Settlement Patterns in Namibia.“ Geographical Review 75:156–69. Zimmerer, Jürgen, and Joachim Zeller, eds. 2003. Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen. Berlin: Links.

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3 The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science in the Spanish and American Philippines Greg Bankoff

When Americans occupied the Philippines in 1898, they began the persistent propagation of a second leyenda negra about their colonial predecessors. Rather than depicting the conquest of the New World in lurid and exaggerated details that stressed Spanish brutality as sixteenth-century French and English authors had, this second black legend was a more measured, scientifically couched denunciation that dwelt on the decadence, backwardness, and irrational nature of Iberian culture.1 The proponents of this new missionary colonialism were quick to point to the unsanitary living conditions, the general lack of educational facilities, the absence of scientific inquiry, the superstitious nature of Hispanic culture, the inability to exploit natural resources, and the continuation of archaic forms of social relations such as slavery that were the end products of more than three hundred years of Spanish rule.2 This view was nothing new to the American historiography of Spain and its empire. William Hickling Prescott had said as much in his path-breaking History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic in 1837, contrasting the virile new American Republic to the moral decay of Spain. The initiative and energy that had earned the latter its empire in the sixteenth century, he argued, had already sunk into the torpor of 78

economic backwardness, intellectual stagnation, and political weakness by 1600. This trope became so marked in subsequent American historiography that it soon was known as “Prescott’s paradigm”: an understanding that Spain was everything the United States was not.3 Its tone and tenor were readily adopted and echoed by many Filipino nationalist writers who condemned the Spanish Philippines as an oppressive frailocracy or a society ruled by religious orders mired in bigotry, corruption, and superstition (Reyes y Florentino 1887; Del Pilar 1889). Actually, Spanish science in the Philippines was not nearly as rudimentary as it is frequently made out to be and was partly based on different schools of thought. Darwinian concepts have so dominated twentieth-century natural science that those who held alternative notions have been deemed unutterably backward (Endersby 2003). This northern European monopoly on perceptions of nature has come to constitute modern scientific thought and has shown only disdain for anything that does not share its cultural affinity. Only now are alternative notions based more on ecological concepts that stress commensality rather than species competition regaining some scientific respectability. Such alternative ideas, however, were very much current in the intellectual tradition of the nineteenth century, especially in Southern Europe, and traced their origins back to late eighteenth and early nineteenth transformist ideas on acclimatization and the inheritance of acquired characteristics found in the writings of Georges Buffon, Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and the latter’s son, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. The late nineteenth-century Philippines pose an interesting case where different notions about the environment vied for state and public acceptance. This chapter examines ideas about the science of nature and the nature of science in relation to forestry, botany, meteorology, and animal breeding. Far from demonstrating an unsophisticated dialogue about the environment, the evidence shows a surprisingly rich fusion of European debates and discourses. The Spanish colonial official, the foreign naturalist, and the missionary father were as well versed in the science of their day as geographical location and international communications permitted. Only in the eyes of the selfThe Science of Nature and the Nature of Science | 

assured and self-righteous proponents of the new American imperium was all darkness and ignorance.

Science of Nature After the discovery in 1952 that DNA provides the genetic information for cell replication, explanations of evolution that stressed the hereditary nature of acquired characteristics lost their scientific validity. Prior to this scientific breakthrough, however, the prevalent views for most of the nineteenth century favored the notion of acclimatization, the idea that an organism adjusted to climate and physical environment. The French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck even speculated on the extent to which such acquired characteristics could be inherited by progeny (Mayr 1972, 55). The fate of organisms was of particular concern to the imperial mission in an age of high colonialism that sought the transfer of plants, animals, and humans from their ancestral environments in more temperate climes and their successful introduction into tropical zones. The earliest European accounts describe equatorial regions in almost ecstatic terms, evoking frequent analogies between an environment of abundance, lushness, fecundity, and tranquillity and the location of an earthly paradise (Greenblatt 1991; Pagden 1993). However, more unfavorable attitudes that accorded value to environments only in terms of human utility rapidly came to prevail in the seventeenth century (Thomas 1983). The very exoticness of the landscape was increasingly associated with a more malevolent nature, and heat and humidity were increasingly held responsible for the high death rate of Europeans. When these were compounded by the usual intemperance, imprudence, and diet of the newly arrived, Batavia and India became the “white man’s graveyard.” As the European encounter with these regions intensified during the eighteenth century through the slave trade, plantation agriculture, and the colonial experience, so, too, did the perception that disease, putrefaction, and decay ran rampant in the moist warm air of the tropics.4 David Arnold (1996) argues that the growing body of scientific knowledge on these regions, increasingly substantiated by statistical  | Greg Bankoff

enumeration of morbidity and mortality and by a medical geography that attributed local diseases to specific climates, vegetation, and physical topographies, invented a particular discourse that he refers to as “tropicality” (7–10). The distinctive characteristic of this discourse was the creation of a sense of otherness that Europeans attached to the tropical environment, the indigenous societies and their cultures, and the distinctive nature of disease. More than denoting simply a physical space, the otherness conveyed by tropicality was a conceptual one, an imagined region, “which was, at once, a place of parasite and pathology, a space inviting colonial occupation and management, a laboratory for natural selection and racial struggle and a site of moral jeopardy and trial” (Livingstone 1999, 109). Imperial science was deeply concerned with the failure or success of organisms in tropical environments. Western European states were bent on an unprecedented exploitation of the world’s resources through extending their dominion across the face of the globe, and at the same time relieving their own shores of surplus populations through overseas migration.5 The two were not necessarily the same; some regions were more susceptible to European habitation (colonies of settlement) and others more amenable to European management (colonies of exploitation). Whether, when, and how specific organisms acclimatized to new climatic conditions were matters of heated debate among learned circles in the capitals of Western Europe (Livingstone 1999). Those broadly in support of the notion that acclimatization was feasible also generally tended to favor European settlement beyond the continent; those who held the contrary view that “races” degenerated outside their ancestral environments tended to be more ardent proponents of colonial exploitation (Livingstone 1987). While acclimatization was the concern of science in all imperial centers—especially in Great Britain, and later in the United States—the origins of this debate lay more properly on the continent, particularly among French but also German, Italian, and even Austrian writers.6 Of particular significance to the notion of evolution was the inversion among eighteenth-century naturalist philosophers of the classical model that envisaged all life as part of “a great chain of being,” échelle or scala naturae, which linked species together in a descending order The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science | 

from the most perfect to the least developed. In elaborating schemas of ascending perfectibility from the most simple to the more complex, scientists such as Gottfried Leibniz, Charles Bonnet, Jean-Baptiste Robinet, and others had perforce to confront the possibility of “interruptions” or changes in beings ever striving toward perfection (Rigotti 1986). The influence of George-Louise Leclerc de Buffon is seminal in this respect. In various editions of his monumental Histoire Naturelle and subsequent writings, Buffon laid before his contemporaries the issue of organic evolution (Bowler 1973; Sloan 1976). In particular, he raised serious doubts about the immutability of species through his general hypothesis on the common descent of all life-forms, his belief in their great antiquity, the potent forces making for variability among organisms, and his recognition of the effects of climate, food, and domestication on species (Lovejoy 1968; Llana 2000).7 The really momentous step in making the chain of being not only spatial but temporal was the inspiration of Buffon’s onetime protégé, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who in his Philosophie zoologique published in 1809 and later writings expounded his theory of “transformation” or “transmutation.”8 Building on the earlier conceptualization of an ordered universe, Lamarck claimed that any examination of the animal world from the commencing infusoria to its culmination in mammals revealed a marked “progressive complication” in the structure of organisms. Individual creatures’ efforts to adapt to changes in circumstances affected animals’ forms over time; the webfeet of waterbirds and the elongated legs of waders were cases in point. The structural characteristics acquired in this manner could be passed on to offspring.9 This latter aspect of his work, however, for which he is now principally remembered, was the most flawed part of his scheme, suffering from inadequate empirical evidence (Burkhardt 1972). Lamarck’s ideas were greeted with public neglect and private ridicule, although they gradually reached a wider audience through the influence of one of his students, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hiliare, who became president of the Acclimatization Society of Paris at its foundation in 1854 (Corsi 1988, 230–68). Early nineteenth-century Paris was the recognized center to which naturalists from all over the Western world came to study com | Greg Bankoff

parative anatomy and zoology under the guidance of teachers such as Lamarck, Cuvier, Saint-Hiliare, and Henri de Blainville (Appel 1980, 292). It was the home of both functionalist and philosophical anatomy with their respective emphases on utility and homology.10 With the publication of the first edition of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, however, the center of intellectual inquiry began to shift across the Channel to England where it was to stay for the rest of the century. Darwin’s theories made a decisive break with Lamarck, whose work he dismissed as “nonsense” and “veritable rubbish.”11 Both Darwin and Lamarck recognized that species evolved, but at this point they parted company: The essential difference between the two lay in the respective responsibility each ascribed to historical contingency in elaborating the present forms of living creatures. For Lamarck, it played no role at all, as an individual organism’s tendency toward progressive complexity accounted for the principal taxonomical structure of the animal kingdom. For Darwin, the historical accumulation of transmissions was the primary force responsible for the evolution of species (Somerset 2000). Those organisms whose random variation better adapted them to an environment at any particular time were better able to compete for scarce resources and so reproduce. Through this process of the survival of the fittest, Darwin (1859) deduced that organisms had evolved over time (61).

State of Science in the Spanish Philippines Colonial science was practical, born out of the necessity of coming to terms with new and alien environments. Its ideals of dominance and possession concentrated its interests principally with the land and its attributes: the mineral wealth, the flora and fauna, the climate and its effects on agriculture, the diseases and their consequences for the newcomers.12 The Spanish Philippines may have been on the “outer edge” of this western world in the sense that the islands’ politico-meteorological geography isolated the archipelago until the early nineteenth century at the farthest extreme of a sailing route that stretched back across the Pacific to the Atlantic and Europe (Bankoff 2006).13 The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science | 

Its seclusion, however, did not mean that the science practiced there was purely derivative. Its practitioners were few, and they generally lacked modern equipment and were more often than not strapped for funding, but the science they made had a virility of its own, perhaps born of its hybridity as it struggled to make sense of an alien tropical environment. Small but significant advances were made in the fields of forestry and botany. Greater heights were reached in the realm of meteorology so that by the end of the century the Philippines formed an integral link in a Far Eastern early warning system that advised ships of cyclonic activity. But it is in debates over the nature of acclimatization that the influence of current European thought is most evident. Moreover, it was frequently the colonial state that was the prime mover in instigating or promoting this inquiry, much as the Casa de Contratación and the Council of the Indies had been during the Scientific Revolution.14 The role the late Spanish colonial state played in this respect does much to contradict its usual portrayal as a structure devoid of dynamism, innovation, or enterprise. At the time of European contact in 1521, most of the Philippines were covered in forests, which impressed early visitors with their extent and variety.15 Over time, however, these great stands of timber had increasingly receded from the main centers of Spanish settlement as the population of the archipelago rose from fewer than a million in the mid-sixteenth century to about seven million by the end of the nineteenth century. Trees were felled to make way for agriculture, to provide the principal construction material for buildings, for industrial purposes (shipbuilding and later cigar boxes), and to render the wherewithal for resin gatherers and charcoal manufacturers to practice their trades.16 Indeed, it was the scale of this destruction that was partly responsible for convincing colonial officials of the need to establish a forestry service in the archipelago. From its modest beginnings of one inspector and four assistants in 1863, the Inspección general de Montes, the Inspection-general of Forests, grew to be an agency of considerable size comprising more than one hundred employees by 1891. Senior personnel were recruited from Spain, graduates of the state forestry school, or members of the forestry department who had completed four years of study.17  | Greg Bankoff

Though the Inspección general de Montes was always hampered by shortages of manpower and fiscal pressures, it achieved some remarkable successes under a series of notable directors.18 As a service, it was able to undertake the first systematic survey of the archipelago’s forests, identifying the principal species growing in each province and estimating the proportion of land area still timbered, a daunting task by any standards and one in which the efforts of the Spanish colonial bureaucracy have not been properly recognized (Vidal y Soler 1875). Its findings, moreover, accord surprisingly well with the more precise surveys carried out by the Bureau of Forestry under the succeeding American administration.19 Ramón Jordana y Morera revealed in his “Memoria sobre la Producción de los Montes Públicos de Filipinas” a pattern of timber exploitation based on concentric circles of exploitation radiating out from Manila (and to a lesser extent Cebu), already firmly established by 1871–72. Those areas immediately adjacent to the capital were already largely deforested, and the contiguous provinces were now the principal sites for logging. Forests on the island of Cebu and on the adjacent island of Bohol were practically all gone. Almost everywhere else, agriculture was encroaching upon woodlands, and primary forests were to be found only in central Luzon, the less populated parts of the Visayas, and on Mindanao (Jordana y Morera 1873, 1874). Perhaps as much as 50 percent of the forests under effective Spanish control had disappeared by the turn of the twentieth century, and contrary to what was so often claimed in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century accounts, the tropical forest was far from inexhaustible (Vidal y Soler 1874, 11).20 If the surveying and cartographical skills of the Spanish forestry service have been largely forgotten, so, too, have the scientific contributions of some of its principal officials. Of particular note is the work of two functionaries: Sebastián Vidal y Soler and Ramón Jordana y Morera. Both were head foresters whose scientific and historical works provide our principal knowledge about the state of forests in the Philippines for this period. Vidal y Soler was appointed temporarily to the position at the age of twenty-nine upon the death in 1871 of the first incumbent, Juan Gonzales Valdez (Jordana y Morera 1891, 239). Not only did he tirelessly carry out his duties as acting inspector general of the The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science | 

forestry department, but he also published several works on flora over the eleven years of his connection with the archipelago.21 Moreover, he was the first to recognize the necessity of comparing the specimens he collected on his numerous trips about the islands with material held in various European botanical collections before declaring them new to science (Merrill 1903, 20). In 1872, he was sent to Mindanao as a special commissioner to investigate the effects of a series of severe earthquakes there and used this opportunity to undertake a study of the island’s flora. While on medical leave back in Spain the following year, he found the time to translate an important German travelogue into Spanish. He also represented the Spanish government at the International Exhibition of Philadelphia in 1875, where a large collection of native timbers were displayed, and was appointed to head the Philippine Flora and Statistical Commission in 1876. Ramón Jordana y Morera, on the other hand, was more an administrator, and it was primarily under his direction that the forestry department was able to expand and reorganize during the 1870s and early 1880s.22 Though also a prominent contributor to the natural history of the archipelago with his Bosquejo Geográfico é Histórico-Natural del Archipiélago Filipino (1885), Jordana y Morera is better remembered for his studies of colonial forestry, especially his magisterial comparative history of British India, the Netherlands East Indies, and the Philippines (1891, 1894). It was this caliber of professionally trained, well-read, and scientifically curious functionaries that prompted the first chief of the U.S. Bureau of Forestry, Captain George Ahern, to conclude that Spanish laws and regulations were “excellent, practicable and in line with the most advanced forest legislations of Europe where forestry had reached a high state of development” and then to lament the fact that they unfortunately “were not fully enforced” (Nano 1953, 23). Vidal y Soler and Jordana y Morera were not isolated examples, but part of a much longer tradition of botanical inquiry in the islands stretching back to the seventeenth century. These earlier naturalists were predominantly churchmen, members of the religious orders who devoted their lives to the evangelization of the archipelago’s inhabitants, learned the local languages, and whose interest was excited by the new world of tropical life around them. Many of these initial  | Greg Bankoff

studies were confined to the medicinal qualities of plants. The first paper of any importance on the colony’s flora appeared in 1704 based on the material collected by Fr. Georgio Camel, a German Jesuit in the islands, who sent his findings to London, where they subsequently proved useful in determining the dates new species were introduced from the Americas. Most of these works, however, remained as manuscripts in the archives of the missionary orders and were published only many decades or even centuries later, like the late seventeenthcentury treatise on medicinal plants by Fr. Ignacio de Mercado, which was not published till 1880.23 Most notable of these religious naturalists, however, was Fr. Manuel Blanco, who arrived in the archipelago in 1805 as an Augustinian friar. His various offices as an important dignitary of his order afforded him the opportunity to travel extensively through the provinces of Luzon and the Visayas and to study their flora. Blanco’s Flora de Filipinas, first published in 1837, was the most comprehensive study of the Philippines yet, but contained many errors due to the limited number of books available to him for identifying species. Two posthumous editions of his work, published in 1845 and 1877–83, did much to remedy these deficiencies. The latter edition, prepared by Fr. Celestino Fernandez-Villar under the general editorship of Domingo Vidal y Soler, Sebastián’s brother and also a noted forester, identified plants by their proper Linnaean names.24 Interest in the indigenous flora of the archipelago culminated in the establishment of the Manila Botanical Garden in 1858, which included a school of botany and agriculture. Despite its unfavorable location in a former rice paddy bordered by the Pasig River and the outer moat of the capital, the zeal of its initial directors ensured the successful introduction of a considerable number of exotic plants with economic potential and experimentation in plant culture. A notable achievement of these early years was the publication of an elementary textbook on agriculture, the Cartilla de Agricultura Filipina, written by the institution’s second director, Zoilo Espejo, and intended for use in native schools. The garden later passed under the administrative control of the Inspección general de Montes and was entrusted to the care of Domingo Vidal y Soler. Vidal y Soler was succeeded by his The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science | 

brother, Sebastián, who carried out an extensive building program that saw the original wooden buildings replaced by more-permanent ones and the additional cultivation of many native species. According to its catalogs, the Botanical Garden contained as many as 1,371 different plant varieties or species in 1890. Unfortunately, the legacy of this considerable botanical corpus was almost completely lost at the close of the century. An accidental fire in September 1897 resulted in the total destruction of the forestry department building and inflicted severe damage on the Botanical Garden, while fighting between revolutionary and American troops on February 19, 1899, led to the demise of the botanical collections held in the Guadalupe Convent near Manila. Losses included the main libraries on natural history, detailed maps of the archipelago’s forests executed by the Flora Commission, the colony’s principal herbarium and collection of natural history specimens, the archives of both institutions, and the small museum.25 The most significant contribution made by these “scientists of the cloth,” however, was in the field of meteorology. Here science in the Philippines demonstrates its hybrid vitality born of the European scientific tradition and the tropical environmental experience to become a regional innovator, one other European colonial and Asian powers looked to for direction and assistance. With the establishment of an observatory at their Ateneo College in 1865, the Jesuits created the first meteorological service able to monitor atmospheric disturbances in Eastern Asia. Under the energetic directorship of Fr. Federico Faura, the Manila Observatory began collating and publishing their daily observations on barometric pressures, thermometer readings, wind force and direction, and rainfall as monthly bulletins.26 More important, in July 1879, it issued its first advance warning of an impending typhoon, correctly predicting its likely passage of destruction over northern Luzon (Hidalgo 1974a, 16–17). When the observatory delivered a subsequent alert that another storm was approaching Manila on November 18, vessels were forbidden to go to sea. In this manner, major loss of life and damage to property were averted in those ports where authorities could be contacted in time. Between 1879 and 1882, fifty-three forecasts were made, and in only five cases did the storms not reach their predicted destinations. The ability of the observatory  | Greg Bankoff

to indicate correctly the force and direction of cyclones was predicated on the concurrent development and expansion of the telegraphic service, the first line of which was opened in 1872.27 In 1878, the director of civil administration mandated that weather observations made at telegraph stations be made available to the Jesuit fathers and that the observatory be linked to the telegraphic network. The colonial state took an even more active role in 1884, funding the establishment of thirteen secondary meteorological stations throughout Luzon that were progressively equipped and made operational by Father Faura and his associates between 1885 and 1887.28 The extent of this scientific achievement can be gauged by the international recognition the Manila Observatory garnered from its contemporaries, the caliber of instruments improved upon or invented by its staff, and the prolific literature on meteorology and seismology that was published as a result of its inquiries. Surrounding states, both colonial and native, looked to the Philippines for advance warning of impending storms and for assistance in establishing their own meteorological stations. No sooner was Manila linked by telegraph to Hong Kong in 1880, than its governor applied to his Spanish counterpart for an exchange of daily meteorological observations, a cooperation that led in 1883 to the erection of an observatory in the Crown Colony. Similar relations were initiated by Macao (1885), Saigon (1887), and Tokyo (1890).29 Manila, therefore, was the initial linchpin in a network of meteorological stations that eventually encompassed the whole of the South China Sea, providing timely warnings to shipping and coastal authorities (Solá 1903, 10, 16–18). But the staff members of the Manila Observatory were more than simply collators of data; they were also pioneers in instrument improvement and design for tropical locations. Much of the precision instrumentation was imported from Europe, but a striking feature of the scientists working in the Philippines was their innovation in adapting them to local conditions. Beginning with the more simple modification of an aneroid barometer to better reflect storm warnings in 1885, then to the more novel combination of a barometer and a cyclonometer in one instrument (barocyclonometer) in 1897, and culminating in the invention of a refraction nephoscope to determine The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science | 

cloud direction and velocity in 1900, Jesuit scientists such as Father Faura and especially Fr. José Algué commanded international recognition. The fruits of their labors were celebrated at international exhibitions such as the Exposición Filipina held in Madrid in June 1887, the World’s Columbian Exposition of Chicago in 1893, and the Universal Exposition at Paris in 1900. Perhaps no more fitting tribute to the scientific value of these instruments exists than the attempt by Paul Bergholz, director of the Observatory of Bremen, to market the barocyclonometer under his own name in Germany and Europe.30 Finally, there is also the substantial corpus of scientific writings left by the Jesuits and others not only on meteorology but also on seismology, to which the observatory extended its interests. Principal among these are the meteorological studies of Fr. José Algué, the seismological treatises of Fr. Miguel Saderra Masó and Fr. José Coronas, and the various works on volcanic eruptions by the mining engineer Enrique Abella y Casariego.31 The degree of international recognition that such works received can be measured by the “great favor” and “liveliest enthusiasm” that were extended to the publication of Father Algué’s Las Nubes en el Archipiélago at the meeting of the International Meteorological Committee in 1899.32 Nor were these works geared toward only a learned audience; they also had more practical applications. Father Faura’s Señales Precursoras de Temporal, published in 1882, was an easy-to-follow factual guide, “adapted to the intelligence of all,” on how to interpret signs of impending typhoons. Perhaps more surprisingly, this familiarity with current debates and scientific theory was exhibited not only among officials and priests but also among the senior ranks of the colonial military. If not quite men of the pen, some of these officers were more than simply men of the sword who considered their calling a profession with its own need for scientific knowledge, albeit of a certain kind and of a particular nature. Nowhere is this more evident than in the debates over the military capabilities of the native horse. There is no evidence of horses in the northern and central islands of the Philippines prior to the Spanish conquest, though it is possible that some animals had been introduced into the very southern parts of the archipelago as early as the mid-fifteenth century. After 1565, semiwild animals obtained from  | Greg Bankoff

Spain’s colonies in the Americas were bred with stock secured from China and Japan to create what came to be considered a distinctive breed by the eighteenth century.33 However, a particularly noticeable adaptation of the Philippine horse to its new environment and a cause of growing alarm to colonial authorities was its attenuation (Bankoff 2004). This diminishment in the animal’s size and strength was held responsible for its limited usefulness, given the broken landscape, the marshy terrain, and the total absence of roads in the greater part of the islands (Aguilar 1893, 260). In particular, concern revolved around the horse’s unsuitability for military purposes: It was unable to draw artillery pieces or to bear the weight of a fully armed European. At least two attempts were made during the course of the nineteenth century to improve the size of military mounts by crossing native mares with imported stock. On both occasions, the endeavor proved abortive, through ignorance of their different dietary requirements in 1856–58 that saw most animals starve to death, and from a failure of political will in 1888 when the newly arrived stock were auctioned off to private buyers (Bankoff 2001). What is notable about these ventures, however, is the nature of the debates held among members of the special military commission convened in 1883 to consider the reasons for the horse’s diminution and to recommend steps for its improvement. The discussions among these senior engineering, artillery, veterinary, and cavalry officers reveal an easy conversance with Lamarckian notions of acclimatization. Animals, especially domesticated animals, were represented as locomotoras vivientes, living machines or engines susceptible to improvement through breeding, “no longer subject to obscure and uncertain laws but a science of calculation and growth.” Scientific breeding permitted humanity to obtain “appropriate animals for particular services, with different aptitudes, according to what the caprice of the times demands or the necessities of Man.”34 Some went even further and almost appropriated to the “intelligence of man” the very act of creating beasts such as “the horse, cow and pig, living machines that are aptly suited to obtaining the desired ends” (Aguilar 1893, 259). Science was to provide the means by which humanity could manipulate nature to compensate for any defect of function or pernicious effect of environment. The The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science | 

application of science to breeding was hailed as the answer needed to halt the continuing degeneracy of the native horse. “Zootechny,” concluded the special military commission, “will give us the methods and sure rules so that improvements will not fail.” Nor was there any doubting humanity’s right to benefit from such manipulation, “since the more it is possible to bring this living machine nearer perfection, the more will be the labours we can demand of it and the service with which it can recompense us.”35 Spaniards, however, were also mindful that they had introduced the horse to the Philippines and that its present state and condition must be the result of local factors acting upon it that had ultimately led to the generation of a new breed, one that was considered “inappropriate for the service that this animal has been called upon to lend to humanity.”36 In tropical regions like the Philippines, diminutiveness in form was one of the results to be observed in the animal kingdom: “Weakness, decadence and smallness” increased the higher one ascended the ladder of life, just as “vigour, luxuriance and exuberance” multiplied the lower one descended toward the vegetable kingdom. That was why native “ruminants, pachyderms and solipeds yield much in terms of size, weight, strength and gracefulness, to those from temperate zones.”37 But if the animal had been changed once, then it could be changed back again. And while the exact particulars of how this transformation was to be realized remained “mysterious” until the mechanism of hereditary was properly understood, scientific breeding or zootechny seemed to confer upon humanity at least a certain control over the forces of nature.38 In the event, the special military commission recommended a comprehensive breeding scheme of state-stocked stud farms and an acclimatization center close to Manila.

The Nature of Science This discussion of colonial scientific endeavors in the archipelago is by no means all-encompassing. Mention could also be made of developments in medicine, pharmacopoeia, agriculture, mining,  | Greg Bankoff

hydrology, and architecture.39 What it does suggest, however, is the extent to which an appreciation of science increasingly infused the formation and operation of government services, the nature of experimentation and debate, the adaptation or invention of instrumentation, and a growing corpus of works across a whole range of disciplines. In some cases, moreover, these accomplishments even merited international recognition, most notably in the case of meteorology. Admittedly such successes were few and far between compared to advances in Western Europe and to a lesser extent North America, but they were not negligible. The argument is not that the Spanish Philippines was a hitherto unacknowledged oasis of research and activity, but neither was it a scientific desert, a culture devoid of the new knowledge circulating in the wider world. And far from being a priest-ridden society mired in superstition, it was often the servants of this religion who were at the forefront of scientific inquiry. It was often, too, this same moribund colonial state that, despite its severe pecuniary constraints, found the money necessary to fund important centers of inquiry such as the Manila Botanical Garden. Yet the Americans apparently found a very different society in 1899 when they imposed their rule upon the archipelago. In part, the explanation for this apparent paradox may lie in the nature of the scientific tradition to be found in Spain and the United States. Both in a sense were colonial sciences but derived from different traditions.40 Notwithstanding the diffusion of scientific ideas of all persuasion throughout the European world, certain schools of thought or certain discourses about nature were more prevalent in some countries than in others. Science in the Hispanic world had been firmly rooted in French cultural traditions since at least the eighteenth century and the establishment of the Bourbon monarchy.41 The persistence of this influence is hardly surprising given the preeminence of French science during the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century (Appel 1980, 292). Quite simply, Paris was where naturalists from all over the world came to study. French colonies like Algeria were at the forefront of scientific endeavors, and French authority carried over into the Iberian colonial context as well (Osborne 1984; Grove 1995). Spanish science in the colonies, however, did not survive The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science | 

the transition to modernity well, neither as a model nor in knowledge production (Pimentel 2000). As Spanish power waned, it fell increasingly under foreign influence and failed to develop a firm scientific, technological, or industrial base of its own (Elena and Ordóñez 2000, 72). Too little has been written about science in Spain’s colonies, still less on the Iberian nineteenth century, and almost nothing on the Philippines (Cañizares-Esguerra 2005, 64–65; Barrera-Osorio 2006).42 What research there is, however, does point to the dominance of French scientists and publications, as in the case of nineteenth-century Cuba (Pruna 1994, 422). Science in the United States, however, remained within the orbit of Great Britain till well into the twentieth century and did not emerge as a serious contender in its own right until between the World Wars (Basalla 1967, 620). For most of the nineteenth century, American natural science perpetuated a British model of utilitarian natural theology that still explained organic adaptation in terms of divine design. Despite advocating a more interpretative geography that stressed the interdependence of all nature, seminal figures such as Matthew Maury and Arnold Guyot firmly maintained the harmonious operation of natural law.43 The publication of On the Origin of Species, with its emphasis on random selection, challenged and eventually eclipsed this notion of divine intention but not for many decades. A heady mixture of neo-Lamarckism and neo-Darwinism, heavily laced with notions of the frontier as promoting American values, gave rise to an increasingly environmentally deterministic view of nature and people, one that was expressed in works such as Albert Brigham’s (1903) Geographic Influences in American History and Ellen Semple’s (1903) American History and Its Geographical Condition.44 With these models in mind, the newly arrived American colonial bureaucrats and scientists turned their gaze upon the Philippines. What they saw only seemed to confirm their belief in the superiority of Anglo-American culture and the corresponding degeneracy of all things local whether Filipino or Spanish: an ineffective forestry service understaffed and devoid of scientific inquiry; a chaotic botanical taxonomic system that had only recently come to grips with the archipelago’s flora after more than three centuries of neglect; and an animal breeding pro | Greg Bankoff

gram whose diminutive equine mounts were testament enough to its utter failure.45 If the metrological service was of a different order, then its adherents, the priests of the Manila Observatory, were quickly inducted into the nascent American colonial administration and claimed as its own. That this was not a fair assessment of colonial science in the Spanish Philippines was actually not the issue. Americans had triumphed so conclusively over the forces pitted against them that the whole archipelago and everything in it now appeared in the light of primitive exhibits to be shown off at World Fairs or specimens to be tested within what Warwick Anderson has called “an incipient colonial laboratory” (1995, 654).46 The Spanish-American War and the latter’s takeover of the Philippines in 1899 constituted not only the collision of two imperial systems, one in decline and the other on the ascendancy, but also the encounter of two colonial natural sciences, one influenced primarily by France and the other by Britain. The so-called “Darwinian revolution” also heralded the gradual eclipse of the former’s preeminence in the natural sciences and its replacement by the latter as the center of research and innovation. English and American authorities become progressively less enthusiastic about French theories. The late nineteenth century is increasingly (and somewhat erroneously) cast as a period of decline in French science: An “aura of failure hangs over Lamarck as a dark cloud” (Sheets-Johnstone 1982, 446–47).47 This, in fact, was not the case: The notion of natural selection took many decades to be fully accepted and was not so much a revolution as an incorporation into highly developed, often French, ideas; according to his notebooks, Darwin himself continued to consider that the inheritance of acquired characteristics accounted for at least some adaptation in organisms; and the evidence of Lamarckism remained very much a feature of alternative views of evolution propounded by philosophers such as Herbert Spencer within the tradition of British natural science (Freeman 1974; Grinnell 1985, 53–54; Hodge 2005). All this leads Richard Somerset to conclude that the demise of French natural science is “a myth whose origin can be attributed to the domination of the field by Anglo-Saxon historians who have tended to write Darwin’s French precursors out of their histories” (2000, 2). In the Philippines, The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science | 

the Americans found only a faint echo of a scientific tradition they already held in low esteem, and it was this disdain that gave birth to a new widely held leyenda negra.

Notes 1. Ironically, major support for the black legend came from the misuse by Spain’s enemies of published self-criticism written by Spaniards themselves, such as Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, published in 1552. 2. See Morris, Our Island Empire; Brown, The New Era in the Philippines; Atkinson, The Philippine Islands; Crow, America and the Philippines; Worcester, The Philippines Past and Present; and Elliot, The Philippines to the End of the Military Regime. 3. Kagan, “Precott’s Paradigm,” 430. See also Lea, “The Decadence of Spain”; and Hamilton, “The Decline of Spain.” 4. See Anderson, “Immunities of Empire”; and Curtin, Death by Migration, 87–90. 5. See Anderson, “Disease, Race and Empire”; Harrison, “The Tender Frame of Man”; and Curtin, Disease and Empire. 6. See Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate; Ly-Tio-Fane, “A Reconnaissance of Tropical Resources,” 335–37; Lever, They Dined on Eland, 1–9; and Corsi, “Before Darwin,” 7. As Lovejoy points out, Buffon continued to maintain the somewhat contradictory position that species remain unalterable despite such factors. 8. Considerable debate surrounds whether Buffon should be cast as a precursor of Lamarck, as he was no believer in organic transmutation. See Eddy, “Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle History?” 9. See Mayr, “Lamarck Revisited”; Simpson, “The Concept of Progress in Organic Evolution”; Sheets-Johnstone, “Why Lamarck Did Not Discover the Principle of Natural Selection”; and Corsi, The Age of Lamarck Evolutionary Theories in France. 10. Cuvier propagated the view that all animals were endowed with a biology appropriate to survive and reproduce in a given environment. Geoffroy, on the other hand, believed that the various parts in different animals were “essentially” the same, though they might have different shapes and be employed for different purposes. See Appel, The CuvierGeoffroy Debate, 41–104.

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11. See Freeman, “The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer,” 213; and Grinnel, “The Rise and Fall of Darwin’s Second Theory,” 51–54. Grinnell, however, argues that Darwin later somewhat revised his initial derogatory assessment of Lamarck’s theories. 12. See MacLeod and Lewis, Disease, Medicine, and Empire; Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men; Grove, Green Imperialism; Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; Miller and Reill, Visions of Empire; Harrison, Climates and Constitutions; Drayton, Nature’s Government; Schiebinger and Swan, Colonial Botany; Boomgaard, “The Making and Unmaking of Tropical Science”; and Kumar, Science and the Raj. On Spanish colonial science, see Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature. 13. Until the abolition of the galleon trade in 1815, international commerce and communications with the Philippines were limited to two ships each year between Manila and Acapulco. That is, news, goods, and personnel had first to cross the Atlantic to Vera Cruz on the Caribbean coast, and travel overland via Mexico City to the Pacific, before taking ship for the Philippines. 14. Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature. 15. See Legazpi, “Letter to Felipe II,” 242; Mirandaola, “Letter to Felipe II,” 225; and San Nicolas, Jesús, and Concepción, “General History of the Discalced Augustinian Fathers,” 197, 227. Dipterocarp forests accounted for 75 percent of all trees, molave for 10 percent, mountain varieties for 8 percent, pine for 5 percent, and mangrove for 2 percent. These proportions are based on the forest surveys carried out by Harry Whitford in 1910, who notes the “more or less complete destruction of the original forest” with respect to molave, how mangrove in thickly populated districts “has been reduced to such an extent as to render it valueless for anything except firewood,” and how many mountain areas “have already been cleared of their forests by caiñgin (kaiñgin) makers and are now covered in grass” (The Forests of the Philippines, 17, 26, 28, 29, 31). 16. Greg Bankoff, “Almost an Embarrassment of Riches.” 17. Nano, “Brief History of Forestry in the Philippines,” 13. The state forest school was founded at Villaviciosa de Odon and later moved to the Escorial near Madrid in 1869 by graduates trained at Tharandt in Germany. The Cuerpo de Montes, the Spanish state forestry department, was created in 1853. On comparisons of colonial forestry practice in Southeast Asia, see Potter, “Forests versus Agriculture”; and Vandergeest and Peluso, “Empires of Forestry.” 18. A comparison of staff to forest showed that the equivalent service on Java in the Netherlands East Indies had three times more personnel.

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See Jordana y Morera, Estudio Forestal Acerca de la India Inglesa, 286. On the fiscal lens of state forestry, see Scott, Seeing Like a State, 11–22. 19. See Annual Report of the Director of Forestry, 1932, 732–37; and Bankoff, “One Island Too Many.” 20. For a fuller discussion of the extent of deforestation, see Bankoff, “Almost an Embarrassment of Riches”; and Bankoff, “One Island Too Many.” 21. Among the principal works of Sebastian Vidal y Soler not already referred to are Sinopsis de Familias y Géneros de Plantas Leñosas de Filipinas (1883); Phanerogamae Cumingianae Philippinarum (1885); and Revisión de Plantas Vasculares Filipinas (1886). (See Works Cited section immediately following Notes for complete publication information.) 22. Nano, “Brief History,” 16. 23. Fernández-Villar, Flora de Filipinas. Ignacio de Mercado, born in Parañaque in 1648 to a Tagalog mother and a Spanish father, can be considered the first indigenous scientist of the Philippines. 24. This discussion of the contribution to botany by religious naturalists relies on Merrill, Botanical Works, 8–17. 25. Merrill, Botanical Works, 7, 30–33. 26. On the history of the Manila Observatory, see Saderro Massó, Historia del Observatorio de Manila; Repetti, The Manila Observatory; Hennessey, “The Manila Observatory”; and Schummacher, “One Hundred Years of Jesuit Science.” 27. The initial rail line between, predictably, Manila, the capital, and Cavite, the main port and naval arsenal, was opened on December 1, 1872, in the same year as the first major nationalist uprising, the Cavite Mutiny. 28. Solá, Meteorological Service of the Philippine Islands, 8–10, 12–16. 29. Meteorological observations were also exchanged with the Jesuit observatory of Zikawei near Shanghai and with Batavia (Jakarta). See Hidalgo, El P. Federico Faura, 42. 30. Solá, Meteorological Service, 19–23, 27–28. 31. On meteorology, see Algué, Baguios o Ciclones Filipinos; Algué, El Baguio de Leyte y Samar; andAlgué, Las nubes en el Archipiélago Filipino. On seismology, see Saderra Masó, La Seismología en Filipinas; and Coronas, La Actividad Séismica en el Archipiélago Filipino. On volcanism, see Abella y Casariego, Terremotos de Nueva Vizcaya; Abella y Casariego, El Mayon o Volcán de Albay; and Abella y Casariego, Terremotos Experimentados en la Isla de Luzón.

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32. Solá, Meteorological Service, 21; Algué, Las nubes en el Archipiélago Filipino. On the life and works of Father Algué, see Hidalgo, El P. José Algué Científico. 33. On the history of the horse in the Philippines, see Bankoff, “Colonizing New Lands”; and Bankoff, “Adapting to a New Environment.” 34. “Memoria Preliminar para la Ejecución del Proyecto.” 35. Ibid. 36. “Expediente sobre la Ejecución del Proyecto.” 37. Gonzaléz y Martín, Filipinas y Sus Habitantes, 21–23. 38. “Expediente sobre la Ejecución del Proyecto.” 39. For a general overview of science during the Spanish period, see Rodriguez, “Brief Observations on Science in the Philippines.” Apart from the Escuela de Botánica y Agricultura, a nautical school (Escuela de Náutica) and a school of medicine and pharmaceutics (Escuela de Medicina y Farmacia) were also established, in 1820 and 1875 respectively. On the nature of the discussions at the time, see in particular the Boletín Oficial Agrícola, published by the Agricultural Service (Ingenieros y Ayudantes del Servicio Agronómico) between 1893 and 1897; the Boletin de Medicina de Manila, which first appeared in 1886; and the monthly La Correspondia Médica de Filipinas, first available in 1893. A hydrographic commission also began charting the archipelago’s coastal waters in 1834. On architecture, see Bankoff, “Fire and Quake in the Construction of Old Manila.” 40. See Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science.” 41. See Urteaga, La Tierra Esquilmada, 14–36; and Lafuente, “Enlightenment in an Imperial Context.” One of the most influential “French” texts of natural history in eighteenth century Spain was, ironically, written by an Irishman, William Bowles (1705–1780), who studied science in Paris. See Bowles, Introducción á la Historia Natural. 42. An example of how little the Philippines figure in any discussion of scientific endeavor is illustrated by Elena and Ordóñez, “Science, Technology, and the Spanish Colonial Experience,” 75–77. On a reassessment of the Philippines and the Spanish nineteenth-century empire, see Morillo-Alicea, “Uncharted Landscapes of ‘Latin America.’ ” For a reassessment of the Spanish Empire in general, see Fradera, Colonias para Después de un Imperio. 43. See Livingstone, “Natural Theology and Neo-Lamarckism”; and Livingstone, “The History of Science and the History of Geography.” 44. Frederick Jackson Turner accounted for the unique qualities of American history as a social and political response by its people to its particular geography. For the influence of the Turner thesis on

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American geography, see Block, “Frederick Jackson Turner and American Geography.” 45. This view is ably detailed in the case of health and hygiene in Anderson, Colonial Pathologies. 46. See also Yengoyan, “Culture, Ideology and World’s Fairs”; Vergara, Displaying Filipinos Photography, 111–50; and Anderson, Colonial Pathologies. 47. See also Crosland, “The History of French Science,” 162; Anderson, “Immunities of Empire,” 101; and Corsi, “Before Darwin.”

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———. 1996b. “Immunities of Empire: Race, Disease, and the New Tropical Medicine, 1900–1920.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70:94–118. ———. 2006. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press. Annual Report of the Director of Forestry, 1932. 1933. Manila: Bureau of Printing. Appel, Tony. 1980. “Henri de Blainville and the Animal Series: A Nineteenth Century Chain of Being.” Journal of the History of Biology 13 (2): 291–319. ———. 1987. The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades Before Darwin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arnold, David, ed. 1996. Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500–1930. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Atkinson, Fred. 1906. The Philippine Islands. Boston: Ginn & Co. Bankoff, Greg. 2001. “A Question of Breeding: Zootechny and Colonial Attitudes Towards the Tropical Environment in the Late NineteenthCentury Philippines.” Journal of Asian Studies 60 (2): 419–23. ———. 2004. “Bestia Incognita: The Horse and Its History in the Philippines 1880–1930.” Anthrozoös 17 (1): 9–14. ———. 2006. “Winds of Colonisation: The Meteorological Contours of Spain’s Imperium in the Pacific, 1521–1898.” Environment and History 12 (1): 65–88. ———. 2007a. “Adapting to a New Environment: The Philippine Horse.” In Breeds of Empire: The “Invention” of the Horse in Maritime Southeast Asia and Southern Africa, 1500–1950, edited by Greg Bankoff and Sandra Swart, 105–21. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press. ———. 2007b. “Almost an Embarrassment of Riches: Changing Attitudes to the Forests in the Spanish Philippines.” In A History of Natural Resources in Asia: The Wealth of Nature, edited by Greg Bankoff and Peter Boomgaard, 103–22. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. ———. 2007c. “Colonizing New Lands: Horses in the Philippines.” In Breeds of Empire: The “Invention” of the Horse in Maritime Southeast Asia and Southern Africa, 1500–1950, edited by Greg Bankoff and Sandra Swart, 85–103. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press. ———. 2007d. “Fire and Quake in the Construction of Old Manila.” Medieval History Journal 10 (1–2): 411–27. ———. 2007e. “One Island Too Many: Reappraising the Extent of Deforestation in the Philippines Prior to 1946.” Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2): 314–34.

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Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. 2006. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press. Basalla, George. 1967. “The Spread of Western Science.” Science 156 (3775): 613–17. Block, Robert. 1980. “Frederick Jackson Turner and American Geography.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70:31–42. Boomgaard, Peter. 2006. “The Making and Unmaking of Tropical Science: Dutch Research on Indonesia, 1600–2000.” Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 162 (2–3): 191–217. Bowler, Peter. 1973. “Bonnet and Buffon: Theories of Generation and the Problem of Species.” Journal of the History of Biology 6 (2): 259–81. Bowles, William. 1775. Introducción á la Historia Natural y á la Geografía Física de España. Madrid: Francisco Manuel. Brigham, Albert. 1903. Geographic Influences in American History. New York: Chautauqua Press. Brown, Arthur. 1903. The New Era in the Philippines. New York: F. H. Revell. Burkhardt, Richard. 1972. “The Inspiration of Lamarck’s Belief in Evolution.” Journal of the History of Biology 5 (2): 419–20. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. 2005. “Iberian Colonial Science.” Isis 96 (1): 64–70. Cohn, Bernard. 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coronas, José. 1899. La Actividad Séismica en el Archipiélago Filipino durante el Año 1897. Manila: Tipolitografía del Observatorio. Corsi, Pietro. 1988. The Age of Lamarck Evolutionary Theories in France 1790–1830. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2005. “Before Darwin: Transformist Concepts in European Natural History.” Journal of the History of Biology 38:67–83. Crosland, Maurice. 1973. “The History of French Science: Recent Publications and Perspectives.” French Historical Studies 8 (1): 157–71. Crow, Carl. 1914. America and the Philippines. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page. Curtin, Philip. 1989. Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounters with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: Murray. Del Pilar, Marcelo. 1889. La Frailocracia en Filipinas. Barcelona: Imprenta Iberia de Francisco. Drayton, Richard. 2000. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press. Eddy, John. 1994. “Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle History? A Critique of Recent Interpretations.” Isis 85:644–61. Elena, Alberto, and Javier Ordóñez. 2000. “Science, Technology, and the Spanish Colonial Experience in the Nineteenth Century.” Osiris 15 (2): 70–82. Elliot, Charles. 1917. The Philippines to the End of the Military Regime: America Overseas. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Endersby, Jim. 2003. “Escaping Darwin’s Shadow.” Journal of the History of Biology 36:385–405. “Expediente sobre la Ejecución del Proyecto de Renovación y Mejora de la Cría Caballar de Este Archipiélago.” 1881. Manila: Philippine National Archive, Raza de Caballería de Filipinas, Formento y Mejora. Raza de Caballería. Fernández-Villar, Celestino. 1877–83. Flora de Filipinas, por el P. Fr. Manuel Blanco . . . Adicionada con el Manuscrito Inéditó del P. Fr. Ignacio Mercado, las Obras del P. Fr. Antonio Llanos, y de un Apéndice con Todas Las Nuevas Investigaciones Botáncias Referentes al Archipiélago Filipino. Manila: Establecimiento Tipo-litográfico de Plana y Compañía. Fradera, Josep. 2005. Colonias para Después de un Imperio. Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra. Freeman, Derek. 1974. “The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.” Current Anthropology 15 (3): 211–37. Gonzaléz y Martín, R. 1896. Filipinas y Sus Habitantes. Béjar: Establecimiento Tipográfico de la Viuda de Aguilar. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1991. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grinnell, George. 1985. “The Rise and Fall of Darwin’s Second Theory.” Journal of the History of Biology 18 (1): 51–70. Grove, Richard. 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Lever, Christopher. 1992. They Dined on Eland: The Story of the Acclimatisation Societies. London: Quiller Press. Livingstone, David. 1984a. “Natural Theology and Neo-Lamarckism: The Changing Context of Nineteenth-century Geography in the United States and Great Britain.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74 (1): 9–28. ———. 1984b. “The History of Science and the History of Geography: Interactions and Implications.” History of Science 22 (3): 274–78. ———. 1987. “Human Acclimatization: Perspectives on a Contested Field of Inquiry in Science, Medicine and Geography.” History of Science 25 (4): 384–85. ———. 1999. “Tropical Climate and Moral Hygiene: The Anatomy of a Victorian Debate.” British Journal for the History of Science 32:93–110. Llana, James. 2000. “Natural History and the Encyclopédie.” Journal of the History of Biology 33:1–25. Lovejoy, Arthur. 1968. “Buffon and the Problem of Species.” In Forerunners of Darwin: 1745–1859, edited by Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William Straus, 84–113. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ly-Tio-Fane, Madeleine. 1991. “A Reconnaissance of Tropical Resources during Revolutionary Years: The Role of the Paris Museum d’Histoire Naturelle.” Archives of Natural History 18 (3): 332–62. MacLeod, Roy, and Milton Lewis, eds. 1988. Disease, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion. London: Routledge. Mayr, Ernst. 1972. “Lamarck Revisited.” Journal of the History of Biology 5 (1): 55–94. “Memoria Preliminar para la Ejecución del Proyecto de Renovación y Mejora de la Cría Caballar de Este Archipiélago.” 1883. Manila: Philippine National Archive, Raza de Caballería de Filipinas, Formento y Mejora. Raza de Caballería. Merrill, Elmer. 1903. Botanical Works in the Philippines. Bulletin no. 4. Manila: Department of the Interior, Bureau of Agriculture. Miller, David, and Peter Reill, eds. 1996. Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representation of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mirandaola, Andrés de. 1903–9. “Letter to Felipe II, 8 January, 1574.” In The Philippine Islands, 1493–1803, vol. 3, edited by Emma Blair and Alexander Robertson, 223–29. Cleveland, OH: A. H. Clark. Morillo-Alicea, Javier. 2005. “Uncharted Landscapes of ‘Latin America’: The Philippines in the Spanish Imperial Archipelago.” In Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends, edited by Christopher

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Schmidt-Nowara and John Nieto-Phillips, 25–53. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Morris, Charles. 1899. Our Island Empire: A Hand-book of Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippine Islands. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott. Nano, Jose. 1953. “Brief History of Forestry in the Philippines.” Philippine Journal of Forestry 8 (1–4): 9–128. Osborne, Michael. 1984. Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pagden, Anthony. 1993. European Encounters with the New World from Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pimentel, Juan. 2000. “The Iberian Vision: Science and Empire in the Framework of a Universal Monarchy, 1500–1800.” Osiris 15 (2): 17–30. Potter, Lesley. 2003. “Forests versus Agriculture: Colonial Forest Services, Environmental Ideas and the Regulations of Land-use Change in Southeast Asia.” In The Political Ecology of Tropical Forests in Southeast Asia: Historical Perspectives, edited by Lye Tuck-Po, Wil de Jong, and Abe Ken-ichi, 29–71. Kyoto: Kyoto University Press. Pruna, Pedro. 1994. “National Science in a Colonial Context the Royal Academy of Sciences of Havana, 1861–1898.” Isis 85 (3): 412–26. Repetti, William. 1948. The Manila Observatory. Washington, DC. Reyes y Florentino, Isabelo de los. 1887. Filipinas. Manila: J. A. Ramos. Rigotti, Francesca. 1986. “Biology and Society in the Age of Enlightenment.” Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (2): 215–33. Rodriguez, Eulogio. 1936. “Brief Observations on Science in the Philippines in the Pre-American Era.” In Encyclopedia of the Philippines, vol. 7, edited by Zoilo M. Galand, 52–107. Manila: P. Vera & Sons. Saderra Masó, Miguel. 1895. La Seismología en Filipinas Datos para el Estudio de Terremotos del Archipiélago Filipino. Manila: Establecimiento Tipo-Litográfico de Ramírez. ———. 1915. Historia del Observatorio de Manila, 1865–1915. Manila: McCullough. San Nicolas, Andrés de, Luis de Jesús, and Juan de la Concepción. 1903–9. “General History of the Discalced Augustinian Fathers, 1624.” In The Philippine Islands, 1493–1803, vol. 21, edited by Emma Blair and Alexander Robertson, 111–318. Cleveland, OH: A. H. Clark. Schiebinger, Londa, and Claudia Swan, eds. 2005. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schummacher, John. 1965. “One Hundred Years of Jesuit Science, 1865–1965.” Philippine Studies 13:258–86.

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Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Semple, Ellen. 1903. American History and Its Geographic Conditions. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 1982. “Why Lamarck Did Not Discover the Principle of Natural Selection.” Journal of the History of Biology 15 (3): 443–65. Simpson, George. 1974. “The Concept of Progress in Organic Evolution.” Social Research 41 (1): 28–51. Sloan, Philip. 1976. “The Buffon-Linnaeus Controversy.” Isis 67 (3): 356–75. Solá, Marcial. 1903. Meteorological Service of the Philippine Islands: Report of Its Establishment and Development under the Spanish Government and Its Reorganisation under the Government of the United States. Manila: Bureau of Printing. Somerset, Richard. 2000. “Transformism, Evolution, and Romanticism.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 29 (1–2): 1–20. Thomas, Keith. 1983. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800. London: Allen and Unwin. Urteaga, Luis. 1987. La Tierra Esquilmada Las Ideas sobre la Conservación de la Naturleza en la Cultura Española del Siglo XVIII. Madrid: Ediciones del Serbal y Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Vandergeest, Peter, and Nancy Peluso. 2006. “Empires of Forestry: Professional Forestry and State Power in Southeast Asia, Parts 1 and 2.” Environment and History 12 (1): 31–64 and (4): 359–93. Vergara, Benito. 1995. Displaying Filipinos Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th Century Philippines. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Vidal y Soler, Sebastián. 1874. Memoria Sobre el Ramo de Montes en las Islas Filipinas. Madrid: Imprenta, Estereotipia y Galvanoplastia de Aribau. ———. 1875. Memoria Catalogo de la Colección de Productos Forestales Presentada por la Inspección General de Montes de Filipinas en al Exposición Universal de Filadelfia. Manila: Imprenta de la Revista Mercantil de J. Loyzaga. ———. 1883. Sinopsis de Familias y Géneros de Plantas Leñosas de Filipinas, Introducción á la Flora Forestal del Archipiélago Filipino. Manila: Chofré. ———. 1885. Phanerogamae Cumingianae Philippinarum: ó, Índice Numèrico y Catálogo Sistemático de las Plantas Fanerogamas Coleccionadas

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en Filipinas por Hugh Cuming, con Características de Algunas Especies no Descritas y del Género Cumingia (Malváceas). Manila: Establecimiento Tipo-litográfico de M. Pérez Hijo. ———. 1886. Revisión de Plantas Vasculares Filipinas, Memoria Elevada al Excmo. Sr. Ministro de Ultramar. Manila: Establecimiento Tipolitográfico de M. Pérez Hijo. Whitford, Henry. 1911. The Forests of the Philippines, Parts 1 and 2. Manila: Bureau of Printing. Worcester, Dean. 1914. The Philippines Past and Present. 2 vols. London: Mills & Boon. Yengoyan, Aram. 1994. “Culture, Ideology and World’s Fairs: Colonizer and Colonized in Comparative Perspective.” In Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World, edited by Robert Rydell and Nancy Gwinn, 62–83. Amsterdam: Free University Press.

 | Greg Bankoff

4 Aerial Photography and Colonial Discourse on the Agricultural Crisis in Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930–1945 David Biggs

From 1880 to 1930, the French colonial government in Indochina supported rapid canalization and settlement in the recently cleared forests and marshes of the Mekong Delta (see map 4.1). The region’s population increased fourfold in that era to more than four million persons, and the area of land put under cultivation expanded from roughly four hundred thousand hectares, consisting mostly of small landholdings along alluvial banks bordering creeks and rivers, to more than two million hectares covering much of the vast floodplains.1 Despite this rapid reclamation campaign, when the global economic depression hit in September 1930, a free fall in rice export prices combined with several floods to produce what French economist Paul Bernard (1934, 123–24) called an “agricultural crisis,” a combination of economic, political, and ecological factors that left more than three million tenant farmers as well as many landowners bankrupt. The near-total confiscation of most rice stocks by plantation owners, needed to repay debts, triggered many local revolts. These peasant revolts in the Mekong Delta helped fuel a broader anticolonial agenda spearheaded by newly formed local cells of the Indochinese Communist Party. In response to this complex crisis, French civil servants, agricultural engineers, and social scientists spent much of the 1930s formulating new approaches to the agricultural crisis in Cochin China. Of all the tools 109

used in their analyses, none were more effective in shaping public opinions and proposed solutions than aerial photography. In particular, aerial photographs comparing the abandoned terrain in the Mekong Delta to densely parceled landscapes in the Red River delta (see fig. 4.1) were very effective in shaping colonial policies. Human geographers such as Pierre Gourou (Les paysans du Delta Tonkinois [1936]) gained national and international notoriety for their detailed studies of traditional patterns of soil and water management, drawing extensively from aerial photography. Besides the catalyzing effect that this new “view over the village hedge” offered in an era of populist and reformist support for family farming, aerial photographs also were instrumental in hardening late colonial perceptions of traditional agriculture and the Tonkinese peasant in colonial research. Gourou’s “Tonkinese peasant” was in part a fabrication of Indochinese Orientalism, backed up with new evidence in the form of aerial photographs showing densely parceled, irrigated landscapes subject to the same Orientalist lens. This photo-aided imagination of northern peasants as heroic or superhuman ultimately played into Vichy-era and post-1945 programs to resettle thousands of northern farmers, from what was in many places a famine-stricken landscape, into the troubled wastelands of the Mekong Delta. This essay addresses the role that aerial photography, in the hands of human geographers and other social scientists, played in the formation of two colonial ideals that had significant physical consequences for mass resettlement and infrastructure development in the Mekong Delta in the 1940s and throughout both Indochina Wars. Aerial photographs, as interpreted by Gourou and others, contributed to the formation of two dominant ways of “reading” nature in these intensely complex, human-altered hydraulic environments. First, comparisons of aerial photography between the two river deltas produced what I consider to be an Orientalist reading of human nature in comparing the ways northern and southern farmers managed water in two ecologically distinct river deltas. Gourou and many others were complicit in creating a myth that the genius of the intricate landscapes in the Red River delta was resident within northern peasants and that, in contrast, failure in reclaiming the Mekong Delta was due to the inherent “laziness” of southern farmers.  | David Biggs

Map 4.1: The Red River and Mekong River Deltas in Vietnam.

The second “reading” that aerial photographs fostered was an equally potent misreading of built landscapes where social scientists assumed that the cellular system of locally managed dikes in the north could be reproduced with the same effects in the south (regardless of very different hydraulic conditions in these two environments). Aerial photographs combined with ethnographic studies in the north helped produce an idealized unit for government-sponsored development and resettlement: what scientists and engineers called a casier, an encasement of land and people within a surrounding flood dike. While early attempts to build such settlements in 1944 were failures, the idea of controlling both the environment and the community within such a social and environmental unit continued to animate successive resettlement attempts including such projects as agrovilles and strategic hamlets in the 1950s and 1960s, even several postwar collectivization schemes in the late 1970s.

Aerial Photography and French Geography in Indochina Aerial photography, meaning oblique photos taken at a near-vertical angle of the ground below, were not common in Indochina until after World War I. The proliferation of surplus aircraft and cameras, combined with the development of aerial photography in the liberated areas of France, led to a gradual adoption of techniques and equipment in French colonies. Given the difficulties in accurately determining altitude in hilly areas, the Service géographique de l’Indochine (SGI) first developed photo-aided property surveys in the two river deltas where elevation varied only by several meters and where most of the valuable farmland was located. On January 1, 1926, SGI was reorganized directly under the governor-general, and both the northern Hanoi office and the southern Saigon office commenced a new 1/20,000 scale topographic survey using aerial photography in the two river deltas (Gouvernement générale 1931, 12–14). SGI did not operate the flights, the cameras, or the subsequent rectification of the photographs. The Aeronautic Service, a branch of the colonial military service, had conducted this photography work  | David Biggs

since 1922 within its larger mission to maintain aerial surveillance. In what was very likely an entrepreneurial move for the fledgling air squadron, pilots, photographers, and technicians previously employed during World War I sought to continue and expand the need for their services abroad. The funds and oversight of the photography mission, however, came directly from SGI. Thus, cartographers and the successive generation of human geographers such as Gourou were not working from military aerial reconnaissance photographs but instead poring over well-cataloged and relatively complete collections of photographs of both delta territories produced by a carefully articulated program in place by 1926 (Gouvernement générale 1922, 69). Understanding why Gourou and others placed such primary importance on the local genius of individual farmers to alter their landscape is not possible without also mentioning the legacy of the French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blanche, who taught at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1898 to 1918 and opposed then-prevalent ideas of environmental determinism. Vidal de la Blanche fostered a young generation of social scientists and geographers who considered the importance of region and locality in their analyses of landscape change and economic development. Gourou, born in Tunisia, educated in Paris, and then assigned a teaching post at the Lycée Albert Sarraut in Hanoi in 1927, readily applied Vidal de la Blanche’s ideas to the intensely human-influenced water landscapes he encountered in the Red River delta.2 By combining this newly available medium—aerial photographs—with a new approach to understanding the role of human relationships in nature, Gourou and others commenced a new reading of delta people and delta environments in Indochina.

Imaging and Imagining “Heroic” Tonkinese Peasants The bird’s-eye view afforded by aerial photos shot over Tonkin shifted colonial knowledge of the hydraulic landscape by showing the interior spaces of villages and fields to be densely intricate patchworks of fields, orchards, hedgerows, and homes. The blank spaces on topographic maps were replaced with vibrant grayscale mosaics of fields, dikes, and Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930-1945 | 

Figure 4.1: Casier Landscape. The image above is an aerial photograph of the Red River Delta detailing the “cloisonné” of rice paddy encompassed by individual field dikes and then the taller casier of village dikes described by the thicker black lines in the photograph. At the top of the photo, an island like village is surrounded by trees and hedges and is located on a hill above the floodplain. Gourou studied hundreds of aerial photos generated by the colonial air force an the grouped villages into differnent types depending on their topographic ans spatial configurations. Source: Indochina Military Air Service op cit Plate 36, Pierre Gourou. Les Paysans du Delta Tonkinois.

villages. Engineers and scientists quickly recognized the value of such interior landscapes subdivided into so many cells of dikes and canals, and they used the term casier to describe this case-like landform. An account of the power of aerial photographs to shift colonial scientists’ interpretation of nature and the role of local people is eloquently stated by the geographer J. Y. Claeys, traveling through the Red River delta in 1940: On the ground, even traveling at low speed on the roads, one does not see into the villages; one sees of it the small woods and hedges of high bamboos. The aerial view transforms these screens into plumes of palms planted in crowns tightly around the houses. The plan of the village is extremely variable. . . . Materially, the village is enclosed in its hedge of bamboos as hermetically as in its social rules . . . the greatest punishment that district prefects could inflict at the villages, as a collective punishment, was to make them raze this edge of bamboo. They still inflicted this sanction in the villages active at the time of the disorders of 1932 in the area of Vinh. . . .  The Tonkinese will always remain stubborn movers of earth. They were the ones who raised these dams and dikes that compartmentalize the delta into an infinity of casiers. In these casiers—Vidal de la Blanche too quickly calls them “natural” forgetting the human side in human geography—the bird’s-eye view shows that the Vietnamese agricultural landscape is born of the masses, a characteristic fact. (1940, 45)

Aerial photographs not only redefined the landscape in visual terms, but in the hands of influential geographers they also redefined colonial understanding of the power and potential of local people. Through the medium of aerial photography, this younger generation of colonial observers in Indochina modified older, Orientalist interpretations of the logic behind human-environmental relationships, what Mary Louise Pratt calls transculturation.3 One of the most impressive scenes for these interpretations in the Red River Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930-1945 | 

delta landscape was the endless network of dikes encircling fields and villages that almost every year was menaced by floods. The sight of thousands of farmers working day and night to protect their fields and villages from flooding brought frequent comparisons to masses of laborers constructing the pyramids in Egypt or the temples at Angkor Wat. Each dike was built out of millions of clay blocks, and some were several hundred years old. Women carried smaller blocks in baskets while men carried larger blocks on their backs. Six or seven thousand people might engage in construction or repairs to a dike, especially during the floods.4 This effort was a traditional communal duty, not typically paid or contracted out. Gourou made the important observation that while dikes protected the delta from floods, they also complicated problems of drainage—in effect causing the floods to rise higher. At Hanoi, the Red River rose from its lowest level of 2.8 meters above sea level to 12 meters above sea level during floods. Houses and streets in the city were at about 9 meters above sea level, while the countryside was generally lower. Gourou’s observations aside, most colonial writers in the period contributed wholesale to the expanding myth of the heroic Tonkinese peasant. André Touzet, on a mission from the home office in Paris, described one such scene: One should see these instances of great danger that leave one speechless at the sudden buildup of the flood . . . to size up the fearsome mass of water rushing six or eight meters above the plain, villages, and cities . . . it is necessary to witness the defense against this invading water, to have participated with these armies of courageous peasants who fight from casier to casier, desperately, to save life and possessions. (1934, 239–40)

He praised the genius and solidarity of northern peasants, suggesting even that there were hints of Goethe in their oeuvre but without the assistance of “diabolical sorcers” (241). This portrayal of northern peasants as “heroes,” however, contrasted sharply with colonial interpretations of the troubled landscapes populated with tenant farmers (many of them northern migrants) in  | David Biggs

the Mekong Delta. One observer noted their lack of patience in clearing new lands, noting with frustration how people appeared to move ceaselessly—especially in the areas most affected in the agricultural crisis. They cleared fields one year and then abandoned them the next to cultivate elsewhere: Rather than make an effort, tiny as it may be, they prefer to move in the province or to another, according to the climactic conditions, to put in culture lands possibly abandoned because they are too high or too low. The risks and the expenses that the indigène incurs because of these displacements are as large, if not more, than if he had remained on the plantation working just a little more. (Normandin 1913, 15)

Farmers in the Mekong Delta, thus, were described repeatedly as a kind of opposite personality to their counterparts in the north, never mind that many thousands of these farmers’ families had come just twenty or thirty years before from the north, especially the delta provinces. Administrators and geographers, however, did not only blame the victim in connecting the agricultural crisis to the disposition of southern farmers; they also frequently aimed an accusatory finger at colonial policies. The idea of a densely patterned casier landscape presented by Gourou and others from their studies in the north presented a measure by which to judge the successes and failures of colonial agricultural policies in the south. Provincial administrators and researchers adopted the idea that sustainable crop yields were associated with patterns of smaller landholdings and denser populations. One administrator in Long Xuyên noted that owners of smaller parcels in Mỹ Tho and Vĩnh Long doubled and sometimes tripled the one-ton-per-hectare average yield.5 He contrasted this pastoral ideal with the situation on the large estates, where an image of a verdant, intricate landscape of trees and fields was replaced by a treeless horizon with scattered clumps of “floating rice” growing in immense flooded zones. Houses were built against the banks of a canal or roadway. Workers came in small boats and lived there temporarily during a harvest. If their contracts were not renewed, they demolished the Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930-1945 | 

house and carried the wooden piers to the next destination. Plantation owners failed to encourage tenants to settle permanently: They never settle definitively, and consequently, what good is it to build a garden or plant fruit trees or bamboo from which others would profit? (Fraisse 1942, 140)

Even in defending the tenant farmer in the south, however, such observations failed to recognize the inherent hydraulic and ecological differences between the two river deltas, thus pushing too far the role of human agency in controlling flooding and fertility of soils in the Mekong Delta. The single most influential work published during this period was Pierre Gourou’s (1936) Les paysans du Delta Tonkinois. A meticulous study produced after years of poring over aerial photos and making trips into the delta countryside, Les paysans established Gourou as one of the most influential experts on agriculture and rural life in Indochina. With regard to water management in the Red River delta, Gourou noted that local farmers assumed responsibility for building and maintaining local dikes, noting that there was little need for the state to intervene in local flood prevention or irrigation. Instead, the colonial government in Tonkin had focused on improving commercial navigation and flood protection around Hanoi. The new spatial perspective afforded by aerial photographs allowed Frenchmen such as Gourou a rare glimpse inside the village hedge, and he used this perspective to redefine and interpret village life into categories based upon his grouping of landscape patterns detected in the photos as well as drawings and studies prepared from more traditional, ground-level views. Gourou’s quote below indicates the power that this new technology achieved: In this Petri-like land of humanity, where man created everywhere the landscape such as we see it, the unity of the peasant population is powerful; the natural uniformity of the deltaic country has also played no small part in creating a human unity. Natural uniformity and human unity, by aiding one another,  | David Biggs

have created a remarkably homogeneous land and a nation perfectly coherent. (1936, 14–15)

Gourou’s metaphoric comparison of the Tonkinese delta to the microscopic terrain of bacterial colonies expanding across the flat surface of the petri dish reveals the intense confidence that colonial scientists and administrators felt in their ability to somehow steer these activities of Tonkinese peasants into the considerably more troubled petri dish of the Mekong Delta. The aerial photo offered a visual prop to Gourou’s ideas of unity where individual farmers were reduced to microscopic size and importance in lieu of larger patterns of cultivation.

Casiers in the Mekong Delta While the term casier conveyed the idea of a distinctively native construction in Tonkin, in the south it instead described a more distinctively colonial, industrial construction of protective dikes and canals, mostly produced by the Department of Public Works using advanced machinery and large teams of day laborers. Such constructions were often considered in contrast to historic agricultural landscapes in the Mekong Delta built from the natural ebb and flow of tides through winding creeks and along smaller rivers. Historically, there had been much less need for flood control in the Mekong Delta, especially in the densely populated alluvial regions. It was only after the expansion of several million hectares of land across the depressed western floodplains that flooding became a problem, each year swamping large tracts on the sprawling estates. One of the most persuasive examples of a colonial casier was the Gressier Estate, one of the largest and most successful French companies in Cochin China. In 1903, Rémy Gressier built the largest rice mill in the delta at the center of a plantation covering some fifty-six hundred hectares of land, running fourteen kilometers on either side of a government-funded canal. State-of-the-art sluice gates and mechanical pumps lifted or drained water from a company-maintained primary grid of irrigation canals at one-kilometer intervals. The estate Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930-1945 | 

was a terrestrial “chessboard” in which tenant farmers cultivated rectangular sections of land.6 At each one-kilometer intersection along the main canal bisecting the estate, residential hamlets were established with names that corresponded to their distance from the property boundary: One Thousand Hamlet (Ấp Một Ngàn), Two Thousand Hamlet (Ấp Hai Ngàn), and so on. Eight Thousand Hamlet at the middle of the property was also the location for the company’s central offices, the mill, shipping docks, a maternity ward, a school, and in the 1930s an airstrip. In each hamlet, the company operated general stores that took company scrip paid to tenants for their rice. Gressier even briefly operated an agricultural training school in hopes of turning out future farm managers willing to oversee expansion of the estate.7 A local mill owner living near the old estate recalled life on these large company plantations: Before ’45, there were some big plantations like Cơ Đỏ of Huỳnh Kỳ in the Mekong Delta, Gressier in Xà No, and some other large French plantations in Bạc Lieu. . . . They all had technology—machinery, water pumps, and plows. When landlords lent land to farmers, farmers just bought buffaloes to plough their fields—they did not use any machines. Agriculture developed up to the edge of each rectangular plot [casier]. The plantations developed faster than other land. . . . Gressier cleared several thousand hectares in this region, expanded his plantation, dug canals like a chessboard. . . . All water was conducted through this rectangular scheme, and all canals had dikes. When they wanted to bring water in, they turned the flap gate in; when they wanted to rinse water out, they turned the flap gate out. . . . They turned the flap gates out when the harvest came to clear the water and dry the fields. At low tide water drained out; at high tide [the flap gates blocked it so that] it could not enter. The system was perfect because it covered the whole area. They could decide the field to be dry or wet easily. . . . Very scientific. . . . 8

In hydrologic and agricultural terms, Gressier’s operation was successful, though few planters could afford the machines and labor  | David Biggs

necessary to maintain such a casier on their own. The planter Robert Labaste experimented with water pumps and dikes around his smaller estate, and he built a mill as well. After consecutive years of flooding from 1909 to 1912, however, he sold the pumps to the provincial government and reduced his holdings to his residence.9 During the agricultural crisis surrounding the Great Depression in the 1930s, while numerous researchers and officials criticized the reckless manner in which wealthy landlords and government engineers had developed the system of canals and treeless estates in the Mekong Delta, most continued to emphasize the promise of industrialized agriculture. Gressier’s estate and a few others served as powerful examples of the benefits derived from scientific or corporate management. Instead, observers cited a failure of small landholders to invest in such infrastructure and they noted the tendency of tenants to move around from one estate to another. As criticisms of colonial agriculture increased and comparisons to the relatively sustainable landscapes of the Tonkin delta were rendered more telling through aerial photography, officials, engineers, and social scientists attempted to fuse together what they understood about indigenous patterns of cultivation and water management in a new hybrid form: the resettlement casier. Responding to a wave of violence caused by the dispossession of several thousand ethnic-Khmer villagers from traditionally held lands, the Department of Public Works attempted to construct a grid of canals and encircling dikes in a forested portion of the delta that had yet to be reclaimed. From 1930 to 1933, the government granted five-hectare and ten-hectare plots of land in this area to predominantly Khmer people. Public Works completed the primary grid of canals before the migrants (called petit colons in the newspapers) arrived. Hundreds of families rushed to gain legal title to these plots (on Tri Tôn, Rạch Giá–Hà Tiên, and Ba Thê Canals). Demand far exceeded the available number of lots, requiring use of a lottery system to distribute parcels. The government prohibited settlements within one kilometer of major canal intersections, reserving this space for police, navigational constructions, and commercial leases. In the forested interior zones of these casiers, settlers cleared more than Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930-1945 | 

100,000 hectares in just three years. Deforestation was aided by disastrous fires that incinerated the thick layers of peat soils. Concerned by the increasing dredging costs and the uncontrolled destruction of forests, the government closed the project in 1933.10 Large tracts of stateowned forest beyond the casiers had also been reduced to ashes, and within a few years, many migrants left the casiers because floods and acidity had rendered the land unproductive. The dredging contractor also reduced its operations to 25 percent capacity in 1934 during the worst year of the economic crisis.11 For the rest of the decade, one with intense political shifts in France as well as Indochina, few new projects were attempted. Following the election of a Popular Front government in France in 1936, a number of new measures were passed by the Colonial Council that reflected shifted priorities toward a more popular form of agricultural development in the river deltas. Ironically, it was an empowered group of reformists, including those in recently legalized, Vietnamese political parties, who continued to push the government in Cochin China to establish more resettlement casiers in the Mekong Delta. The Parti Democrate Indochinois, a moderate pro-reform group in Sài Gòn, petitioned the governor to continue building more settlements: This work, the utility and urgency of which are shown by the havoc of the flood, is likely to bring work and an immediate help to the populations of the disaster victims. . . . From the political point of view, this convenient gesture of the authorities, coming to the assistance of populations who have proven their work to be valuable, will have a considerable effect. Regarding social aspects, we know too well how misery is often a bad adviser. He risks being exploited by adversaries of the current regime, partisans of the class struggle and enemies more or less declared against French influence in Indochina. They will be too happy to appeal to the worst instincts, on a ground already prepared by disappointments and deprivations, to destroy the social order.12

The old coalition that had supported government intervention in building dikes and canals—promoters of an industrial hydraulic  | David Biggs

landscape—was now augmented with an unlikely group of new allies—native political activists, left-leaning reformists, and displaced tenants. While the colonial government took considerable steps in addressing the environmental, economic, and political crisis in the Mekong Delta, including laying out ambitious plans to resettle some thirty to fifty thousand tenants and northern migrants into casiers, it did not carry out any significant new works before the collapse of the Third Republic to the Nazis on June 17, 1940.

Fascist Approaches to the Crisis: Casiers Tonkinoises The subsequent establishment of a Vichy government in Indochina resulted in the isolation of reformist French officials and the violent suppression of Vietnamese nationalists. The five years of Vichy administration from 1940 to 1945 are perhaps the least understood in Vietnam’s colonial history with respect to rural conditions and land development. Wartime demands of the Vichy government and its Japanese military rulers caused widespread shortages of basic supplies and fuel. My interviews with elder farmers confirm David Elliott’s description that the countryside “fell into darkness, both figuratively and literally” (2003, 33). The Japanese military controlled access to fuel, fabric, and medicine; and supplies of these basic goods for rural consumption all but disappeared. Within the Vichy government during this period from 1940 to 1945, engineers, scientists, and officials spent much of their time debating ideas about land tenancy and future economic development, especially in the Mekong Delta. It was in this era that earlier readings of nature were refined into more-repressive forms that in the decades following World War II took such forms as agrovilles and strategic hamlets. In the world of colonial offices, limited by the Japanese imperial military and a growing crisis in the countryside, debates emerged between the agricultural engineers (Genie Rurale) and the hydraulic engineers (Public Works) over the causes of the agricultural crisis in the past decade. Agricultural engineers blamed Public Works for its failure to construct waterways and develop the delta in any logical Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930-1945 | 

fashion. In a paper titled “Problème du Riz,” they criticized plantation owners and Public Works engineers for their absence from actual work on the land.13 The large waterways had come to represent ecological folly, as Public Works engineers had not sufficiently planned for the contingent effects of a new waterway on existing lattices of secondary works. The agricultural engineers argued that Public Works used no comprehensive logic in planning their projects but instead succumbed to special interests.14 Irrigation, they argued, should instead fall under local jurisdiction as had happened with agriculture in France and as happened in Tonkin. Neither Public Works nor the dredging contractor could fully appreciate locally complicated questions of an agricultural nature; instead they tended to expand new canals that served the speculative interests of their constituency—powerful landowners and bureaucrats in Sài Gòn.15 Meanwhile, Public Works engineers argued the opposite case in support for more centrally managed projects. They discredited the agricultural engineers on technical grounds and for writing such “pessimistic reports” with catastrophic conclusions such as “All of Cochin China is in danger.”16 Engineer Bigorgne reinterpreted rice statistics to argue that ten-year averages from 1924 to 1934 and 1934–44 had actually increased from 2.0 million tons to 2.9 million tons. Annual outputs also varied due to natural conditions, especially in years of high floods or long droughts. He attributed irrigation problems and abandoned lands in part to local practices in the newly opened regions. Unlike farmers in Tonkin, farmers in the Mekong Delta irrigated fields with rainwater, and they refused to build irrigation and drainage channels in cooperation with their neighbors.17 It was in this moment, in 1943–44, that a struggling Fascist government under Japanese military oversight adopted older ideas of the “heroic Tonkinese” shaped by the “view over the bamboo hedge” offered in aerial photographs and Gourou’s publications to attempt a radical new reworking of nature and society in the Mekong Delta. The Vichy colonial government adopted older land redistribution and family farming campaigns initiated in 1938 by the Popular Front government and reworked them to create a kind of scientifically managed  | David Biggs

settlement grid, the Casier Tonkinoise. The Casier Tonkinoise aimed at relocating peasants directly from crowded northern delta provinces into new experimental settlements not far from the earlier Khmer settlements that had ended with the forest fires and protests in 1938. Public Works engineers (with agricultural engineers conspicuously absent) drafted plans for a Premiere Casier Tonkinoise in 1943.18 The plan combined the “genius” of Tonkinese peasants with an infrastructure that would be constructed with mechanical dredges, maintained with diesel water pumps, and further augmented by the modern technology of French enterprises. This was to serve as a model settlement, a kind of agro-utopian city, ideally attracting locals to copy the same patterns and thus propagate a new kind of landscape and society in the region. In keeping with what Eric Jennings (2001, 17) describes as the “neotraditional” tendencies of Vichy, the Casier Tonkinoise was an attempt to rapidly convert the Mekong Delta landscape into the cellular landscapes of the north, albeit strengthened with the rumbling of new machines. The settlement also featured such progressive features as a maternity ward, a school, and a sports stadium. A workforce consisting of both Tonkinese migrants and local day laborers completed the main canals in the Premiere Casier Tonkinois on August 20, 1943. Tonkinese immigrants and local workers together had dredged a grid of irrigation canals 13 kilometers by 3 kilometers. Seven hundred fifty families (approximately 3,800 people) voluntarily moved there from Thái Bình and Nam Định Provinces. Each family received new clothes, mosquito netting, raincoats and hats, blankets, and matting upon arrival. They received a five-hectare lot upon finishing construction on the main canals. They received a hot meal upon arrival, one month’s supply of food, cooking supplies, farming tools, and a small boat. Besides these personal amenities, the government established a school, an administrative center, a market, and a đình or communal meetinghouse. The sports stadium was to be built later in the year. The casier would then serve as the focal attraction for independent migration.19 Within a year of the project’s completion, farmers had cleared onethird of the land, removing and burning twisted melaleuca stumps from the clay before they planted rice. Unfamiliar with either the tidal Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930-1945 | 

or flooding regimens, they dug deep canals to drain waters outside of protective field dikes. In this way, they avoided flooding, but as the dry season progressed, water levels dropped severely in the spring, and they were unable to bring enough water into the fields. The rice crop then suffered from drought and the buildup of alum. The government spent more than 175,000 piastres on the experimental project in just one year.20 Believing that in one more year this first casier would be self-sufficient, the government started building a second settlement in 1945. This area mirrored the first casier on the opposite bank of the main canal; and immigrants arrived several months later, just as the Vietminh claimed independence for Vienam in August 1945.21 Work on the projects then stopped with the Vichy government’s collapse, postwar struggles with the Vietminh, and the violent restoration of French control in the delta in early 1946.

Conclusion Though French engineers abandoned the casiers as military forces fought for control of the territory, the idea of casiers as a hydraulic and social engineering model persisted well beyond 1945. Public Works engineers had drawn up plans for much larger, future projects in other environmentally and politically contentious regions such as Đồng Tháp (Plain of Reeds), Long Xuyên, Bạc Liêu, and U Minh/ Cà Mau. They believed that these projects would ultimately permit them to “fix the type of water management for the region.”22 To many French, Vietnamese, and, a decade later, Americans, the casiers represented a compromise situation for appeasing peasants and stabilizing agricultural development, while nevertheless continuing to promote the role of industry and government contractors. Like the large canal projects before 1930, settlements continued to require heavy inputs of machinery, engineers, and new outlays for farm equipment. Colonial ideas about landscape and agricultural development in the Mekong Delta, particularly the government’s focus on development of casiers after 1930, were charged with a new idealization of northern peasants and the northern landscape as depicted in Pierre  | David Biggs

Gourou’s influential works and in the thousands of aerial photographs he used to develop his arguments. Photography combined with a new turn in humanist geography to offer new views into what Gourou and others believed was the locus of such landscapes—the mass labor and inherited traditions of human communities that for most of the colonial era had been insulated from colonial modes of agriculture common in the south. Aerial photography alone did not push these ideas, but rather it offered seemingly unassailable proof that the forms of land use in the northern deltas were mostly the result of human action and not the more common view before 1930 that society was instead a product of the delta environment. This subtle turn in understanding human-environment relationships in the 1930s was an important one with far-reaching consequences in successive decades, not only in Indochina and not only at the hands of the French, Vietnamese, or Americans. Humanist geography in the tradition of Vidal de la Blanche’s and later Gourou’s writing supported a belief in the possibility for human communities, either through local genius or aided by machines, to shape a given environment into a desired and sustainable form of agricultural production. While this was an important moment in questioning an earlier faith in the deterministic power of the surrounding environment, these ideas were quickly adopted by technological positivists, Fascists, and Socialists to justify new endeavors that failed for not acknowledging the environmental limits to specific projects. Gourou’s study of Tonkinese peasants supported rather than contradicted the faith of engineers and the colonial government in scientific management. Such studies on settlements were simultaneously popular with anticolonial Vietnamese nationalists and reformers who believed that a radical redistribution of land into small holdings would in turn produce a productive, small-farm landscape populated with an agricultural proletariat. They frequently held up settlement casiers as a peaceful means of relocating the poorest farmers and stemming the growing trend toward violence against plantation owners and the government. Vichy engineers and supporters of a French-backed State of Vietnam in the late 1940s continued to emphasize such projects as the Casier Tonkinoise as evidence of the benefits to be gained by supporting a quasi-colonial, Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930-1945 | 

quasi-independent government—all the while ignoring the catastrophic consequences of the projects in environmental terms. The Mekong Delta was not only bound by legal problems in land ownership or the disproportionate influence of wealthy landowners and Public Works engineers, but it was also still subject to environmental conditions that differed greatly from the northern deltas. What both Vietnamese nationalists and French Fascists ignored in this period was the continuing role that local ecology and the river played in undermining various model developments borrowed from elsewhere. In the process of attempting to construct a “cloisonné landscape” as depicted in the bird’s-eye views of the Tonkinese landscape, engineers and contractors, together with thousands of new immigrants, continued the erasure of older water-management practices and social relationships that had governed land use before the onset of plantation agriculture; meanwhile, they imported a form of landscape often subject to catastrophic flooding. The French government had since 1879 acted to limit and undermine local forms of land ownership and land use by putting traditionally settled areas into a separate legal category from French lands, thus rapidly diminishing the authority of traditional institutions. Reestablishing such patterns of traditional landownership and village culture after fifty years of dualism in Cochin China was an impossible proposal. Instead, land reform hinged on the idea of transplanting a northern landscape into the southern delta. Planners of the Casier Tonkinoise attempted to create a neotraditionalist agricultural landscape, reinventing what they perceived of the traditional agrarian past as seen in Tonkin, although now aided with machinery and the guiding hand of the state. Projects such as the Casier Tonkinoise borrowed their logic from landscapes believed to be both “natural” and “traditional” while they were inevitably subject to the colonial politics of land ownership and the unique water conditions of the Mekong Delta. This essay makes a case for understanding how a specific new technology, aerial photography, empowered not only shifts in notions of the role of humans in the environment but also successive changes in the approaches of colonial governments to land abandonment, rural poverty, and environmental degradation. The specific relation | David Biggs

ship between photographs and such projects as the Casier Tonkinoise or later resettlement efforts such as agrovilles was not causal but indirect and more complex; a general shift in colonial reading of the environment precipitated by the “view over the village hedge” that aerial photographs offered in the 1930s helped fuel the creation of a “neotraditionalist” ideal toward rural development—one that assumed that humans with sufficient labor or technology could sustainably manage their environment and one that capitalized on a somewhat nostalgic longing for a pastoral ideal as represented in the family farm—this was especially true during Vichy rule. With regard to the discussion by Christopher Morris in this volume on whether colonial engineering generally aimed to “get the people out of nature,” evidence from the casiers suggests that late colonial engineering in the 1930s and 1940s attempted to redress earlier displacements by reinserting people into a given environment, but one that could be easily manipulated and watched by the state. Aerial photography provided the “eyes in the sky” for the state, allowing social scientists and officials alike to feel that they could then manage the activities of people who, before 1900 and until 1930, they had worked so hard to displace from their precolonial settlements. Especially in the case of Vietnam, aerial photography and other forms of remote sensing after 1945 became the only reliable source of land-use data as the countryside continued to slip into the hands of the Vietminh and the National Liberation Front after 1960. Despite occasional internal debates in the 1930s and later during American occupation, government officials failed to respond to the fact that the failures to achieve sustainability or realize development in the countryside were not so much failures in choosing one form of settlement or another but instead were the continuing failures to connect to social and economic realities on the ground.

Notes 1. Figures for land areas cultivated in the Mekong Delta can be found in an Indochinese government publication (1930): Dragages de Cochinchine, 20.

Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930-1945 | 

2. For Vidal de la Blanche’s opinions, see Vidal de la Blanche, Principles of Human Geography; and Berdoulay’s account of the Vidalian legacy in “Place, Meaning and Discourse in French Language Geography,” 125–28. For a concise biography of Gourou, see Bruneau, “Pierre Gourou (1900–1999).” 3. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Particularly in chapter 6, “Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of América,” she describes how von Humboldt’s publication of thirty volumes on South America defined European and modern South American ideas of culture and nature in the region. 4. Gourou, Les paysans, 88–89. 5. Xacat, “Riziculture et Hydraulique Agricole,” August 29, 1944, Southern Delegate (TDBCPNV), Vietnam National Archives Ctr 2 (TTLTQG2), H.6/20. 6. Gressier’s total holdings varied with land sales over the years, but his firm’s total holdings may have exceeded 140 square kilometers (14,000 hectares) during the “agricultural crisis.” An exact figure is difficult to assess because land was both sold and purchased at different times. The “casier” of Gressier land, however, was controlled by Gressier and his heirs until 1945. The Gressier Concession was originally formed by the former administrator of Rạch Giá, Guéry, who requested the land in 1899 and then sold it to the Gressier company. Plan Topographique de la Province de Cantho, 1/100.000 (Hanoi: Société Geographique de l’Indochine, 1925). A total of 2,800 hectares (7x4 kilometers) were located on the Cần Thơ side of Xà No, and approximately 2,800 hectares were located in Rạch Giá Province. An unpublished 1963 map of landholdings still claimed by French nationals shows the same area in Cần Thơ and Chương Thiện Provinces was still claimed by Gressier heirs. A 1936 provincial monograph lists the total size of Gressier holdings as 12,049 hectares. Adding 2,800 hectares from Cần Thơ gives a total of 14,849 hectares owned by the Gressier Estate, probably from the early 1900s to 1945. See “Monographie de Rach-Gia,” TTLTQG2, TDBCPNV E.02/71. 7. Brocheux, The Mekong Delta, 133. 8. Ông Diều, interview by author, April 19, 2002.. 9. Services Agricoles et Commerciaux, “Visite Faite Les 1er et 2 Mai à l’Exploitation Rizicole de M. Labaste,” May 29, 1912, TTLTQG2, Fonds Goucoch IB 25/124. 10. Administrator of Rạch Giá to the governor of Cochinchina, December 7, 1932, TTLTQG2, Fonds Goucoch IB23/096 (19). 11. Annual expenditures for dredging from 1930 to 1937 were as follows: 1930: 1.75m piastres; 1931: 1.75m piastres; 1932: 1.4m piastres; 1933:

 | David Biggs

.8m piastres; 1934: .4m piastres; 1935: .4m piastres; 1936: .45m piastres; 1937: .4m piastres. “Dragages dans les canaux de Cochinchine: Concours pour l’exécution de travaux de dragages en Cochinchine pour une période de dix ans,” TTLTQG2, Fonds Goucoch VIA 8/186(31). 12. “Le President du Parti Democrate Indochinois a Monsieur le Gouverneur de la Cochinchine,” April 6, 1938, TTLTQG2, Fonds Goucoch VIA 8/207(21). 13. Hoeffel, “Le Riz,” TTLTQG2, TDBCPNV H6/20, 3. 14. Xacat, “Riziculture et Hydraulique Agricole,” August 29, 1944, TTLTQG2, TDBCPNV H.6/20, 1. 15. Ibid., 7. 16. Bigorgne, “L’Hydraulique Agricole en Cochinchine,” August 25, 1944, TTLTQG2, TDBCPNV H.6/20, 1. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. L’Ingenieur en Chef de la Circonscription d’Hydraulique Agricole et de Navigation de Sud-Indochine (HANSI) a Monsieur le Gouverneur de la Cochinchine, September 1, 1943, TTLTQG2, TDBCPNV BO/3904. 19. Ibid. 20. L’administrateur, chef de la province de Rachgia a Monsieur le Gouverneur de la Cochinchine, January 22, 1945, TTLTQG2, TDBCPNV BO/3904. 21. Budget Generale: Amenagement de la Region Rach-Gia – HaTien, January 25, 1945, TTLTQG2, TDBCPNV BO/3904. 22. Jamme, “Amenagement de la Plaine des Joncs: Avant-Projet,” July 20, 1943, TTLTQG2, TDBCPNV H.62/7, 14.

Works Cited Bernard, Paul. 1934. Le problème économique Indochinois. Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines. Berdoulay, Vincent. 1989. “Place, Meaning and Discourse in French Language Geography.” In The Power of Place, edited by J. Agnew and J. Duncan, 124–39. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Brocheux, Pierre. 1995. The Mekong Delta: Ecology, Economy, and Revolution, 1860–1960. Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Bruneau, Michel. 2000. “Pierre Gourou (1900–1999): Géographie et civilizations.” L’Homme, Observer Nommer Classer 153 (January–March): 7–26. http://lhomme.revues.org/document1.html.

Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930-1945 | 

Claeys, Jean Yves. 1940. “La géographie humaine des pays Annamites basée sur des observations aériennes.” Cahiers de l’Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient 22:41–50. Elliott, David W. P. 2003. The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta 1930–1975. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Fraisse, André. 1942. “Notes de géographie humaine sur la Province de Long-Xuyên.” Extrait du Bulletin de l’Institut Indochinois pour l’Etude de l’Homme (May 26): 137–44. Gourou, Pierre. 1936. Les paysans du Delta Tonkinois: Etude de geographie humaine. Paris: Les Editions d’Art et d’Histoire. Gouvernement Générale de l’Indochine. 1922. Instruction pratique provisoire pour les levés au 1/20.000e avec l”appoint de la photographie aérienne dans les Deltas de la Cochinchine. Hanoi-Haiphong: Imprimerie d’Extrême-Orient. ———. 1930. Dragages de Cochinchine: Canal Rachgia-Hatien. Sài Gòn: [s.n.]. ———. 1931. Service Géographique de l’Indochine: Son organisation, ses methods, ses travaux. Hanoi: Imprimerie d’Extrême-Orient. Jennings, Eric T. 2001. Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Normandin, A. 1913. Travaux d’Hydraulique Agricole à étudier et à entreprendre en Cochinchine. Saigon: Imprimerie Commerciale M. Rey. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Touzet, André. 1934. L’Economie Indochinoise et la grand crise universelle. Paris: Marcel Giard. Vidal de la Blanche, Paul. 1926. Principles of Human Geography. Translated by M. T. Bingham. New York: Henry Holt.

Archival Record Groups Goucoch: Gouvernement de la Cochinchine, the French colonial government at Saigon from 1879 to 1949. Records stored at Vietnam National Archives Center 2, Ho Chi Minh City. Southern Delegation (Toà Dậi Biểu Chính Phủ Nam Việt): The southern regional representative at Saigon (1949–55), affiliated with the State of Vietnam under Emperor Bao Đại. Records stored at Vietnam National Archives Center 2, Ho Chi Minh City.

 | David Biggs

Part 2 Managing the Colonial Environment

5 Wetland Colonies: Louisiana, Guangzhou, Pondicherry, and Senegal

Christopher Morris

Introduction: Seeing Wetlands In 1715 and 1716 Antoine Crozat, director of the French colony of Louisiana, drafted several reports for his investors in France, in which he described the natural environment of the lower Mississippi Valley, detailing its prospects for profitable enterprise and trade. Much of what he observed was just what we would expect of a North American environment. Crozat noted possible sources of lead and copper, the abundance of deer and so of deerskins, forests of timber, pastures for grazing cattle that could supply meat to the West Indies, and the suitability of the soil for tobacco. But a North American environment is not what Crozat saw, at least not exclusively. “One is able to cultivate in Louisiana as much rice as one wants,” he wrote, and make silk “from the quantity of mulberry trees that are found naturally” in a countryside that he thought was “to some degree like China.” Crozat had invested deeply in the Asian trade and so perhaps knew what he was talking about. Within a few years, French in Louisiana were importing enslaved Africans skilled at wet rice cultivation. It was their hope that people familiar with one wetland environment, the coastal lowlands between the mouths of the Senegal and Gambia Rivers of 135

West Africa, would help them transform another wetland region, at the mouth of the Mississippi River. The French looked at Louisiana, thought they saw China, and so went to Africa.1 Much later in the eighteenth century the engineer and botanist Charpentier de Cossigny traveled to Canton (present-day Guangzhou). The scene along the Pearl River was striking to the European: “The immense quantity of boats, going and coming, the flooded plains which present rice fields, on which one sees sailing some boats, the towers placed on the river banks, the picturesque mountains.” It was the wet rice fields—certainly not the mountains—that reminded Cossigny of the Mississippi River. He had read that the marshes along the Mississippi “are covered with wild oat, which rises in tufts with the top of water, and which the savages make each year of abundant harvests; they reduce this grain in flour, by crushing it in a mortar.” During his time in China he became quite interested in the possibilities of turning wetlands in France into productive rice fields, following the Chinese and Native Americans, an idea he further developed in a book on the wetlands of India’s Bengal delta, where the French had an important colonial post at Chandernagore (Chandannagar), near Calcutta. The French also established a post at Karaikal, in the Kaveri River delta on the Coromandel Coast, 132 kilometers south of their administrative center at Pondicherry. From Pondicherry the French developed a trade in rice, cotton, and silk with the people of both river deltas.2 This essay considers the Mississippi River delta and lower floodplain in Louisiana; the Pearl River delta around Guangzhou in Guangdong Province, China; the Kaveri delta of present-day Union Territory of Pondicherry, in Tamil Nadu, India; and the Senegal River in Senegal as wetland colonies, that is to say, as places in which the colonial experience of outsider and indigenous populations, in settler and native colonies, owed much to the peculiarities of wet floodplain environments. In the United States especially, but in Europe, too, there is a tendency to see history in terms of two disconnected hemispheres, east and west. This is a product of the second wave of colonialism, after the American independence movements, and a product, too, of the Cold War. Globalization thus seems new. But as Andre Gunder Frank,  | Christopher Morris

among others, has pointed out, East and West have been interconnected for centuries. Examples from the eighteenth century abound, ranging from people of little means in search of a comfortable living to the well-connected in search of fortune and power. A young Thomas Thistlewood left his English village and hired on with a merchant ship that took him as far abroad as India before he settled down in Jamaica. Elihu Yale, another Englishman, though born in Boston, made a fortune in India and Indonesia trading diamonds and nutmeg. Upon being unceremoniously relieved of his duties as governor of Madras, he returned to England to die, leaving much of his estate to the North American college that bears his name. In 1723 a group of Ursuline nuns gathered at Lorient, in France, in preparation for departure to New Orleans, Louisiana, where they planned to establish a convent. As they waited, two Jesuits asked them to consider instead joining them in a new mission to Pondicherry, in India. The priests escorting the nuns to Louisiana would have none of it, and so the women sailed to America, first to Saint-Domingue in the French West Indies, and finally to New Orleans. Ship captains, Jesuits, and self-styled adventurers regularly traveled between East and West. John Law, a Scotsman and financial wizard in the employ of France, undertook perhaps the most ambitious scheme for global trade and colonization. Law amalgamated several existing French trading companies, including those Antoine Crozat had a hand in, operating in Africa, Asia, the East and West Indies, and the Americas, into a single empire, the Compagnie des Indes, overseen by him and centered around his interests in Louisiana.3 In the eighteenth century trade connected the four wet corners of the world that are the subject of this essay. So, too, did the experiences of the men and women who conducted that global trade. Experience in one place shaped what they saw in another. Antoine Crozat looked at the Mississippi River and saw China. Charpentier de Cossigny looked at the Pearl River and Ganges River and saw North America. What they saw was a blend of the real and the imagined. The Mississippi and Pearl Rivers, and the Senegal and Kaveri Rivers, too, invited comparison then, as now, because they were hydrologically and ecologically alike. As river wetlands these four places, although separated by continents, oceans, and human histories, were environmentally comparable, if one Wetland Colonies | 

sees only land and water and not people. Put people into the environment and the four places appear quite different. Whenever a European entered the Mississippi, or the Senegal, or the Pearl, or the Kaveri, or any number of other rivers, the experience was very likely one of, in the French of baseball immortal Yogi Berra, déjà vû all over again. There is a sameness to the delta environments of meandering, highly sedimented rivers. They are muddy, marshy savannahs not more than inches above sea level, often covered with grass, broken by natural levees that rise to several feet above sea level, sufficiently high to support some trees—mulberry, cypress, oak, palm. The water is a brackish, briny mix of salt, sweet, and silt. Typically, they support an abundance of life: fish, shellfish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and small mammals such as muskrats. It is common for a river to break into several channels as it traverses its delta. Broad, flat rivers invited Europeans. River deltas were the meeting grounds of empires. Europeans sailing to Africa, Asia, and the Americas wanted more than contact; they sought land, resources, and people. Rivers that meandered through vast delta wetlands indicated the fall line lay well upriver, that nothing would obstruct passage for ocean vessels sailing far into the continental interior. When Europeans approached from the sea, they looked for rivers that offered the easiest transition from sea to land, and from outside to inside. The desire for gradual entry into foreign lands led outsiders to rivers that were likely to have deltas. It was no coincidence, therefore, that Europeans, whether in Asia, Africa, or the Americas, found themselves in environmentally familiar places. At the same time delta environments, precisely because the transition from sea to land was so gradual, and thus so ecologically rich, were often, although not always, home to heavily populated, complex societies that both attracted and blocked intruders. The river environments I will discuss influenced the history of colonialism to the extent that they determined where Europeans would go, what and who they would find, and what they would and would not do once there. Europeans took the experiences in foreign wetlands home with them. The arrow of colonialism pointed in both directions. Foreign yet familiar environments had their impact on Europe, for example, when Frenchmen familiar with wetlands in Asia  | Christopher Morris

or America began to rethink what they knew or thought they knew about wetlands in France. Cossigny suggested that educated French farmers study Chinese husbandry, especially wet rice cultivation, and apply their methods to France’s underutilized and unhealthy wetlands. What we see in the river deltas, in those places where the line between sea and continent is blurred, are equally fuzzy lines between imperial and colonial, and between domestic and exotic.

Similar Environments, Different Histories The French were latecomers to these four places. In 1638 they built a trading post at the mouth of the Senegal River, two centuries after the Portuguese had first arrived. When in 1684 La Salle proclaimed the mouth of the Mississippi a possession of Louis XIV, the Spanish were nearby in Florida and had been in the vicinity since Hernando de Soto’s ill-fated expedition more than a century earlier. When the French established themselves at Pondicherry in 1674 and began to trade for rice and cotton textiles produced in the Kaveri River delta to the south, the British were already positioned at Madras. Not until 1739 did the French negotiate with the king of Thanjavur for dominion over several villages in the delta around the town of Karaikal. French access to Guangzhou on the Pearl River came after 1685, with the end of the Portuguese monopoly. In 1687 the first French Jesuit mission arrived. A French trade office opened early in the next century, in competition with offices run by the British and the Dutch. It is significant for the global comparisons made here that the French first engaged these river deltas at about the same time, the Senegal in the 1640s, the Kaveri in the 1670s, the Mississippi and the Pearl in the 1680s. They saw similar environments at about the same time and projected the same colonial imperatives-of-the-moment upon each of them.4 What they in fact found were four places generally similar and yet profoundly different. Among the similarities: In all four places, rice was or would soon become the principal grain; farmers used wetland environments without completely separating water and land, by incorporating the flood regime and the fertilizing power of the river Wetland Colonies | 

into the agricultural economy; in each setting the river was used not just for irrigation but also as the basis of an entire ecosystem that supported a diversified economy of, in addition to rice, the cultivation of other crops such as cotton, sugar, and indigo, as well as hunting and, perhaps most important, fishing; delta ecosystems were often intensely harvested by means of sophisticated irrigation technology, yet labor forms varied widely, from family homesteads to communal villages to slave plantations. Among the differences: The Pearl and Kaveri River deltas were heavily populated and intensely cultivated, whereas the Mississippi delta was sparsely populated and only lightly touched in a few places by cultivation. The Senegal fell somewhere in between.5 Up the Senegal River people cultivated a domestic rice (Oryza glaberrima) and gathered its wild ancestor (Oryza barthii), with little or no alteration of the natural environment. In the “morasses” interspersing the grassy savannah, “rice grew naturally without being sown,” or so thought Michel Adanson. It is very possible that at certain times of the year fields of domesticated rice and meadows of wild rice were indistinguishable to the foreign eye. Later in his journal Adanson describes fields lined with small embankments, or “causeys,” designed to hold water to keep rice moist, but he also notes that in the winter months these fields “were a sort of drained morasses, on which grew a few wild herbs.” Farmers planted rice on the upper Senegal floodplain at the start of the rainy season, in July, when the river would begin to rise, and allowed the river to flow unimpeded over fields, fertilizing them with alluvium. If the river current was gentle and not likely to sweep seed away, it could be broadcast, often encased in cattle dung to protect it from birds and insects, onto a riverbank broken by hoeing. The river floodplain method of cultivation was not particularly labor intensive, once the ground had been cleared. Nor, aside from the initial clearing of the land, was it particularly ecologically disruptive, requiring no embankments or canals or other technological additions to the landscape. At the height of the rainy season, the plants growing along the riverbank could to the unfamiliar eye be mistaken for patches of wild rice, and not recognized as fields. In addition to rice, the Senegal floodplain supported a diversified economy that included millet, sorghum, legumes, cattle, and fish.6  | Christopher Morris

The transformation of the mangrove swamps in the Senegal River delta began later, upon the arrival of European traders, and was a consequence of colonization. Nevertheless, the method of cultivation was entirely of indigenous origin. The wetlands were peopled by many who had abandoned ancestral homelands and relocated near the coast, in the protective environments of dense mangrove swamps, to escape the domination of the powerful nations and empires of the African interior. From their new locations near the coast, the Balanta and other societies were among the first sub-Saharan Africans to encounter Europeans. With steel implements acquired through trade with the newcomers, they transformed mangrove swamps into rice paddies. They cleared swamps and constructed a sophisticated technology of dikes and canals that harnessed tidal floods to moisten soil and manipulate fresh rainwater to cleanse the land of saline. The natural process of inundation by salt water and freshwater was incorporated into the mangrove paddy system. The construction and maintenance of mangrove rice fields required more labor than floodplain cultivation, but not so much more that it required a stratified and centralized system of social organization and management. A decentralized polity of villages persisted through the era of economic and environmental transformation. Work was organized and completed at the village level and, when necessary, through intercommunity cooperation. A gender division of labor was clear, with men performing the heavy chore of clearing mangroves, and women performing the lighter but more technically difficult task of constructing earthworks.7 Rice production near the mouth of the Senegal and Gambia Rivers helped reconfigure the slave trade within West Africa. With agricultural intensification, coastal societies grew in population and military strength. West Africans, long preyed upon by interior Muslim nations who caravanned captives eastward as far as the Arab world, became raiders themselves, reversing the flow of slaves by seizing prisoners in the interior and handing them over to Europeans who shipped them westward across the Atlantic Ocean. So formidable did coastal rice societies become that they prevented Europeans from penetrating the interior of the continent and seizing control of the slave trade. Instead, the Portuguese and all who followed, including the French, remained Wetland Colonies | 

dependent on coastal African villagers for the slaves they shipped to American plantations, and for the rice that fed crews and human cargoes.8 The indigenous economies along the lower Mississippi River were remarkably similar to those of the upland regions of the Senegal River. The primary wetland crop was different, there being no domesticated rice in the Americas. However, centuries before Europeans arrived people gathered and cultivated chenopod, called by Europeans “little rice” for its resemblance to what we know as rice, along the floodplain of the Mississippi River. This may have been the wild rice referred to by Cossigny. He may also have been referring to Zizania aquatica, familiar to North Americans as the wild rice of Minnesota, which grew in the oxbow lakes and slow-moving streams of the Mississippi Valley from the Great Lakes region to Louisiana. The primary grain cultivated along the river at the time of European contact, however, was maize, and in the lowest reaches of the river, in the delta, it was planted on high ground, upon natural levees, in February so it could grow to withstand the floodwaters of May and June. Standing in water, maize fields reminded Europeans of rice fields. As was the case along the Senegal River, cultivators did nothing to manipulate the river. They cleared canebrakes with mattocks and hoes, planted crops in common village fields, and let the river moisten and fertilize them. This method of cultivation was not especially labor intensive, indeed, it was probably the least so in pre-Columbian North America, because the river did so much of the work. There were no systems of irrigation, as there were in the desert Southwest, nor did floodplain fields have to be abandoned as quickly as the upland forests of slash-and-burn, or swidden system farmers, because of the annual deposition of fertilizing alluvium. Recent archaeology has made it clear that agriculture was only one part, and probably the lesser part, of an intensive harvest of the wetland environment, which provided a subsistence of fish, shellfish, small animals, and deer. A distinctive feature of North America was the absence of domesticated livestock, which played an integral role in the wetland ecologies of Africa and Asia.9 As in West Africa, intensive agriculture in the wetlands of the Mississippi River delta followed the arrival of Europeans and their  | Christopher Morris

iron and steel implements. However, Europeans, not indigenous societies, transformed the delta into fields of grain, albeit with a labor force collected from around the Atlantic Ocean and a knowledge of rice cultivation acquired from around the world. Initially, landowners tried to raise wheat, but it succumbed every summer to a mold that thrived in the damp soil and air. Antoine Crozat was among the first to suggest rice, drawing perhaps on his Asian experiences, and it was on his watch that the first successful harvests were made. Over the next several decades his successors at the Company of the Indies put bound laborers—including indentured French and enslaved Africans and Native Americans—to work clearing marshes and constructing earthworks to control land and water for the rice that fed the fledgling colony. Only after the French were confident they could farm in the Mississippi delta wetlands did they build their colonial capital at New Orleans. However, their foothold in the delta was hard fought, against the resistance of indigenous peoples, and perhaps more important, of the land itself. Bound laborers were hard to hold. They kept running away to live in an environment rich in renewable sources of food and commodities for trade, especially fish, small animals, fowl, and timber, exactly as the Balanta had escaped captors by fleeing to the wetlands of the lower Senegal and Gambia Rivers, and as the French later in the eighteenth century would escape the British in the wetlands of Bengal, when they were, in the words of Jacques Ignace Courtin, chief of Decca, “entrenched by nature” (Hill 1903).10 India and China were far more densely populated than West Africa and North America, and Europe for that matter. In 1687, when the French arrived in Guangzhou, also known as Canton, there were 7.5 million people in Guangdong Province, including perhaps 200,000 people in the city. Population was growing rapidly. By mid-eighteenth century the provincial population reached 13.2 million, of whom about 400,000 lived in Canton. The population of the Pearl River delta at that time surpassed one million. The Pearl River wetlands had been intensely cultivated for centuries, and were becoming more so.11 The French at Canton found farmers practicing an agriculture more technologically and ecologically sophisticated than existed anywhere in Europe, preparing land with plows designed especially Wetland Colonies | 

for wet soil and planting with seed drills in a landscape of embankments and canals, working fields continuously yet maintaining the soil fertility with river alluvium, with applications of fertilizer, including human excrement, and by careful crop rotation. Mulberry trees upon the banks fed silkworms, droppings from which added nitrogen to fields beneath. Fish and ducks swam in flooded fields, the former feeding on insects, the latter on fish. Fields of sugarcane also blanketed the lowlands. Citrus trees grew on surrounding hills. Winter crops of rape, barley, sweet potatoes, vegetables, and spices such as turmeric helped restore soil quality in preparation for the next crop of rice. Such intensive cultivation rested on diversity and dated back to the “Green Revolution” of the Song period of the twelfth century. Very much impressed by what they saw, Europeans sent descriptions of planting methods and models of plows, seed drills, and winnowing machines back to Europe. Frenchman Pierre Poivre was greatly impressed by the continuous cropping, something “inconceivable to Europeans.” The Chinese managed it, he wrote, with applications of marl and “common salt, lime, and all sorts of animal dung, but above all that which we [Europeans] throw in our rivers: they make great use of urine, which is carefully stored in every house, and sold to advantage: in a word, everything produced by the earth is re-conveyed to it with greatest case” (Marks 1998, 285).12 In what historian Mark Elvin has called a “proto-democracy,” responsibility for water control and management that made for such productive agriculture in Guangdong Province fell first to peasant farmers in rural villages, and secondarily to publicly selected representatives to coordinate activities among villages. The role of the state was minimal. With the exception of the largest levees and canals, families privately built irrigation structures. But even the largest public works financed by the state were organized from the ground up, by cooperatives of families, villages, and counties. In other words, Karl Wittfogel’s hydraulic despotism was not seen here. Instead, it was the human-made landscape that was perhaps despotic. Despite an ecologically sophisticated agriculture, Guangdong’s farmers were committed to or “locked in” to a landscape that demanded substantial annual inputs of labor and materials for maintenance. This distin | Christopher Morris

guished the region from the wetlands of the Mississippi Valley and the African Sahel, although to some extent Mangrove swamp farmers of Senegambia were “locked in” to their technology.13 The water-control structures in the wetlands of the Kaveri River delta long preceded the arrival of Europeans. Nearly two thousand years ago the region’s ruler, the Chola king, Karikala, ordered the construction of the first canal to drain floodwater from the rich soil so it could be planted with rice. Over time, the technology of water and land manipulation, the dams, sluices, reservoirs, and canals, grew in number and sophistication, as did the population sustained by wetland rice and cotton cultivation. When the French arrived on the Coromandel Coast, rival empires and independent rulers, or nawabs, hotly contested the interior plain, known to Europeans as the Carnatic. A Hindu Maratha dynasty controlled the ancient Chola city of Thanjavur (Tanjore) at the head of the delta. From the west, another expanding Hindu state (later, after 1761, a Muslim state), Mysore, challenged Thanjavur, as did the independent nawabs of the Carnatic. The French tended to support Mysore, while the British tended to support the Marathas in Thanjavur. Nevertheless, in 1739 the French paid 37,502 pagodas to the Maratha king of Thanjavur for the right to trade and settle in Karaikal, the town at the mouth of the Kaveri River whose name recalls the Chola king who built the first canal.14 Despite all the political turmoil, which lasted throughout the eighteenth century, the agricultural economy and society of the lower Kaveri, as in much of India, was surprisingly stable. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries most of the Kaveri delta was owned by nonlaboring mirasidars and worked by landless laborers bound to the land, like serfs, and in some cases bought and sold like slaves. Control over land and labor gave the mirasidars tremendous power, which they used for, among other things, the undertaking of large irrigation projects. As in Louisiana, where wetland development and bound labor forms evolved hand in hand, it was the delta itself that invited such environmental and sociopolitical development. It was rich land, capable of producing bountiful harvests of rice and cotton. Compared to other Indian river wetlands, the Bengal delta, for example, the Kaveri River delta was well protected, generally less prone to tidal waves and other Wetland Colonies | 

ocean incursions. (Nevertheless, the 2004 tsunami took five hundred lives in Karaikal District.) The risk to human life and technology was less than elsewhere, which helps to account for the great investment in infrastructure in the Kaveri delta. The mixed agriculture of the Bengal delta, in contrast, was irrigated with rain and river floods but, like the interior of the Senegal River, with a minimum of infrastructure, and a minimum of bound labor.15 In the Kaveri delta rice was the primary subsistence crop. It fed the indigenous population, as well as the French at Karaikal and at Pondicherry. It also fed the crews of French ships outbound for Chandernagore in Bengal, for China, and for Africa. Cotton grown, spun, and woven into cloth by every farm household was the basis for the region’s lucrative export trade. Cotton was the primary cargo carried by ships manned by rice-eating sailors. Textiles brought wealth and power to the Thanjavur kingdom and its landowners, until the trade was captured partially by the French in the 1740s, and then entirely by the British at the end of the eighteenth century.16 In 1757 the British defeated the Mughals and their French allies in the Battle of Plassey in Bengal. The date is often said to mark the unofficial beginning of the British Raj. However, land, water, and rice remained in the hands of local landlords, or zamindars, and the people who worked the estates. No less than had the Mughals, the British depended on zamindars for food and commodities. At the ground level, their victory at Plassey changed little in the short run, except that it marked the end of the French threat in India. In the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War, the French relinquished their North American possessions, including Louisiana, in return for the Indian posts captured by the British. But while the French remained in a few settlements, they no longer invested in the expansion of their influence over Indian rulers and territory. French trade in India never amounted to much, nor did it intrude upon their interests in continental Europe. They realized such was not the case for England, and from their remaining bases in India did what they could at minimal cost to disrupt the trade of their rival, principally by supporting Mysore. However, by 1800 the British had defeated Mysore and gained control of the Carnatic and the Coromandel  | Christopher Morris

Coast. As in Bengal, their struggle was now with the local landlords, including the mirasidars of the Kaveri delta.17

Colonization, Control, and Resistance As different as these four places were from one another, especially China and India from Africa and North America, it is all the more intriguing that Europeans identified similarities. Moreover, they sought to realize those perceived similarities, for example, by introducing the same exotic plants to each region. Alfred Crosby (1986) has written most memorably about the Columbian exchange of European plants and animals, and the process by which pathogens, weeds, and animals facilitated European imperialism in the Atlantic islands, the Americas, and the Pacific. Crosby emphasized the transformation of environments into neo-Europes. Without disagreeing with him, I would like to emphasize the ways in which environments remained unchanged—and so were perhaps not really colonized—because they already were so similar. Rather than think about how European plants and animals transformed the Mississippi River delta, I would like to consider how river deltas were predisposed to receive alien plants and animals. This is how Antoine Crozat thought of the Mississippi when he suggested planting rice, mulberry trees, and silkworm colonies, and how others thought when they introduced indigo, sugarcane, citrus, vegetables, legumes, and livestock. While they imagined how they might change the wetlands, initially they saw them as places that might be used more or less as they existed, that is, as wetlands. Along the Senegal the French planted citrus, fig, banana, pomegranate, and cashew. “The different legumes of Europe thrive here in great perfection,” wrote Adanson. “They have plenty of potatoes which multiply greatly in wet marshy lands, where they have been once planted. This root serves them instead of chestnuts, which it greatly excels in goodness and delicacy of taste” (1759, 84–85). Maize was perhaps the most significant contribution to Asian agriculture, brought from the Americas by Europeans, although potatoes were a close second, followed by peanuts. What would grow in a wetland on Wetland Colonies | 

one side of the world would grow in a wetland on the other side of the world. This is what Europeans believed when they looked at the Mississippi River and saw the Pearl River, and looked at the Pearl and saw the Mississippi. And they were right, at least for the most part. Similarity between environments facilitated a process of standardization that brought still greater similarity. Places that looked the same to European eyes, and that environmentally had much in common, in European hands eventually became even more alike. The much bemoaned present-day process of global standardization—McDonald’s is everywhere—began centuries ago. In colonial wetlands, standardization would proceed until the technology of water control and the sociopolitical arrangements that sustained it were more or less the same. Standardization occurred not simply because imperialist Europeans took their ways with them to their colonies; it occurred because similar environments encouraged similar adaptations, modifications, uses, and developments, almost as if the wetlands were colonizing the Europeans.18 It was not just the wetlands that received (or rejected) new plants and animals; it was the people who lived there. Chinese farmers in Guangdong incorporated sweet potatoes into their farm ecologies and cuisine. Why Pearl River farmers did not take to maize as easily as they did sweet potatoes is not clear, but the best explanation is that they simply did not like its taste. In any case, this New World plant enabled them to cultivate the drier, sandy soils that bordered the wetlands where they planted rice, permitting population to grow and prosper when they might otherwise have reached the limits of wetland rice farming. Potatoes extended the life of wetland farming without “unlocking” people from dependence on it. Significantly, when they took New World plants from European traders, they did not take Europeans, whom the Chinese kept out of the countryside and confined to a few places, such as the foreign trade district of Canton. The natural environment and indigenous people of the Mississippi River Valley resisted some Old World crops, although they were too few in number to resist European settlement. The French tried hard to raise wheat in Louisiana, but the wet soil and humid air foiled them. Native peoples had no need to incorporate rice into their diets because it offered no immediate advantages to maize, which they raised  | Christopher Morris

in small but sufficient quantities on natural levees and terraces in the delta and inland floodplains. For their part, the French, like the Chinese of Guangdong, were loath to incorporate maize into their cuisine. They wanted wheat but would settle for rice; however, until they figured out how to grow it they had no choice but to eat maize, grown very often in native fields, often by natives. The combination of environmental possibilities, European and indigenous cultures, and the power relationships among all groups, native and newcomer, shaped the entrée of Europeans into the Mississippi wetlands.19 In Senegal, a healthy indigenous agricultural economy well adapted to the floodplain kept societies strong, sufficiently so that they blocked European advancement into the interior of the continent. The French— and the same goes for their European counterparts elsewhere in West Africa—would have built their sugar plantations in Africa, rather than the West Indies, had they been able to get more than a toehold on the coast. Thus did the environmental transformations of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue owe much to the human and environmental history of West Africa. If the French had an easier time settling along the Mississippi River, they struggled to impose a plantation regime upon it, much as in West Africa. As historian Daniel Usner (1992) has shown, the rich natural environment lured laborers into lives of hunting, fishing, gathering, trading, and subsistence farming, and away from commercial plantation agriculture.20 Change and colonization did come to the wetlands, as the French gained control of them. With persistent application of capital and enslaved African labor, the French succeeded in transforming parts of the Mississippi River into a place that really did resemble the Pearl River delta and other Asian wetlands. By about 1803, just as the French were handing Louisiana over to the United States, and following a century of struggle in the swamps of the Mississippi River delta, a commercially viable plantation regime based on water control and bound labor had been established in the area around New Orleans and was spreading inland. In Africa, too, the French eventually got control of valuable agricultural land. The same Atlantic slave trade that built Louisiana and that initially strengthened indigenous societies along the West African coast eventually undermined them, including those of the mangrove Wetland Colonies | 

swamps of Senegal and Gambia. Until the nineteenth century the Europeans had been unable to penetrate the interior of the continent. But midcentury planters were establishing themselves on the coast, divesting in American colonies and reinvesting in African colonies. China and India proved impenetrable to Europeans largely because indigenous states were strong and densely populated, their power derived from control over rich wetlands that had for centuries been harnessed to support commercial agriculture. Europeans could only hope to insinuate themselves into existing Asian economic and environmental contexts by capturing the trade in rice, indigo, sugar, and cotton textiles, and then get a foothold on the land that produced those commodities. In the end, that is precisely what happened, when the British began to pay for Chinese tea, porcelain, and silk with raw cotton from India. Rice farmers in the Pearl River delta responded to the sudden surge in foreign demand for silk by concentrating on sericulture at the expense of rice production. Farm households in Guangdong raised silk and processed raw Indian cotton for export, and imported more and more food from other regions of China, or from marginal areas within their own region, by planting more potatoes. By 1800 the flourishing commercial trade had triggered such population growth and strain on the environment that China began what Kenneth Pomeranz has termed the Great Divergence from Europe. In India, in the Kaveri River delta and elsewhere, British demand for cotton for the China trade had a similar effect of intensifying commercial agriculture, altering land-use patterns, and straining the natural environment.21 As Kenneth Pomeranz (1993) has noted, China’s defeat in the Opium War brought about European, more specifically British, domination and a transformation of the state, as its purposes were linked to those of empire and competition in a global capitalist economy. With European domination too came a new way of perceiving environment and the people who belonged to it. Land and people become resources to be controlled in the most efficient and scientific way, according to the experts in the colonial regime. James Scott attributes the objectification of nature and its distancing from human life to the rise of the modern state. Bureaucrats and technocrats believe by virtue of their scientific and managerial training that they know best how to reduce,  | Christopher Morris

simplify, and reorder the environment in the interest of efficiency, profits, and state authority. The “high-modernist faith” Scott (1998) describes is an ideology of colonialism if ever there was one, and has been held by many outside government departments and ministries. It explained very clearly to Europeans what they had to bring to foreign environments and why. The best example concerning wetlands might well be Karl Wittfogel’s (1957) thesis connecting hydrological engineering and agriculture to despotism in Asia. For Wittfogel, writing in the 1950s, the historical origins of a despotic East and free West lay in the large irrigation projects undertaken by ruthless states that employed enslaved or otherwise forced labor. The communist regimes of Wittfogel’s era were merely continuing an old tradition of hydraulic despotism, as he saw it. But we now know that the West also brought despotism by way of hydrological engineering, and moreover that western states were very capable of bringing it to their own people, as Donald Worster (1985) has argued. It was the British who in India built what Wittfogel called the “hydraulic-bureaucratic official-state.” By 1830, primarily through shrewd moneylending, the British turned the tables on the zamindars and mirasidars and seized most of India, including the Kaveri delta. What remained in the hands of indigenous farmers was taxed as private property, and of course seized and sold when owners defaulted. The British also used the opportunity to reconfigure India’s taxation system, assessing irrigated acreage, rather than crop and water usage as Indian regimes had done for centuries, and bypassing nawabs and collecting taxes directly from landowners. During the political and military upheavals of the eighteenth century, irrigation works fell into disrepair. The British set about repairing them, initially at the request of landowners to whom the British lent money, and under the supervision of British engineers. The British, who controlled the land as owners or tax collectors, held that peasants were not capable of hydrological engineering. The tax policies and lending practices encouraged zamindars, mirasidars, and other landowners to plant the most commercially valuable crops, such as cotton and sugar, regardless of how much water they demanded, at the expense of rice and other food crops, and to make all farmers Wetland Colonies | 

directly answerable to them as individual private property owners, and to the colonial state, but not to the community or region along the river. The introduction of private property ended centuries-old traditions among riparian farmers of working to prevent flooding in the entire region. They now left that to the colonial state, and invested only in their private property. But taxation, commerce, and private land development were not the stated foremost objectives of British engineering. They were natural outcomes of rational, efficient, and scientific management of land, water, and people, or so colonial authorities claimed. Writes Doug Gilmartin, “The moving force behind British irrigation expansion lay in the fact that the definition of the large, integrated, scientifically-defined (and potentially controllable) hydraulic environment helped to empower the colonial state and define the British as a distinctive, scientific ruling community” (1995, 229). In the process of reconfiguring nature, the British also reconfigured village life. Gilmartin, again: “By trying to incorporate indigenous ‘natural’ communities into a larger hydraulic model, the colonial state thus undercut the local environmental foundations for the very local communities that it professed to rely on” (230). The ideological sleight of hand that permitted the British to build their colonial state was their objectification of nature. Writes Jessica Teisch, “The British modeled the Indus Basin”— and I would add that they so modeled other river basins, such as the Kaveri—“as an irrigation machine. They viewed the valley as an integrated human and natural environment, which allowed them to move water and people freely to maximize the environment’s productive potential. Colonial political authority thus required the conceptual separation of the state from both nature and native Indian society” (2001, 59). The British ruled from on high, as scientists teaching ignorant Indian farmers the objective facts of land, water, and good government.22 Elsewhere in the United States democracy provided a check on the authority of bureaucrats, but in the Mississippi delta during slavery days, and later between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there was not much democracy. In the twentieth century the Army Corps of Engineers worked with a free hand to reconfigure the river and its adjacent wetlands  | Christopher Morris

and the lives of thousands of landless African American laborers and tenant farmers, much as the British did in India. If there is any place where the Wittfogel thesis applies, it is in the lower Mississippi Valley. Here was a colonial wetland in which land, water, and people were controlled. The Great Flood of 1927 did little to undermine the Corps’ authority as scientists, in part because the overwhelming numbers of victims of the flood were disfranchised African Americans. In early nineteenth-century Senegal, the French planned irrigation projects to make land suitable for plantations of cotton, indigo, coffee, hibiscus, and the host cacti for cochineal. For the first time in the history of this part of Africa, slave laborers were to be used specifically for the construction of canals, dikes, and fields. Capital investments would come from the top down, from the French government in Paris. In 1819 the people of the Waalo, as the delta was known locally, forfeited their claim to the land, but their leaders refused to abide slavery, forcing the French to consider importing laborers from the Canary Islands, Martinique, and France. Again they were thwarted, this time by merchants in the colonial capital of St. Louis, who made a living by shipping slaves to the Antilles. In an effort to attract local laborers, the French scrapped plans for slavery and introduced instead a brutal system of indentured servitude. It was all for naught because the Moors and their Muslim allies contested the land transfer and raided French settlements, destroying fields and killing, capturing, or chasing away servants. By 1822 Jean François Roger’s botanical garden, established for research purposes, was about the nearest thing to a viable plantation. Not until 1865 did the French conquer the delta and secure it for commercial agriculture. By the early twentieth century, French plantations in Senegal raised for export crops of peanuts, bananas, cotton, sugar, some wheat, and most of all, rice. Since the 1960s the primary effort in the delta has been devoted to irrigated rice agriculture.23

Postcolonial Wetlands Pre- and early colonial accommodations and adaptations to the wetlands were forgotten or ignored by late nineteenth and twentieth-century Wetland Colonies | 

scientists and politicians who believed only the modern state could make them useful. Recent events, the 2004 tsunami, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and most recently the array of problems stemming from the rapid development of the Pearl River delta, have called modernist faith into question, and caused some to ask how premodern, precolonial people lived in wet places.24 The reconstruction of the rice regions of Senegal and elsewhere in West Africa by European colonial powers is more recent, and much of it has come since independence, under the auspices of international aid agencies such as the World Bank, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. Few of these agencies show much interest in history. Since the French seizure of Senegal in the nineteenth century, the history of irrigated agriculture was forgotten. According to a volume published by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in 1986, “Mangrove rice cultivation was introduced to West Africa—to countries such as Sierra Leone and Senegal— probably little over a hundred years ago.” In other words, irrigated agriculture began with the European seizure of West Africa in the nineteenth century and the arrival of modern scientists and engineers. In fact, the French and English conquest of the coast destroyed systems of irrigated rice cultivation that were centuries old. Also lost was the knowledge that the rice West Africans had planted was an indigenous species. Europeans brought the Asian species (Oryza sativa) to Africa and let the indigenous domesticate go wild. It turns out that Asian rice is highly susceptible to African diseases and pests, leading modern scientists to propose that African wild rice, which is immune to these problems, be domesticated or crossbred with Asian rice. Up the Senegal River and along the Niger River, developers consider the centuries-old Fulani method of rice planting, which integrates rice, cattle herding, and fishing—the very method observed by Adanson in 1749—to be an underutilization of wetland areas that could be continuously cropped with rice. They are entirely ignorant of local ecology and local knowledge. Whatever Jean François Roger was doing in his botanical garden in 1822,  | Christopher Morris

he was not preserving for posterity local knowledge about water control and wet rice cultivation. Modern scientists of the postcolonial world base their well-meaning work on the assumption that “high technology” for swamp development is beyond the capacity of swamp farmers, and that state and international planning and direction are needed.25 None of the wetland regions discussed here were pristine when colonized by Europeans, certainly not China and India, but not even relatively lightly touched North America. Nevertheless, the environmental transformations linked to colonialism were profoundly different, if not in scale, certainly in type, than any that preceded them. The difference was not merely that the land and its products were commercialized and commoditized, or even capitalized. The Pearl River and Kaveri River deltas, and probably the Senegal River delta, were producing for regional and foreign markets before colonialism. Nor can the difference be attributed to empire alone. Guangdong, Karaikal, and Senegal had been subject to the rule of previous empires. Nor can the difference be attributed to the rise of the modern state. It was the ideology of European colonialism, perpetuated by the modern state and rooted in Enlightenment science, economics, and political philosophy that made modern colonial environments different, because that ideology positioned Europeans, and Euro-Americans, as outside observers of the natural world and the people who inhabited it. Because of its ideological premises, I would argue that the United States has engaged the Mississippi Valley (and probably also the American West, according to Donald Worster’s work) as colonies. Not all colonies lay beyond the boundaries of the territorial state; in the case of the United States, the government in Washington and eastern investors and developers located principally in New York regarded as colonies much of the South and West, including the Mississippi Valley. The engineers who built and continue to build new landscapes of land and water rarely saw, let alone understood, the people whose land they reconfigured. And yet, indigenous people have internalized much modernist ideology, and welcome the technologies and expertise of outsiders, even if it comes in the form of local knowledge repackaged.26 Wetland Colonies | 

Conclusion I began with the French in the eighteenth century for no good reason other than that they connected four wetlands. These places are controlled by different states now, and yet they remain connected because their similar environments and the people who inhabit them engage the world, including world markets, in similar fashion, and because in all four places rice cultivation remains the primary means by which people engage the wetland environment. Nearly two centuries after Antoine Crozat observed that Louisiana looked like China, the New Orleans Times, in 1880, took note of Louisiana’s burgeoning rice trade and declared the state would soon be “the China of America.” By the start of the twentieth century, Louisiana was the largest producer of rice in the United States. Today, the lower Mississippi Valley, including Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, produces in excess of 14.6 billion pounds of rice annually, three times the combined production of Texas and California, and is competing with China and India for markets in the European Union, Mexico, Canada, and Japan. The “successes” with rice in the wetlands of America, China, and India are the inspiration for agronomists in West Africa. Moreover, Mississippi Valley fish farmers produce crawfish and catfish for growing world markets. Their biggest competition comes from Southeast Asia, and increasingly from India. Africans are trying to develop aquaculture businesses in their wetland regions. Africa has recently given America the fish most suitable for raising on farms, tilapia, which is produced primarily in Florida. We have seen trade wars between the United States and Vietnam and Thailand over catfish. More wars will come, no doubt. In the postcolonial global economy, as producers in similar environments compete for similar markets, the rewards given to labor will be similarly minimal, the technologies developed to harness land and water to global commerce will be similarly intensive, and state bureaucrats and experts will similarly apply their expertise to the similar problems they similarly perceive. And maybe one day the Mississippi, Senegal, Kaveri, and Pearl River deltas, and many more river deltas, will all look the same, as Antoine Crozat imagined.27  | Christopher Morris

Notes 1. Antoine Crozat, “Mémoire sur La Louisiane,” n.d. (1713–15),and “Mémoire sur La Louisiane,” 11 fevrier 1716, vol. 4, 55–56, Archives des Colonies, Correspondance Général, Louisiane, Archives Nationales de France, Series C 13 A, microfilm copy in the Williams Research Center, The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans. See also Allen, “Geographical Knowledge and American Images of the Louisiana Territory,” 157; Manning, Fortunes á Faire, 22; and Ray, The Merchant and the State, 452. 2. Cossigny, Voyage à Canton, 72, 124–29, 342; and Cossigny, Voyage au Bengale, 175–220. 3. Hachard, De rouen a la Louisiane, 17; Clark, Voices from an Early American Convent, 33–34; Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire; Sudan, “Elihu Yale”; Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans, 3–10; Allain, “Not Worth a Straw,” 55–69; Havard and Vidal, Histoire de L’Amérique Française, 86–90; Eccles, France in America, 167–77; Goubert, The Course of French History, 154–57; Frank, ReOrient; Hulme, “Postcolonial Theory and Early America,” 33–48; and Chaplin, “Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early American History,” 1431–55. 4. Standard references on the establishment of these colonies and trading posts include Giraud, A History of French Louisiana; Ray, The Merchant and the State; Manning, Fortunes á Faire; and Delcourt, La France. 5. The original comparative history of water and agriculture is Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism. 6. Adanson, Voyage to Senegal, 80–84, 151, 166. 7. Carney, Black Rice, 17–18, 47, 55–68; Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves, 38–39, 152, 166–68, 171; Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. 8. Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves, 10–11. 9. “D’Artaguette to Pontchartrain,” May 1712, Mississippi Provincial Archives, French Dominion, vol. 2, ed. Dunbar Rowland and Albert G. Sanders, 63 (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1927–32). See also Asch and Asch, “Chenopod as Cultigen,” 3–45; “Zizania aquatica L. var. aquatica Wild Rice”; Kidder and Fritz, “Subsistence and Social Change in the Lower Mississippi Valley”; and Kidder, “Timing and Consequences of the Introduction of Maize Agriculture.” 10. Morris, “Impenetrable but Easy,” 22–42; and Usner, Indians, Settles, and Slaves. In the nineteenth century much of the Bengal delta remained a refuge for people hiding from the law or otherwise seeking to survive on their own. See Paul Greenough, “Hunter’s Drowned Land.”

Wetland Colonies | 

11. Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past; Pomeranz, “Political Economy and Ecology”; and Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt, 158, 280, 252. 12. Bray, Science and Civilisation, 374, 377, 427, 430, 432, 570, 581; Bray, The Rice Economies, 125, 132; and Yoshinobu, Commerce and Society in Sung China, 62, 90. 13. Elvin, The Retreat of Elephants, 117–18, 128, and esp. xviii and 123, on technological “lock-in.” See also Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt, 86, 107. 14. Marshall, The Eighteenth Century in Indian History, 1–49; and Manning, Fortunes á Faire, 211–12. 15. Grove, Damudaran, and Sangwan, Nature and the Orient, 95–96, 97; Schendel, Three Deltas, 38, 45, 48–49, 50–51, 60; Alexander, “Caste Mobilization and Class Consciousness,” 367–70; and Greenough, “Hunter’s Drowned Land.” 16. Schendel, Three Deltas, 50. 17. Marshall, The Eighteenth Century in Indian History, 25–33. 18. In reconsidering who colonized whom, I have been influenced by Michael Pollan’s (The Botany of Desire) similar rethinking of whether people manipulate plants to serve their purposes or whether plants manipulate people. 19. Morris, “Impenetrable but Easy,” 22–42. 20. See also Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. 21. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt, 176–84; Pomeranz, “Political Economy and Ecology”; Pomeranz, The Great Divergence; and Marshall, The Eighteenth Century in Indian History, 32–33. 22. See also Schendel, Three Deltas, 82–84; Hardiman, “The SmallDam Systems of the Sahyadris”; and D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed. 23. Maïga, Le Bassin du Fleuve Sénégal, 33–39, 52–59, 173–90. 24. The subject of science, race relations, and the reconstruction of flood control in the lower Mississippi Valley after the Civil War is the subject of a chapter in my book (in press), titled A Big Muddy River Runs Through It: An Environmental History of the Lower Mississippi Valley from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina, to be published by Oxford University Press. See also Barry, Rising Tide; and Howard W. French, “Chinese Success Story Chokes on Its Own Growth,” New York Times (December 19, 2006): A, 1, 12. 25. Juo and Lowe, The Wetlands and Rice in Subsaharan Africa, 9, 11, 104–6, 144–46, 194, 214, 262–63. 26. Gadgil and Guha, This Fissured Land; Scott, Seeing Like a State; Grove, Green Imperialism; Gupta, Postcolonial Developments; Sivaramakrishnan, Old Potions, New Bottles; and Sudan, “Mud, Mortar, and Other Technologies of Empire.” The classic account on the U.S. South regarded

 | Christopher Morris

as a colony by the U.S. Northeast is C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South. On the U.S. West as a colony, see Worster, Rivers of Empire. 27. USDA, “2000 January Annual Summary, March 2000 Report”; and Coclanis, “Distant Thunder.”

Works Cited Adanson, Michel. 1759. A Voyage to Senegal. London. Alexander, K. C. 1989. “Caste Mobilization and Class Consciousness: The Emergence of Agrarian Movements in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.” In Dominance and State Power in Modern India, edited by Francine R. Frankel and M. S. A. Rao. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Allain, Mathé. 1988. “Not Worth a Straw”: French Colonial Policy and the Early Years of Louisiana. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana. Allen, John L. 1971. “Geographical Knowledge and American Images of the Louisiana Territory.” Western Historical Quarterly 2: 151–70. Arnold, David, and Ramachandra Guha, eds. 1995. Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Asch, David L., and Nancy B. Asch. 1977. “Chenopod as Cultigen.” Mid-Continental Journal of Archaeology 2:3–45. Barry, John M. 1997. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. New York: Simon and Schuster. Bray, Francesca. 1984. Science and Civilisation in China. Part 2, “Agriculture,” in vol. 6, Biology and Biological Technology, edited by Joseph Needham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1986. The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Burnard, Trevor. 2004. Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Carney, Judith A. 2001. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chaplin, Joyce. 2003. “Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early American History.” Journal of American History 89 (March): 1431–55. Clark, Emily. 2007. Voices from an Early American Convent: Marie Madeleine Hachard and the New Orleans Ursulines, 1727–1760. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

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Coclanis, Peter A. 1993. “Distant Thunder: The Creation of a World Market in Rice and the Transformations It Wrought.” American Historical Review 98 (October): 1050–78. Colten, Craig E., ed. 2000. Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Cossigny, Charpentier. 1799a. Voyage à Canton. Paris. ———. 1799b. Voyage au Bengale. Paris. Crosby, Alfred W. 1986. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delcourt, André. 1952. La France at les établissements français en Sénégal entre 1713 et 1763. Dakar. D’Souza, Rohan. 2006. Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India, 1803–1946. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Eccles, W. J. 1990. France in America. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Eltis, David. 1999. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elvin, Mark. 1973. The Pattern of the Chinese Past. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2004. The Retreat of Elephants: An Environmental History of China. New Haven: Yale University Press. Frank, Andre Gunder. 1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Frankel, Francine R., and M. S. A. Rao, eds. 1989. Dominance and State Power in Modern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Gadgil, Madhav, and Ramachandra Guha. 1993. This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilmartin, Doug. “Models of the Hydraulic Environment: Colonial Irrigation, State Power and Community in the Indus Basin.” Pp. 210–36 in Arnold and Guha, Nature, Culture, Imperialism. Giraud, Marcel. 1974. A History of French Louisiana: The Reign of Louis XIV, 1698–1715. Translated by Joseph C. Lambert. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Goubert, Pierre. 1991. The Course of French History. New York: Routledge. Greenough, Paul. “Hunter’s Drowned Land: An Environmental Fantasy of the Victorian Sunderbans.” Pp. 237–72 in Grove, Damudaran, and Sangwan, Nature and the Orient.

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Grove, Richard H. 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expanion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grove, Richard H., Vinita Damudaran, and Satpal Sangwan, eds. 1998. Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Gupta, Akhil. 1998. Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham: Duke University Press. Hachard, Marie-Madeleine. 1988. De Rouen a la Louisiane: Voyage d’une Ursuline en 1727. Rouen: Université de Rouen. Hardiman, David. 1995. “The Small-Dam Systems of the Sahyadris.” In Arnold and Guha, Nature, Culture, Imperialism. Havard, Gilles, and Cécile Vidal. 2003. Histoire de L’Amérique Française. France: Flammarion. Hawthorne, Walter. 2003. Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations Along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Hill, S. C. 1903. Three Frenchmen in Bengal: The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757. London. http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/10946/10946-h/10946-h.htm#Note_127. Ingersoll, Thomas N. 1999. Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Juo, A. S. R., and J. A. Lowe, eds. 1986. The Wetlands and Rice in Subsaharan Africa. Ibadan, Nigeria: International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. Kidder, Tristram R. 1992. “Timing and Consequences of the Introduction of Maize Agriculture in the Lower Mississippi Valley.” North American Archaeologist 13:15–41. Kidder, Tristram R., and Gayle J. Fritz. 1993. “Subsistence and Social Change in the Lower Mississippi Valley: The Reno Brake and Osceola Sites, Louisiana.” Journal of Field Archaeology 20 (Fall): 281–97. Maiga, Mahamadou. 1995. Le Bassin du Fleuve Sénégal, de la traite négrière au développement sous-régional autocentré. Paris: l’Harmattan. Manning, Catherine. 1996. Fortunes á Faire: The French in Asian Trade, 1719–48. Aldershot, Hampshire: Variorum Ashgate. Marks, Robert. 1998. Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late-Imperial South China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 2004. “Robert Marks on the Pearl River Delta.” Environmental History (April): 296–99. Marshall, P. J., ed. 2003. The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution? New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Morris, Christopher. 2000. “Impenetrable but Easy: The French Transformation of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Founding of New Orleans.” In Colten, Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs. ———. Forthcoming. A Big Muddy River Runs Through It: An Environmental History of the Lower Mississippi Valley from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Needham, Joseph, ed. 1984. Science and Civilisation in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pollan, Michael. 2001. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. New York: Random House. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 1993. The Making of a Hinterland: State, Economy, and Society in Inland North China, 1853–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2002. “Political Economy and Ecology on the Eve of Industrialization: Europe, China, and the Global Conjuncture,” American Historical Review 107. Ray, Aniruddha. 2004. The Merchant and the State: The French in India, 1666–1739. New Delhi: Munchiram Manoharlal Publishers. St. George, Robert Blair, ed. 2000. Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Schendel, Willem van. 1991. Three Deltas: Accumulation and Poverty in Rural Burma, Bengal, and South India. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sivaramakrishnan, Kavita. 2006. Old Potions, New Bottles: Recasting Indigenous Medicine in Colonial Punjab: 1850–1940. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Sudan, Rajani. 2004. “Mud, Mortar, and Other Technologies of Empire.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 45 (Summer): 147–69. ———. Forthcoming. “Elihu Yale, the British East India Company, and the Problem of Madras.” In Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700–Present, edited by Angela Woollacott, Desley Deacon,

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and Penny Russell. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Teisch, Jessica B. 2001. “Engineering Progress: Californians and the Making of a Global Economy.” Ph.D. diss., University of California. USDA. “2000 January Annual Summary, March 2000 Report.” http:// www.ricecafe.com/stats.htm. Usner, Daniel H., Jr. 1992. Indians, Settlers, and Slaves In a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture. Wittfogel, Karl. 1957. Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. New Haven: Yale University Press. Woodward, C. Vann, 1951. Origins of the New South, 1877–1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Worster, Donald. 1985. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Pantheon. Yoshinobu, Shiba. 1970. Commerce and Society in Sung China. Translated by Mark Elvin. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Chinese Studies. “Zizania aquatica L. var. aquatica Wild Rice.” 2004. Michigan Natural Features Inventory. http://web4.msue.msu.edu/mnfi/abstracts/botany/ Zizania_aquatica_var_aquatica.pdf.

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6 Colonization of the Russian North: A Frozen Frontier

Julia Lajus

Introduction According to well-known Russian historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii (1956, 31), Russia’s entire history is the history of a country that colonizes itself.1 In contrast to colonization of the southern and eastern parts of the Russian Empire, which continued as late as the end of the nineteenth century,2 the frontier movement in the North was mostly finished by the end of the sixteenth century.3 Early, slow, and relatively peaceful penetrations of Russians into the northern areas are the reason why the North is not generally included in the narratives of the development of the Russian Empire, being either included into a core land of Russia, or partly described within the framework of peasant colonization (Shaw 1989). Defining Russian center-periphery relations in terms of colonialism is usually applied to regions with populations ethnically distinct from the Russians. However, in the North not only the indigenous peoples but even local Russian populations, which formed culturally and economically distinct groups, could in some periods be involved in relations similar to those of internal colonialism. The Russian North is usually described as the area stretching from the border with Scandinavia to the Northern Urals, bounded in the 164

North by the White and Barents Seas, and in the South going down to the Vologda region with its complex riverine system, where several tributaries come together to form the Northern Dvina River, one of the largest in the area. This paper is focused mostly on the northwestern part of this enormous area, adjacent to the White and Barents seacoasts and known as Pomorye and Kola Land. Fish and marine mammals were crucial natural resources here, and access to them was the major driving force for colonization. In addition, in the early period an important role was played by fur and in the later period also by forests and minerals. The beginning of the frontier movement of Slavic population into this region dates back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the North definitely was the most accessible frontier, because it was sparsely populated. Newcomers needed to adjust mostly to environmental threats, in contrast to other frontiers where neighbors were powerful. It is very difficult to judge which factor was more important for Russian colonization in general—spontaneous movements of peasants or “the leading and stimulating role of the state in its quest for power and resources.”4 From an early period authorities at different levels sent their vassals to the remote northern territories to get fur, walrus ivory, and other commercial goods. Being interested in getting profit from the exploitation of natural resources, the state imposed tribute upon native tribes, taxation on peasant communities, and supported the monasteries, which mediated between the state and the peasants. Monasteries served as managers of the resources in the large remote territories, providing effective organization of their use, and access by the state to their consumption. They organized fisheries and salt production, controlled the trade routes, and were also involved in collecting taxes from the peasant communities, which were deeply dependent on the monasteries.

Mastering the Northern Environment, Thirteenth-Seventeenth Centuries Although the first records of eastern Slavs reaching the White Sea coast date back to the early eleventh century, permanent settlements Colonization of the Russian North | 

were not established until the end of the thirteenth century on the southeastern coast and the fifteenth century on the northwestern coast. The early colonization of the North was sponsored by several political centers, with the leading role of the town of Novgorod. Fur, especially that of the gray squirrel, which was sent to the European markets, was the most attractive commodity. Thus the imposing of fur taxes on the local populations and organizing the trade routes were the priority activities for this earlier expansion by Novgorodians.5 Novgorodian colonization of the Russian North went on steadily, in the beginning through the penetration of small Slavic settlements among Finno-Ugric tribes.6 They appropriated small plots of land along the rivers, lakes, and seashore, and thus their possessions were scattered as they were interested in the products of fisheries and marine hunting, but not in the land itself, which was not appropriate for agriculture (Kliuchevskii 1867). In the coastal areas of the White Sea the newcomers formed a distinct group of Slavic people known as the Pomors. They settled in places with good access to the most valuable natural resources, such as salt and salmon. Fishing and hunting for marine mammals were the foundations of their economy (Bernshtam 1978). As elsewhere in Russia, rivers were a very important factor in the colonization of the North, and fishing for salmon in rivers profoundly shaped the settlement patterns there. Thus main settlements on the most profitable salmon rivers are known from the fifteenth century. The natural environment of the western and northern coasts of the White Sea was not conducive to farming, and the Pomors were therefore dependent on external sources for their grain requirements. Indeed, the salmon-for-grain trade was a prerequisite for the Pomors’ survival and their keeping of cultural identity as Slavic people. In addition to salmon, other northern trade goods from coastal areas that were provided to central Russia by the Pomors included fur, salt, walrus tusks, seal and walrus blubber and skin, and in some places also reindeer skins, and bird feathers.7 After pacification of the Karelians in the mid-fourteenth century, Novgorod further extended its authority over the Saami (Martin 1988, 29), whose distribution range at that time included the southern coasts of the White Sea (Vitov 1962, 43). The Saami hunting territory  | Julia Lajus

was gradually reduced and they became involved in trade relations exchanging fur and fish for cloth, iron, and other goods (Kalinin 1929). During the fourteenth century, the major Novgorodian feudal lords and monasteries, which attracted or forcedly moved peasant inhabitants, gained control over a large part of the western and southern coasts of the White Sea. They dominated this territory fully, while the peasant communities developed along the eastern coast, especially in the lower Dvina River area (Martin 1988, 33). This contradicts the statement that Novgorod “was solely interested in extracting tribute from the native population of the north” (Khodarkovsky 2006, 318), and not in the colonization of the region. Throughout the fifteenth century, Novgorod was forced to cede more and more of its northern colonies to Moscow, and finally all of them were confiscated by the central government after the defeat of Novgorod in 1478. Subsequently, all the northern Russian lands and fisheries were controlled and distributed by central officials, and from this time the resources of the North became a matter of concern to the centralized state. After abolition of the Novgorodian landlords’ possessions, most of the northern peasants became so-called state (or black land) peasants, while part of them were dependent on the monasteries. The central government had been keeping control over the natural resources through taxes. For example, the collection of the “tenth fish” was the most common tax in the most profitable salmon fisheries. The state made cadastral descriptions of the settlements and arable lands for tax purposes, which sometimes included also descriptions of the other resources: haylands, fisheries, hunts. The czar could also give access to resources to other users, especially to monasteries and foreign merchants, who in their turn paid taxes to the treasury. The Solovetsky monastery, which was founded in 1436 under Novgorodian rule on the islands of that name in the White Sea, became the largest landowner and the outpost of Muscovite colonization, organizing fisheries, salt production, and trade.8 The monasteries steadily appropriated the richest salmon fisheries on the Kola Peninsula, in the process driving the Saami people out of their territories (Bernshtam 1978, 35; Kalinin 1929; Friis 1896). In the seventeenth century, in addition to the expansion of monasteries, the Colonization of the Russian North | 

other migration connected with religion was the movement to the North of religious refugees after the Great Schism (Raskol) of the Russian Church in 1658. As in Siberia, the religious refugees served here as frontiersmen who settled in the most remote places. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the settlement of Kola was founded in the top of the Kola Bay of the Barents Sea, and this region became involved with the economical activity of the Pomors, at first due to rich salmon fisheries. Later a seasonal inshore cod fishery emerged along the Murman coast of the Barents Sea and rapidly assumed importance in the local economy. The scale of fishing operations shaped life within coastal communities. Where possible, fishing was combined with farming and hunting. The specificity of these combinations along different parts of the coast formed distinct patterns of resource use within a given economic framework, or ecotypes. For instance, in most settlements on the western White Sea coast, nearly every able-bodied male went to the Murman coast during the spring and summer months to fish for cod, leaving other members of the family at home to manage subsistence fisheries and other household activities. In the fall, after the men had returned, they conducted more extensive salmon fisheries, after which they might go ice-fishing for herring.9 At the same time the fishermen along the southern coast of the Kola Peninsula did not go to the Murman coast but focused mostly on the salmon fisheries, which were especially productive in that area. Kola was, for a long time, the only permanent Russian settlement on the Barents Sea coast. It played a key role in shaping the Pomors fisheries, serving as a “cultural corridor” linking the White and Barents Seas to the entire North Atlantic region. Soon the Pomors had reached the distant Arctic islands of Novaya Zemlya and, probably, Spitsbergen.10 The Pomors were in contact with international traders who came to exchange cloth, copper, tin, and other items for salmon and cod. Even after foreign trade was forcedly moved by the central government to Arkhangel’sk, founded in 1584, Kola remained the center for the export of fish, as well as seal and walrus train oil (Andreev 1920). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the North was undoubtedly an important region for supplying fish to the Russian market. Later, the domestic demand for northern fish was adversely affected by  | Julia Lajus

the emergence of fisheries in Russia’s newly won territories on the Baltic, Caspian, and Black Seas and rapid growth of import. The northern fisheries remained important local and regional food sources. However, before this change, the state experimented with facilitating the extraction of marine resources, making the region a new source of wealth for the nobility and the treasury by borrowing the examples of Western colonial institutions—namely, large trade companies.

Trade Monopolies, Eighteenth Century In 1703, czar Peter the Great, inspired by the examples of the Dutch and English trade companies, decided to concentrate the fish trade of the White and Barents Seas in private hands. Local fishermen were obliged to sell all the fish caught to the newly established company at fixed, low prices, while the company sold fish at two or three times the purchase price. In spite of the hopes of the czar, the company had no interest in making any investment in the development of the area or improving fisheries. However, the system was profitable not only for the company but also for the treasury, which assessed higher taxes. The northern peasant communities and local merchants vigorously opposed monopolies. Because of this, in 1730, the cod fisheries were temporarily removed from monopoly protection when the government decided to forbid cod export on the grounds that it was the most important food source for the local population. In 1767 the merchants of Arkhangel’sk forwarded a petition to the government demanding an end to private monopolies. In this period a significant decline in the fisheries took place, one that appears to have been caused by a combination of natural, social, and economic factors. In spite of the profit provided by the monopoly system, the state could not completely ignore the rights of the local inhabitants. Fear of social disorder, which was a very powerful factor in the internal politics of the Russian Empire in general,11 was especially evident in this vulnerable frontier region. In 1768, under Catherine the Great with all her measures compatible with liberal economics (Dixon 1999, 225), the colonial approach to the region in the form of large trade companies Colonization of the Russian North | 

was abandoned. Some level of state interest toward the resources of the North was still visible through the support of the scientific expeditions that were part of a larger program of resource inventory of the empire begun by the Imperial Academy of Science (Puteshestviia 1805; Ozeretskovsky 1804). Four years earlier, in 1764, as part of secularization efforts, the treasury took possession of most of the lands and fishing grounds belonging to the monasteries. The treasury gave this property to the peasants who had previously been dependent on the monasteries. In 1775, the government took the next step in support of the northern fisheries when it abolished duties on fishing and marine hunting. All these decisions seem to have had favorable consequences for the Pomors economy in general, while causing a decline in the town of Kola. Instead of an export trade, which was in the hands of monopolies and for which foreign ships (mainly from Britain and northern Germany) came to Kola,12 the Pomors began to engage in local trade with Norway using their own vessels (Schrader 1988). Up to the middle of the nineteenth century the state did not give much attention to the region, “allowing only the local inhabitants to improve and extend their industries” (Veberman 1914, 112). Several attempts to organize private enterprises failed without receiving governmental support (Lajus, Kraikovski, and Yurchenko 2009, 59). Only after the defeat in the Crimean War of 1853–56, which strongly affected the North, did the Ministry of State Domains send a scientific expedition to explore that area. The expedition was part of the longterm studies of the status of Russian fisheries under the leadership of well-known zoologist Karl Ernst von Baer. The expeditions hoped to provide an impetus for the economic development of the region in general and laid the foundations for the subsequent governmental politics in the colonization of the Murman coast.

Governmental Colonization, 1860–1914 Intensification of contacts between core and periphery in nineteenthcentury Russia, and the intensification of contacts with the periphery  | Julia Lajus

of the neighboring states, facilitated an awareness that the development of the Russian North was proceeding too slowly. This became especially visible against the background of the rapid development of northern Norway. Thus at the end of the 1850s, the local authorities raised the issue of the need for improvement of the economy in general, and the northern marine fisheries in particular, to the “Norwegian level.” This idea was supported by the central government, and fiscal and recruitment privileges for prospective colonists were issued in 1860. The colonization of the Murman coast was, in many respects, a unique phenomenon, as it involved the simultaneous engagement of completely different ethnic groups—Norwegians, Finns, Russians, Karelians, and Saami—who all lived side by side for more than eighty years, working hard to make a living in this inhospitable region.13 Inviting Finns and Norwegians to settle on the coast, the authorities expressed utopian idea that foreign colonists could serve as an encouraging example for reinforcing Russian colonization. Settlers from each group adapted to the new environmental conditions within the context of their own cultural traditions, forming distinctive ecotypes in the western and eastern parts of the coast that differed sharply in their physical environments. However, three decades later the authorities understood that the colonization process was proceeding too slowly for the modernization of the region to the “Norwegian level.” As it was becoming increasingly clear how much effort the improvement of the economy of the Russian North demanded, the government paid ever greater attention to the real and hypothetical harm caused by foreigners who settled on the coast. This case might serve as one more example of “the tension between utopian visions and dystopian results” (Rieber 2007, 267) that characterizes Russian colonization in general. Several measures to improve the economic situation in the Russian North were undertaken: A new administrative center and port of Aleksandrovsk (from 1931, called Polyarny) on the Barents Sea coast was opened in 1899, the railroad to Arkhangel’sk was built, and telegraph connections were developed (Engelhardt 1899). At that time the focus of colonization policy moved from the attraction of individual Colonization of the Russian North | 

Figure 6.1 View of the newly founded town of Alexandrovsk in the Kola Bay, the Barents Sea, 1902. Courtesy of St. Petersburg Branch of Archives of Russian Academy of Sciences. Collection 731, inventory 1, file 99, list 8.

colonizers to the need for state and private investments for the development of the local industries. At the beginning of the twentieth century a change of priorities in the development of the Russian North took place. This change can be considered as a shift from support for the traditional economic development of the region, based most of all on fisheries, to a search of new means of development. After a rather unsuccessful attempt to use science for the improvement of the fisheries—the Murman Scientific Fishery Expedition (1898–1908), which was developed using examples from the Scandinavian countries—authorities decided instead to support scientific research focused on exploration of remote Arctic islands, where one of the main resources was supposed to be coal.14 However, no coalfields suitable for mining were found on Novaya Zemlya islands, and in the last years before WWI the government turned its attention to Spitsbergen (Svalbard), where other nations had already started coal mining.  | Julia Lajus

Novaya Zemlya remained uninhabited and used only for seasonal hunting and fishing by the 1870s, when the Russian government faced the threats from Norwegian hunters, who appeared there in increasing numbers, decided to colonize the islands. The remoteness and severe environmental conditions of the islands were the major obstacles. Because of this, in 1877 the government decided to settle there a group of natives who inhabited a similar environment—the Nenets people, and by 1898 their numbers on the islands grew to about a hundred people.15 The Russian government looked more or less indifferently upon foreign fisheries near its coasts, equipping for their defense only one very slow ship, which was of almost no assistance (Popov and Davydov 1999). Foreign fishermen took only fish, a large proportion of which were not taken by locals, but were not able to control the sea itself. By contrast, in the case of Novaya Zemlya, the authorities were faced with the threat of losing land, which was considered of great worth, even though it was mostly unused. Thus, the Norwegians, by their colonization of the Murman coast, by their fisheries along it, and by marine hunting on Novaya Zemlya, attracted the interest of the Russian authorities in their own northern territories.16

WWI and Changing Attitudes toward the North The interest of the Russian government in the North greatly increased during the First World War. This was a consequence of the new strategic role of the North as a region through which the supplies for the Russian army from its allies were organized and also of increasing interest toward exploitation of domestic natural resources. The most important change to the region was brought about with the building in 1915 of the railroad that penetrated the western part of the northern region from Petrograd17 through the densely forested area of Karelia, went along the western coast of the White Sea, continued through the tundra and the Khibiny Mountains of the inner part of the Kola Peninsula, and ended in the newly founded town Romanov-na-Murmane (from April 1917—Murmansk) at the top of Kola Bay on the Barents Sea. In 1916 Russia proclaimed sovereignty over its Arctic territories. Colonization of the Russian North | 

The imperial government considered natural resources important for war use. The necessity for the studies of the North was proclaimed by the newly established Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces and the Polar Commission under the Imperial Academy of Sciences, in which the most prominent natural scientists participated. The practical tasks of these studies included assisting in supplying the front and the hinterland with necessary raw materials and foodstuffs, including northern fish. Circumstances of war, on the one hand, facilitated connections of the northern periphery with the center of the empire, but on the other hand, the increasing strategic importance of the North led to the growth of the self-dependence and responsibilities of the regional authorities, a process started already before the war. In January 1918, Soviet power came to the North but already by the summer it was overthrown and the region became independent from Russia. It was named Severnaia oblast (the northern region) and had its own government.18 As in Siberia at the same time, this government was most sympathetic to regionalist ideas and thus very much concerned with the development of the local economy (Kotsonis 1992). At meetings in its Department of Trade and Industry, representatives of local authorities, merchants, scientists, public organizations, and the cooperative movement of fishermen discussed not only everyday problems, but issues of long-term importance such as new rules for the protection of fisheries, which included the establishing of a coastal economic zone.19 However, the work of the regional administration was not effective enough in a very difficult political and economic situation with the increasing activity of military forces, including English, American, and French troops. The region finally came back under Soviet power by January 1920.

“Railway Colonization” of the 1920s After the revolution, the Soviet government immediately paid close attention to the North in the search for necessary natural resources: timber, minerals, and foodstuffs. The existence of the direct railroad  | Julia Lajus

Figure 6.2 Local fishermen of the village Gavrilovo, Murman coast, the Barents Sea, 1927. Courtsey of the Department of Ichthyology and Hydrobiology, St. Petersburg State University.

that connected the center with a productive fisheries area was considered especially favorable for resource extraction and for continuing colonization of the region. In the beginning resource use was concentrated around timber and fish. The role of the timber industry in the economic life of the Soviet North, especially in Karelia, which, along with the Arkhangel’sk region and Komi Republic were the main regions for timber extraction, has been studied in some detail.20 The role of fisheries and the fish industry are less known. Fish was crucial as a food supply for the army and urban population, and thus during the period of the “military communism” special troops were sent to the North to collect fish from the local fishermen. In this period all fisheries were declared a state monopoly and no private use was possible. Fishermen were united into cooperatives. They were forced to deliver all fish to the representatives of the State Fisheries Administration (Glavryba). In return for fish they received meager Colonization of the Russian North | 

Map 6.1 Map of the Russian North: “railway colonization,” second half of the 1920s.

food rations and very small amounts of gear and salt, which were in catastrophic shortage. While the railway facilitated connections between the northern periphery and the center, it significantly changed the traditional roots of exchange within the northern region itself. The situation was worsened by administrative reforms imposed from above, which were incompatible with local environmental conditions and trade practices established in ancient times and based on marine and river transportation. With the administrative reform in June 1921, the Kola Peninsula was put under authority of the newly established Murmansk region, but villages along the coast and far away from the railroad were left almost without any administration and assistance. Thus, the inhabitants of these villages were not able to exchange fish for other foodstuffs and suffered famine.21 In spite of such examples, it was evident that only the railroad could provide intensive flows of resources, goods, and especially labor, which was in a great demand in this scarcely populated region. This stage of colonization of the North was called “railway colonization.” It is important to stress that in many ways it continued the late imperial strategies for colonization, trying to keep the principle of voluntariness and providing some privileges to colonists as well as picking up their “utopian impulse.”22 Even the same people often remained in charge: Thus, the former head of the Resettlement Bureau in the prerevolutionary Ministry of Agriculture, G. F. Chirkin, became the main proponent of the idea of Soviet “railway colonization” (Baron 2007, 75–78). In his colonization program Chirkin chose a model of “pioneering-colonizing railway” (1929, 4–5) based on the examples of North American, especially Canadian railway companies, which not only provided connections between the regions but served as economic agencies facilitating the colonization of the frontier zones. The Murmansk railway, which, like all Soviet state-funded companies, experienced severe lack of funding, was able to fulfill the aims of colonization only through appropriating the land and the intensive use of terrestrial and aquatic resources. This became possible with the end of the period of “war communism,” with its highly centralized economic system, and the beginning of the period of the New Economic Colonization of the Russian North | 

Policy (1921–29), when economic life became more diverse, some level of private enterprise was allowed, and economic decision-making became to some extent decentralized. In this era, building a local economy meant building local authority. A new economy needed to be built on increasing resource extraction and preferably also on new technology. This was the reason why trawling was so important for the authorities, even if it did not bring any economic profit at the beginning.23 At the same time, competition for funding and privileges from the center between neighboring Murmansk and Arkhangel’sk administrative units was intolerable; during the years 1922–24, relations between these two regional fisheries administrations were described as being “close to war” (Tchernavin and Tchernavina 1999, 12). The Murmansk administration wanted to manage the trawling fisheries, which were operated from Arkhangel’sk, and while the Arkhangel’sk administration refused, it did not allow the trawlers to use ports on the Murman coast. To overcome these tensions and to facilitate the technological modernization of fisheries, the idea of involving foreign capital in the form of concessions was discussed but failed. In a situation of food shortage in the country, the northern fisheries were declared by the authorities to be “a matter of state importance” (Lajus 1999). A twelve-mile economic zone was established to protect the inshore fish resources. Finally, both local fisheries administrations were tightly connected with a new state trawling enterprise—the Northern State Fisheries Trust. The trust was responsible not only for trawl fisheries but also for collecting fish from the local fishermen and providing them with foodstuffs, gear, and salt. Inland, similar operations were fulfilled by the Murmansk railway administration through its colonization department, with branches responsible for the management of different natural resources, especially timber and fish. These economic bodies were responsible also for the “cultural development of the backward locals,” teaching them how to improve timber cutting and fisheries technologies, which included techniques used in the preparation of fish products.24 At that time the state authorities still wanted to educate local people, but not to replace them with other settlers. The colonizing  | Julia Lajus

process was widely perceived as a means “to overcome economic backwardness, plugging the porous frontiers, and taming the wilderness as an emblem of European civilization” (Rieber 2007, 270). Both the Northern Fisheries Trust and the Murmansk railway contracted scientists from leading research institutes to study fish resources, test technological innovations, and provide materials for the education of locals. However, many fishermen remained very skeptical toward education and rejected even very modest attempts at mechanization of the fisheries (Lajus 1999, 52–53). The same was true of the timber industry in Karelia, where workers did not want to accept new tools, equipment, and methods of work from experienced Finnish immigrants who had been invited with the aim of teaching local workers to use more effective working methods (Autio 2002, 80). In the 1920s the idea of bringing new technologies to the wilderness constituted the core of the state colonization policy. The process of transformation of the North with assistance of railway technology was called “Canadization,” and according to Chirkin (1929), who became a head of the Murmansk railways colonization department, the Karelo-Murman region should become a new “Soviet Canada” (5). Technological development was accompanied by forcing the connection of the region with the core of the country. The administrations of most large economic enterprises, including the railway and fisheries trusts, were located not in the North, but in Leningrad, the closest big city. The northern identity and networks with other northern countries were broken. While local administrations, especially in Karelia, favored the existence and even immigration of settlers on a national basis, central government pursued broader goals for resettlement of the area. These were directed not only at resource development but also at strengthening the Soviet border areas.

Internal “Socialistic” Colonization of the 1930s The relatively soft “railway colonization” was interrupted in the early 1930s during what is known as the “Great Break,” when the industrialization and collectivization of peasants started. This period is Colonization of the Russian North | 

characterized by the centralization of the economy. Management of fisheries was concentrated in the central agency, “Soiuzryba,” and put under the authority of the Ministry of Supply (Narkomsnab). Forest administration also shifted from the local level to the center, and forest areas in Karelia were moved under central authorities. Thus Karelia at first lost its main source of income, and then in 1931 lost its economic autonomy.25 With the first Five-Year Plan, the demand for increasing catches became unrealistic. The administration of the trawling was totally reorganized, with most of the staff of Northern Fisheries Trust being removed and repressed (Tchernavin and Tchernavina 1999). In 1931 collectivization reached the North. Fishermen, who were considered a specific kind of peasant, were forced into collective enterprises— kolkhozy. Although the collectivization of the fishermen on the White Sea coast started earlier than the collectivization of peasants, the situation in the kolkhozes, which specialized in fisheries, was even worse than in agricultural collective farms due to bad coordination of different seasonal activities and lack of fishing equipment (Zakharova 2002, 109–10; Shashkov 2004, 55–82). On the Barents Sea coast rather effective small fishing cooperatives were enlarged, which made them less manageable and the prices for fish uncompetitive with very cheap trawling fish. Reindeer-herding Saami also underwent collectivization, with its own tragic consequences. Rapid industrialization obviously was not possible in scarcely populated northern areas without an inflow of labor, and the easiest way to get the latter was the drafting in of convict labor and “special settlers” whose numbers rapidly increased during the years of collectivization. Thus in the 1930s, the process of colonization of the North totally moved away from the earlier Soviet romanticism of being a new Canada. The system of concentration camps, known as Gulags,26 military power, opening of the Northern Sea route, and big industry—mining and metal melting—became the driving forces of regional development, sharply changing its patterns with all subsequent consequences for local peoples and nature. From the industrial point of view, both preindustrial landscapes and the people inhabiting them were regarded as extremely “backward.” At  | Julia Lajus

this stage the “civilizing mission” of colonizers changed from the idea of improvement of local economy to the goal of its complete transformation: The traditional ways of life, not only of indigenous peoples but of the Pomor fishermen and Murman colonists of different nations, were not considered to have enough potential to be developed. Large numbers of immigrants, both free and convicts, immigrated to the region. Urbanization occurred at full speed: The growth of Murmansk was spectacular—from twenty-seven thousand to sixty thousand in four years alone, but the number of industrial mining sites grew to twenty thousand in one year.27 By contrast, the growth rate of indigenous and local people was very small—6–10 percent in five years, and in the industrialized areas their populations even declined. All these features—flows of new labor, including a large number of convicts with emerging and rapid growing of Gulags, urbanization, and abandoning of the coastal settlements—are those often described within the framework of internal colonialism (Calvert 2001). During that time fishery managers and scientists who focused on traditional fisheries fell under repression (Tchernavin and Tchernavina 1999). A new generation of scientists, mostly biologists who focused their studies exclusively on fish resources, became the advisers of the rapidly developing fishing industry. As the Soviet authorities at that time were able to provide a large amount of very cheap labor— both from free citizens and from convicts—they, and not the scientists, developed the social dimensions of fisheries and other resource use and fully took managing labor and markets into their hands. Authorities could easily move labor from one place in the country to another; for instance, fishermen from the Black Sea together with the peasants from Ukraine were sent to fish in the North, while groups of northern fishermen were forcedly relocated to the Far East. Military colonization of the region started in the mid-1930s and rapidly expanded to the point that at the beginning of WWII, most of the Barents Sea coast was put under military control. Militarization reshaped the forms of resource use, for instance, preventing development of inshore fisheries by transforming the bays convenient for fisheries into submarine bases. Secret military towns as well as camps where people from the entire country were mixed brought to the region their Colonization of the Russian North | 

own specific culture, much different from the local one. The need to strengthen the border zone led to the forced removal of the Finnish and Norwegian colonists from the coast, and the resolution of June 23, 1940, in connection with the Soviet-Finnish War prescribed the expulsion of “foreign nationals” from the frontier zone.28 The deportations seriously disrupted the status of the fishing industry in the region, and virtually obliterated the many years of hard work that had been invested in the colonization of the Murman coast. Later, in the 1950s, the Nenets people who colonized Novaya Zemlya island suffered the same fate on account of the military interests of the state as the island was chosen to become a ground for nuclear weapons tests. The Barents Sea, with the ice-free port of Murmansk, became the starting point for the Northern Sea Route. From the late 1930s its administration (GUSMP) became the agent of internal colonization and militarization in the Soviet Arctic. Increasing international threats in the late 1930s and during the Cold War made the maintenance of a secure navigable route a first priority (Trautman 2006). The imperative for securing Soviet borders in the 1930s spread rapidly from the northern borders closest to the center, such as the Karelian border, to the most distant Arctic islands with sovereignty being claimed over Franz-Josef Land, and the adoption of a sectoral approach toward the division of the Arctic. From 1950s the colonization proceeded on a voluntary basis through establishing “northern privileges” and ideological propaganda, but the main features of internal colonialism described above persisted.

Conclusion Several different models were used historically to push the region’s development, and currently there is much discussion about possible models for its future.29 A new stage of networking of the Russian North with neighboring regions of Finland, Sweden, and Norway became apparent in the regional cross-border initiative and led to the creation in 1993 of a new regional unit—the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. In the framework of the activities of this new cross-border organization, the  | Julia Lajus

special concern of the development of “Barents Russia” is highly pronounced.30 One of the most unpredictable parameters in any future scenarios of development of the North is the uncertainty and rapid changes of the center-periphery relations in Russia. From at least the eighteenth century, the state played a central role in the development of infrastructure, knowledge assembling, and organizing patterns of colonization. Private initiative was very limited even when it was possible. In the Soviet Union the North was maintained by a complex structure, which was created by the interplay of external and internal colonization. This structure was as vulnerable as the Soviet Empire itself. Notable decolonization of the North with decreasing of the industrial activity and population has taken place in last two decades. This phenomena might be described as “whipping” the northern borders of Russia, which are not strengthened anymore by the adjoining space of colonizing and developing territory (Korolev 2002, 12). Thus the problems of mastering the northern periphery, its networking with the core of the country on one hand, and improvement of the vulnerable northern environment and traditional cultures and values on the other, remain pressing problems for Russia. The Soviet Union, in its attitudes toward construction of space and toward any local activities, was a kind of empire. It was driven by an impulse of modernization, which certainly had “pathological” features (Baron 2007, 3). The economy created under this modernization had a very large ecological footprint. In the North the most severe environmental problems, which became visible by the 1960s and 1970s, were the high level of air pollution from the metal melting industry, which destroyed the large square of forests around; nuclear presence; overfishing of the Barents Sea by huge trawling fleets, and the decrease in freshwater fish stocks including valuable salmon, which constituted an important part of traditional resource use. The Soviet rapid industrialization of the area and modernization of fisheries destroyed the whole set of traditional relationships between human and nature, putting the last touches on the changes that were already under way or totally swept away the local communities, as in the case of fishermen settlements along the Murman coast. Colonization of the Russian North | 

Strong economic, environmental, and security constraints impede the development of the Russian northern frontier, which is likely to remain “frozen” unless it is changed by the recently revived mineral resource rivalry and global warming concerns. Better understanding of all advantages and disadvantages of previous experience of colonization of this space along with the grasping of its intrinsic features: northern landscapes, resources, patterns of human-nature relations, and their interpretations through the lenses of local and metropolitan culture, traditional knowledge, and state science, are crucial.

Acknowledgments The work on this paper was partly supported by the Marie Curie Fellowship project “Changing attitudes towards living natural resources in the Russian/Soviet Empire and the exchange of knowledge with Europe: an environmental history perspective.” The author is very grateful to Denis J. B. Shaw for valuable advice on the final stage of writing this paper, and to Karen Alexander, whose friendship and encouragement were crucial in the early stage of this work. Christina Folke Ax and Karen Oslund were the most attentive editors of this work, which improved a lot due to their efforts.

Notes 1. See also Kluchevsky, A History of Russia. Historical geographers and environmental historians often prefer to use the term “settlement” instead of “colonization”; see, for instance, Armstrong, Russian Settlement in the North; Pallott and Shaw, Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia; Moon, “Peasant Migration”; and Richards, The Unending Frontier, 732–826. The term “colonization” was widely in use by the older generation of Russian historians—the classical study of Russian colonization is Liubavskii, Obzor Istorii Russkoi Kolonizatsii. During Soviet times the term was dropped in reference to Russian territory for political reasons. 2. The bibliography of this subject is enormous; see Breyfogle, Schrader, and Sunderland, “An Introduction”; Lieven, Empire; and Kappeler, The Russian Empire.

 | Julia Lajus

3. The best studies on the early colonization of the Russian North include Martin, “Russian Expansion in the Far North”; Platonov, Proshloe Russkogo Severa; and Makarov, Kolonizatsiia Severnykh Okrain Drevnei Rusi. 4. For discussion on this, see Shaw, “Russia’s Geographical Environment,” 32. 5. Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness, 61–85; Pipes, “The Environment and Its Consequences,” 13–14. 6. See, for instance, Nuorluoto, The Slavicization of the Russian North. 7. Kalinin, “Torgovye otnoshenia.” 8. Kliuchevskii, Khoziaistvennaia Deiatelnost. 9. For details on different types of fisheries, see Lajus, Kraikovski, and Yurchenko, “The Fisheries of the Russian North,” 41–64. 10. Stora, “Russian Walrus Hunting in Spitsbergen.” See also Richards, The Unending Frontier, 607–9. The possibility of a Russian presence on Spitsbergen prior to the eighteenth century is a matter of severe contention, especially between Russian and Norwegian historians; see Acta Borealia: A Nordic Journal of Circumpolar Societies 22, 1 (2005). 11. David Moon, “The Problem of Social Stability in Russia.” 12. See Ozeretskovsky, Opisanie Koly i Astrakhani; and Zakharov, Zapadno-evropeiskie kuptsy, 299–304. 13. For details, see Yurchenko and Nielsen, In the North My Nest Is Made. 14. See Lajus, “From Fishing to Mining.” 15. Armstrong, Russian Settlement, 120. 16. Nielsen, “The Barents Region in Historical Perspective.” 17. This name was given to St. Petersburg in 1914. 18. Goldin, “The Civil War in Northern Russia.” 19. State Archives of Russian Federation (GARF) coll. Р-3090, inv. 1, f. 55. 20. Autio, “Soviet Karelian Forests in the Planned Economy of the Soviet Union”; and Baron, Soviet Karelia. 21. RGAE coll. 764, inv. 2, f. 62, ll. 66–69. 22. See Orekhova, Kolonizatsiia Murmanskogo Berega Kolskogo Poluostrova; and Rieber, “Colonizing Eurasia,” 270. 23. RGAE, coll. 764, inv. 2, f. 108. l. 105. 24. Concerning attitudes toward the alleged “backwardness” of the indigenous northern peoples, see Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors; and of Russian peasants in general, see Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward. 25. Autio, “Soviet Karelian Forests,” 80.

Colonization of the Russian North | 

26. Some authors term the colonization of the North in this period “Gulag colonization”; Korolev, Otechestvennye zapiski, 4. See Baron, Soviet Karelia, 119–36. 27. Korotaev, Russkii Sever v kontse XIX, 163. For the overview of population and economic development of the Russian North overall in the twentieth century, see Kauppala, The Russian North. 28. Portsel, “The Norwegian Colonists in Murman during the Soviet Period.” 29. See, for instance, Brunstad et al., Big Oil Playground. 30. “Barents Russia” includes virtually the same territory as “the Russian North.”

Works Cited Andreev, Alexandr I. 1920. “K istorii russkoi kolonizatsii zapadnoi chasti Kolskogo poluostrova.” Dela i dni 1:23–36. Armstrong, Terence E. 1965. Russian Settlement in the North. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Autio, Sari. 2002. “Soviet Karelian Forests in the Planned Economy of the Soviet Union, 1928–37.” Rise and Fall of Soviet Karelia: People and Power, edited by Antti Laine and Mikko Ylikangas, 71 – 90. Helsinki: Kikimora Publications. Baron, Nick. 2007. Soviet Karelia: Politics, Planning and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1920–1939. London: Routledge. Bernshtam, T. A. 1978. Pomory: Formirovanie gruppy i sistema khoziaistva. Leningrad: Nauka. Breyfogle, Nicholas B., Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland. 2007. “An Introduction.” In Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History, edited by Breyfogle, Schrader, and Sunderland, 1–18. London: Routledge. Brunstad, Bjørn, Eivind Magnus, Philip Swanson, Geir Hønneland, and Indra Øverland. 2004. Big Oil Playground, Russian Bear Preserve or European Periphery? The Russian Barents Region towards 2015. Delft: Eburon. Calvert, Peter. 2001. “Internal Colonialism, Development and Environment.” Third World Quarterly 22:51 –63. Chirkin, G.F. 1929. Sovietskaia Kanada (Karelo-Murmanskii krai). Priroda i Liudi, kn. 3. Leningrad: P. P. Soikin.

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Dixon, Simon. 1999. The Modernization of Russia, 1676–1825. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engelhardt, Alexandr P. 1899. A Russian Province of the North. Translated by Henry Cooke. Westminster: Archibald Constable. Friis, Jens A. 1896. The Monastery of Petschenga: Sketches of Russian Lapland. (From Historical and Legendary sources). Translated by Hill Repp. London: Elliot Stock. Goldin, Vladislav. 2000. “The Civil War in Northern Russia.” Acta Borealia 2:65–82. Kalinin, I. M. 1929. “Torgovye otnosheniia loparei s russkimi v polovine XVII veka.” Izvestiia Russkogo geograficheskogo obschestva 61 (1): 59–76. Kangaspuro, Markku, and Jeremy Smith, eds. 2006. Modernisation in Russia since 1900. Studia Fennica Historica 12. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Kappeler, Andreas. 2001. The Russian Empire: A Multi-Ethnic History. Translated by Alfred Clayton. Essex: Pearson Education. Kauppala, Pekka. 1998. The Russian North: The Rise, Evolution and Current Condition of State Settlement Policy. Helsinki: Finnish Institute for Russian and East European Studies. Khodarkovsky, Michael. 2006. “The Non-Christian People on the Muscovite Frontier.” The Cambridge History of Russia. Vol. 1, From Early Rus’ to 1689, edited by Maureen Perrie, 317–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Kliuchevskii, Vasilii O. 1867. Khoziaistvennaia deiatelnost Solovetskogo monastyria v Belomorskom krae. Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia. ———. 1956. Kurs Russkoi istorii. Vol. 1, chap. 1. Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury. Kluchevsky, Vassily O. 1960. A History of Russia. Translated by C. J. Hogarth. New York: Russell & Russell. Korolev, Sergei. 2002. Kraia prostranstva. Otechestvennye zapiski (Margins of space). No. 6. http://magazines.russ.ru/oz/2002/6/2002_06_24.html. Korotaev, Vladimir I. 1998. Russkii Sever v kontse XIX—pervoi treti XX veka. Problemy modernizatsii i sotsialnoi ekologii. Arkhangel’sk: Izd. Pomorskogo universiteta. Kotsonis, Yanni. 1992. “Arkhangel’sk, 1918: Regionalism and Populism in the Russian Civil War.” Russian Review 51 (4): 526–44. ———. 1999. Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Lajus, Julia A. 1999. “Science, Politics and Practice in the Fishery: Scientists, Industrialists and Fishermen in the Russian North, 1898–1940.” In Technological Change in the North Atlantic Fisheries, edited by Poul Holm

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and David Starkey, 49–59. Esbjerg: Studia Atlantica 3/Fiskeri–og SØfartsmuseets Studieserie 13. ———. 2004. “From Fishing to Mining: The Change of Priorities in the Development of the North and Russian Expedition to Spitsbergen in the Early 20th Century.” Arktisk Gruvdrift II. Teknik, vetenskap och historia i nor. Foredragpresenterade vid ett seminarium pa Kungl. Vetenskapsakademiem dem 6 maj 2000, 93–106. Stockholm: Jernskontorets Berghistoriska Utskott. H. 74. Lajus, Julia, Alexei Kraikovski, and Alexei Yurchenko. 2009. “The Fisheries of the Russian North, c. 1300–1850.” In A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries. Vol. 1, From Early Times to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, edited by David J. Starkey, Jon Thor, Ingo Heidbrink, 41–64. Deutsches Marine Studien: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum Bd. 6. Bremen: Verlag H. M. Hauschild GmbH. Lieven, Dominic. 2000. Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. London: John Murray. Liubavskii, Мatvei К. 1996. Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizatsii s drevneishikh vremen i do до XX veka. Мoscow: Izd. Moskovskogo universiteta. Makarov, Nikolai A. 1997. Kolonizatsiia severnykh okrain Drevnei Rusi v XI-XIII веках. Мoscow: Scriptorii. Martin, Janet. 1986. Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and Its Significance for Medieval Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1988. “Russian Expansion in the Far North. X to Mid-XVI Century.” In Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917, edited by Michael Ryw­ kin, 23–43. London: Mansell. Moon, David. 1997. “Peasant Migration and the Settlement of Russia’s Frontiers, 1550–1897.” Historical Journal 40 (4): 859–93. ———. 1999. “The Problem of Social Stability in Russia, 1598–1998.” Reinterpreting Russia, edited by Geoffrey Hosking and Robert Service, 54–74. London: Arnold. Nielsen, Jens Petter. 1994. “The Barents Region in Historical Perspective: Russian-Norwegian Relations 1814–1917 and the Russian Commitment in the North.” In The Barents Region: Cooperation in Arctic Europe, edited by Olaf S. Stokke and Ola Tunander, 87–100. London: SAGE. Nuorluoto, Juhani, ed. 2006. The Slavicization of the Russian North: Mechanisms and Chronology. Helsinki: Department of Slavonic and Baltic Languages and Literatures. Orekhova, Ekaterina A. 2009. Kolonizatsiia Murmanskogo berega Kolskogo Poluostrova vo vtoroi polovine 19–pervoi treti 20 vekov. Avtoreferat dissertatsii. St. Petersburg.

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Ozeretskovsky, Nikolai A. 1804. Opisanie Koly i Astrakhani. St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk. Pallott, Judith, and Denis B. Shaw. 1990. Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia, 1613–1917. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pipes, Richard. 1994. “The Environment and Its Consequences.” In Major Problems in the History of Imperial Russia, edited by James Cracraft, 4–21. Lexington, MA: D. C. Hearth. Platonov, Sergei F. 1924. Proshloe Russkogo Severa. Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii Pomoria. Berlin: Obelisk. Popov, Gennadii P., and Ruslan A. Davydov. 1999. Murman. Ocherki istorii kraia XIX–nachala XX v. Ekaterinburg: UrO RAN. Portsel, Alexander. 2005. “The Norwegian Colonists in Murman during the Soviet Period (1920–1940).” In the North My Nest Is Made: Studies in the History of the Murman Colonization, 1860–1940, edited by Alexei Yurchenko and Jens Petter Nielsen, 145–65. European University at St. Petersburg, University of Tromso. Puteshestviia akademika Ivana Lepekhina v 1772 godu. 1805. Vol. 4. St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk. Richards, John F. 2003. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkley: University of California Press. Rieber, Alfred J. 2007. “Colonizing Eurasia.” In Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History, edited by Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland, 265–79. London: Routledge. Schrader, Tatjana A. 1988. “Pomor Trade with Norway.” Acta Borealia 5 (1–2): 111–18. Shashkov, Victor Ya. 1993. Spetspereselentsy na Murmane: Rol’ spetspereselentsev v razvitii proizvoditelnykh sil na Kolskom poluostrove (1930– 1936). Murmansk: Murmanskii pedagogicheskii universitet. ———. 2004. Spetspereselentsy v istorii Murmanskoi oblasti. Murmansk: Maksimum. Shaw, Denis J. B. 1989. “The Settlement of European Russia during the Romanov Period (1613–1917).” Soviet Geography 30 (3): 207–28. ———. 2006. “Russia’s Geographical Environment.” In The Cambridge History of Russia. Vol. 1, From Early Rus’ to 1689, edited by Maureen Perrie, 19–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slezkine, Yuri. 1994. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stora, Nils. 1987. “Russian Walrus Hunting in Spitsbergen.” Etudes Inuit Studies 11 (2): 117–38.

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Tchernavin, Vladimir, and Tatiana Tchernavina. 1999. Zapiski vreditelia: Pobeg iz Gulaga. St. Petersburg: Kanon. Trautman, Linda. 2006. “Modernization of Russia’s Last Frontier: The Arctic and the Northern Sea Route from the 1930s to the 1990s.” In Modernization in Russia since 1900, edited by Markku Kangaspuro and Jeremy Smith, 252–66. Studia Fennica Historica 12. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Veberman, Ernst A. 1914. Kitoboinyi promysel v Rossii. I. Istoriia promysla. Izvestiia Moskovskogo kommercheskogo instituta. Kommerchesko– tekhnicheskoe otdelenie. Kn. II. Moscow. Vitov, M. V. 1962. Istoriko-geograficheskie ocherki Zaonezh’ia XVI– XVII vv. Iz istorii selskikh poselenii. Moskva: Izdatelstvo Moskovskogo Universiteta. Yurchenko, Alexei, and Jens Petter Nielsen, eds. 2005. In the North My Nest Is Made: Studies in the History of the Murman Colonization, 1860– 1940. European University at St. Petersburg, University of Tromso. Zakharov, V. N. 2005. Zapadno-evropeiskie kuptsy v rossiiskoi torgovle XVIII veka. Moscow: Nauka. Zakharova, Ol’ga A. 2002. “Pecularities of Collectivization in Karelia.” In Rise and Fall of Soviet Karelia: People and Power, edited by Antti Laine and Mikko Ylikangas, 91–122. Helsinki: Kikimora Publications.

 | Julia Lajus

7 Recasting Disease and Its Environment: Medical Practitioners, the Plague, and Politics in Colonial India (1898–1910)

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

The plague arrived in North India in 1897, after being contained near the presidencies of Bombay and Bengal in western and eastern India where it had arrived earlier. In the early years, plague mortality in India had already touched 354,000 deaths, and between 1903 and 1907 there were a further 4.5 million deaths, half of which were in the province of Punjab in North India.1 This paper focuses on the outbreak of plague in Punjab in its urban manifestation in large populated cities like Delhi, Lahore, and Amritsar, with forays into examining its impact on smaller towns in Punjab’s districts. The plague created social and political conditions that briefly recast relations between various social groups in the urban setting. It also generated a debate and rhetoric in the public arena that employed the vocabulary of sanitation and hygiene, and also shaped perceptions regarding state medical intervention and medical practice that emerged in these years. Much of the evidence for this paper is drawn from vernacular sources such as newspapers, tracts, diaries, and pamphlets, along with an overview of government plague records and reports. The government records of the period were authored by civil and medical 191

officials who were employed in framing Punjab’s plague laws and in implementing them in urban settings, and the vernacular sources were written mostly by publicists and indigenous medical practitioners or physicians who enjoyed significant social status and influence in urban settlements. These writings were addressed both to an emerging market of literate urban readers or public and indirectly to the local plague administration. The politics of the urban environment or its understanding and expression through plague-time writings and rhetoric is therefore crucial to locate plague-time ideas and alignments. The politics of urban sanitation, health, populations, and spaces in towns and cities was an important focus of concern for indigenous practitioners or physicians in the public arena. Indigenous practitioners were also critical mediators in regulating and mediating control of communities and neighborhoods. Their writings and rhetoric addressed these concerns by projecting an understanding of epidemic disease as a manifestation of the natural world, and this in turn helps us understand changing relations between the human environment and disease. Ideas and interventions associated with plague control in urban spaces, the circulation and movement of elements or their pollution or benefits such as of air, sunlight, and of populations, therefore formed a crucial part of writing on the plague by indigenous medical practitioners. The control of urban spaces through quarantines, plague reporting, and sanitary cordons was also increasingly important for the colonial administration during the plague in Punjab, and indigenous practitioners played a crucial role in mediating this control and responding to the initiatives that sought to implement such measures. Their own spokesmanship and networks, however, varied greatly in towns and cities. Urban publicist groups and in particular traditional intellectuals such as indigenous practitioners formed a crucial network of writers and publicists in the urban public arena and were associated with fast-circulating vernacular tracts and journals associated with public debate and engagements since the late nineteenth century. These writings responded to various aspects of colonial medical intervention and its relationship with urban spaces and environment.  | Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

Indigenous physicians addressed ideas regarding the need to avoid disease—a distorted representation of the natural environment—and the changes that had occurred in the urban environment. Recent writing on the third plague pandemic has tended to focus on the critical relationship between the colonial administration and Western medical doctors and scientists at the turn of the century in the context of colonial priorities as many “scientific” priorities were set aside.2 This work seeks to focus on the plague years from the perspective of indigenous physicians.3 Indigenous physicians addressed not so much the government’s epidemiological priorities as the political priorities inherent in government plague-time interventions, relating to controls over space or its “segmentation,” inspections, and segregation rather than therapeutic and “medical” interventions. The colonial government’s plague interventions in Punjab, as the initial section of this paper demonstrates, initially prioritized segregation and quarantines that were rapidly diluted in urban centers when they were met with threats of disorder and were followed by preventive initiatives and local mediation through physicians and public men to control local spaces in the towns and cities.4 Indigenous physicians in their writings and rhetoric did not merely reflect an “indigenous,” “popular” view of disease and its management. Indigenous medical practitioners posited not only a humoral understanding of the plague based on the physical environment. They also embraced, without seeming contradiction, conceptions of contagion that prevailed among medical administrators.5 Indigenous practitioners and state administration were also not entirely oppositional in their interpretation and priorities during the plague and were brought together or divided by alliances and networks that were shaped by the urban political environment. Physicians and medical administrators as much as the reading public shared a fear of the epidemic and insecurities regarding its spread and check. The “popular” lower classes were marginalized not only by the government but also by indigenous physicians as they were seen as representing the imbalances in the urban environment. Indigenous publicists in their writings and through their alliances with local leaders therefore Recasting Disease and Its Environment | 

also pursued and facilitated an agenda of imposing conformity upon urban spaces and populations.

The Onset of Plague and Its Administration in Punjab In the autumn of 1897, a number of cases of plague began to be identified in the Jullundur and Hoshiarpur districts of the northern Indian province of Punjab. The Punjab government had already passed regulations regarding the check and quarantine of travelers from these districts. In January 1898, it drafted a more detailed resolution to be applied to Punjab that was empowered by the government of India’s Epidemic Diseases Act,6 to ensure a course of plague administration that was modeled upon the Bengal Rules named after the plague directives in that presidency. The January Resolution provided a rigorous framework for plague administration. It proposed strict surveillance and inspection for the early identification of plague, the complete evacuation of plague-ridden homes, and camp-based segregation for not only plague patients but also their relatives and others suspected of having contracted plague.7 This resolution was publicized widely through the district authorities and in the official gazette, and news of its contents spread rapidly to the public. In Delhi, keeping in mind the strategic nature of the city, the January Resolution was presented to the city’s municipal committee while emphasizing to its members the need to prepare the public, particularly with regard to the enforcement of segregation of plague patients and suspects to quarantined areas.8 The city administrations’ anxieties were soon borne out as news of the plague rules created widespread panic among the people. The plague scare spawned a familiar round of rumors and threats of disorder such as already experienced earlier in the Bombay presidency. The scare lingered for nearly a month. It led to the flight of Delhi’s betteroff residents following rumors of quarantines and water poisoning, and generated a flurry of public representations to the government and press-based campaigns expressing public responses to the January plague rules.  | Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

The January Resolution was distinct from other forms of medical administration in that it routed medical intervention through the subordinate medical and police agencies. This implied that the local networks of urban mediation, based at the level of the locality, or mohalla, were circumvented. While district authorities, such as in the meeting called by Delhi’s deputy commissioner, did engage the city’s municipality members, their use solely of official government machinery in the form of its plague doctors and police implied that private, local agency remained marginalized.9 The plague scare in Delhi and other cities like Lahore and Jullundur served to dramatize certain issues in relation to the hierarchy and networks of urban social control. Colonial authority and its relationship with the urban leadership on the one hand, and the contest in turn within urban politics on the other, now found articulation. In previous epidemics, however, the local medical administration and the city elite, who mediated epidemic relief, directly addressed local-level agencies of the neighborhood. The municipal councillors, of whom raises, or urban magnates in the city, formed a significant component, were directly engaged in their capacity as mohalladars, or heads of locality, in distributing posters and placards as well as participating in debates within the vernacular and in accompanying the government’s medical doctors on their rounds.10 In cholera epidemics, such as occurred in 1868–69 in Amritsar, they were engaged in persuading people to file death returns, and in other Punjab cities the local civil surgeons’ subordinates were introduced in each mohalla by these leaders.11 The plague scare in the summer of 1898, however, had important implications for plague administration in urban centers. The Punjab provincial government, as in the case of the northwestern provinces earlier, surmised that the towns and cities of the province were likely to offer “forcible resistance” and conceded the need to place medical intervention in the hands of the local, urban administration.12 This was prompted by the colonial administration’s concerns regarding the effectiveness of their allies such as the raises and occupational networks in the city. A separate set of rules, termed the “Modified System,” was therefore devised for plague administration in urban areas.13 Recasting Disease and Its Environment | 

According to the Modified System, municipal committee members and local notables were to form plague vigilance committees and to organize ward committees with an emphasis upon involving local public leadership at the level of the mohallas or neighborhoods for conducting plague-related operations.14 Members of the ward committees included representatives of local communities, and inspections as well as evacuations were to be conducted in the presence of two indigenous practitioners.15 The revision in the plague rules after September–October 1898 increasingly led to debates concerning plague administration and public responses’ being restricted to the local, urban area. The municipalities, led by the local district administration, took the initiative to establish stronger ties of consent with a ward-based public leadership, as well as to engage the participation of the local press. The government’s directives also increasingly emphasized measures of plague prevention. Between 1902 and 1903, inoculation operations were initiated and devolved to the municipal administration.16 And this was followed in 1904 and 1905 by the introduction of preventive measures such as urban sanitary precautions as part of plague administration. The engagement with the local public leadership of each town’s or city’s neighborhoods and wards in these years also implied a dialogue that aimed at the cooption of indigenous practitioners. The latter’s willingness to lend support to state medical efforts and to provide social leadership in wards was often crucial for the local acceptance of these government initiatives.

Indigenous Physicians: Changed Moorings Plague administration in Punjab brought into relief processes and ideas that were beginning to shape the self-perception of indigenous practitioners and their medical practice in urban centers. Plague experiences and social tensions created rising anxieties in urban society and politics. They also reinforced certain emerging attitudes and prompted mobilization among indigenous practitioners.  | Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

The interplay of plague-time politics and public debate moreover created the conditions for indigenous practitioners to assume a more articulate public profile. It allowed them to advance formative ideas and initiatives that addressed the public role and function of their learning. This was particularly critical as indigenous learning was increasingly marginalized from state patronage and government medical education.17 The plague also created the conditions for greater engagements between state agency and indigenous practitioners. Plague administration faced the challenge of controlling the urban environment and control over urban spaces, particularly in the latter phase of plague interventions; and this led to renewed engagements between colonial agency and local physicians. This was brought about after the plague scare and the growing lack of confidence on the part of the city’s administration in existing networks of mediation through traditional local leaders. Plague administration was therefore also marked by the growing contests between the raises and the emerging influence of the new public men, represented by reformist ideologues, patrons, and newspaper editors. Though several families of traditional practitioners were also influential raises in towns such as Amritsar, Delhi, and Lahore, their influence and control over urban spaces and their ability to maintain order were being increasingly challenged by groups of practitioners who were also successful publicists and who were closely allied to the new public men and leaders of Hindu and Sikh ethnic reformist groups. Early in the twentieth century, practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine, or vaids, were increasingly involved in print and publicity networks in an emerging urban public sphere. They served as editors and publicists of vernacular journals and tracts, and also began to use their growing public profile to address urban patrons and the local administration and also to build political networks and constituencies. In the late nineteenth century, there had been significant intersections between colonial authority and indigenous practitioners such as at times of legislative enterprise, on occasions of debating municipal patronage and also during medical intervention at the Recasting Disease and Its Environment | 

time of epidemics such as cholera. During the cholera epidemics, for instance, indigenous practitioners were crucial to the provision of government medical relief. At Peshawar, the civil surgeon employed the services of a dozen or so local hakims during the cholera epidemic and co-opted them in the distribution of cholera pills and other medicines.18 While performing such duties, during the Amritsar cholera of 1869–70, for instance, indigenous physicians frequently posed a challenge even to government medical practitioners. For they still enjoyed patronage from the British Colonial administrators who co-opted them in offering medical relief in cities. During the cholera, for instance, the administrative head of the district, the district commissioner, was in some cases known to use their services more frequently than the district civil surgeon’s office. The control by the local district medical administration over these physicians was mostly indirect, allowing them by and large to practice their own remedies. Their activities were also rewarded by means of monetary rewards and the award by the government of titles of recognition for services to the state or khillats.19 The cooption of local hakims by the state administration therefore gave them an important local status during these earlier epidemics.20 It also posed challenges to urban control for medical administrators and brought out the limitations of Western medical therapeutics. In this sense, it dramatized the role and function of indigenous practitioners in the wider public sphere of polemic and debate surrounding issues concerning urban power relations and public leadership. During the plague years, indigenous practitioners also showed an adaptation to new public roles as well as to newer media such as the vernacular press that conducted urban public debate. In fact, plague-time debates and engagements through the medium of the vernacular press brought out the resilience of indigenous practitioners in urban politics. It was these publicists who wrote petitions to the government, published tracts, spoke in local forums, and began to identify the ideas and networks that were to guide their political, particularistic concerns in the public sphere. Their engagements with the vernacular press and their attempts to author popular tracts and to establish a dialogue with local, colonial authority marked their early attempts  | Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

during the plague years to project a public profile and to define a reformulated and rationalized frame of ideas for indigenous medical knowledge.

Projecting Medical Advice and Authority: Plague Tracts and Publicity in Urban Centers The plague years lent urgency to the efforts of indigenous practitioners to publicize their medical advice and to frame a public role for their practice. The arrival of the plague in a mofussil or small town in the interiors of Amritsar district—the latter being a trade entrepôt for the northwestern frontier and northern provinces of British India— was closely observed and documented by an indigenous Ayurvedic physician in his daily record or roznamcha. Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid, a Sikh Ayurvedic practitioner, was from an eminent family of hereditary medical practitioners who had increasingly become publicists of Sikh social reform in the town. They owned the only notable druggist shop in the town and were also closely associated with the local Sikh school and Gurudwara or Sikh temple in Tarn Taran. Mohan Singh wrote in his diary in February 1902 that the local revenue authorities such as the Tehsildar had issued summons to all the indigenous practitioners in the town.21 Indigenous practitioners were asked to influence the local public in the conduct of plague operations and to ensure local cooperation in inoculation operations. He noted: “Today, many Hakims22 gathered at the Tehsil, and waited anxiously. The Tehsildar only told them that they must instruct people to get inoculated.”23 Within a week, however, Mohan Singh Vaid (1902) had written and published from his private press a plague tract in Punjabi called Mahamari daman. He wrote in its opening pages that he was writing this tract to give his readers an idea of the origins and spread of this disease and how it would need to be managed or vanquished as the title suggested. Plague tracts such as Mahamari daman were significant in that they played the role of “introducing” the disease since it was “new” Recasting Disease and Its Environment | 

as, unlike smallpox and cholera, there was no biological, cultural, or institutional memory of it. The plague had already been reported in the vernacular press from other provinces, and oral reports had followed from immigrants who had fled to towns like Amritsar from the western provinces and from Sindh. Many plague tracts and books were therefore produced in Punjabi, Urdu, and Hindi during the plague years in Punjab. In particular, the plague was an urgent concern for the informed urban public that formed an important section of the clientele of hereditary practitioners and vaid publicists. To address this growing preoccupation, many reformist bodies and associations published and distributed short tracts on the plague. The plague tracts underlined their role in and support of public concerns as well as their claims to leadership of their various constituencies.24 The Khalsa Tract Society (1902), for instance, issued a plague tract in Punjabi, Plague Darpan, which was authored by a local assistant surgeon.25 It aimed at familiarizing its readership with the origins and history of the plague outbreak, and provided guidelines for medical relief, aiming to make the epidemic intelligible in social and medical terms. Plague tracts were printed and circulated by philanthropic individuals as well as prominent social organizations. Indigenous practitioners, however, seemed to have formed the largest number of authors of plague tracts issued by private agencies. More than a half dozen plague tracts and plague journals issued during the plague years were written by indigenous practitioners, a few of which were written and distributed in several vernaculars and ran into several editions.26 More specifically, the contents and arguments in plague tracts that were written by indigenous practitioners, in particular by publicists like Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid and Thakur Dutt Sharma, a renowned “high-caste” practitioner from Lahore, represented the first attempts by individual vaid publicists to project issues concerning their medical knowledge and regarding the legitimacy of their medical practice to a critical urban public readership. The growing number of vaidauthored plague tracts represented the earliest manifestation by indigenous practitioners to negotiate a public place for their learning  | Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

and also to define the scope of their politics in the context of urban plague administration. These practitioners, in the face of growing competition, particularly from commercial quacks, now sought alternative social legitimacy and a public profile distinct from the sanction in local, social networks and patronage that had earlier sustained traditional practitioners. This was particularly critical in the plague years, as many contemporaries noted that there was a proliferation of quacks in towns and cities and that this problem was being largely overlooked by the government. In their writings, publicists therefore distinguished their concern for public issues and their “service-oriented” approach to the plague, from the narrow, commercial concerns of quacks. The authors of these tracts made mention of their public philanthropy, or narrated incidents that featured a qualified practitioner of indigenous medicine, stressing to a patient the importance of committed and personal treatment over the greed for consultation fees (Lal ca. 1902–5, 21). Some tracts offered medical advice aimed at plague prevention and for treating plague cases at home (Vaid 1902, 83–85, 94–95), so as to establish the publicist-practitioner not merely in the sphere of curative relief but also in preventive efforts. The charity and service for the “public” as promised by the plague tracts, however, was not to be confused with medical services aimed at society at large. Plague tracts were aimed at a literate and educated “public.” These groups did not simply form an influential clientele, but during the plague became a private, critical sphere of interest and began to project their leadership of urban opinion upon various aspects of medical relief. Plague treatises often contained appeals or benati made to the government on various aspects of medical administration. They also sought to influence urban patrons and public men whose authority and resources would allow them to influence a wider, urban public. Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid summed this up in the plague tract Mahamari daman as he introduced the aim of his tract and related it to the eroded public support of Ayurveda. He wrote: “The declining prestige of Ayurvedic learning can be traced to two main reasons. The first being Recasting Disease and Its Environment | 

that we lack real support from the ruler, secondly our own people do not give it sufficient attention. . . . Other patriotic citizens who observe this attitude . . . start to believe [Ayurvedic] knowledge to be false and Hindi Vaids to be ignorant!” (Vaid 1902, 22–23, emphasis added).

Interpreting the Plague: Of Humors and Contagion Indigenous physicians in their writings interpreted the etiology of the plague in manifold ways. While contemporary press reports projected the Western/European understanding of the plague as being distinct from the “indigenous” perceptions of its etiology, plague tracts written by indigenous physicians showed a far more fluid interpretation of the disease.27 For instance the Paisa Akhbar, a popular Urdu newspaper in Lahore, reported: “European Doctors and native Hakims are divided in regard to the methods which should be adopted to stamp out the bubonic plague. . . . The hakims cite old medical authorities in support of their idea. The Government should not treat their opinions with indifference and should at least give a trial to the remedies suggested by them.”28 In both the Ayurvedic and the Yunani systems, disease etiology is based on principles of bodily humors and the equilibrium of these humors being governed internally as well as being derived from the natural environment.29 The spoiling of air and putrefaction caused by Miasmas were held responsible for humoral imbalance and the susceptibility of individuals to disease. In the interpretation of the plague and its management, indigenous physicians in some cases wrote without seeming contradiction of its transmission and prevention based on contagionist theories of transmission from direct or indirect contact with the infected, including through rat fleas. A well-known Lahore-based hakim described contagion based on the rat flea to human chain in his tract titled Rat, Cat and Plague. Hakim Ghulam Nabi’s tract (n.d.)30 was aimed specifically at Lahore’s local readership and aimed to influence the residents to accept inoculation and also to support the nascent campaign for sanitation in urban areas. He therefore persuasively argued for the adoption of in | Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

oculation, represented by him as a foolproof, “body guard” or defense against the plague. He also supported the government’s inoculation efforts, arguing in a widely publicized meeting for inoculation’s effectiveness in plague prevention. The printing of certain pamphlets and journals on the plague, such as by hakim Ghulam Nabi, was also timed at a point when the city’s raises, public men and leading indigenous practitioners, had successfully come together to mobilize support for inoculation operations in and around the city. This was evident in other writings by Ayurvedic practitioners, which discussed the issue of plague prevention as advanced by the government, as well as the instructions and rules related to disinfection and plague-related precautions issued by the deputy commissioner of Lahore (Sharma 1905).31 Many Ayurvedic physicians, however, reiterated the theories of humors or dosas in their interpretation of disease etiology. Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid (1902, 107–10), the physician-publicist from Tarn Taran, argued, as did many of his contemporaries, that the plague was a disease of dirt, degeneration, filth, and overcrowding in towns and cities. He argued that all these conditions caused the putrefaction of air and made people susceptible to the disease. He cited classical Ayurvedic texts to recommend that the diseasecausing airs be purified by putting medicines on flags that would purify the wind, and, if done across the country, he added, this would check the epidemic throughout India. In this sense, the cleansing of the plague would be done by air purification and would not need to take recourse to the control of and isolation of spaces and segregation. He and another well-known Ayurvedic practitioner from Lahore, Pandit Thakur Dutt Sharma, recommended therefore that fires be lit all over human settlements, with special herbs being burned in these fires to cleanse an environment that had become “spoilt” by putrefaction and dirt.32 Mohan Singh Vaid argued that the sun’s rays were particularly critical to cleanse the environment and recommended to his readers that all household effects and belongings be exposed to sunlight. He argued that plague “doctors” who visited plague patients were safeguarded from catching the infection simply because they stayed in Recasting Disease and Its Environment | 

camps that were open to sunlight and all their belongings were constantly “purified” by sunlight. Vaid publicists like Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid and Pandit Thakur Dutt Sharma also attempted to define the place of indigenous, Ayurvedic learning and its prescriptions in relation to and as equivalent to Western scientific systems. They argued that indigenous Ayurvedic medicines were derived from local traditions, and were therefore suitable to the habits and customs of the people, unlike Western drugs, which were alien, foreign, and threatened desi, or indigenous/local habits and religious beliefs. In this way, an emerging case for Ayurveda as an indigenous scientific tradition that was derived from the “scientific” scriptural authority of the Vedic treatises, while also being located in a moral-religious idiom as an alternate “indigenous” modernity, was being framed.33 Based upon their claims regarding the superiority of Ayurvedic medicines, Vaid practitioners offered a range of desi drugs, which were locally made preparations used to treat plague as well as to maintain sanitary surroundings. The ras kapoor or camphor-based lotion was offered as an alternative to the perchloride of mercury lotion employed by doctors (Vaid 1902, 116–18), and phenyl, which was widely prescribed for all manner of plague-related disinfection, could be substituted with desi or indigenous phenyl that could be prepared in homes (116–18). Guidelines on diet, based on Ayurvedic therapeutics, also closely guided the reader (Sharma 1905, 46–47). However, even beneath the overarching ideas and claims of indigenous Ayurvedic learning and its relevance to social taboos and religious reform lay also distinct political, particularist identifications among indigenous practitioners. Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid’s (1902, 22– 23) evocation of the ancient vidvans, or learned men and sages who had written the old Ayurvedic texts, was quite distinct from Pandit Thakur Dutt Sharma’s association of “Hindu” rishis or ascetics and their contribution to founding old and valuable Aryan customs. The havan or fire-based purification ceremony that the latter offered as an alternative to fumigation during plague was identified specifically within the composite Hindu reformist tradition being constructed by the Arya Samaj (Sharma 1905, 23).  | Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

Ayurvedic physicians interpreted the plague epidemic as arising also from the new diets that were emerging in a changing economy of imports that was “spoiling” the equilibrium or weakening native constitutions. Thakur Dutt Sharma wrote strongly about the import of “foreign” products like beet sugar that he argued had led to dietary changes that impaired the strength of bodies (1905, 46–47). In this sense, the plague also illustrated in these writings the dilemmas regarding nature-culture, in its association with growing populations and new immigrants in trading cities such as Amritsar, the movement of goods and the pressures of economic imports. Large cities like Delhi, Amritsar, and Multan became important trade entrepôts in the 1880s and 1890s, due to the establishment of important railway lines that radiated from these centers (MacLagan 1892, 15–18). Other cities like Lahore grew as important centers of administration and education, attracting a large service class in these years (24). Famine and epidemics no doubt contributed to significant movements of population into these cities, especially the famine in Punjab’s southern districts in the 1890s. In addition there were also the fleeing populations from plague-stricken Karachi and Bombay to Delhi and Amritsar. The changing composition and size of urban populations in Punjab’s large cities in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and during the plague, as discussed in the previous section, were also leading to tensions and fissures in the urban social fabric that were seen as directly impinging upon the urban environment and its disequilibrium. Even if “traditional” dietary prohibitions based on Yunani medical theories were invoked by physicians such as the renowned Hakim Majid Khan and his disciples, they were often met with resistance from powerful traders in Delhi, while also reflecting the lack of social leadership and public support that certain physicians/public men faced in the public arena. One such anonymous placard, reported as having been put up overnight in Delhi, was quoted as urging: “Oh! The disciples of Hakim Abdul Majid Khan, you have brought disgrace upon your teacher and yourselves by prohibiting the use of Kachalu,34 roasted meat, plums, & c., which cure diseases of all sorts. If the use of these articles be prohibited how will their dealers maintain themselves? Do not care for Hakims and throw away their medicines.”35 Recasting Disease and Its Environment | 

Among all of this plague-time writing and rhetoric, there was also advice on the management of the disease both by the individual and within society—the family, clan, and community. The plague was addressed in its social dimension where personal conduct—in terms of diet, personal hygiene, and cleanliness—now was translated as a “public” issue and conscience. Nature’s imbalance would also need to be controlled therefore through strategies of social control and checks. Indigenous practitioners asked for these social controls to be devolved to the local level, to be participative with their engagement and access, rather than as condemnation of the strategies of quarantine and checks of plague patients and suspects. In a petition sent to the government, Pandit Shiv Chandra Jaini, a Hindu physician of the Jain sect, conveyed the sentiments of a meeting of all the prominent vaid practitioners in the city. He advised that segregation of plague patients in camps be discontinued and local physicians be appointed in camps to look after patients. He also revealed that vaids, under the patronage of influential bankers in Delhi of the Jain sect—a group that had increasingly grown in prominence in Delhi politics—had met to discuss the government’s plague rules.36 Based upon this meeting, as the leader of the city’s assembled vaids he was writing to offer the local government a medical treatise on the plague. The treatise offered cures for the plague based on Ayurveda as well as criticized the segregation or guaranties as proposed in the plague rules. The vaids also offered their services to conduct medical relief in case of an outbreak of plague.37 Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid wrote in his tract that there was need for the government to allow neighborhood committees that represented various caste associations/meetings or panchayats to be in charge of checking and quarantining travelers as well as to identify and isolate plague patients. He also observed that quarantines for each neighborhood could be successful only when leaders and mohalladars guided a meeting of all religions and kinship networks; as the success of quarantine rules depended upon the cooperation of local leaders and the cooperation that they exercised from the public.38 The process of controlling urban spaces for segregation and isolation was therefore contested by physicians who desired to be media | Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

tors in this process of plague administration, and yet were themselves unwilling to apply the same norms and allow diversity among poorer classes and alternate forms of medical healing.

Conclusion This paper argues that there were no identifiable “popular,” indigenous strategies of plague perception and management as observed from the writings of indigenous practitioners. There was a critical process of negotiation and engagement between state agency and public men including physicians, and between the ins and the outs of urban arena politics that were evident during the plague years in Punjab’s towns and cities. In the latter context, plague administration, or the navigation of its priorities and the mediation of its initiatives in urban arenas, needs also to be understood as bringing into focus the newer, public leadership that was emerging in urban arenas in these years. It confirmed the crucial place of press and publicity in urban social control and its role in contesting older networks of authority in urban administration. Plague administration was also marked by the growing contests between the raises, or urban notables who dominated kinship networks and municipality membership,39 and the emerging influence of the new public men, represented by reformist ideologues, patrons, and newspaper editors and practitioners who were gaining influence through their pharmacies.

Acknowledgments This paper was revised after receiving valuable inputs from colleagues during the GHI Conference, and its final revision was undertaken at the Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard University, where the author was supported by a David. E. Bell Research Fellowship.

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Notes 1. Annual reports on sanitary measures in India, quoted in Chandavarkar, “Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India,” 204. 2. Myron Echenberg, writing on the global dimensions of this pandemic (“Pestis Redux”), notes that this new visitation of the plague, its third pandemic (1894–1901), coincided with the high-water mark of the biomedical revolution that ushered in the modern age of scientific, laboratory-based medicine. He notes, however, that major tensions marked the complex interaction among health officials as they confronted the specter of calamitous infectious disease—with the conflict between scientists and politicians being the most dramatic. Plague control practices continued to be influenced by premodern, pregerm theory, which dictated interventions and overrode political and sometimes even ideological imperatives. 3. Arnold, “Cholera and Colonialism in British India”; and Arnold, “Touching the Body,” argue that there were “indigenous” responses to the plague. So does Klein, “Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest.” 4. Chandavarkar (“Plague, Panic and Endemic Politics”) points out that, ironically, despite growing self-confidence in tropical medicine by the turn of the century, the measures taken during the plague in India were reminiscent of the Black Death and of seventeenth-century England. Chandavarkar’s work refutes some of the arguments advanced by Arnold and Klein, and he also argues that plague-time mobilization cannot be generalized as representing “resistance and collaboration” alone. 5. Knowledge regarding the impossibility of “direct inter human contagion” was not acquired until the 1910s, and it has been argued that fear existed therefore on both sides of the ethnic divide and made the lower classes expendable both to the “imperialist” and the “native.” This is argued in a recent article by Gamsa, “The Epidemic of Pneumonic Plague in Manchuria.” 6. Proceedings no. 143, Home Department (Medical and Sanitary) (hereafter H[M&S]),143–45B, Punjab Government (PG), September 1898, Punjab State Archives (PSA), Chandigarh. 7. No. 308, H(M&S) progs. no. 308–70A, PG, 1898, PSA. 8. No. 9, Home Sanitary (hereafter H[S]), 461–72A, Government of India (hereafter GOI), April 1898, National Archives of India (NAI), Delhi. 9. Nos. 9–10, H(S) no. 461–72A, GOI, April 1898. 10. H(M&S), 1A, PG April 1870, 63; and H(M&S) no. 1A, PG, April 1870, 63 (PSA).

 | Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

11. H(M&S), 1A, PG April 1870, 60. 12. Ibid. 13. H(M&S), 143–45B, PG, September 1898, n.p. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. The deaths due to tetanus infection caused by the plague prophylactic at Malkowal village in the Gujrat district of Punjab raised the issue of coercion during inoculation operations and compromised the advocacy and future course of inoculation operations. This issue was debated in the provincial and national press, and there was pressure at higher levels to conduct investigations regarding the deaths. Aside from the investigations conducted by the Punjab government, provincial newspapers, particularly the Tribune, contained regular coverage of the Malkowal “affair” in the last quarter of 1902. See “Resolution on Malkowal disaster,” H(S), 61A, GOI, 1902, NAI. 17. After the British annexation of Punjab in the mid-nineteenth century, the scope of colonial medical intervention gradually widened to setting up institutions that would impart Western medical education, such as the Lahore Medical College. Spheres of “scientific” research were also founded, such as medical societies and research institutes that had no engagements with “empirical” and “unscientific” systems of indigenous medical learning. The earlier system of Durbar, court-based land grants to traditional intellectuals including medical practitioners, was withdrawn after the new revenue settlements were made following annexation. Medical administration was also institutionalized, and the registration of “legitimate” practitioners, though under consideration for more than a decade, was finalized in the form of a Medical Registration Act (1916). 18. H(M&S), 1A, PG. 19. Ibid., 63. 20. A lingering engagement, often at the individual level, persisted in the Orientalist sympathies of an earlier generation of Punjab’s medical administrators, even until the turn of the century. This was manifested in their campaign for the patronage of indigenous learning and education in the medium of vernacular languages. 21. M. S. Vaid diaries, entries February 10–14, 1902. Personal collection of Mohan Singh Vaid Family. 22. In popular parlance, hakims stood in the northern Punjab for indigenous practitioners of both Ayurveda and Yunani or Galenic medicine. 23. M. S. Vaid diaries, entry February 14, 1902. Personal collection of Mohan Singh Vaid Family.

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24. Leaders of the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reformist body located in the holy Sikh city of Amritsar in Punjab, founded this tract society to publicize reformist concerns in the medium of Punjabi in the Gurumukhi (this was the holy Sikh script). 25. Other such tracts included the Sat Sabha-sponsored Plague Patrika by Bishan Das Puri, published from Lahore in 1900. 26. Vaid’s tract Mahamari daman was published in Urdu, Gurumukhi, and later translated into Hindi. A revised version of it was printed in 1914 under a new title, Plague De Dinan Di Rakhya. Thakur Dutt Sharma had earlier published in Lahore (October 1905) his tract, in parts, in a special plague issue of his journal Desh Upkarak. 27. Carlo Cipolla (Cristofano and the Plague) has argued in the context of the plague and public health in the preindustrial age in Europe that Galenic theories were juxtaposed with interpretations based on contagionist theories by physicians. 28. Native Newspaper Reports from Punjab (NNR), report and extract from Paisa Akhbar (Lahore), April 14, 1898, 258, emphasis added. 29. Both traditions—Ayurveda and the Yunani or Galenic tradition— are based on generic physiological and cosmological concepts. including four and three humors, respectively, that are alignments of opposing humoral qualities possessing an equilibrium that maintains health and is sustained in a dynamic relationship with climate, season, and the correlation of physical symptoms with the environment. Discussed in the “Introduction” of Leslie’s Asian Medical Systems. 30. References to Nabi’s publications appear on the back page of the pamphlet along, with the English title of this tract. His tracts were reissued in many editions, and he also published a journal on the plague intended for free circulation. 31. See the section in this tract titled “Shriman C. J. Halifax Sahib Ka Aadesh (The orders given by C. J. Halifax, Sahib),” 76–82. Haifax was the deputy commissioner of the district of Lahore. No doubt these tracts were not entirely comparable in their views, even if written from the same city, as Sharma’s tract was written at a later phase in plague operations. In Plague Pratibandhak, Thakur Dutt Sharma did not discuss any of the plague administration’s more coercive measures, because his own experience while attending to his plague-stricken son in a quarantine camp had been uninterrupted by any subordinate official agency restrictions. 32. Vaid, Mahamari, 119–20; and Sharma, Plague Pratibandhak, 23. 33. Vaid, Mahamari, 119. 34. A vegetable of the yam family.

 | Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

35. H(S) files, 461–72A, GOI, April 1898, NAI. 36. H(M&S), 4–7B, PG, May 1898, 2, PSA. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 119–20. 39. In Punjab, the larger municipalities of Delhi, Lahore, and Amritsar had been founded in the 1860s. Their constitution was revised under the Municipalities Act XV of 1867, and they shared an important responsibility, as recommended by the Army Sanitary Commission, in implementing sanitation projects and extending medical relief. The early membership of these municipalities had included a carryover of the aristocratic mohalladars, or heads of neighborhoods and ministers of the previous regime. However, this membership was increasingly dominated by members of influential families in the city and established business magnates. See Gauba, Amritsar, 162. Despite the introduction of elections in these municipalities in the 1890s, the Rais (urban magnates) composition did not see any immediate or substantial change. In Delhi, the hereditary domination of the municipality continued through a handful of powerful old families consisting of Hakims, Hindu, and Jain bankers. See Gupta, Delhi Between Empires, 110.

Works Cited Ali, Daud ed. 1999. Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Arnold, David. 1986. “Cholera and Colonialism in British India.” Past and Present 113:118–51. ———. 1987. “Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian plague, 1896–1900.” In Subaltern Studies 5, edited by Ranajit Guha, 55–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1993. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Baber, Zaheer. 1995. The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization and Colonial Rule in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bala, Poonam. 1991. Imperialism and Medicine in Bengal: A Sociohistorical Perspective. New Delhi: Sage. Catanach, I. J. 1988. “Plague and the Tensions of Empire: India, 1896–1918.” In Imperial Medicine & Indigenous Societies, edited by David Arnold. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan. 1992. “Plague, Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896–1914.” In Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, edited by Terence Ranger and Paul Slack, 203–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cipolla Carlo. 1973. Cristafano and the Plague: A Study in the History of Public Health in the Age of Galileo. London: Collins. Cunningham, Andrew, and Bridie Andrews, eds. 1997. Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Echenberg, Myron J. 2002. “Pestis Redux: The Initial Years of the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, 1894–1901.” Journal of World History 13 (2): 429–49. Gamsa, Mark. 2006. “The Epidemic of Pneumonic Plague in Manchuria, 1910–1911.” Past and Present 190 (February): 147–84. Gauba, Anand. n.d. Amritsar: A Study in Urban History: 1840–1947. Jalandhar: ABS Publications. Gupta, Narayani. 1981. Delhi Between Empires, 1803–1931: Society, Government and Urban Growth. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Jones, Kenneth. 1976. Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth Century Punjab. Berkeley: University of California Press. Khalsa Tract Society. 1902. Plague Darpan. Amritsar: Khalsa Tract Society. Kidambi, Prashant. 2007. The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public culture in Bombay, 1890-1920. Hampshire: Ashgate. Klein, Ira. 1988. “Plague Policy and Popular Unrest in British India.” Modern Asian Studies 22 (4): 723–55. Leslie, Charles. 1998. Asian Medical Systems: A Comparative Study. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass. Lal, Hakim Mehta Nand. Ca. 1902–5. Sanad Majurbat. MacLagan, E. D. 1892. Report on the Census of Punjab, 1891–1901. Calcutta: Government Press. Nabi, Hakim Ghulam. n.d. Rat, Cat and Plague. Lahore. Pati, Biswamoy, and Mark Harrison, eds. 2001. Health, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Prakash, Gyan. 1996. “Science between the Lines.” In Subaltern Studies 9, edited by Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty, 60–81. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Oberoi, Harjot. 1994. The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh tradition. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Puri, Bishan Das. 1900. Plague Patrika. Lahore: Sat Sabha. Sharma, Thakur Dutt. 1905. Plague Pratibandhak Upay. Lahore: Desh Upkarak Press. Vaid, Bhai Mohan Singh. 1902. Mahamari daman (The conquest of the plague). Tarn Taran: published by the author. ———. 1914. Plague De Dinan Di Rakhya. Revised version of Mahamari Daman. Published by author. Viswanathan, Shiv. 1997. A Carnival for Science: Essays in Science, Technology and Development. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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8 Changing Times, Changing Palates: The Dietary Impacts of Basuto Adaptation to New Rulers, Crops, and Markets, 1830s–1966

Phia Steyn

Introduction Beyond nutrition, mainstream Southern African historiography has paid very little attention to the history of food consumption in the region. When historians do venture into this area, food consumption patterns are generally treated as interesting by-products of the wellcovered field of food production in the region. The history of foodways has also failed to capture the attention of environmental historians working on Southern Africa. While the history of food consumption has intrinsic value, this field is important for mainstream and environmental histories on Southern Africa in four ways. First, it either does or does not provide historical grounding for so-called “traditional” practices. African historiography has showed in numerous studies the colonial or recent origins of many African traditions. Similarly, food history flags periods in which changes occur as well as insight into the historical development of “traditional” foods. Second, research into food consumption patterns tell us a great deal more about how groups and communities interacted with and exploited their local environments. When read together with the history of food produc214

tion, researchers obtain a better understanding of the environmental knowledge of South African communities, and how relationships between communities and their local environments change over time due to a variety of factors. Third, the study of actual food-consumption patterns enables researchers to make more-informed pronouncements about nutrition in precolonial Southern African societies and how colonial rule affected nutrition in particular communities. And last, research into the foodways of communities tells us about cultural influences that impact communities over time. As is the case in many other African cultures, the processes through which traditional Basuto foodways have been changed over time are closely associated with Westernizing influences that came with the travelers, missionaries, traders, relations with Orange Free State farmers, the colonial government, migrant labor, and international aid and development projects. Much of Basuto historiography treats changing food consumption patterns as incidental, and does not dwell in detail on the changes that occurred over time. This paper seeks to address this imbalance and focuses on the changing foodconsumption patterns of the Basuto people of Lesotho that resulted from their interaction with Westernizing influences from the 1830s until the end of colonial rule in 1966. It not only focuses on how the diet of the Basuto changed over time, but also explores, through food, the impact of European missionaries and colonialism on the Basuto, and how the Basuto adapted and changed as a result of these influences, which in turn impacted their interaction with and exploitation of their local environments. The paper ends in 1966, when the colony became the independent state of Lesotho. As other case studies in sub-Saharan Africa indicate, the postcolonial era has brought many changes to traditional foodways in most of Africa, including that of the Basuto. The lattermost of these changes has not been documented, in part because Lesotho food discourse centers on poverty, malnutrition, food insecurity, and food aid.1 Basuto foodways since independence deserves greater study, in particular the influence migrant labor had on traditional foodways. This paper alludes to some of these influences toward the end, but only in a cursory manner due to paucity of sources. Changing Times, Changing Palates | 

Pre-European Basuto Foodways The Basuto live in Lesotho, a small, landlocked state that is entirely surrounded by South Africa. They are a relatively “young” nation that traces its origin back to the 1820s when a Bakoena chief, Moshoeshoe, managed to unite a diversity of small groups under his authority and provided safety amid the chaos caused by the lifaqane.2 Traditional Basuto society subsisted on mixed agriculture, herding, and hunting, with cultivation providing the bulk of food consumed on a daily basis under normal conditions.3 As was the case in many Southern African societies, food production and preparation were female affairs, though men did help at certain points in the production process, in particular in clearing fields for cultivation and at the height of harvesting. The land was cultivated using small diamond-shaped hoes that were the size of a man’s hand and to which short wooden handles were attached. This small implement placed restrictions on the amount of land that could be cultivated; according to Ellenberger (1912, 293), a healthy man working from sunrise to sunset could sow only an ox horn filled with grain. To a large extent the iron hoes suited their food production patterns perfectly, since fields in the pre-European phase tended to be much smaller and amounted to what Eldredge (1993, 67) calls gardens. These would expand greatly in size once peace returned to the South African interior in the course of the 1830s. During normal conditions, when food was plentiful and their lives were not disrupted by warfare, the Basuto consumed two meals a day. The first was taken in the morning a few hours after sunrise and the other at sunset. The evening meal was the main meal of the day and was prepared by women who had spent most of the day working the fields, collecting food, and grinding grain for the evening meal. The morning meal, on the other hand, tended to consist of leftovers from the night before, which were generally consumed with soured milk, if available. Casalis observed that one hour of grinding produced enough food for the morning meal, while Wallman in the 1960s wrote that two days’ supply took half a day to grind. Basuto meals conformed to the basic format of meals found in most sub-Saharan African regions in that their meals consisted of a thick starch in the  | Phia Steyn

form of either porridge or bread, accompanied by a relish, normally made from leafy vegetables. All food was eaten cold. Contrary to the commonly held belief that lisu, dried animal dung, was the traditional fuel source of the Basuto, early Basuto communities relied mostly on wood resources for fuel. Eldredge points out that it is a mistake to assume that Lesotho had always had a treeless landscape and notes that overexploitation of wood resources led to wood becoming scarce by the mid-nineteenth century. Lisu was used as early as 1845, and by 1891 was considered the standard fuel source of the Basuto.4 Sorghum (Sesotho: mabele) formed the basis of the Basuto diet and was particularly suited for the highveld environment, since it was relatively resistant to drought and could withstand waterlogging for long periods of time. The grain, however, was highly vulnerable to birds during the ripening months and consequently required constant human observation and protection during that period (Fox and Young 1982, 41–42). Sorghum was consumed daily in various ways as the basis of both the morning and the evening meals. Casalis writes that it was “sometimes cooked in its natural state, like rice—sometimes ground, and made into a kind of coarse pudding” (1861, 165). Sorghum porridge (motoho) seems to have been the most popular method to consume the grain and was prepared in various consistencies that ranged between very thick and very thin, and was normally made by adding ground sorghum to boiling water, or for special occasions to soured milk or water and yeast. Bread was also made and was called bohobe (Martin 1903, 35–36; Ellenberger 1912, 295). Casalis described being given a “pot of milk, a small shallow basket containing a loaf of sorgho the size and form of a canon-ball” (1889, 179) at the house of Moshoeshoe’ s premier wife, Queen Mamohato, at their first meeting in June 1833. Bohobe sometimes consisted of different ingredients with Arbousset, for example, describing being served moist bohobe made from half-ripe maize, sorghum, and pumpkin when he accompanied Moshoeshoe and one of his sons during a visit to a mountain village in 1840. From these and other descriptions of bohobe it seems likely that Basuto bread closely resembled dumplings, which were steamed above simmering water in a closed pot. Sometimes the bohobe was wrapped in leaves prior to the steaming process.5 Changing Times, Changing Palates | 

Sorghum not only provided the main daily food, but further formed the basis of two types of beer, a mild refreshing beer called leting and a strong intoxicating beer called joala. The making of both beers followed the same initial process but differed in that leting was fermented once and joala twice, which accounted for the different alcohol levels of the two beers. Leting was considered a cool, subacid drink that Ellenberger called the “drink of mothers, especially when nursing babies” (1912, 295). Along with water and soured milk, beer constituted the main beverage of the Basuto and was central to most of their celebrations (Martin 1903, 37–58). The Basuto also consumed huge quantities of a sweet sorghum variety, Sorghum brot, which was a kind of sweet reed called intse or ntsoe, described by Casalis (1861, 168) as both refreshing and nourishing. Consumption of this sweet reed was common among most of the groups in Southern Africa in the precolonial era (Coetzee 1982, 68). The Basuto also cultivated maize (poone) in the pre-European era. It is uncertain when maize arrived in the Caledon River valley and whether it arrived from the Portuguese via Mozambique or from the Cape. According to Burtt-Davy (1914, 12–14, 277–78, 316), research has shown that by the end of the eighteenth century maize was introduced into Swaziland, from which point it traveled westward. Dr. Andrew Smith wrote in 1834 that maize probably reached the Caledon valley only by the 1820s (Sanders 1975, 9n1). Casalis (1861, 168), on the other hand, speculated that it was probably introduced from Mozambique and the Cape at about the same time. The maize that the Basuto adopted into their cuisine in the 1820s belonged to the flint variety (Zea Mays var. indurata), which was probably of Brazillian origin and was early maturing and a relatively light yielder. As was the case with tobacco (which was believed to have been introduced by the Portuguese into Southern Africa in the sixteenth century), the Basuto were quick to realize the potential of maize and incorporated it into their cuisine. Maize was initially planted on the edge of sorghum fields and was not cultivated on a large scale since it was eaten as a side dish that complemented their sorghum-based main dish. Casalis described the preparation of maize as follows: “The natives gather the ears before they are perfectly ripe, and eat them  | Phia Steyn

boiled or roasted. This method of preparing it is at first repugnant to Europeans but they soon acquire a taste for it, and adopt it themselves. The portion of the harvest which reaches maturity seldom undergoes the process of grinding. The indigestible part of the grain is removed by pounding it in a wooden mortar, and then it is cooked in the same manner as rice” (1861, 168–69). The last dish described by Casalis most probably refers to what today is commonly called samp, which is made from crushed maize kernels and was consumed by many Southern African ethnic groups. Maize not only had human food value, but maize stalks also served as cattle fodder, and the dried cobs were utilized as fuel. Despite Casalis’s glowing review of maize production in Basutoland, where he wrote that the “plant thrives to perfection,” maize was much harder to cultivate than sorghum. As Eldredge points out (1993, 68), maize needs a lot more rain than sorghum during the growing period—otherwise it will dry out; while it requires very little rain to turn yellow during the maturing phase. Apart from grain, the Basuto cultivated several vegetables and beans for consumption or utilization as household utensils. Gourds (Lagenaria siceraria; Sesotho: seno) in particular were cultivated for making eating utensils and calabash containers. Pumpkin was a very popular food. Casalis, for example, described exchanging a few pinches of salt for “some magnificent pumpkins” (1889, 167) on his very first night in Basutoland. Pumpkin was prepared in a variety of ways and could be boiled in water or cooked whole on the fire and consumed as a vegetable, or it was mixed with sorghum and maize to make bread. Pumpkin was also preserved by sun-drying it in strips. Pumpkin flowers, seeds, and leaves also had numerous uses and could be utilized in relish-making to improve the taste of the sorghumbased main dish. According to Eldredge (1993, 68), the Basuto cultivated three kinds of melons (mahapu), one used as animal fodder, one eaten by people, and a rare variety that was made into bread and jam. All these belonged to the family Citrullis lanatus. In the absence of sugar in pre-European Basuto society, it is highly likely that the Basuto started using this melon to make jam only after their encounters with the Europeans. Melons were important to the Basuto diet because they are largely drought-resistant and can be stored for long Changing Times, Changing Palates | 

periods. Melons were consumed fresh, cooked, or sun-dried, depending on the variety.6 Beans and milk provided the bulk of protein within the Basuto diet. Two kinds of beans were cultivated, a black bean (possibly jugo beans, Vigna subterreanea) and a green/white bean. The black bean, according to Casalis (1889, 169), was not recommended for the European palate. Beans were dried and mainly cooked with water into a potage.7 Milk, on the other hand, was taken in a fresh, soured, or curdled state. Fresh milk as a rule was given only to babies and the old, and then only after it had been boiled. Milk was normally taken soured or curdled and tended to be taken at meals and not on its own. Though cow’s milk was preferred, those villages that did not keep cattle consumed goat’s milk.8 The Basuto rarely consumed meat, and as was the case with many other Southern African black groups, cattle were kept as male social capital and not for consumption purposes. Cattle were slaughtered only for special occasions or if an animal was very old. Meat for consumption was obtained mainly from hunting. Eldredge (1993, 65–66) points out that hunting was in particular important during the 1820s when the lifaqane period disrupted agricultural production, while Sanders also noted that many communities in the north lived mainly off hunting. Game was at that stage still plentiful, and missionaries and others traveling through Basutoland would continue to comment on the large numbers of game animals and birds available until the 1850s.9 Though important, there is little indication from the consulted sources that meat consumption was a daily affair, and it seems likely to have taken place sporadically with higher incidences of meat consumption during the winter when meat could be kept fresh for longer. According to Ellenberger (1912, 295), meat was consumed grilled on the embers, roasted on a stick, or stewed in a pot. Commenting on practices prevalent in the 1890s, Martin (1903, 36) stated that women were not allowed to eat certain parts of the animal, in particular the kidneys, heart, head, feet, stomach, and cooked liver. Raw liver, on the other hand, could be consumed by women if they wished (Eldredge 1991, 717). While the Basuto also kept goats, sheep, and chickens, there is no indication that they consumed these animals on a regular basis. In com | Phia Steyn

munities without cattle, sheep and goats acquired greater social importance. The function of chickens in the pre-European Basuto cuisine is unclear, since there is no description of chicken consumption in the consulted sources, while women were not allowed to consume eggs. An additional, and popular, source of protein was locusts, which were caught during the numerous locust plagues that devoured the Basuto crops on a regular basis. Locusts were consumed fried or dried and were considered pleasant to the taste. Despite the many rivers in their traditional territory, the Basuto rarely ate fish. Ashton pointed out in the 1930s that the lack of fish consumption was mainly because the dominant barbel (with its less than enchanting feeding habits) and yellow fish (its hooked bones made for hazardous eating) were rather unpalatable, and because there existed a personal distaste for fish among many Basuto.10 Food gathered in the veldt constituted the last major source of food for the Basuto in the pre-European phase. During normal conditions edible leafy green vegetables, collectively called moroho, constituted an important part of the daily diet of only women and children. Basuto men did not partake in the consumption of leafy green vegetables under normal conditions prior to the second half of the twentieth century (Thompson 1975, 10; Ashton 1939, 157–62). The Basutoland environment supported a great number of edible wild plants, with 88 different varieties identified by Jacot-Guillarmod in the 1960s and 103 by a UNESCO study in the 1990s.11 Lephole (2004, 52), who investigated the nutritional status of the most commonly used leafy green vegetables, reemphasized the nutritional importance of these plants in a recent study. She found that two species, Amaranthus hybridus (African spinach; Sesotho: theepe) and Sisymbrium thellungii (wild mustard; Sesotho: sepaile), had higher protein contents per 100g, at 28.09g and 27.44g respectively, than meat (20.5g), milk (3.3g), or eggs (12.6g). Only chicken, and then only the breast portion, came close at 28.0g per 100g. Moroho, also popularly referred to as wild spinach in the literature, was as a rule boiled in water, with a bit of fat and salt added if available, and served as a relish to accompany the sorghum-based main dish. During drought conditions and other difficult times, moroho, along with wild bulbs, shrubs, wild fruits, and the tiny grains of the moseeka grass, formed the basis of Basuto food (Theal 1919, 269). Changing Times, Changing Palates | 

The Missionary Phase The permanent settlement of three missionaries from the Société de Missions Évangéliques de Paris in June 1833 represents the first direct Westernizing phase in the history of Basuto food. Though the missionaries were not the first white people to visit the young Basuto nation, and their products by no means the first foreign products to be introduced from the outside, their permanent settlement among the Basuto would ensure a lasting influence on Basuto food production, consumption, and preparation patterns. As Judith Kimble, James McCann, and many others have pointed out, the missionaries set out from the start to transform not only the religious beliefs of the Basuto, but also their architecture, settlement patterns, food consumption, social practices, and so forth into patterns more familiar to the Europeans. Of particular importance was the introduction of plowhs, which over time gradually replaced hoes and enabled the Basuto to greatly expand their agricultural production. The Westernization process of Basuto foodways started with the introduction of new crops and animals shortly after the permanent settlement of the missionaries at Morija. Casalis describes what he brought back from the Philippolis mission station in 1833 to start agricultural production at the Morija mission station: “tools of all kinds; vine-shoots; slips of peach, apricot, fig, apple, quince, and other trees; a herd of heifers, . . . a flock of sheep . . . ; a fine mare in foal, and two horses; some wheat; some vegetable seeds; and, above all, potatoes” (1889, 194–95). According to Casalis, most of the new plants and seeds succeeded in their new environment, with the exception of wheat, which initially was difficult to cultivate. By 1835, he could write that “the seeds of the cereals and vegetables which we had brought with us, as well as the slips of fruit trees, had prospered abundantly. Under the sky of this country almost everything flourishes. The Basutos in due time understood the value of the new grass from which our bread come; and one may imagine their exclamations when they tasted for the first time our peaches, apricots, figs, etc. On all sides there were demands for seeds, pips, and shoots” (1889, 233–34). The missionaries also introduced new breeds of dogs, cats, pigs, ducks, geese, and turkeys. Pigs, in particular, became important dur | Phia Steyn

ing the wars with the Orange Free State when the Basuto lost cattle in large numbers. Pork consumption, however, was not universal, with a proportion of Basuto society refusing to consume pork. This trend was continued unto the 1930s and is still not uncommon among the Basuto today. Pigs were useful even to those who refused to consume their meat but who utilized pork fat for numerous purposes, including soap making. By 1875 the Basuto owned a total of 15,635 pigs.12 The gradual adoption of European crops, animals, and products were greatly aided during the missionary phase by four factors. First, Moshoeshoe embraced and adopted many European goods, crops, and habits, and encouraged his subjects to follow suit. Moshoeshoe was at the front line of Basuto exposure to European foods through the many meals he consumed with the resident missionaries and with European visitors. At his first dinner as a guest of Casalis and Arboussett, he was served hashed mutton, pumpkin, and coffee. Casalis (1889, 181) informs us that Moshoeshoe did not like coffee much, but that he drank it eagerly after they sweetened it with raw sugar. Moshoeshoe wholeheartedly approved of tea, and this beverage along with sugar were the only two European foods he adopted into his traditional, private space (Thompson 1975, 100–101, 112). No doubt Moshoeshoe’s renowned diplomatic skills served him well during his numerous dinners with the European visitors. Dr. Andrew Smith wrote on October 14, 1834, that Moshoeshoe dined with Smith’s exploration party, and he “complimented us upon our taste in cooking, and said the English food was very good” (Kirkby 1939, 106). Moshoeshoe’s encouragement of European goods greatly aided experimentation with these products by the Basuto before some of them were fully incorporated into the Basuto foodways. The second factor that influenced Basuto incorporation of Western foods was the growth in the number of missionary stations within the Basuto territory and the increase in the number of Christian converts. This ensured that a greater number of people, in particular ordinary people with limited influence, would come into direct contact with European goods, foods, and ways of life. By 1848, for example, the church had 1,003 full members and more than 2,000 people attended church at the various stations in Basutoland on any given Sunday. By 1873 the Changing Times, Changing Palates | 

church had 10,300 members, and 2,000 children were attending mission schools of the Paris Missionary Society.13 At the mission stations and the schools set up alongside, the Basuto were instructed in the ways of the French, with some adjustments allowed to account for the environmental differences between continental France and the South African highveld. Fanny Barkly (1896), for example, commented in the 1870s on a visit she paid with her husband to two French mission stations while traveling from Leribe to Mohale’s Hoek. She was most impressed with the schools, where “the girls are taught to preserve fruit with great skill, and to do all kinds of work. Sacks upon sacks of peaches and apricots, dried in the blazing sun of the Basuto summer, were filled with fruits and put away for use in the winter. The girls also made a sort of macaroni and vermicelli” (58–59). Peaches in particular proved to be a popular new addition to the Basuto diet, and the widespread consumption of the fruit was commented on through the years by various authors such as Barkly (1870s), Martin (1890s), Ashton (1930s), and Wallman (1960s). The Lifefo Women’s Forum confirmed the continued popularity of peaches in 2003, writing that they are best “when dried open-air on a roof made of tin” (23). The preservation technique has remained essentially the same since the introduction of peaches in the 1830s, and was adopted from traditional Basuto methods of drying melons and pumpkins.14 According to Eldredge (1993, 69), the Basuto also took well to potatoes since they grew in all the areas, though their popularity within the Basuto diet over the long term is debatable; with Ashton (1939, 67) commenting in the 1930s that potatoes were not grown extensively. The one product that failed to gain favor with the Basuto during the missionary phase was wheat. Casalis, who described the role of sorghum within the Basuto diet by using the analogy “what wheat is to us,” often wrote about his cravings for wheat, commenting at one point that the absence of wheat was a “trial [that] was no small one for French stomachs” (1889, 202). Despite the centrality of wheat within the diets of the missionaries, the Basuto were slow to take up the production of wheat and even slower at incorporating this crop into their foodways. As Eldredge (1993, 68–69) points out, the limited wheat production in the period prior to the 1870s was mostly due to the  | Phia Steyn

fact that wheat was not particularly suited for the lowlands with their lower levels of rainfall. Only after the Basuto started settling in the highlands from the 1870s onward did wheat production finally take off on a large scale. Along with the fact that it took the Basuto a long time to develop a taste for wheat, the fact that this grain was much harder to grind and more tiresome to cook than sorghum or maize ensured that the Basuto women did not experiment much with wheat during the missionary period (Dutton 1922, 63). The third factor that aided the spread of European foods and products was the traders that followed the missionaries. Cape traders started to call on the Basuto in the 1830s with wagons loaded with European goods. The omnipresent trading stores of rural Africa arrived in the 1850s when a few traders started to build permanent stores close to the mission stations at Beersheba, Mekoatleng, Thaba Bosiu, and Morija. By 1875 the number of trading stores had increased to nearly fifty. Traders and trading stores facilitated the Westernization process among the Basuto, and the stores became centers where the Basuto could obtain European clothing, implements and tools, cooking utensils, foods, wagons, and cattle in exchange for horses, cattle, skins, grain, wool, and so forth. This process resulted, inter alia, in the enthusiastic adoption by the Basuto of the three-legged cast-iron pot, which replaced their traditional earthenware cooking pots completely by the turn of the century. Also popular were iron frying pans, which enabled Basuto women to diversify their preparation methods to include frying foods on a more regular basis. Trading stores also became places where the Basuto were ensured a constant supply of tea, salt, sugar, ground flour and meal, and tinned food, to name but a few products, which greatly facilitated their adoption into the Basuto foodways over time. Trading stores also became places where Basuto sold portions of their grain supplies at the end of the harvest, when prices were low, in order to buy products such as blankets, clothing, and implements; the same grain was bought back from the trader at much higher prices when the household supplies ran out during the summer months.15 The fourth and last major factor that had an impact on Basuto foodways during the missionary phase was the permanent settlement Changing Times, Changing Palates | 

of white people in the territory between the Orange and Vaal Rivers in what would become first the Orange River Sovereignty (1848–54) and thereafter the Orange Free State republic (1854–1902). Though the Basuto would eventually fight a series of wars against the Orange Free State farmers, the latter’s need for grain coincided with the expansion of Basuto agriculture after the lifaqane. By the 1840s whites regularly called on the Basuto to purchase grain, mainly maize and wheat; and by 1853 a British official claimed that almost all the maize consumed in the Orange Free State was cultivated by the Basuto. The expansion of maize production had a profound impact on the role of maize in the Basuto diet. While maize played a marginal role in the pre-European period, it gradually increased in importance and maize meal came to be used in the same manner as sorghum meal, using very much the same recipes to produce the same types of breads and porridges, albeit with a remarkably different taste. Consequently Barkly reported in the 1870s that Basuto used either maize or sorghum to prepare their main starchy dish, while sorghum was still the only grain used in beer making. Maize had also become the food of choice for those traveling longer distances, with Barkley describing the standard travel food as consisting of a quart of maize, which was burned and grounded very finely. Travelers consumed this three times a day by mixing a tablespoon of maize flour into a pint of water.16

Colonial Phase The British annexation of Basutoland in 1868 did not have an impact on Basuto foodways in the same way as the permanent settlement of the missionaries had back in the 1830s. While the British authorities did promote the cultivation of more varieties of maize and wheat, and tried to improve the quality of the livestock, especially after the devastating rinderpest at the end of the nineteenth century, changes to the Basuto diet during the colonial era are very closely related to the political and economic processes of this period. Peace with the Orange Free State and the permanent settlement of the border between the republic and Basutoland in 1869 with the Aliwal North Conven | Phia Steyn

tion effectively limited the economic and territorial expansion of the Basuto. With the lowlands already overpopulated, the only alternative was up and the Basuto started to settle in the highlands from the 1870s onward. Settlement in a different ecological zone required changes to traditional food production patterns to make allowance for only one growing season, a much-reduced summer growing season, higher levels of annual rainfall, and early frost that tended to ruin lowland staples well before they were ripe.17 In 1888 Lieutenant-Colonel Marshall Clarke, commissioner of Basutoland, reported that the people of the Lelingoana village had managed to cultivate only one crop of maize or millet in the four years since they had settled in the highlands. Wheat, potatoes, and lentils, on the other hand, were reportedly doing very well in the area (Germond 1967, 421). The move into the highlands facilitated the massive expansion of Basuto wheat cultivation and exports, with wheat becoming the most important grain export for the colony by the turn of the century (McCann 1999, 161). More important, it also led to the widespread incorporation of wheat into the diet of the highlanders. Over time the ecological differences would result in the development of distinctive highland and lowland diets that were first described by Ashton in the 1930s. According to him, the main difference between the two diets was the fact that the highlanders utilized sorghum almost exclusively for beer-making, their main starchy dish was derived mainly from maize, and wheat was used for bread and for sprouted grain used in the making of beer. In the lowlands, on the other hand, the main starchy dish was still made from either sorghum or maize meal, while wheat consumption was very low. Wheat in the area was grown mainly as a commercial crop for export. Ashton (1939, 162–71) reported that the lowlanders ate less peas and beans than the highlanders and consumed less milk, while European goods were more readily available in the lowlands. Butcheries had also become common and enabled lowlanders the opportunity to consume meat on a more regular basis than was the traditional practice. In the highlands, by contrast, butcheries had not become an established part of daily life and were rarely used. By the 1930s the Basuto to a large extent still consumed their basic foods in the traditional way: flour, except when making thick porridge Changing Times, Changing Palates | 

(motoho), was always used whole, though the type of flour used for different dishes had changed depending on the geographical location of the village and the wealth of the cook. Maize was principally used to make breads (bohobe) or porridge (papa), while it was also consumed on the cob, fried, and ground for travel food, or cooked with peas into a potage. A new dish developed by the 1930s was a runny maize porridge made with water called lesheleshele, which was consumed mostly by invalids, children, nursing mothers, and Europeans. A leavened meal paste, made from slightly rotted maize (though perfectly fine maize worked just as well), was also used to make a new type of nonalcoholic drink called mahleu. Leting and joala, on the other hand, were still made exclusively from sorghum meal, though by the 1930s the yeast (tomoso) was increasingly being made from sprouting wheat, not maize as was the practice in the nineteenth century. Though sorghum was still used in bread and porridge in the lowlands in the 1930s, Ashton reported that its usage was second to maize (1939, 206–10; 1967, 128–29). Wheat consumption, on the other hand, had become general practice in the highlands by the 1930s, though Ashton reported that the frequency of consumption depended on the wealth of the household. With wheat sales generating more money than that of maize, poorer families were more inclined to sell their wheat than consume it. Apart from grain, the Basuto also consumed peas and beans, which were mostly cooked into a potage and eaten hot. They also continued to consume their milk either in a soured or curdled state, and their meat roasted, boiled, or broiled. Ashton reported in the 1930s that the Basuto did not make biltong18 from their meat. They also still ate the majority of their foods cold, as Ellenberger reported in the nineteenth century. By contrast to the precolonial period, the Basuto by the 1930s made extensive use of pepper, salt, and curry to flavor their foods. Despite the promotion of vegetable gardening, first by the missionaries and then by the British colonial authorities through the distribution of seeds and trees for terraced gardens, vegetable production and consumption remained relatively low amongst the Basuto. Of the European vegetables, onions and leeks were the most popular and most commonly used in daily cooking. The collection of edible wild vegetables was still very important, and these vegetables were  | Phia Steyn

cooked into a relish used to flavor the papa of women and children, but not that of men in general (Ashton 1939, 157–62). By the time Ashton produced his seminal study on the foodways of the Basuto in the 1930s, another socioeconomic process that would influence Basuto food consumption was already well under way. The process through which Basutoland ceased to be the granary of the region and became “a depot for unskilled labour,” in the words of Godfrey Lagden (1909, 641), have been well documented by Colin Murray, Timothy Keegan, and others. This process resulted in a lack of male labor at key stages of the production process, which in turn led to a shift away from labor-intensive sorghum production to the relatively labor-light production of maize. Consequently, according to McCann (2001, 260–64), maize replaced sorghum as the major food crop and wheat as the major cash crop by 1930. By that time, however, maize consumption on a daily basis had already surpassed that of sorghum, with Martin reporting already in the 1890s that papa was made from either sorghum or maize and that bogobe (bread) was made from white maize (probably borotho, i.e., bread maize) and not sorghum.19 Maize consumption was by the 1930s much higher than estimated by McCann, though it is uncertain when exactly maize consumption on a daily basis surpassed that of sorghum. The absence of male labor, along with the changes in production and the severe droughts of the early 1930s, ensured that Basutoland became a net food importer in this decade and would remain so for much of the years that followed. The decline in agriculture is very closely related to the migrant labor system, which saw increasing numbers of Basuto men leave for the mines in South Africa and would over time have far-reaching impacts on Basuto society. The impact of the migrant system on Basuto food becomes evident in Sandra Wallman’s 1963 fieldwork in Matsosa in the Mafeteng district, a lowland community. In this community, more than half of the men ages seventeen to fifty were absent, earning wages in South Africa. Wallman reports that “the village economy is geared to the amount of money that can be earned in South Africa, so cash consumption reflects South African preferences” (1969, 61). This is also true for South African food, which is considered semate (i.e., smart, and therefore to be aspired Changing Times, Changing Palates | 

to) because it is considered more satisfying, in terms of both variety and nutrition, than traditional Basuto food. Consequently, Wallman writes that households spent large parts of their income on tinned and processed foods, especially those with protein and sugar. Wallman (61, 63) does not describe the South African foods popular with the Basuto beyond mentioning that the wife of the local trader makes very popular white-sugared buns that sell out quickly. Forty years on the Lifefo Women’s Forum (2003, 4, 47) would list biltong, nama ea nku (mutton curry; most probably Cape Malay or from the Indians in Natal), chakalaka (a popular spicy dish in most South African communities), and khoho e halikilloeng (fried chicken) as traditional Basuto foods. Osseo-Asare, in her survey of sub-Saharan African food (2005, 76), describes the consumption of pickled beetroot and ginger beer, both South African favorites, in her short discussion of food in Lesotho. The South African influence was not confined to migrant labor to the mines, where all the foods listed were widely available, but also arrived via women working as domestic servants in South Africa, and in particular in the Free State province. By the end of the colonial era in 1966, the Basuto foodways had changed remarkably in some respects, while remaining essentially the same in others. The main food was still a starchy dish that was by now made exclusively from maize. Sorghum was seldom eaten and was described to Wallman by the villagers as being “not the food of Basuto; it leaves one hungry” (1969, 47). But it was still used for producing joala and leting. In most communities meat was still consumed only on special occasions and when old animals died. While Wallman describes the general absence of vegetables in the Basuto diet, she does refer to the usage of edible wild vegetables, especially theepe, to make a relish to accompany the main starchy dish. Theepe was often supplemented with pumpkin, cabbage, or other garden vegetables. By the 1960s “porridge was considered a full meal when . . . eaten with cooked, pulped vegetables” (68). This was the first time that relish had been documented as being central to the diet of all Basuto and not just that of women and children. By this time the Basuto had also come to rely on two sources of fuel for food preparation, namely lisu and paraffin stoves. Lisu, the “traditional” fuel resource, was used for  | Phia Steyn

all major cooking activities, but because a lisu fire took a long time to reach a proper heat level, smaller dishes and beverages like tea that required a shorter cooking time were heated on paraffin stoves. These were bought from the local trading stores (46).

Conclusion As is the case in many, if not most, African communities, Basuto foodways were by no means static following the gradual formation and development of this Southern African ethnic group from the 1820s. Throughout history the Basuto showed themselves capable of adopting and incorporating new plants and foods that proved useful and palatable—sometimes without European agency and at times with strong European encouragement. Maize and tobacco, for example, were well-established crops within Basuto culture prior to the arrival of the French missionaries in 1833. The process of adopting foreign foods and plants increased rapidly after the French fathers settled permanently among the Basuto as the French missionaries set out to transform the Basuto landscape, food production, and food consumption into patterns more familiar to Western Europeans. The introduction of new crops and implements by the missionaries triggered an experimental phase in Basuto foodways as this group, at the urging of their chief, Moshoeshoe, experimented with various European crops. The expansion of the variety of foods did not always translate into different ways of preparing and eating the new foods. More often than not, the Basuto ate the new foods in familiar ways. Peaches, for example, were preserved using the established method of melon drying and were eaten uncooked, while maize was increasingly being eaten in exactly the same way as sorghum and was often used as a substitute for sorghum when making the main starchy dish by the 1860s. The French missionary phase directly impacted Basutho foodways and led to the adoption and incorporation of a variety of European foods. The same cannot be said of the British colonial phase that started in 1868. There is very limited evidence that British colonial rule had any direct impact on Basuto food consumption—tea, sugar, Changing Times, Changing Palates | 

and other popular British products were, after all, popularized during the missionary phase that preceded British colonial rule. Indirect rule in this British High Commission Territory further ensured that the actual British influence on Basuto food consumption remained extremely limited. What was important, though, during the colonial phase was the integration of the Basuto into the regional economy—a process facilitated by British colonial rule. This economic integration enabled many different ethnic groups to meet and interact, most often in the gold and diamond mines, but also in white farms and in European households, which interaction in turn had lasting impact on food consumption patterns in the Southern African region. For the Basuto, regional integration led to the adoption of spices into their relatively bland diet. In addition it also led to changes in the way established crops and foods were consumed by the Basuto, as dishes and foods closely associated with other regions and other peoples made their way into the Basuto kitchen and came to be regarded as “traditional” over time. These dishes were not confined to those prepared by other black communities, but also included foods of the Indian communities in Natal and on the Rand, the Malay community in the Cape, and Afrikaner communities in the Free State and the Transvaal. Strikingly absent, though, is any mention of traditional British dishes in the general diet of the Basuto by the end of colonial rule in 1966. While the British influences on Basuto food seem to have been marginal at best, the Basuto on the other hand did make some allowances and changes to their diet to accommodate the European palate, of which the development of the dish lesheleshele in the 1930s is an important example. Colonial rule therefore had limited direct impact on Basuto foodways, but through its economic networks colonial rule brought the Basuto into contact with other foods that would over time come to be regarded as traditional Basuto food.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Robin Law and Christina Folke Ax for their comments on this paper.  | Phia Steyn

Notes 1. See, for example, Johnston, “The State and Development”; and Wallman, Take Out Hunger. 2. The lifaqane (difaqane or mfecane in South Arica) was a period of widespread political instability in South Africa that lasted from ca. 1815 to ca. 1830. It has its origins in Shaka’s wars of conquest, which snowballed to destabilize the Southern African interior and East Coast as far north as Lake Victoria. 3. It is important to point out that “normal conditions” is a tenuous concept when dealing with the Basuto. Apart from disruptive periods such as raids and war, the Basuto were frequently subjected to environmental disasters such as drought, hail, early frost, and locusts that wreaked havoc on their crops and therefore their food supplies. Consequently, as was the case with many other Southern African communities, the line between feast or famine was very thin. While acknowledging the fluctuating nature of the Basuto diet as communities moved from good to ordinary to bad years, I am concerned with the general diet of average Basuto during “normal conditions,” for the purposes of this paper viewed as periods in which there was enough food for the whole household, whether this food was wholly self-produced or partly traded or bought. 4. See Martin, Basutoland, 38; Ashton, The Basuto, 88–89; Wallman, Take Out Hunger, 47; Thompson, Survival in Two Worlds, 9; Eldredge, A South African Kingdom, 83, 108; and Ellenberger, History of the Basuto, 295. 5. See McCann, “Maize and Grace,” 261; Snyman, Rainbow Cuisine; and Martin, Basutoland, 36. 6. See also Coetzee, Funa Food from Africa, 68; Ellenberger, History of the Basuto; and Martin, Basutoland, 36. 7. See also Eldredge, A South African Kingdom, 68; and Ashton, The Basuto, 122. 8. Ellenberger, History of the Basuto, 293; and Ashton, “A Sociological Sketch of Sotho Diet,” 160. Dr. Andrew Smith reported on November 25, 1834, that he was offered goat’s milk by the Basutos from a village where they had no cattle. See Kirkby, The Diary of Dr. Andrew Smith, 145–46. 9. See also Sanders, Moshoeshoe, 9; and Ashton, The Basuto, 158. 10. Ashton, The Basuto, 158; Shortt-Smith, “Basutoland,” 58; Molema, The Bantu Past and Present, 118; Eldredge, A South African Kingdom, 66, 102; Martin, Basutoland, 36; and Theal, Ethnography and Conditions of South Africa, 271.

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11. See Jacot-Guillarmod, “A Contribution”; and Prasad, Mapetla, and Phororo, Edible Wild Plants in Lesotho. 12. See Casalis, My Life in Basuto Land, 234; Germond, Chronicles of Basutoland, 326; and Ashton, “A Sociological Sketch of Sotho Diet,” 161. 13. See Sanders, Moshoeshoe, 124; and Theal, Compendium, 187. 14. See description by Barkly, Among Boers and Basutos, 67. 15. See Thompson, Survival in Two Worlds, 191–92; Germond, Chronicles of Basutoland, 325, 327–28; and Fox and Young, Food from the Veld, 24. 16. See Barkly, Among Boers and Basutos, 46, 63–64; Eldredge, A South African Kingdom, 151–52; and Maylam, A History of the African People of South Africa, 118. 17. See Germond, Chronicles of Basutoland, 413–30; and Thabane, “Shifts from Old to New Social and Ecological Environments,” 636–38. 18. Biltong is salted, air-dried meat. A similar product in the USA is called jerky. 19. See Martin, Basutoland, 35; Ashton, The Basuto, 122.

Works Cited Ashton, Edmund Hugh. 1939. “A Sociological Sketch of Sotho Diet.” Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa 27 (2): 147–214. ———. 1967. The Basuto: A Social Study of Traditional and Modern Lesotho. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press. Barkly, Fanny. 1896. Among Boers and Basutos and With Barkly’s Horse: The Story of Our Life on the Frontier. Revised ed. London: Roxburghe Press. Burtt-Davy, Joseph. 1914. Maize: Its History, Cultivation, Handling and Uses with Special Reference to South Africa. London: Longmans, Green. Casalis, Eugène. 1861. The Basutos or Twenty-Three Years in South Africa. London: J. Nisbet. ———. 1889. My Life in Basuto Land: A Story of Missionary Enterprise in South Africa. Translated by J. Brierley. London: R.T.S. Coetzee, Renata. 1982. Funa Food from Africa: Roots of Traditional African Food Culture. Durban: Butterworths. Dutton, E. A. T. 1922. The Basuto of Basutoland. London: Jonathan Cape. Eldredge, Elizabeth A. 1991. “Women in Production: The Economic Role of Women in Nineteenth Century Lesotho.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (4): 707–31.

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———. 1993. A South African Kingdom: The Pursuit of Security in Nineteenth Century Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellenberger, D. Fred. 1912. History of the Basuto: Ancient and Modern. Translated by J. C. MacGregor. London: Caxton. Fox, Francis W., and Marion E. N. Young. 1982. Food from the Veld: Edible Wild Plants of Southern Africa. Johannesburg: Delta Books. Germond, R. C. 1967. Chronicles of Basutoland: A Running Commentary on the Events of the Years 1830–1902 by the French Protestant Missionaries in Southern Africa. Morija: Morija Sesuto Book Depot. Jacot-Guillarmod, Amy. 1966. “A Contribution Towards the Economic Botany of Basutoland.” Sartyck ur Botaniska Notiser 112 (2): 109–212. Johnston, Deborah. 1996. “The State and Development: An Analysis of Agricultural Policy in Lesotho, 1970–1993.” Journal of Southern African Studies 22 (1): 119–37. Kirkby, Percival R., ed. 1939. The Diary of Dr. Andrew Smith, Director of the “Expedition for Exploring Central Africa.” Vol. 1. Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society. Lagden, Godfrey. 1909. The Basutos: The Mountaineers and Their Country. Vol. 1. London: Hutchinson. Lephole, Monica ‘Maleabua. 2004. “Uses and Nutritional Value of Indigenous Vegetables Consumed as Traditional Foods in Lesotho.” MSc diss., University of the Free State. Lifefo Women’s Forum. 2003. A Taste of Lesotho: Traditional Recipes from the Basotho Kitchen. Hleoheng: Lifefo Women’s Forum. Martin, Minnie. 1903. Basutoland: Its Legends and Customs. London: Nichols. Maylam, Paul. 1987. A History of the African People of South Africa: From the Early Iron Age to the 1970s. 2nd ed. London: Croom Helm. McCann, James C. 1999. Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa, 1800–1990. Oxford: James Currey. ———. 2001. “Maize and Grace: History, Corn, and Africa’s New Landscapes, 1500-1999.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (2): 246–72. Molema, S. M. 1920. The Bantu Past and Present: An Ethnographical and Historical Study of the Native Races of South Africa. Edinburgh: Green and Son. Osseo-Asare, Fran. 2005. Food Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa. Westport: Greenwood Press. Prasad, Gisela, Matseliso Mapetla, and Hopolang Phororo. 1993. Edible Wild Plants in Lesotho: An Important Source of Nutrition. Roma: UNESCO.

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Sanders, Peter. 1975. Moshoeshoe: Chief of the Sotho. London: Heinemann Education. Shortt-Smith, K. E. 1963. “Basutoland.” In Fresh-Water Fish and Fishing in Africa, edited by A. C. Harrison et al., 55–72. Johannesburg: Nelson. Snyman, Lannice. 1998. Rainbow Cuisine. Hout Bay: S & S Publishers. Thabane, Motlatsi. 2000. “Shifts from Old to New Social and Ecological Environments in the Lesotho Highlands Water Scheme: Relocating Residents of the Mohale Dam Area.” Journal of Southern African Studies 26 (4): 633–54. Theal, George McCall. 1878. Compendium of the History and Geography of South Africa. 3rd ed. London. ———. 1919. Ethnography and Conditions of South Africa Before A.D. 1505. London: Allen & Unwin. Thompson, Leonard. 1975. Survival in Two Worlds: Moshoeshoe of Lesotho 1786–1870. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wallman, Sandra. 1969. Take Out Hunger: Two Case Studies of Rural Development in Basutoland. London: Athlone Press.

 | Phia Steyn

Part 3 The Legacy of Colonialism

9 State Rationality, Development, and the Making of State Territory: From Colonial Extraction to Postcolonial Conservation in Southern Mozambique

Elizabeth Lunstrum

On December 9, 2002, the governments of Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe launched the 3.5-million-hectare Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP), creating one of the world’s most expansive conservation spaces (see map 9.1).1 The GLTP has drawn the world’s attention to a little-known area of Mozambique that lies adjacent to South Africa’s renowned Kruger National Park. In stark contrast to Kruger, Mozambique’s portion of the GLTP, the Limpopo National Park (LNP), is only beginning to house tourist accommodation and lacks Kruger’s concentration of large game, as most were killed during Mozambique’s seventeen-year civil war.2 Today the area is undergoing significant transformation as the park administration is building infrastructure, restocking the park with wildlife, and working to attract tourists. Supporters of the park argue it has the potential to not only protect wildlife, but also bring economic development to the region and, as a “Peace Park,” promote peaceful relations among the three countries. Unlike South Africa and Zimbabwe, which had preexisting parks, Mozambique’s LNP was established in 2001 only a year before the larger transfrontier park was opened. In fact, the LNP was created 239

Map 9.1: Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) in southeastern Africa. The GLTP is part of the larger Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area (GLTCA). Cartography by Elizabeth Fairley, University of Minnesota Cartgraphy Laboratory.

as a national park for the explicit purpose of linking it with Kruger and Gonarezhou to create the GLTP.3 Since its creation, the LNP has brought about increased state surveillance and state control over the area and the people who live there. In this sense, the LNP amounts to an act of state formation, as the Mozambican state has worked to  | Elizabeth Lunstrum

consolidate its power over this space, determining the new purposes of the landscape and more strictly regulating who and what can pass through the park as well as the international borders. Building on the work of scholars such as Duffy (2001) and van Amerom and Büscher (2005), who have suggested that the transfrontier park brings about a consolidation of state power over the internationally shared space, in this chapter I show the ways in which state-led territorial transformations enabling the construction of the LNP amount to particular acts of Mozambican state formation.4 The state-led refashioning of territory within this region of Mozambique has a long and complex history. Mozambique’s Massingir District, which lies partially within the LNP, has long been the object of state formation, as different states have worked to transform, police, and control the landscape and its inhabitants for specific political, economic, social, and environmental ends. While the LNP may significantly impact, strengthen, and consolidate state power and even yield configurations of state power at scales we have not yet seen, it is the latest in a long line of state interventions, aimed at reorganizing state territory and the relationships between the state, the population, and the territory they inhabit. My aim in this paper is to uncover the submerged territorial history of Mozambique’s Massingir District, focusing in particular on two of its villages: Massingir Velho, located within the LNP along its southern border; and Canhane, located just outside the park on the opposite side of the Massingir Reservoir from Massingir Velho (see map 9.2). A history that focuses on the ways different states have consolidated power over, and impacted people’s relation with, the landscape as national territory is particularly important in the context of national parks, which tend to erase human history as these spaces are celebrated as paradigmatic spaces of “wilderness.”5 Drawing on archival material, secondary sources, and extensive interviews with government representatives and residents of Canhane and Massingir Velho in 2004–5 and 2008, I chart how different state rationalities have put the landscape to work in different ways, profoundly altering the physical landscape and territorial relations. This story begins with the mid- to late period of colonial Portuguese rule, continues on to Mozambique’s independence and the rise of the The Making of State Territory | 

Map 9.2: Mozambique’s Massingir District and the southern section of the Limpopo National Park. Cartography by Elizabeth Fairley, University of Minnesota Cartography Laboratory.

socialist state, to the brutal civil war, itself in part a backlash against national development, and finally moves on to market reform and the construction of the Limpopo National Park. I analyze the predominantly state-led territorial reconfigurations emerging from each of these historical moments, drawing attention to how each has been achieved through distinct and shifting state rationalities aimed at realizing particular conceptions of national development.6 Furthermore, it is not only the landscape that is transformed but also the ever-shifting relationships among the state, the people, and the land as national territory. What emerges from this history is that these development projects are neither isolated nor do they clearly reproduce the effects of previous projects. Although there are important connections uniting these projects, they are marked by equally significant disjunctions.

Colonial Portugal in Mozambique: Consolidation of Power and Cotton Production Portugal’s colonial rule of Mozambique in the early twentieth century was decentralized, disorganized, incompetent, and corrupt (Isaacman and Isaacman 1983). In 1928 an economics professor named António Salazar came to power as the Portuguese Minister of Finance and began to centralize control over the colonies, tightening the small country’s grip over its East African colony of Mozambique. Recognizing Portugal’s increasingly marginalized role within Europe, Salazar, who was elected Portuguese Prime Minister in 1932, attempted to lessen Portugal’s economic dependence on its European neighbors by exploiting African labor and raw materials. Central to this extractive economy was the compulsory production of cotton, which transformed territory across Mozambique. Beginning in the late 1930s, the Portuguese government instituted a series of compulsory cotton-growing schemes to provide cheap cotton for Portugal’s fledgling textile industry.7 Compared to earlier years when Portugal was heavily dependent on cotton imports from other countries, by the 1940s on average 80 percent of its cotton came from its colonies. Such large-scale production in the colonies provided Portugal with cotton at approximately half the The Making of State Territory | 

world price and gave Portugal a needed competitive edge within European markets. By midcentury cotton production had significantly transformed parts of Gaza Province, especially the fertile alluvial soils lining the shores of the Limpopo River and its tributaries like the Elefantes River.8 Located along the Elefantes, compulsory cotton production eventually reached Gaza’s Massingir District despite its remote location, sparse population, and limited rainfall. Cotton farms began to spread out across the landscape, prompting significant changes in land-use patterns as more and more land was cleared and committed to commercial agricultural production. And as cotton production became more coercive, Massingir’s residents found their labor and land more firmly integrated into the colonial economy and within the purview of (limited) state surveillance. Some residents found elements of cotton production beneficial, as the wages it produced (along with remittances from the South African mines) provided income to pay a compulsory “hut tax,” to buy essential household goods, and to invest in farming equipment including cattle and cattle-drawn plows. Yet in large part cotton producers in Massingir found the work exploitative. While some work amounted to chibalo (literally forced labor), other types of work, although technically not forced, yielded exploitative wages and constant threats of physical violence and humiliation. The people of Massingir were routinely punished, sometimes by Portuguese overseers themselves but more often by the Mozambican capitazes (captains or policemen) working for the Portuguese. As three women from Canhane sat talking and recalling the toils of cotton production under the Portuguese, they all concurred that “the one type of suffering [the Portuguese] caused us had to do with their compulsory crop of cotton. . . . If you didn’t take good care of the cotton farm, they used to beat you.”9 Cotton production, moreover, threatened food security as it forced peasants to redirect labor away from their personal-subsistence farms (Isaacman 1996; Newitt 1995). As Maria, a former cotton producer in Massingir Velho, explained, her first priority was to work on the cotton farm, and only then was she able to grow her own food to feed her family. And even if she found a cow eating maize on her personal farm, she could not stop

 | Elizabeth Lunstrum

working on the cotton farm long enough to drive it away until her work there was complete. The cotton farm, she explained, always took precedence.10 Such compulsory cotton production generated a great deal of wealth for the colonial government. But it ultimately fueled resentment among Mozambicans throughout the colony, contributing to intensifying anticolonial, nationalist sentiment. Although territorial configurations were significantly altered by cotton production, it was not until several years after the fall of Portuguese colonial rule in 1975 that the Massingir District was to see its most significant territorial transformation, the construction of the Massingir Dam. The construction of the dam was completed between 1972 and 1977. Yet to understand the complex and shifting state rationality behind its construction—in particular how the dam was to play an important role in the development of Portuguese East Africa and the fortification of colonial interests—we need to move down the Elefantes and Limpopo Rivers and turn back to the 1950s, a time of nascent crisis for the Portuguese state.

Portugal Confronts a Growing Nationalism: Irrigation, Colonatos, and Colonial Anxiety After World War II, Portugal began to alter its development policy for Mozambique, focusing more on the development of the colony rather than merely its exploitation for the benefit of the metropole, a shift we can see in the First and Second Development Plans in the 1950s. The First Development Plan (1953–58) focused on the development of infrastructure and white immigration, calling for “migration from Portugal to establish white population centers which could contribute to the nationalization of the territory” (A. B. Herrick et al., quoted in Newitt 1995). One of the most important sites for Portuguese settlement was the fertile Limpopo Valley where, in the central valley, the state began to build its largest irrigation and settlement scheme, the Colonato do Limpopo, which saw the arrival of its first ten members, or colonos, in 1954 (see map 9.3).11

The Making of State Territory | 

Map 9.3: Mozambique’s Massingir District in relation to the Colonato do Limpopo. Cartography by Elizabeth Fairley, University of Minnesota Cartography Laboratory.

The motivation behind the Colonato do Limpopo was varied, and, as Hermele explains, it was often justified with “murky ideology” (1988, 36). One of the main rationales behind colonatos in general was to provide an “overspill for mass unemployment” (Munslow 1983) for the unemployed peasants in the Portuguese countryside. The colonatos additionally were a means of social engineering. Salazar, for example, saw them as a way of “replicat[ing] the Catholic Portuguese peasant family”; such a family was to have a “civilizing” influence on Portuguese and Mozambican colonos alike (Henriksen 1983; Newitt 1995). Portuguese settlers were also a form of defense for colonial interests in Mozambique, as settlers provided power in numbers (Munslow 1983). Moreover, the Colonato do Limpopo in particular was instituted to decrease Mozambique’s food dependence on its neighboring countries (Tanner, Myers, and Oad 1993). The colonatos also served as propaganda. In addition to showing the world the engineering aptitude of Portugal—still the “backward man” of Europe—the colonatos were designed to symbolize what Portugal saw as its particular commitment to racial equality and integration by promising to admit Mozambican colonos into the scheme.12 For Portuguese officials like António Trigo de Morais, chief engineer of the Limpopo scheme, the racial mixing in the colonotos was a form of nation-making through national and racial unity. As he explained in his 1960 progress report, “The irrigation works on the Limpopo have been carried out as part of a colonization plan, i.e., to settle and benefit the white and black population and promote their self-improvement free of all racial precepts for the purpose of promoting national unity” (quoted in Ribeiro-Torres 1973).13 Yet this seemed more rhetorical than anything else, as, especially in the early years of the Colonato do Limpopo, few Mozambicans were invited to join (Hermele 1988; Valá 2003). By the end of the 1950s, Portugal faced a much more precarious political climate as a wave of anticolonial sentiment and military activism had brought decolonization and the rise of independent states across Africa, and nationalists within Mozambique were beginning to make demands on the Portuguese state. As Portugal’s hold on its African possessions was challenged, its resolve to stay the course was only strengthened (Henriksen 1978). Reflecting a sense of urgency The Making of State Territory | 

and anxiety over threats to its colonial possessions, Portugal did indeed respond with its “Second Development Plan” covering 1959–64. The plan laid out a framework through which Portugal was to stabilize its colonial possessions by rapidly speeding up development and improving its treatment of its colonial subjects. On the Colonato do Limpopo, this materialized into increased pressure on Portuguese settlement and expansion of the colonato as a form of territorial control (Hermele 1988). Yet equally significant, the Portuguese state began to open the colonato to Mozambican farmers.14 Its desire was to create a class of politically conservative African farmers who would benefit directly from the policies of the colonial government and thus be more willing to support the colonial regime and resist Mozambican nationalism (Bowen 2000; Mondlane 1969; Newitt 1995). As described by revolutionary leader Eduardo Mondlane shortly before his assassination in 1969: “The officially stated aim [of the colonatos] was to create a semi-literate population of Africans and Portuguese holding rural Portuguese values, dedicated to the land and politically conservative, so as to absorb and divert the energies of the rising African, and render him unable to threaten the large European economic interests represented by the agricultural estates, the main economic props of the colony” (1969, 90). Whereas the state had admitted few Mozambican colonos in 1954, by 1959 it had radically changed its tune, allowing certain Mozambican colonos to enter the colonato on the same terms as the Portuguese. Thus, by 1961 there were 97 African colono families living in the Colonato do Limpopo and 460 at the end of colonial rule, with another 2,583 as probationers.15 The Massingir District some ninety kilometers upstream seemed relatively removed from these changes; by midcentury, it was home to no large development projects, and cotton production continued apace. Yet, as anticolonial resistance became more of a reality and as the irrigation and settlement schemes along the Limpopo Valley became more economically, symbolically, and strategically important to the success of the colonial mission in Mozambique, the state instituted measures to link Massingir more tightly to the valley through the construction of a dam and reservoir. From the early days of colonial settlement and agricultural interests in the Limpopo, the valley posed a serious obstacle. Receiving  | Elizabeth Lunstrum

only little rainfall, the valley depended on the Limpopo River and its tributaries for irrigation, yet the river had a propensity for yielding an erratic flow of water, sometimes torrential and sometimes insufficient (WAPCOS 1993). Attempting to address these problems, and also recognizing the potential for producing hydroelectric power, the colonial state began looking to Massingir as a promising site to build a dam (Cabrita 1960; Trigo de Morais 1964). In 1964—the same year as the onset of Mozambique’s liberation struggle—a working group for the Massingir Dam was created by the Overseas Ministry, which recommended urgency in the study of the dam. Developments picked up pace, and in 1969–71 intensive preparatory work was done to develop necessary infrastructure, including the construction of a new road linking Massingir to a village located near the Colonato do Limpopo, which integrated the district more firmly into the colonial state. Finally, in 1971 the contract to build the dam was awarded to the Portuguese construction firm Tâmega Limitada.16 In addition to providing water to irrigate the Limpopo Valley and the possibility of hydroelectric power, the dam would also enable the irrigation of land along the Elefantes River in the Massingir District, irrigating a total of ninety thousand hectares (WAPCOS 1993). With irrigation possible along the Elefantes, the colonial state was able to design a new colonato to be located near the foot of the dam, thus contributing to the larger goal of safeguarding the colonial presence in Mozambique. Writing on the eve of independence in 1974, Mozambican historian Elisio Martins explained: The birth of the Liberation Movement [in Mozambique] ignited the physical manifestation of the [Massingir Dam]. . . . [It] would collect an amount of water equivalent to the sum total of 95 dams spread over Portugal. . . . [Yet the] irrigation project is not an isolated one. The Portuguese government intends to: a) settle about 1,000 Portuguese families in the area, b) build a village to be known as the Massingir [V]illage, where the technical and administrative personnel would reside, c) establish a “colonato” where their families and relations would be installed (these areas are today going through deforestation; an area of The Making of State Territory | 

about 7,000 hectares), and d) build a modern airport to cater [to] aircrafts of all dimensions. (1974, 157)

Especially given its proximity to South Africa’s Kruger National Park, there was also talk among the Portuguese administration of tourism development on the reservoir to be created by the dam. Although the colonato at Massingir never came to fruition because it was halted by Mozambique’s independence, which prompted the mass exodus of Portuguese throughout the country, the airport was built, as was much of Massingir Village. As the Portuguese population that never materialized fades from view, another group emerges in the pages of government planning documents and yearly reviews, namely the Mozambican peasants living along the shores of the Elefantes River on the land slated for inundation by the Massingir Dam. The 1972 Annual Report of the Gabinete do Limpopo explains that the inundation will dislocate “only” two of the five regulados that make up the administrative divisions of the Massingir District. On the southern bank of the river, the report specifies, it will be necessary to relocate the 1,275 people who constitute the communities of Cubo, Canhane, and Covane, while on the northern bank of the river, it will be necessary to relocate the 1,700 people who make up the communities of Massingir Velho and Mavodze. Although the report does specify that the “dislocation of people from the area inundated by the reservoir has deserved particular attention since the beginning of the studies” (11) and that provisions have been made for relocation, it does not mention the possible ill effects of relocation. Backed up by economic feasibility studies showing the economic benefits of building the dam (11), relocation of these relatively remote populations seems, in the planning documents, an easy calculation. Lost behind these numbers are the experiences of the people scheduled for relocation. The Portuguese approached several of the affected villages to discuss the necessity of moving before the floodgates of the dam were too close, and they put up markers to show people the level to which the water would rise. They encountered residents who, resistant to the idea of moving, were also quite skepti | Elizabeth Lunstrum

cal as to the viability of the project. William, a man from Canhane, commented: “When the idea of constructing the dam became a reality, [the Portuguese administration] came to meet us and told us to move because where we were living would become a lake. We complained. We didn’t believe them. For us, it was impossible for the lake to take up all this space.”17 Yet before the dam was completed, and thus before communities were relocated, independence came on June 25, 1975, and power was transferred to Frelimo (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique), the revolutionary party that had fought for independence. Portugal’s accelerated development of Mozambique, along with its attempt to win over the Mozambican people, had failed, dashing all hopes for the future of a Portuguese African empire. There was, however, one additional late colonial territorial change within (and beyond) the Massingir District, which has generated little attention either in academic literature or in local history. In 1969, the land located east of the South African border, west of the Limpopo River, and north of the Elefantes River, roughly forming a triangle, was gazetted by the colonial Portuguese government as Coutada 16, a hunting reserve for European sportsmen (Farinha 1972). Although residents could not remember exactly when the Portuguese had first come to hunt in significant numbers, they had clear memories of Portuguese hunters and prohibitions that barred local residents from hunting many of the larger wild game. As Herberto explained, drawing particular attention to the significance of ivory, “The Portuguese forbade people from hunting elephants. But if you killed one, you should give them the tusks and you could keep the meat. Even if you killed a hippopotamus, you should inform them.”18 Eventually prohibitions were more strictly enforced and guards were hired to circulate through the woods to prevent residents from “poaching.” Although such prohibitions may have been in place before the creation of the coutada, its designation at a minimum gave them legal backing. Coutada 16 is significant because of its link to increased state control over natural resources like wild game and because it eventually would become the land legally and physically transformed into the Limpopo National Park, a transformation I return to shortly. The Making of State Territory | 

Building a Postindependence, Socialist State: Frelimo and the “Socialization of the Countryside” Although construction of the Massingir Dam was delayed by Portugal’s departure, shortly after independence Frelimo restarted the project. Despite the fact that nearly three thousand people would have to be moved, Frelimo embraced the potential of the dam in helping realize its new vision of what Mozambique could be, a vision framed by its commitment to building a socialist nation. At the national level Frelimo began to translate its socialist vision into concrete political, social, economic, and territorial changes aimed at a complete transformation of independent Mozambique to be accomplished through unprecedented centralized planning. This commitment is captured in the words of Mozambican president Samora Machel in 1976: “Everything must be organized, everything must be planned, everything must be programmed” (Hall and Young 1997, 67). There was a particular push to discipline rural areas, both territorially and socially, as the vast majority of the population was rural. Such a transformation was to be realized through three related projects, each necessary for the “socialization of the countryside”: the development of communal villages, which required removing peasants from their “scattered” locations across the countryside and concentrating them in modern, rationally organized villages; cooperative farms where each village would be engaged in cooperative agriculture for their communal benefit; and large state farms designed for large-scale food production. The collectivization of the communal villages and cooperative farms served several interrelated purposes. First, the concentration of the rural population facilitated the provision of social services, including education and health care. Second, although peasants would spend significant time on their personal farms, crops grown on the communal farm would help them to produce cash crops for sale to fund community projects. Third, such concentration and collectivization allowed for social engineering, more specifically the construction of a modern, revolutionary, socialist, anticolonial citizenry or peasantry. Having citizens live near one another in concentrated villages also facilitated social engineering by enabling a much greater degree  | Elizabeth Lunstrum

of state surveillance over residents’ behavior, practices, and attitudes, in particular those tied to “tradition.” Frelimo largely took an antitradition stance, as it tended to see “traditional” authority structures as “feudal and despotic” (Machel 1981b) and considered many “traditional” practices to be backward, rooted in colonial relations, and harmful in particular to women, especially practices like polygamy, lobolo or bride price, and drinking.19 The state farms were also central to Frelimo’s development plan for Mozambique, as they were to produce surplus agricultural products to feed industrial workers in urban centers (industry being another important component of Frelimo’s development plan) and, by radicalizing its workers, help socialize the countryside (Hermele 1988). Shortly after independence, Frelimo began work on the largest of its state farms, CAIL (Limpopo Valley Agro-Industrial Complex), formed from the defunct Colonato do Limpopo. Reflecting its larger step in nationalizing land, Frelimo centralized control of the colonato and turned it into a massive, highly mechanized state farm. Given hopes of high production, Frelimo declared the Limpopo Valley the “bread basket” of the country, with CAIL as its most important producer, followed by agricultural production in the lower Limpopo Valley.20 The promise of agricultural production throughout the Limpopo Valley, along with the promise of hydroelectric power, translated into continued interest in the Massingir Dam (Gabinete do Limpopo 1975; WAPCOS 1993). As the dam was to play a key role in the modernization and development of the countryside, the state restarted the project, completing it in 1977. Yet, as the Portuguese had never relocated the five villages in the floodplain, the task fell to Frelimo. Unlike other areas of the country where communities resisted moving into the communal villages—resistance that grew with time21—by and large the residents of Canhane and Massingir Velho agreed to move with little incident, being overwhelmingly supportive of Frelimo and its development policies and recognizing the imminent loss of their homes. Although it remained up to the community and its leaders to decide where each family would be located within the newly constructed villages, Frelimo representatives helped plan their layout, basing each on a characteristic grid usually consisting of four neighborhoods (or bairros) where each The Making of State Territory | 

family had its individual plot for sleeping, cooking, food storage, and so forth. Individual subsistence and cooperative farms and areas for livestock grazing were located on the outskirts of the villages.22 Almost thirty years later, it is difficult to say categorically whether or not the communal villages of Massingir Velho and Canhane were a success, as they have proven quite ambivalent in their effects. One thing is clear: They profoundly transformed territorial relations, social relations, and the presence of the state in the communities. Even in 2005 many residents expressed their support of the communal villages and state presence tied to education and infrastructure, although there was a shared sense that the state should have provided more social services like health-care clinics. Also, despite some dissenting voices, residents generally liked living near one another. Before their consolidation into communal villages, people lived relatively far from their neighbors, sometimes nearly an hour’s distance by foot. Living closer together provided a welcome level of security, as it was easier to call for help. This need for security only intensified as the civil war arrived several years later. More ambivalently, given its (selective) disdain for tradition, Frelimo worked to take power out of the hands of “traditional” leaders like the land chief, or chefe de terras. The land chief was often seen by Frelimo representatives as an agent of the colonial government, given that he was normally the person responsible for collecting hut taxes, a significant source of wealth for Portuguese coffers. In his place, Frelimo installed a community leader, supported by a number of secretaries, one from each neighborhood, illustrating how political authority was written into the highly organized landscape. Although welcomed by some members of the community, this new leadership structure left the land chief largely disempowered, a move that continues to cause tension and hard feelings even today, particularly in Massingir Velho. In Massingir Velho and Canhane, and in fact throughout the country, national prohibitions against “traditional” practices like polygamy, lobolo, and drinking were facilitated by the fact that people were living close to one another, making it easier to monitor their behavior. Nonetheless, such prohibitions were often met with amusement and noncompliance. As described by Luis, a resident of Massingir Velho,  | Elizabeth Lunstrum

[The government administrator] told us that we had to live in communal villages and we had to cultivate on the agricultural cooperatives. They also told us that we couldn’t make lobolo [bride price]. If we wanted to have a wife we could, but we would have to do so without a lobolo ceremony. We didn’t accept this. We asked them why our daughter couldn’t have a lobolo ceremony. It’s such a source of pride! They also told us that we couldn’t have more than one wife and that, if we refused, they would separate us. We said that it is impossible to live like this because in our culture, it is normal to have more than one wife. . . . We told [the administrator] that what he was suggesting was impossible. We didn’t accept it.23

In fact, even local Frelimo representatives within the villages were selectively noncompliant with the national party’s often puritanical prohibitions, illustrating a significant disconnect between state power and rationality on national and local scales.24 So while Frelimo’s relocation of Massingir’s residents had succeeded in consolidating them into concentrated, organized, and monitored villages, its larger goal of radical social transformation and modernization via territorial transformations was far from achieved. Likewise, in both Massingir Velho and Canhane, the least successful aspect of rural transformation was the agricultural cooperatives, which had failed across the country (Bowen 2000). At first residents found the cooperatives promising, yet this support proved short-lived as a severe drought struck the region shortly after independence. There were also concerns that not everyone was pulling her or his own weight, that privileged members of the community were pilfering some of the crops, that Frelimo representatives overly intervened in decision-making, and that the cooperatives were located quite far from where people lived, thus lengthening the workday. Given the brutality and humiliation of life under the Portuguese, residents of Massingir Velho and Canhane were, in the early years of independence, willing to make great sacrifices for the independent state to help realize its vision of a socialist future and unified socialist nation. Yet, as residents began to feel that the state was failing to fulfill its promises and that The Making of State Territory | 

some of its demands were inappropriate, their euphoric support of Frelimo had begun to wane, although it never entirely disappeared. This disappointment in Frelimo combined with prolonged drought led residents to abandon the cooperatives despite—or more accurately because of—their “revolutionary potential.” But the nail in the coffin of the cooperative farms was the arrival of antigovernment guerrillas in the mid-1980s and the civil conflict that ensued. This conflict proved to be the source of the next change radically altering territory in the Massingir District.

Renamo and the De-Territorialization of the Massingir District As Mozambique gained independence under Frelimo’s leadership, it found itself surrounded by hostile neighbors: Southern Rhodesia to the west, at that time led by Ian Smith’s fascist, white-supremacist government; and South Africa to the south and west, a state infamous for its deep commitment to apartheid policies of racial oppression and dispossession. Now bordering an independent Mozambique—a country that was also socialist, anticolonial, and led by a black majority—Southern Rhodesian and South African anxiety grew as Frelimo significantly endorsed and aided African nationalist movements in both countries. In response, first Southern Rhodesia and then South Africa began a campaign of destabilizing Mozambique by providing support to groups of Mozambicans who were disillusioned with Frelimo and who eventually organized under the name Renamo (Mozambican National Resistance). Although Renamo had some degree of political legitimacy, especially in the center of the country, in the rest of the country it functioned primarily through an economy of terror and violence, working not so much to put in place a new political leadership, but to destroy Frelimo and what it had accomplished.25 One of its prime targets for destruction was subsequently the communal villages, in particular their schools and teachers, health-care centers and providers, and Frelimo headquarters and representatives. Renamo troops moved  | Elizabeth Lunstrum

south, eventually arriving in the Massingir District in the mid-1980s where they began their campaign of terror. As residents of Massingir Velho and Canhane recounted in often graphic detail, Renamo’s tactics ranged from burning fields, stealing cattle, sabotaging infrastructure, looting and burning homes, rape, kidnapping, and the murder of civilians, often employing methods of grotesque, ritualized executions and bodily mutilations. With the exception of small militias that stayed behind to protect the villages, both Massingir Velho and Canhane were abandoned as the violence intensified. Their residents fled to the mato (“the bush”), to Massingir Village where there were Frelimo soldiers protecting the Massingir Dam (which was seen as a prime target for Renamo), to other better-protected villages like Cubo, or left the country entirely, traveling through Kruger National Park to find relative safety inside South Africa. Finally, in 1992, Frelimo and Renamo signed a peace accord in Rome, where Frelimo agreed to recognize Renamo as a legitimate political party and guaranteed more democratic rule, including multiparty elections, which were finally held in 1994. With help from the United Nations High Commission on Refugees and various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), refugees were repatriated from South Africa and people who escaped to the mato and Massingir Village returned to start their lives again, although some people chose to stay permanently in South Africa.26 What occurred in Massingir Velho and Canhane, a pattern reflected throughout rural southern Mozambique during the war, was a de-territorialization, a disarticulation of territory, citizens (or populations), and the state. This was precisely Renamo’s intention. Territorial attachments between the people and their homes were undone as the villages were too violent to remain in. Also central to this de-territorialization was a disarticulation of the state with both its territory and its population. The state was no longer able to oversee what was happening within much of the Massingir District, and could not interact with or address the needs of its citizens who resided there. In very real terms, much of the Massingir District, as with vast areas of the country, ceased to be “state space” during the conflict. Without drawing the causal connection too tightly, the de-territorialization wreaked by Renamo was not a discrete or self-contained historical event. Rather, it The Making of State Territory | 

was at least in part a rejection of Frelimo’s often elaborately spatialized governing rationality and style; domestically, Renamo rejected Frelimo’s commitment to a socialist path of development, its disdain for “tradition,” and its highly regimented communal villages and farms. Reflecting on the unfolding of the war in the Massingir District, we begin to see an interesting pattern. Namely, it was resistance to Frelimo’s state rationality elsewhere (i.e., in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa and Renamo strongholds located mainly in the center and north of Mozambique) that brought about the de-territorialization of the Massingir District. This illustrates that there is no direct connection between where state rationality and power are resisted or rejected and where the effects of that resistance are felt, suggesting a sort of territorial reverberation or echo effect. In some ways this is similar to the construction of the Massingir Dam itself, where state rationality concerned with agricultural production in the Limpopo Valley inspired the territorial reconfigurations felt by people located some distance away in the Massingir District.

Neoliberal Reform and the Limpopo National Park Increasingly losing its grip on the Mozambican economy and its legitimacy in the eyes of many of its citizens and undermined by the unrelenting attacks of Renamo, Frelimo came to the negotiating table with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1984. By 1987 Frelimo had accepted a structural adjustment package known as the Economic Rehabilitation Program, in which it agreed to devalue its currency, liberalize trade, privatize state assets, reduce subsidies, and eliminate price controls on agricultural products.27 Another significant step toward political and economic liberalization came when the state passed the 1997 Land Law, which, while retaining the ultimate ownership of land, guaranteed land-use rights based on prior occupancy. The law additionally created a legal mechanism by which land-use rights could be transferred or, in effect, sold. This move was seen as a necessary step in both guaranteeing community rights to land and enabling an amenable political and economic environment for private investment,  | Elizabeth Lunstrum

understood as key to Mozambique’s economic recovery.28 These neoliberal reforms have been so thorough, and some would argue successful, that Mozambique is often held up as the neoliberal poster child for other liberalizing countries to follow (Pitcher 2002). Emerging in part from this shift in economic rationality with its emphasis on the accumulation of capital, the Mozambican state placed significant emphasis on conservation measures. These were thought not only to help protect and rehabilitate wildlife—particularly important in a country that lost much of its wild game during the civil war—but also to generate foreign currency in the form of foreign investment and tourist dollars.29 Likewise, conservation in Southern Africa has in recent years been profoundly impacted by global shifts toward regional political and economic integration and shifts in conservation policy and practice away from strictly national projects and toward transboundary natural resource management (TBNRM) and the creation of transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) (Hanks 2003; NEPAD 2001; Wolmer 2003). As these political, economic, and environmental policy changes were taking place, conservationists, potential investors, and the national governments of Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe began discussing the possibility of building a massive transfrontier park linking South Africa’s Kruger National Park, Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou National Park, and Mozambique’s Coutada 16 (the same coutada mentioned previously). In Mozambique, feasibility studies and capacity building projects were funded by the World Bank, while the German Development Bank agreed to fund the development of Coutada 16, provided it be gazetted into a national park. The Limpopo National Park was thus born on November 27, 2001. A year later the presidents of Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe signed the treaty that officially established what has emerged as the flagship transboundary park in southern Africa, the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP). Reflecting its embrace of a free-market economy, regional integration, and the retreat of state centralization, the Mozambican state promotes the LNP/GLTP on the grounds that it will bring economic development to the region, promote community empowerment and autonomy through community-based natural resource management The Making of State Territory | 

(CBNRM) projects tied to the park, encourage conservation by restocking wildlife populations decimated by the war, and, finally, promote regional cooperation in wildlife management and conservation (Mangane et al. 2003; World Bank 2005a). In short, the park is promoted as a “win-win” scenario for local communities, conservationists, biodiversity and wildlife, investors, tourists, and the three states involved. In its desire to distinguish itself from its more famous neighbor of Kruger National Park, the Mozambican state has claimed that one thing that sets the LNP apart is the Massingir Reservoir, a beautiful freshwater lake capable of providing tourist activities like sport fishing not available in Kruger. In this sense—and reminiscent of the unfulfilled colonial plan to develop the reservoir as a tourist location— the Massingir Dam and Reservoir are being asked to perform yet another role in national development, this time one tied to recreation and tourism. The territorial changes and land-use planning enabling the park are both more vast and more sophisticated than what the Massingir District has previously seen. In constructing a game park, the park administration has rezoned different areas of the park into tourist zones, wildlife zones, and multiple-use zones; such rezoning has severely limited what can happen in each of these spaces. The Kruger administration has begun to bring down parts of the Kruger-Limpopo fence to encourage animal migration across the border, while the LNP administration has been working with Kruger to restock wildlife within the LNP.30 Moreover, in changing its legal status from a coutada to a national park, hunting animals is now strictly prohibited within park borders, and community rights to use, live in, and benefit from this space have been weakened.31 Arguably the park’s most contentious territorial change concerns the planned relocation of several communities living inside the LNP including Massingir Velho.32 Although the administration has promised no forced relocations, it is developing incentive packages to strongly encourage people to relocate outside the park. As the administration points out, it is dangerous for people to live alongside wild animals. In addition, it is concerned that having people live inside the

 | Elizabeth Lunstrum

park may disrupt the “wilderness experience” of tourists, lessening the park’s appeal.33 Thus, the park clearly presents a profound territorial reorganization, both physically—for example, with the relocation of residents, wildlife restocking, the removal of part of the Kruger-Limpopo fence, and the development of infrastructure; and symbolically—as the area is turned into “wilderness” and signs of human labor and daily existence such as farms, homes, and maize silos are erased. This “wilderness,” argue supporters of the park, has the potential to “heal old wounds” (c.f., Koch 1999) tied to the South Africa–Mozambique conflict and, more important from an economic perspective, provide a tourist destination rich in nostalgic possibilities of “reconnecting with nature” and the like (Draper, Spierenburg, and Wels 2004; Wolmer 2003). While there is not yet an official plan to guide the relocation of Massingir Velho, it will be relocated over the next several years.34 The reaction of village residents has been profoundly shaped by the prior territorial transformations that transformed the region’s physical, political, and socioeconomic geography. For instance, Samuel, a former member of a pro-Frelimo militia, explained with indignation that he had fought to protect his land and community of Massingir Velho during the civil war, only to realize that with the coming of the park he had been fighting merely to protect the land for the animals.35 Other residents have pointed out that this is their ancestral land, and they will have to be killed before they will let the state take it. The apprehension toward the park is tied largely to a distrust of the state, mainly a sense that the post-independence state had promised significant developments yet failed to deliver, as people are still quite poor. Furthermore, even people relatively supportive of the park are frustrated that they were not adequately consulted before the park was created in 2001 and were simply informed they were living inside a park.36 Others have been critical of the park on the grounds that they have already been moved too many times, once because of the communal villages and then because of the civil war. While also recognizing benefits afforded by the park, Lerida lamented:

The Making of State Territory | 

When the dam was built, we had to move here because of the water. And the government was right—it was good for us. But [we were relocated to land that was still our community land], and we continued to work on our farms. But now with the park, they said that we have to move somewhere else, and we don’t want to because we have animals, farms, and houses here. And this land is very good for producing maize. We don’t know if the new land is also good. But now we have problems with the wild animals that eat the maize in the farms and kill our animals. Our life is always changing. Once the war finished, we returned from the bush, and now we have to move again! Why?37

In addition to the planned relocation of villages like Massingir Velho, the park’s growing wildlife populations are wreaking havoc on residents’ livelihoods, as wildlife raid subsistence crops like maize and pose threats to residents’ livestock. Hence, the park in this sense is causing a more subtle form of dislocation, as residents’ abilities to utilize their land for farming and grazing have been compromised. Other residents, while smaller in number than the park’s critics, see the LNP in more positive terms, especially as a site of needed economic opportunity. Some see benefit in being able to provide services to tourists like producing tourist souvenirs, providing transportation, or working for the park, while others see economic opportunities in the site of relocation. Several residents even commented that, although the park will not bring development to the villages within its borders, it will bring development to the nation. While many residents expressed frustration over the park’s animals eating their maize and sometimes even attacking their cattle, others voiced strong support of rehabilitating wildlife populations that had been devastated by the war. Fernanda, for instance, explained that the park’s presence is welcome because “our children are going to see the animals we saw only in books. . . . For my entire life, even now, I grew up knowing the animals of the park only from books.”38 In communities like Canhane located beyond the borders of the park, we are beginning to see concrete examples of ways in which the park can  | Elizabeth Lunstrum

Figure 9.1: Covane Community Lodge in the village of Canhane. Photo by the author.

bring community development to the region. Canhane is now home to the Covane Community Lodge, built to provide accommodation for tourists visiting the LNP (Lunstrum 2008) (see fig. 9.1). Half the lodge’s revenue is reinvested back into the lodge and used for upkeep and to pay employees’ salaries, while the other half goes to the community for development projects. In 2005, Canhane received its first check and used the money to expand its schoolhouse. While recognizing the benefits afforded by the park, residents of Canhane have also voiced concern regarding the removal of their neighbors living just across the reservoir. Turning back to the relation among the people, the state, and the land—or more specifically the nation-state-territory triad—relocation tied to the park suggests not just a shift in this triad. As with the civil war and even the construction of the Massingir Dam, this shift translates into a profound disarticulation of nation and territory. As populations are removed from or moved around and consolidated within The Making of State Territory | 

the park, even voluntarily, the link uniting this particular group of people with their land is effectively weakened if not outright severed. But unlike the civil war, with the LNP the state’s relation with this territory is strengthened, as the state emerges as the primary decisionmaker over this site. Yet, more broadly what emerges within the LNP is a new articulation between the state, the territory of the park, and the population, where the population widens to include the Mozambican population or nation as a whole, as this is a national park meant to contribute to national (as well as regional) development and be a symbol of national pride. Thus, we do in fact see a new articulation of state, territory, and nation, yet one in which the relation between territory and population is more diffuse, more symbolic, and less direct.

Conclusion It is possible to read the LNP as the latest in a long line of immense state interventions aimed at reconfiguring territory and, more broadly, reconfiguring the relationship between the state, its territory, and its citizens or subjects. But we should be careful to not read the connections between these territorial interventions as uninterrupted or as equally detrimental to Mozambique’s rural populations. Bowen, for instance, offers a sweeping critique of Portuguese/Mozambican rural development policy, seeing unity among the development policy and practices of the Portuguese, including coercive cotton production; the socialist state under Frelimo, with its communal villages, agricultural cooperatives, and state farms; and the contemporary Mozambican state, with the vast neoliberal reforms it has adopted (i.e., many of the same reforms that have given rise to the LNP).39 Although critics like Bowen are correct that both the colonial and postcolonial states have radically altered rural livelihoods, it is equally important to draw attention to the disjunctions between their different development projects, and also to call into question whether such a clear-cut commonality and continuity in fact exist.40 As we have seen, Frelimo’s socialist development framework was in many ways a rejection of Portuguese colonial development policies,  | Elizabeth Lunstrum

which, especially before the 1950s, aimed at developing Portugal via the exploitation of its colonies. Hence, Frelimo’s plan for national development was an attempt to undo the poverty, illiteracy, and general underdevelopment that proved to be the stubborn legacy of the Portuguese. Contrary to Bowen’s account, Massingir Velho’s and Canhane’s residents found great benefit in the communal villages and were eager to follow Frelimo’s vision of a postindependence society, a vision they did not accept without qualification but that they nonetheless saw rich in emancipatory potential. Even now, several years after Frelimo’s vision of a socialist Mozambique has faded, the communal villages at least in terms of their physical structure remain, and not because of state coercion. Certainly there is an important connection between the development projects of the colonial and post-independence periods. The most profound connection lies in the request or outright demand that communities sacrifice access to their lands in the name of national development. Begun by the Portuguese, yet completed by the socialist post-independence state, the residents of Massingir Velho and Canhane were asked to give up in the name of national development not only their homes, but also their former ways of life as they moved into the communal villages both to escape the rising water and to begin collective forms of production. For several communities within the LNP, such a relocation is currently being requested by the state, this time in the name of conservation and economic development. Furthermore, while the communal villages were generally supported by local residents in their early days, this support began to wane with time; this was in large part because state promises tied to villagization were slow to materialize. The LNP, on the other hand, has never been characterized by general support of local communities. Some residents see the park as a continuation of the state’s sometimes oppressive restructuring of territory. Yet a smaller but not insignificant number of residents see the park as providing needed economic opportunity and a possible way of addressing underdevelopment— left behind by Portuguese colonialism and the civil war—through new employment opportunities and projects like Canhane’s Covane Community Lodge. And some see the park as both oppressive and beneficial, The Making of State Territory | 

suggesting the need to reject an understanding of these territorial changes as decisively harmful to local residents or as a simple continuation of a seemingly long line of similarly detrimental development projects.41 This story—and indeed this history—is, however, far from over, as the LNP is currently in the throes of arguably the largest territorial transformation the region has yet seen as it is physically and symbolically transformed into a national park. This requires the massive restocking of wildlife as well as the relocation of several communities outside park borders. In rejecting the idea that the Massingir District has been a tabula rasa from the perspective of state intervention, as I have attempted to do throughout this chapter, it is necessary to continue investigating how past territorial reconfigurations continue to shape the future of the LNP as a space of conservation, cooperation, and conflict.

Acknowledgments This research has been generously funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the University of Minnesota’s Graduate School and Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC), and York University’s Faculty of Arts. I would like to thank Megan Casey, John Gaalaas, and Karen Oslund for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper as well as Elizabeth Fairley at the University of Minnesota’s Cartography Lab for producing the maps. To protect their anonymity, all names of Massingir’s residents quoted in this chapter are pseudonyms.

Notes 1. The GLTP is part of the larger Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area (GLTCA), which is a mixed-use space comprising national parks, other conservation spaces, villages, farms, and so forth. 2. There is debate about whether this war should be referred to as a civil war, since it was largely funded and fueled by sources outside the country, as I will examine later in the chapter. Some scholars thus prefer

 | Elizabeth Lunstrum

to describe the war as a “war of destabilization.” Although the war was indeed one of destabilization, I will refer to it as a “civil war” to draw attention to the fact that it was fought by two factions within Mozambique (Frelimo and Renamo), while still recognizing that its causes spilled well beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. 3. See Magane et al., “Limpopo National Park Management and Development Plan”; and Vicente, van Wyk, and Boshoff, “Limpopo National Park Business Plan.” 4. Duffy’s larger argument is that, on the surface, it seems that transfrontier parks like the Great Limpopo require the state to cede some degree of sovereign control over territory to a transnational management authority. Yet, ironically, such parks assist the state in gaining control over areas that had before lain beyond its purview, and in effect creating these parks amounts to state formation. Duffy argues, moreover, that transfrontier parks like the GLTP “assist in extending state power over areas that had previously been beyond the reach of law enforcement and other government agencies”—what she characterizes as “unmanaged and unregulated wild places sited around international borders—through increased state surveillance and intervention” (“Peace Parks,” 1–2, emphasis added). I argue, in contrast, that state formation in the Massingir District has long predated the GLTP. 5. See Adams and McShane, The Myth of Wild Africa; and Neumann, Imposing Wilderness. 6. This is not to argue that these territorial changes have been entirely determined by state rationality or action. 7. Isaacman, Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty. 8. Hermele, “Land Struggles and Social Differentiation in Southern Mozambique; and Isaacman, Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty. 9. Interview with Teresa, Taciana, and Noémia, Canhane, August 29, 2004. 10. Interview with Maria, Canhane, November 8, 2004. 11. The lower Limpopo valley was also a significant site of colonial settlement and agricultural production. See, for example, Roesch, “Migrant Labour and Forced Rice Production in Southern Mozambique.” 12. As Trigo de Morais explained: “Barrages, irrigation canals and colonatos are to be found everywhere in the world, but perfect inter-racial brotherhood, which can be observed in the mixed colonatos of Mozambique and Angola, can only be found in Portuguese territory” (quoted in Newitt, Portugal in Africa, 195). See also Henriksen, Mozambique; and Trigo de Morais, O colonato do Limpopo.

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13. For more on the significance of irrigation to the colonial state, see Trigo de Morais, “Contribuição para o estudo da colonização Europeia.” 14. For more on governmentality, see the classic essay by Michel Foucault, “Governmentality.” 15. Despite this gesture toward equality, Mozambican colonos were always granted less acreage than their Portuguese counterparts (see Hermele, “Land Struggles and Social Differentiation”). 16. Gabinete do Limpopo, “Relatório Anual: 1972” (1972). 17. Interview with William, Canhane, September 29, 2004. 18. Interview with Herberto, Canhane, September 29, 2004. 19. See, for example, Machel, “The Liberation of Women.” See also Hall and Young, Confronting Leviathan. 20. Hermele, “Land Struggles and Social Differentiation”; and Roesch, “Migrant Labour.” 21. See, for example, Coelho, “Protected Villages and Communal Villages”; and Casal, Antropologia e desenvolvimento. 22. Araújo, “O sistema das aldeias comunais em Moçambique”; and CNAC, “Primeiro curso de planificação.” 23. Interview with Luis, Massingir Velho, September 8, 2004. 24. Also see Bowen, The State against the Peasantry; and Hall and Young, Confronting Leviathan. 25. See Geffray and Pedersen, “Sobre a guerra na província de Nampula”; Hall and Young, Confronting Leviathan; Newitt, A History of Mozambique; Vines, Renamo; and Wilson, “Cults of Violence.” 26. Whereas people began to return to Canhane shortly after the end of the conflict, people in Massingir Velho at first regrouped closer to the edge of the Massingir Reservoir and did not return to the village until several years later when requested to do so by the government. 27. See Bowen, The State against the Peasantry; Hermele, “Land Struggles and Social Differentiation”; and Pitcher, Transforming Mozambique. 28. See Hanlon, “Renewed Land Debate”; Lunstrum, “Mozambique”; and Tanner, “Law-Making in an African Context.” 29. Hatton, Couto, and Oglethorpe, “Biodiversity and War”; and World Bank, “Project Appraisal Document.” 30. Spenceley, “Tourism Investment in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area”; and Vicente, van Wyk, and Boshoff, “Limpopo National Park Business Plan.” 31. See, for example, World Bank, “Transfrontier Conservation Areas and Tourism Development Project.” Although prohibitions against hunting had been in place since the late 1990s.

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32. For more information on relocation, see Spierenburg and Milgroom, “Induced Volition”; and Republic of Mozambique, “Mozambique— Transfrontier Conservation Areas and Tourism Development Project.” 33. Weissleder and Sparla, “Mozambique”; see also Spierenburg and Milgroom, “Induced Volition.” 34. Interview with LNP senior official, LNP Headquarters, Massingir Village, July 24, 2009. 35. Interview with Samuel, Massingir Velho, November 4, 2004. 36. See also RRP-UW, “A Park for the People?” 37. Interview with Lerida, Massingir Velho, September 8, 2004. 38. Interview with Fernanda, Massingir Velho, February 3, 2005. 39. More explicitly, Bowen argues: “Despite regime changes, both the colonial and postcolonial Mozambican state pursued policies inimical to the peasantry with the same results: increased peasant dissatisfaction and alienation from the state” (Bowen, The State against the Peasantry, 203). 40. Some critics of postcolonial conservation projects like the GLTP see them as a continuation or reproduction of colonial conservation policy more generally. See, for example, Magome and Murombedzi, “Sharing South African National Parks.” See also other essays in Adams and Mulligan, Decolonizing Nature; and Cooke, “From Colonial Administration to Development Management.” 41. For a profound critique of the GLTP on the grounds that it is detrimental to rural residents, see Dzingirai, “Disenfranchisement at Large.”

Works Cited Adams, Jonathan S., and Thomas O. McShane. 1992. The Myth of Wild Africa: Conservation without Illusion. New York: W.W. Norton. Araújo, Manuel G. M. 1988. “O sistema das aldeias comunais em Moçambique: transformações na organização do espaço residencial e produtivo.” Ph.D. diss, Universidade de Lisboa. Bowen, Merle L. 2000. The State against the Peasantry: Rural Struggles in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Cabrita, Castro. 1960. “Possibilidades energéticas do Rio Elefantes/ Limpopo na albufeira de Massingir.” Electridade 20:330–36. CNAC (Comissão Nacional das Aldeias Comunais). 1981. “Primeiro curso de planificação: CNAC.” Maputo: CNAC. Document located at

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the Mozambican National Archives. Box labeled: AC/233 (CNAC Mapas Modelos, “ACs,” Planeamento Físico AC). Coelho, João Paulo Borges. 1993. “Protected Villages and Communal Villages in the Mozambican Province of Tete (1968–1982).” Ph.D. diss., University of Bradford. Cooke, Bill. 2001. “From Colonial Administration to Development Management.” In IDPM discussion paper series. Manchester: Institute for Development Policy and Management. Draper, Malcolm, Marja Spierenburg, and Harry Wels. 2004. “African Dreams of Cohesion: Elite Pacting and Community Development in Transfrontier Conservation Areas in Southern Africa.” Culture and organization 10:341–53. Duffy, Rosaleen. 2001. “Peace Parks: The Paradox of Globalization.” Geopolitics 6:1–26. Dzingirai, Vupenyu. 2004. “Disenfranchisement at Large: Transfrontier Zones, Conservation, and Local Livelihoods.” Harare: IUCN ROSA. Farinha, José Lourenço. 1972. “Caça (legislação): Caça, parques nacionais, coutadas, reservas e regimes de vigilância, outras disposições.” Lourenço Marques: Estado de Moçambqiue: Imprensa Nacional de Moçambique. Foucault, Michel. 1991. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michael Foucault, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Gabinete do Limpopo. 1972. “Relatório Anual: 1972.” ———. 1975. “Relatório Anual: 1975.” Geffray, Christian, and Mögens Pedersen. 1986. “Sobre a guerra na província de Nampula: elementos de análise e hipóteses sobre as determinações e consequências socio-económicas locais.” Revista internacional de estudos Africanos 4–5:303–18. GLTP. “Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (Official webpage of the GLTP).” http://www.greatlimpopopark.com/. Hall, Margaret, and Tom Young. 1997. Confronting Leviathan: Mozambique Since Independence. Athens: Ohio University Press. Hanks, John. 2003. “Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in South Africa: Their Role in Conserving Biodiversity, Socioeconomic Development and Promoting a Culture of Peace.” Journal of Sustainable Forestry 17:127–48. Hanlon, Joseph. 2004. “Renewed Land Debate and the ‘Cargo Cult’ in Mozambique.” Journal of Southern African Studies 30:603–25.

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Hatton, John, Mia Couto, and Judy Oglethorpe. 2001. “Biodiversity and War: A Case Study of Mozambique.” Washington, DC: Biodiversity Support Program. Henriksen, Thomas H. 1978. Mozambique: A History. London: Collings. ———. 1983. Revolution and Counterrevolution: Mozambique’s War of Independence, 1964–1974. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Hermele, Kenneth. 1988. “Land Struggles and Social Differentiation in Southern Mozambique: A Case Study of Chokwe, Limpopo, 1950–1987.” Uppsala, Sweden: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies. Isaacman, Allen F. 1996. Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty: Peasants, Work, and Rural Struggle in Colonial Mozambique, 1938–1961. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Isaacman, Allen F., and Barbara Isaacman. 1983. Mozambique: From Colonialism to Revolution, 1900–1982. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Koch, Eddie. 1999. “ ‘Nature Has the Power to Heal Old Wounds’: War, Peace and Changing Patterns of Conservation in Southern Africa.” In South Africa in Southern Africa: Reconfiguring the Region, edited by David Simon, 54–71. Oxford: James Currey. Lunstrum, Elizabeth. 2008. “Mozambique, Neoliberal Land Reform, and the Limpopo National Park.” Geographical Review 98 (3): 339–55. Machel, Samora. 1981a. “ ‘The Liberation of Women Is a Fundamental Necessity for the Revolution.’ Opening Speech at the First Conference of Mozambican Women, 4 March 1973.” In Mozambique: Sewing the Seeds of Revolution, 17–32. Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House. ———. 1981b. “ ‘Solidarity Is Mutual Aid between Forces Fighting for the Same Objectives.’ Speech at the First National Solidarity Conference for the Freedom and Independence of Mozambique, Angola, and GuineBissau, at Reggio Emilia, Italy, on 25 March 1973.” In Mozambique: Sewing the Seeds of Revolution, 3–11. Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House. Magane, S., B. Soto, S. Munthali, S. Schneider, G. Vicente, A. van Wyk, A. Nhalidede, P. Rode, D. Grossman, P. Holden, T. Kleibl, and M. Maluleke. 2003. “Limpopo National Park Management and Development Plan, First Edition.” Maputo: Limpopo National Park Project, Republic of Mozambique, Ministry of Tourism. Magome, Hector, and James Murombedzi. 2003. “Sharing South African National Parks: Community Land and Conservation in a Democratic South Africa.” In Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era, edited by W. M. Adams and Martin Mulligan, 108–34. London: Earthscan Publications.

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Martins, Elisio. 1974. Colonialism and Imperialism in Mozambique: The Beginning of the End. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Mondlane, Eduardo. 1969. The Struggle for Mozambique. Baltimore: Penguin. Munslow, Barry. 1983. Mozambique: The Revolution and Its Origins. London: Longman. NEPAD. 2001. “The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) (Nepad Framework Document).” New Partnership for Africa’s Development. Neumann, Roderick. 1998. Imposing Wilderness: Struggles Over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Newitt, Malyn. 1981. Portugal in Africa: The Last Hundred Years. London: Hurst. ———. 1995. A History of Mozambique. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pitcher, M. Anne. 2002. Transforming Mozambique: The Politics of Privatization, 1975–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Republic of Mozambique, Ministry of Tourism. 2008. “Mozambique— Transfrontier Conservation Areas and Tourism Development Project: Resettlement Plan. Vol. 2 of 2: Resettlement Action Plan for Macavene Village (draft).” Maputo: Republic of Mozambique, Ministry of Tourism. Ribeiro-Tôrres, J. L. 1973. “Rural Development Schemes in Southern Moçambique.” South African Journal of African Affairs 3:60–69. Roesch, Otto. 1991. “Migrant Labor and Forced Rice Production in Southern Mozambique: The Colonial Peasantry of the Lower Limpopo Valley.” Journal of Southern African Studies 17:239–70. RRP-UW. 2002. “A Park for the People? Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park: Community Consultation in Coutada 16, Mozambique.” Acornhoek, South Africa: Refugee Research Programme, University of the Witwatersrand (RRP-UW). Spenceley, Anna. 2005. “Tourism Investment in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area: Scoping Report.” Wits Rural Facility: University of the Witwatersrand. Spierenburg, Marja, and Jessica Milgroom. 2008. “Induced Volition: Resettlement from the Limpopo National Park, Mozambique.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 26 (4): 435–48. Tanner, Christopher. 2002. “Law-Making in an African Context: The 1997 Land Law.” FAO Legal Papers Online. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.

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Tanner, Christopher, Gregory Myers, and Ramchand Oad. 1993. Land Disputes and Ecological Degradation in an Irrigation Scheme: A Case Study of State Farm Divestiture in Chokwe, Mozambique. Madison, WI: Land Tenure Center. Trigo de Morais, António. 1936. “Contribuição para o estudo da colonização Europeia das zonas de regadio do Império Colonial Português.” Lisbon: República Portuguesa, Ministério das Colónias. ———. 1964. O Colonato do Limpopo. Lisbon: Universidade Técnica de Lisboa. Valá, Salim Cripton. 2003. A problemática da posse da terra na região agária de Chókwè (1954–1995). Maputo: Promédia. Van Amerom, Marloes, and Bram Büscher. 2005. “Peace Parks in Southern Africa: Bringers of an African Renaissance?” Journal of Modern African Studies 43:159–82. Vicente, Gilberto, Arrie van Wyk, and Pieter Boshoff. 2003. “Limpopo National Park Business Plan, Period 2004–2006.” Maputo: Project Implementation Unit of the Limpopo National Park Project, Republic of Mozambique, Ministry of Tourism. Vines, Alex. 1991. Renamo: Terrorism in Mozambique. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. WAPCOS. 1993. “Massingir Dam Rehabilitation Study Feasibility Report. Vol. 1.” Maputo: República de Moçambique, Ministério da construção e águas, Direcção nacional de águas. New Delhi: WAPCOS [Water and Power Consultancy Services, India, Ltd.]. Weissleder, Heiko, and Sonja Sparla. 2002. “Mozambique: Development of the Communities of the LNP: Shingwedzi River Basin (Final Report).” Maputo: GFA: Terra Systems, KfW, and National Directorate of Protected Areas, Ministry of Tourism, Maputo, Mozambique. Wilson, Ken. 1992. “Cults of Violence and Counter-Violence in Mozambique.” Journal of Southern African Studies 18:527–82. Wolmer, William. 2003. “Transboundary Conservation: The Politics of Ecological Integrity in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park.” Journal of Southern African Studies 29:261–78. World Bank. 2005a. “Project Appraisal Document on a Proposed Credit in the Amount of SDR 13.9 Million and Proposed from the Global Environment Facility Trust Fund in the Amount of US$10 Million to the Republic of Mozambique for a Transfrontier Conservation Areas and Tourism Development Project (32148-MZ).” Washington, DC: World Bank.

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———. 2005b. “Transfrontier Conservation Areas and Tourism Development Project: Mozambique: Resettlement Policy Framework.” Washington, DC: World Bank. Yañez Casal, Adolfo. 1996. Antropologia e desenvolvimento: As aldeias comunais de Moçambique. Lisbon: Ministério da Ciência e da Tecnologia, Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical.

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10 Ecological Communication at the Oxford Imperial Forestry Institute Peder Anker

In 1950 Princess Margaret opened with pomp and circumstance the new building housing the Imperial Forestry Institute at Oxford University. “Long before the Royal car was due,” the local newspaper reported, “great crowds, in which women and children predominated, gathered at vantage points to get a ‘close-up’ of the Princess.”1 The royal blessing of the building was meant to foster environmentally sensitive forestry within the British Empire. This paper discusses how this ethic came to shape the building’s design. Historians investigating the colonial and postcolonial heritage of environmental debates have recently focused on the cultural and ecological history of imperialism.2 This trend follows a general shift away from political and economic histories and toward a broader understanding of the role of Orientalism within empires. In the case of scientific practices, this cultural turn has revealed fresh understandings of the relation between places of research in the periphery and central academic institutions.3 Historians of botanical gardens, for example, have documented a reciprocal relationship between scientific microcosms mirroring the socio-organic environment of entire empires.4 At the heart of this connection were natural history museums, and their 275

historians have shown how their order of knowledge represented ways to master Oriental landscapes and people.5 This paper will follow the above trend by exploring the process by which forestry research came to shape the architecture of a particular building. Instead of looking out at the environmental history of landscapes, the following pages will turn inward to the milieu in which imperial scientists worked. After all, even devoted naturalists spent most of their time inside offices, libraries, and laboratories. In the field of environmental studies these places have largely been ignored, with the exception of laboratory and architectural histories.6 The Imperial Forestry Institute’s building was a meeting ground for scientists, forest managers, students, timber dealers, and university administrators, and it should be understood in view of their different agencies and interests. They all had in common a call for knowledge, but they had different agendas with respect to what knowledge should do. One therefore needs to understand the ecology of communication between them. The most dominant group within the building was made up of scientists researching the validity of different forestry theories and empirical findings. To them the building served as a workplace and as a tool for securing funding and opportunities. They were supported by forestry managers within the British Empire whose chief interest was to undermine laissez-faire capitalism and gain control over the empire’s forests through governmental managerial principles. Visitors from the carpenter business also frequented the building, and their interests were in different types of timber in relation to woodwork. The agenda of the students in the building was different, as their chief concern was to pass their exams so that they could find work either as scientists, managers, or otherwise become active in the lumber business. Finally, the building should be understood in view of the architect, whose agenda was to make sure its aesthetic reflected ideals about science held by the Oxford University dons and administration. These different agents of the building came to construe nature as an Oriental economy juxtaposed with the Occidental research represented in the design and outline of its architecture. This relationship between Occidental architecture and Oriental nature was made possi | Peder Anker

ble through the ecology of communication of different social agendas advanced in relation to the building. That people with different backgrounds and professions saw nature differently did not hinder the exchange of opinions, as communication could take place between different systems of knowledge in the form of a pidgin language.7 They could trade knowledge even though they were operating with differing systems of rationality with differing aims and methods. The following pages will first lay out the agenda of the scientists, the managerial ethics of their patrons, and the role of the students within the Imperial Forestry Institute. The next section will discuss its aesthetic and architecture in view of the values held by Oxford dons and patrons of the carpenter business. The final section will address the overall layout of the building, arguing that it came to represent a mirror image of British imperial forests and values.

Managerial Scientists, Students, and Their Patrons The aim of the Imperial Forestry Institute was scientific management of the empire’s forests. It served as a knowledge bank of nature’s economy controlled by a cluster of scientists, students, and their patrons. The institute was established to train forest officers and nurture a culture of scientific management within the British Empire.8 The larger history of this research has been the subject of an excellent study by Ravi Rajan (2006) titled Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development, 1800–1950.9 It is worth reviewing his findings in relation to activities at Oxford University to understand the context in which this managerial culture emerged. When the School of Forestry was reorganized into an institute in 1924, Rajan argues, the aim was to give higher education in forestry and consequently a better running of the Crown’s forests. The experience of timber shortage in the wake of the First World War led to a demand for new management regimes. As free market capitalism sought to exploit forests within the empire, higher education sought to establish a more scientific mode of forest management in the Continental tradition.10 The criticism of laissez-faire capitalism and exploitation was at the heart of the ethos Ecological Communication | 

of the institute. The students were taught that the empire had a sad history of mismanagement, and that broader state ownership, control, and scientific planning of forests was important to avoid irresponsible exploitation of the empire’s forestry resources.11 The prime mover of this call for professional forestry was the first director of the institute, Robert Scott Troup (1874–1939). As previous head of the Forest Service in India, he fashioned forestry management in line with his colonial experiences. His publications consisted mainly of descriptions and suggestions for economic exploration of forests throughout the empire.12 To avoid mismanagement he favored state control and planning at the expense of what he regarded as irresponsible private or local exploitation of forests. Previous depletion of forests “in many parts of the world gives genuine cause for alarm” (1928, v), he wrote in his textbook, and the students’ task was to learn proper forest conservation and management. State ownership could facilitate a synchronization of economic and natural systems that were in the long-term interests of Britain, he argued in Forest and State Control (1938).13 The institute was built for forest management of the British Empire. Maintaining this global approach was of prime importance to defend its existence and to build its future, as the British Isles did not have large forests. The institute had since its beginning received much of its funding from the forest administration in the colonies, money that was often generated by previous students of the institute. At the time of the opening of the new building in 1950 almost all of the 220 officers working for the Colonial Forest Service were alumni of Oxford. This network of former students was crucial for securing financial and material sustainability, as the institute got most of its income from the colonies.14 As students they were required to spend time researching abroad, mostly in India, where they established contacts for potential jobs. The social dynamics of the institute were thus intrinsically linked with successful management of the British Empire. It is telling that the title of its journal, Empire Forestry Review, and the name of the institute itself were kept long after political realities made them obsolete. That the titles “Imperial” and “Empire” were not changed to “Commonwealth” before 1962 is evidence of the profession’s pride in  | Peder Anker

servicing the British imperial mission as well as the importance of the colonial network for their work. This trust in imperial managerial forestry should be understood in context of similar views at Oxford University. Here scholars and students alike, such as the ecologist Arthur G. Tansley, the zoologist Charles Elton, and the ornithologist Max Nicholson, all believed in the importance of scientific management of the empire’s natural resources. Among them was also Julian Huxley, who, in a textbook written together with H. G. Wells, argued that environmental problems could be solved only through scientific planning. Scientists should plan nature’s “energy circulation as carefully as a board of directors plans a business,” they argued (Wells 1931; Anker 2001). The image of scientists as directors planning nature’s economy implied the presence of a bank, which is a fitting image of what the Imperial Forestry Institute came to be. The scholars at the institute would act as brokers, creating both moral and economic profit for their institution. The moral profit was to come in reputation and the economic profit in terms of pay, research grants, and opportunities. The institute came to function as a trading floor of knowledge with scientists in the image of brokers negotiating nature’s economy. The building itself represented the material place in which such exchanges of knowledge and know-how took place. The number of visitors, the diversity of scholarly publications, and the intensity of knowledge trading were all factors that determined the activities of the institute. Careful deliberation on how to attract a diversified and competent audience was an integral part of the planning process of the new building. The construction of a building as a trading floor for ecological communication was crucial for the future of the discipline, since the Imperial Forestry Institute thus would be in a position to control the exchanges. The desire to have their own building was as old as the institute itself. The old home of the School of Forestry was too small and not fitted to the new institute’s needs, and various proposals for a new building circulated in the 1920s without generating enough patrons. This would change in 1930 when Rajah Brook of Sarawak donated £25,000 to Oxford University to promote colonial forestry research.15 This donation was not enough for a new building, but it started a domino effect of Ecological Communication | 

donations. The Rhodes and Pilgrim Trusts soon promised support if others would do the same, and the result was a series of contributions from various colonial agencies with funds controlled by the network of former Oxford students. This financial momentum for a new building, which by the end of the 1930s was still insufficient, was halted by the impossibility of fund-raising during the Second World War. When it ceased, the university was ready to go forward with the building if additional money could be raised. Fortunately, the Colonial Development and Welfare Fund, which normally allocated money to development in the colonies, was willing to provide an additional £45,000, and Oxford University then guaranteed the rest. The construction could thus start in 1945 as part of the movement to rebuild a country shattered by warfare. When finished it became one of the first new buildings to be put in use at Oxford after the war. Almost twenty years of fund-raising provided the institute with only a limited budget, and the scientists had to scale down their desires in planning the building. The most painful curtailment was the abandonment of a forestry museum. A natural history museum for forestry-related research had been the dream of the institute for a whole generation. Such a museum was supposed to not only hold a collection of wood samples from around the empire, but also to display for students, patrons, and the public how trees relate to the environment and the economic prosperity of the empire. It came as a great disappointment to the staff that the original idea of a large central museum in the building had to be abandoned for financial reasons.

A Renewal of Arts and Crafts through Architectural Design In the summer of 1942, at the darkest time of Britain’s fight against advancing Nazi forces, the institute hired an architect to draw up plans for a new research building. It was their way of trying to boost some hope in the midst of a series of catastrophic news from the front lines. The new building was to give scientists and visitors a sense of responsibility for forests within the empire, while at the same time generate  | Peder Anker

respect for wood-making through an appreciation of the British Arts and Crafts tradition. The choice as architect was Hubert Worthington (1886–1963), a partner of Thomas Worthington & Sons architect firm and a former Eaton student (Pass 1988, 160–61). His design was meant to stimulate hopes for a postwar Britain that would care about environmental sensibility. He was a keen reader of John Ruskin (1819–1900), who, according to the historian of architecture John Farmer, “can be credited with the founding of green sensibility” in ecological design. Ruskin, Farmer claims, championed for a renewal of the moral and spiritual values represented in a Gothic Revival architecture that could foster resistance to uncontrolled laissez-faire capitalism. Buildings should display unity between faith and science and between humans and nature by displaying the beauty of the natural world in its design. According to Farmer’s interpretation, Ruskin’s architecture respected “the spiritual power of the air, the rocks and the waters” (1999, 66, 85). The Oxford Museum of Natural History, completed in 1860, is perhaps one of the most famous buildings inspired by Ruskin’s theories. Its countless moldings, capitals, and wrought-iron details of botanical decoration were meant to bridge the spiritual and natural worlds into a grand cathedral of science. For visitors and scholars, the Oxford Museum was meant to foster an ethic of environmental responsibility and sense of belonging to nature. Though not a follower of Gothic Revival, Worthington was sympathetic to Ruskin’s critique of unchecked capitalism and plea for environmental sensibility in the form of organic ornamentation. Thomas Worthington & Sons were known for their rather pompous Victorian style of architecture, and they designed buildings with a rich display of botanical decorations. The professional breakthrough for the young Worthington came with his restoration of the Manchester Cathedral, an achievement that generated a professorship in architecture at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington (1923–28), and later a Lectureship in Architecture at the University of Oxford. Of the two different ways of doing architecture—modern and the “old-fashioned” style (Newton 1925, 216)—Worthington was known for the latter. His lectureship at Oxford gave him access to several rehabilitation jobs for Ecological Communication | 

the university, since he was known as someone who designed within the traditional nonindustrial style. This was the chief reason the university hired him as the architect for the Imperial Forestry Institute (“New Work at Oxford” 1942a, b). Like Ruskin, Worthington sought to build spiritual places for research activities that were sensitive to the beauty of nature and knowledge. The new Imperial Forestry Building was to represent a changing attitude away from industrial exploitation, intrinsically related to the causes of war, and toward a peaceful future where humans would live in harmony with themselves and the natural world. In walking through the building one was supposed to see and feel how the ecology of forests relates to the wealth of each part of the empire, and admire craftwork pointing to a better relationship between humans and nature. The building was to illustrate the importance of visualization to the imperial sciences (Stepan 2001). Thus the building’s design and layout was to set new standards for environmental sensitivity and creativity in the use of timber. Using different types of wood as building material was meant to counteract modernist design based on destructive monoculture forestry. The homage to the machine and mass production of International Style architecture failed to appreciate how this type of design would lead to social and environmental destruction. Instead, Worthington sought a visual language that was supposed to blend in with the old-fashioned style of the Oxford University and community. In a handout to journalists it was thus described as “modern in style, but not severely ‘functional’ ” (Russell 1950, 1), since functionalism was synonymous with the pitfalls of the industrial-minded avant-garde and the laissez-fair-minded capitalists. The presentation of nature’s beauty and variety was an integral part of the building, and one therefore has to take into account the carpenters of the project. A special grant from the university secured the expense of turning raw timber into fine woodwork, and two of the most respected woodcraft firms in Britain, Heal’s Contracts and Webbers Ltd., received the prestigious job (“Timbers” 1950). The interior was to reflect the biological diversity of the world’s forests displayed in floors, walls, wainscots, window frames, doors, columns, reception desks, furniture, and in various ornaments.  | Peder Anker

Traditional Arts and Crafts shops were in decline after the war due to stiff competition in industrial production of building materials. They were the victims of the governmental policy of modernization of the construction and building industry in the ongoing postwar restoration of Britain. The conservative Oxford traditionalists saw this as a most unfortunate trend. Craftwork was to the skilled worker not only an economic opportunity, but a way of living morally in balance with humans in relation to themselves, society, and the natural world. It represented a viable response to the natural world, since it was a type of labor that created a symbiotic relationship between natural materials and humans. To the carpenter, forests were something more than just a stockpile of resources for industrial exploitation. Such questioning of industrial building techniques and relations to nature was an integral part of the agenda for the Oxford dons when planning their new forestry institute. The new building was to be a model for an alternative relation to forests that would respect its intrinsic beauty and vulnerability. It was a display of woodwork, craftsmanship, and the role and usefulness of trees to society in general, and buildings and furniture in particular. In short, the building was to be a place where staff, students, and visitors could learn the art of recognizing types of trees while at the same time reflect upon the state of the art of craftsmanship and its superiority to industrial buildings and their sad exploitation of natural resources. The visitors were at the core of the project, or, as one of the forestry lecturers, Laurence Chalk, explained: “The object of using Empire timbers on such a lavish scale has not been so much to provide a home worthy of the Institute—the building itself does that—but to give a permanent demonstration of what can be done with Empire timbers if they are handled with skill and imagination.”16

The Institute as a Microcosm of the Empire In the discussions between the researchers and the architect, the creative idea surfaced that one should use nature’s commodities to shape the building (Cronon 1991). The institute’s staff argued that one could Ecological Communication | 

get the much-desired forestry museum if one used wood from different parts of the empire to furnish the institute. In this way one would also be able to illustrate the usefulness of timber to visitors. The two most vocal defenders of this museum organization were Chalk and W. R. C. Handley, who in the late 1940s used most of their research time together with the architect figuring out the logistics of what they labeled the “living museum” of different kinds of wood (“Timbers” 1950, 320). In 1947 the institute sent an appeal to their extensive social network for help in realizing the material side of the building. They asked for gifts of wood from all the timber-producing parts of the empire to build and design the institute’s interior. They were amazed by the response. Soon piles of timber and planks of all kinds arrived at the construction site from every corner of the empire, and Worthington, in close collaboration with the research staff, became busy planning the proper order, use, and design of it all. Altogether twenty-eight colonies, dominions, and states within the empire, as well as six private firms and individuals, donated timber and planks to the institute. As a collection it was a unique representation of the world’s biological diversity of trees. The transfer of types of wood was thus a key feature of the building process, and the building came to visualize the global ecological exchange of biota that the historian Karen Brown (2003) describes as “a feature of European imperialism” contributing to the establishment of imperial scientific networks. The building became, in effect, a material representation of a scientific patronage system that can be read as a parable of governmental authority (Scott 1998, 11–22). The gifts were organized in the new institute’s interior according to the location of the patrons, and the building thus became a material microcosm of the empire with various rooms representing patrons, colonies, and collaborators. The outline, design, and materials of the building further demonstrate the intrinsic relationship between imperial politics and scientific research. The empire’s forests were understood as belonging to the Oriental; they were the mysterious, unchanging collection of trees growing in the ultimately inferior regions of the empire. This representation enabled scientists and managers of the Occident to steer and manage these environments. The building was to be a center for distribution of geo | Peder Anker

Figure 10.1 Imperial Forestry Institute, Oxford. Entrance hall paneled in Canadia yellow birch, 1950.

political awareness of the aesthetic value of wood, the appreciation of Arts and Crafts woodwork, the economic utility of sound forest management, and finally the importance of scholarly research. By setting patronage and knowledge on display in a museum, the scholars created a stream of normative assumptions teaching Occidental visitors and students how to rule Oriental nature. The institute was designed as a museum of tree types organized by area, or as Chalk explained: “The general aim has been to group woods from similar geographic regions” (“Imperial Forestry Institute” 1950b, 319). The three-story building was thus meant to be a microcosm of the forest ecosystems, while at the same time also to display a network of patrons of forestry. The types of wood would remind students and staff alike of who supported their activities. The order of the building thus reflected a patronage relationship between scientists and the colonial mission of forest management within the empire. This ordering of the collection emerged from the process of collecting timber, thanks to the mobilization of a large network of former students and colonial patrons with interests in forestry. Ecological Communication | 

When entering the building, the first thing the visitor experienced was a paneled hall in veneered Canadian yellow birch. The decorated columns, arches, doors, and adjacent corridors of the entrance area were also made of the same birch, while the floor was made of maple wood, all from Canadian forests. Given that the chief purpose of the institute was to educate and serve the foresters within the empire, it is not surprising that Canadian timber was given a prominent place in the entrance area of the building. Canada was in 1950, and is still today, the largest producer of timber under the British Crown, and it was important for the institute to place the gifts from the Canadian Lumbermen’s Association at the very entrance. The Canadian government officials were gearing up their research activity on forest management and promoting forest education in light of the growing demand for timber after the war. They thus represented one of the most important future patrons of British forestry research (CMDR 1947). All the subsequent rooms on the ground floor contained various marvels in wood: The two administrative offices located next to the hall had floors made of rimu (a gift from the government of New Zealand), with desks and chairs of crabwood (a gift from the government of British Guiana), and a door made of peroba from South America. The administration did not have a high social status within the institute, and these offices were not meant for public display, so their floors and furniture were made of leftover pieces of plank. The office of the Forestry Commission and laboratory next to the accountant enjoyed a somewhat higher status. Though sparsely decorated compared to the entrance hall, the offices’ occupants could enjoy working surrounded by exclusive handmade furniture made of mupumena, a token of appreciation from the Government of Southern Rhodesia. The west wing of the ground floor represented, roughly, the Far East of the southern hemisphere of the empire. At the end one would find the Rajah Brook Room, which was the exhibition hall of the institute designed for receptions, small exhibitions, and social events of various kinds. The room was named in honor of the generous gift received in 1930 from the Rajah of Sarawak. Yet, no plank came from the state, which at the time was in political turmoil and dissolution,  | Peder Anker

Figure 10.2 Imperial Forestry Institute, Oxford. Ground-floor 1950.

so the staff decided instead to furnish it with gifts from Australia. The idea was to “boast woods from the opposite sides of the world” (“Timbers” 1950, 320). The panels were made of walnut, while the moldings, tables, and chairs were made of maple (all gifts from the government of Queensland), while the floor was made of karri-tree and the edgings of jarrah (all gifts from the government of Western Australia). From the receptions at the Rajah Brook Room one could walk down the western corridor to a small and a large lecture theater to hear about the latest research. This way one could admire doors made of makore (from West Africa) and primavera (from Central America), and perhaps open them to look at the floors inside where the lecturer in silviculture worked. They were made of gurjun (a gift from the government of Pakistan). The small lecture room had a specially designed lecture desk and a host of chairs suitable for taking notes, all made of Ecological Communication | 

muninga, (a gift from the government of Tanganyika), and a floor of kokrodua from the Gold Coast of West Africa (a gift from the Victoria Sawmills, Ltd., England). For larger events one would pass this room and instead walk through an anteroom (with solid knotty panels made of western red cedar) into the large lecture theater. The hall was attached to the Department of Botany, and western red cedar was used for the plywood panels with specially made seating of western hemlock (all gifts from Seaboard Lumber Sales Co. in British Columbia). The middle part of the ground floor generally represented the eastern part of the southern hemisphere. The first office to the right was the Malaya committee room. After the war, the Malaya colony became one of the largest financial sponsors of the institute, and a fair share of both graduate and undergraduate students from this colony got their forestry education at Oxford.17 It was thus important to give gifts from this colony proper display: The visitor would enter through a door made of mengkulang, which was also used for the rotary-cut veneer panels with solid moldings, while the floor was made of merbau, also a gift from the government of Malaya. In order to make the room regionally correct, Indian rosewood was used for the chairs and Burmese padauk for the conference table. The gifts from the government of Burma were displayed fully across the corridor in the pathology laboratory used mainly for teaching, where Burma teak was used for tabletops and bench seats. A similar gift was on display in the Lecture Room farther down the corridor, where Tasmanian oak—a gift from the Tasmanian government—was used to make both the seating and the floor. The right part of the ground floor generally represented the south and southwestern part of the hemisphere. Some of the greatest marvels of the building were to be found in the rooms of Professor Harry G. Champion. He had his own research section donated by the government of British Guiana, with a floor made of mora and a handmade desk made of South American cedar. He also had his own laboratory with a floor of mora, and a specially designed table in African mahogany donated by the Nigerian-based African Timber and Plywood Co. Ltd., which also gave mahogany for furniture in a laboratory across the corridor. This company also sponsored the floor of the anteroom in  | Peder Anker

Figure 10.3 Imperial Forestry Institute, Oxford. First-floor 1950.

which Champion’s personal secretary worked. The door to the professor’s office, made of specially designed stinkwood, opened to a showroom made out of woods from the southern part of Africa. The walls were paneled in stinkwood from South Africa, a personal gift from J. Hunt Holley, the president of the South African Association of Science, and from the Union of South Africa. The floor, made of an African mahogany iroko, was a gift of the African Timber and Plywood Co. in Nigeria, and the furniture was made of mupumena and sapele, which were gifts from the government of Southern Rhodesia. When moving up to the first floor one could lean upon a railing with fir-tree emblems in wrought iron, before entering a corridor made of jarrah, a gift of the government of Western Australia. Given that most of the interior arrangements were carried out by Chalk, it is not surprising to find that his personal office was particularly elegant, with a door, desk, table, chairs, and veneer panel in avodire (a gift from the Gold Coast colony), and a floor made of Rhodesian teak (from the government of Northern Rhodesia). The offices Ecological Communication | 

of the rest of the first floor were less extravagant, though by no means ordinary. Details aside, they were furnished with specially designed office desks, tables, chairs, and shelving made of various types of wood donated by different governments. Most of them had specially designed doors as well. The offices of the director of the Empire Forestry Bureau, located above Champion’s offices, were also elaborately made, displaying Australian trees (as gifts from the government of New South Wales). The laboratories were also favored with various framing, benches, desks, and shelving, thanks to a series of wood gifts from different governments. The students dominated the activities of the first floor, experimenting in the laboratories and reading in the library, which had a floor made of teak, a gift of appreciation from the government of Burma. Their reading room was furnished in “such English stalwarts as mahogany” (“Timbers” 1950, 320) from Honduras, a gift from J. Gliksten & Son Ltd. This room was one of the showrooms, with a floor made of wood from the East African olive tree and a large table with chairs of African mahogany, all generous gifts from the East African Cooperative Society of Nairobi. Leaving the mahogany room—through a solid mahogany door—one passed down a short corridor and entered the periodicals room (through a door made of solid alpine ash from Australia), which was a miniature representation of trees growing on this continent. The room was composed of three types of eucalyptus: mountain ash, obeche, and afara. Mountain ash was used for solid shelving and book stacks, the obeche and afara were used to build card index cabinets, while the alpine ash was used for veneered window framings. All were gifts from the government of Victoria. The floor was made of Australian red mahogany, a gift from the government of New South Wales. A visitor noted that “there is a faint pink tint to some of the wood in this room, much to the annoyance of the Institute. It is hoped, however, that it will fade in the course of time” (320). Feminine pink was not desired by the male scholars. The second floor was less extravagantly furnished. Various leftovers were used in the research rooms and laboratories to make framing, benches, and shelving, but this was not displayed as part of the building. Scholars and students could enjoy sitting on stools made  | Peder Anker

of Trinidad teak or more-luxurious Windsor chairs made of elm and beach, but that was about it. The exception was the display of a gift from the government of North Borneo, which had only sent a tiny amount of seraya, and the architect cleverly used it to make a telephone booth in the corridor so that this part of the empire also could be represented with a room. The basement was not part of the “living museum.” This was the home of three lathes, a Victoria milling machine, a pillar drill, a bench drill, an electric arc welder, a four-post grinder, a treadle guillotine, a power hacksaw, and various other machines. This was where woodworkers labored, and their rooms were not included among the marvels of nature. Judging from journalists’ opinions, one may safely conclude that the “living museum” was a success. The reviewer of the Cabinet Maker and Complete House Furnisher was particularly excited about the fact that the building provided a comprehensive list of types of wood: “The students have the excellent opportunity of getting to know the woods of the world by the doors they open and the furniture that is in the daily use” (quoted in Russell 1950, 2). A visitor from the Gliksten Journal was equally enthusiastic in noting that “the timbers are only a visible token of the help and goodwill of the donors, but will always be valuable in themselves as a much more effective exhibition of timbers than would have been a collection of specimens in the museum that was dropped out of the plan” (“H.R.H. Princess Margaret” n.d., 18–20). The journal Wood praised “the architect in the decorative treatment” of wood and stressed that “the interiors are of great value in forming a permanent exhibition of timber used in a ‘live’ form in contrast to the specimen piece” (“New Building” 1950, 442). Clearly, the role of the building was well understood as a material representation of a patron’s goodwill and relation to the Imperial Institute.

The Oak of Ecological Communication The chief aim of the building was to facilitate communication of knowledge among scholars, students, and visitors whose aims and Ecological Communication | 

objectives were different. The spaces in which such contact took place were built in English oak, as this type of wood represented the solid foundation of the British heritage while also providing a “natural” space for negotiating knowledge. British oak was used by design in the room intended to be used for negotiations and decision-making. Oaks, it is worth noting, have a special place in British environmental culture. The ecologist Arthur G. Tansley wrote a whole book about them, arguing that “the oak rightly takes pride of place among British trees, and this for several different reasons. Everyone—or at least everyone except the city children who have never seen a green field or a cow, and they are surely fewer with each year that passes—everyone knows the oak. . . . The oak has long been the symbol of British solidity and strength, both because of its look of strength and because its wood is hard and resistant to decay” (1952, 1).18 Tansley also added that oaks were the last remnants of the original British landscape, and thus represented its very origin and heritage. An oak-paneled room thus gave researchers and British visitors alike a sense of belonging. It provided the proper setting for scientific, political, economic, legal, moral, artistic, and educational judgments concerning forests. The large meeting room on the top floor was designed to host faculty meetings and special sessions with the VIPs of British forestry. A guided tour of the building for special guests would have its natural ending here, as if one were returning home from a tour around the empire. Even though the floor was made of rimu (a gift from the government of New Zealand), it was definitely a room meant to honor the gifts of oak and chestnut from His Majesty’s Forestry Commission. The room had a solid oak door and paneling with twenty chairs and a large table made of chestnut, all cut and seasoned by the British Forest Products Research Laboratory. A large portrait of Robert Troup would overlook it all. After a tour looking at tree marvels and woodwork wonders from around the empire, this room offered a safe homegrown oak environment from where one could discuss the management and research of forests in the British domains and colonies. The library was also one of the few rooms where English wood dominated, with shelving and moldings made of oak donated by His  | Peder Anker

Majesty’s Forestry Commission. This non-Oriental shelving suggests a sense of neutrality and objectivity for the world’s largest collection of books on forestry and related matters. The same was the case with the wood collection room paneled in English oak. Wood identification was an important part of the curriculum, and the specially designed room was furnished, thanks to its patrons, with a variety of more than seventeen thousand timber pieces “cut and stacked like books” (Russell 1950, 2). These types of wood could be understood as an image of a scientific discovery for the scientist, a managerial prospect for the manager, a tricky exam question for the student, a financial opportunity for the carpenter, and an aesthetic marvel for the Oxford don, since systems of agency operate independently, even while taking place under the same roof and while admiring the same object. That the Imperial Forestry Institute was built as a microcosm of scientific agencies is nothing new or even original. Since medieval times European natural historians have organized marvels of nature in wunderkammern representing the natural world and its patrons. Influential Hermetic and Gnostic thinkers of the Renaissance, for example, were fond of designing microcosms as representations of macrocosms.19 Ever since then, thinkers and scientists have fashioned their research spaces according to respective visions of the environment. It is therefore not surprising to find representatives of the British forestry constructing a building according to their set of imperial beliefs. The building represents a material manifestation of ideas about nature that have dominated Western scientific thinking for centuries. It is still there today as a constant reminder of how the Oriental nature served as a condition for securing British research needs.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Niklas Thode Jensen and Iver Ørstavik for thoughtful comments, and my assistant Frøydis Brekken Elvik for preparing the manuscript. I have also benefited from presenting the article at the conference “Colonialism, Postcolonialism and the Environment,” at the German Historical Institute, Washington, 2006. In Ecological Communication | 

the following I have used material from two boxes labeled “Opening of the Forestry Building 19th Oct 1950” at the Plant Sciences Library at Oxford University (hereafter PSL).

Notes 1. “Princess Opens forestry Institute in Oxford,” 1; “Imperial Forestry Institute, Oxford” 1950b; “Imperial Forestry Institute, Oxford” 1950a. 2. See Howe, “When—If Ever—Did Empire End?”; Powell, “The Empire Meets the New Deal”; Carruthers, “Africa”; Bocking, “Empires of Ecology”; Tvedt, The River Nile in the Age of the British; Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora; and Grove, Green Imperialism. See also Adams and Mulligan, Decolonizing Nature. 3. See Bravo and Sörlin, Narrating the Arctic; Proudfoot and Rouche, (Dis)Placing Empire; Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China; and Grove, Damodaran, and Sangwan, Nature and the Orient. 4. See Drayton, Nature’s Government; Spary, Utopia’s Garden; and Koerner, Linnaeus. 5. See Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order”; HooperGreenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge; Forgan, “Building the Museum”; and Saumarez Smith, “Architecture and the Museum.” 6. See Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes; Macy and Bonnemaison, Architecture and Nature; and Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World.” 7. See Star and Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology”; and Galison, Image and Logic, 781–844. 8. “Forestry at University of Oxford”; Laurie, “The Commonwealth Forestry Institute”; and Imperial Forestry Institute, Annual Report. 9. See also Rajan, “Imperial Environmentalism or Environmental Imperialism?”; and Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. 10. See West, “Forests and National Security,” 270–93; and Prince of Wales, Speech. 11. See “Your Royal Highness.” 12. See Pearson, “Professor Robert Scott Troup”; Stebbing, “Robert Scott Troup”; and the following by Robert S. Troup: The Silviculture of Indian Trees; Indian Woods and Their Uses; Report on Forestry in Kenya Colony; Report on Forestry in Uganda; and Exotic Forest Trees in the British Empire.

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13. Similarly in Anderson, “State Control of Private Forestry under European Control.” 14. See Annual Report, Imperial Forestry Institute; Champion, “The Silver Jubilee of the Imperial Forestry Institute”; and Lee, “The Story of Great Britain.” 15. See “ Rajah of Sarawak’s Gift”; Reece, The Name of Brooke; and Laurie, “The Commonwealth Forestry Institute,” 207–8. 16. Chalk quoted in “Imperial Forestry Institute, Oxford” (1950b, 319). Information about types of woodwork with Latin names, locations in the building, and patrons is listed on pp. 321–27. 17. Champion, The Imperial Forestry Institute, 15–16. Malaya was third in terms of the number of students with 10 graduating from the Institute between 1945 and 1950, compared to 20 from Nigeria (first) and 15 from the Gold Coast (second). Only Nigeria gave more money to the Institute than Malaya. 18. See also Matless, Landscape and Englishness. 19. See Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature; Conger, Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms; and Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore.

Works Cited Adams, William M., and Martin Mulligan, eds. 2003. Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era. London: Earthscan. Anderson, M. L. 1950. “State Control of Private Forestry under European Control: A Survey of Developments in Eight Countries of Western Europe in the Decade 1938–1948.” Oxford Forestry Memoirs 22. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Anker, Peder. 2001. Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Barton, Gregory A. 2002. Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bocking, Stephen. 2004. “Empires of Ecology.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 35 (4): 793–801. Bravo, Michael, and Sverker Sörlin, eds. 2002. Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practices. Canton, MA: Science History Publications. Brown, Karen. 2003. “ ‘Trees, Forests and Communities’: Some Historiographical Approaches to Environmental History of Africa.” Area 35 (4): 343–56.

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Carruthers, Jane. 2004. “Africa: Histories, Ecologies and Societies.” Environment and History 10 (4): 379–406. CDMR (Canada Department of Mines and Resources). 1947. Canada’s Forests and the War, Report from the Fifth British Forestry Conference. Ottawa: King’s Printer. Champion, H. G. 1951. “The Silver Jubilee of the Imperial Forestry Institute.” Journal of Forestry 49 (7): 485–86. ———. 1957. The Imperial Forestry Institute between 1947 and 1956. London: Forestry Commission. Conger, Perrigo G. 1967. Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms in the History of Philosophy. New York: Russel & Russel. Cronon, William. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton. Daston, Lorraine, and Katherine Park. 1998. Wonders and the Order of Nature. New York: Zone Books. Drayton, Richard. 2000. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dunlap, Thomas R. 1999. Nature and the English Diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fan, Fa-Ti. 2004. British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Farmer, John. 1999. Green Shift: Changing Attitudes in Architecture to the Natural World. 2nd ed., edited by Kenneth Richardsen. Oxford: Architectural Press. Forgan, Sophie. 2005. “Building the Museum: Knowledge, Conflict and the Power of Place.” Isis 96 (4): 572–85. “Forestry at University of Oxford.” [1950?] Six pages. PSL. Galison, Peter. 1997. Image and Logic. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Glacken, Clarence J. 1967. Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Berkeley: California University Press. Grove, Richard. 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Grove, Richard H., Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan, eds. 1998. Nature and the Orient. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 1992. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge.

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Howe, Stephen. 2005. “When—If Ever—Did Empire End? Recent Studies of Imperialism and Decolonization.” Journal of Contemporary History 40 (3): 585–99. “H.R.H. Princess Margaret Opens New Building.” n.d. Gliksten Journal, 18–20. PSL. “Imperial Forestry Institute.” Annual Report 1924–50. Oxford: University of Oxford. PSL. “The Imperial Forestry Institute, Oxford.” 1950. Nature 166 (4228, November 11): 818–19. PSL. “Imperial Forestry Institute, Oxford.” 1951. The Builder (January 12): 56–62. PSL. “Imperial Forestry Institute, Oxford: Opening of New Building.” 1950. Empire Forestry Review 29 (4): 316–33. PSL. Koerner, Lisbet. 1999. Linnaeus: Nature and Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kohler, Robert E. 2002. Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the LabField Border in Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno. 1983. “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World.” In Science Observed, Perspectives on the Study of Science, edited by M. Mulkay and K. Knorr-Cetina, 141–70. London: Sage. Laurie, M. V. 1967. “The Commonwealth Forestry Institute,” Commonwealth Forestry Review 46 (3): 206–11. Lee, Mark. 2004. “The Story of Great Britain.” National Identities 6 (2): 123–47. Macy, Christine, and Sarah Bonnemaison. 2003. Architecture and Nature: Creating the American Landscape. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, Timothy. 2003. “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order.” In Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, edited by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, 442–61. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Matless, David. 1998. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books. “The New Building of the Imperial Forestry Institute.” 1950. Wood (December): 442–47. PSL. Newton, W. G. 1925. “Two Ways in Domestic Architecture: Abbot Brow, Alderly Edge: Designed by J. Hubert Worthington.” Architectural Review 58:214–21. “New Work at Oxford.” 1942a. Architects Journal 95 (June 25): 440–41. PSL. “New Work at Oxford.” 1942b. Architectural Review 91:137–39. PSL.

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Pass, Anthony J. 1998. Thomas Worthington. Manchester: Manchester Literary and Philosophical Publications. Pearson, R. S. 1940. “Professor Robert Scott Troup,” Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London 152 (May 24): 378–81. Powell, J. M. 2005. “The Empire Meets the New Deal: Interwar Encounters in Conservation and Regional Planning.” Geographical Research 43 (4): 337–60. Prince of Wales. Speech by H.R.H. The Prince of Wales. London: The Empire Forestry Association, 1926. “Princess Opens Forestry Institute in Oxford.” 1950. Oxford Mail, October 19. PSL. Proudfoot, L. J., and M. M. Rouche. 2005. (Dis)Placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies. Aldershot: Ashgate. “The Rajah of Sarawak’s Gift.” 1993. Times, November 22, 9. PSL. Rajan, Ravi. 1998. “Imperial Environmentalism or Environmental Imperialism? European Forestry, Colonial Foresters and the Agendas of Forest Management in British India 1890–1900.” In Nature and the Orient, edited by Richard H. Grove, Vinita Damodaran, and Sangwan Satpal, 324–71. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development, 1800–1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reece, R. H. W. 1982. The Name of Brooke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russell, Audrey. 1950. “Imperial Forestry Institute.” Handout (October 17). PSL. Saumarez Smith, Charles. 1995. “Architecture and the Museum.” Journal of Design History 8 (4): 243–56. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Spary, Emma C. 2000. Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. 1989. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39.” Social Studies of Science 19 (3): 387–420. Stebbing, Edward Percy. 1940–41. “Robert Scott Troup.” Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 3:217–19. Stepan, Nancy Leys. 2001. Picturing Tropical Nature. London: Reaktion Books.

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Tansley, Arthur George. 1952. Oaks and Oak Woods. London: Methuen & Co. “Timbers of the Commonwealth in New Imperial Forestry Building.” 1950. The Cabinet Maker and Complete House Furnisher (October 28): 320–21. PSL. Troup, Robert S. 1909. Indian Woods and Their Uses. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing. ———. 1921. The Silviculture of Indian Trees. Vols. 1–3. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1922a. Report on Forestry in Kenya Colony. London: Crown Agents for the Colonies. ———. 1922b. Report on Forestry in Uganda. London: Crown Agents for the Colonies. ———. 1928. Silvicultural Systems. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1932. Exotic Forest Trees in the British Empire. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1938. Forest and State Control. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tvedt, Terje. 2004. The River Nile in the Age of the British: Political Ecology and the Quest for Economic Power. London: I. B. Tauris. Wells, Herbert George, Julian Huxley, and G. P. Wells. 1931. The Science of Life. New York: Doubleday, Doran. West, A. Joshua. 2003. “Forests and National Security: British and American Forestry Policy in the Wake of World War I.” Environmental History 8 (2): 270–93. “Your Royal Highness.” [1950?] One-page draft. PSL.

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11 Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines, and the Legacies of Late British Colonialism Joseph M. Hodge

Throughout sub-Saharan Africa as well as other regions of the world, from the Caribbean to Southeast Asia, a new kind of authoritarian social engineering and state intervention directed at agrarian societies was embarked on by European colonial regimes in the 1940s and 1950s, which found its most definitive form in the implementation of numerous land settlement and agricultural development schemes.1 More than seventy major agricultural development initiatives were in operation throughout the British colonies by the mid-1950s, including pilot projects for water and soil conservation and food production; numerous land improvement and resettlement schemes; various mechanized cultivation projects for cotton; rice and paddy cultivation; tractor plowing and hiring units; drainage and irrigation schemes; and cooperative and group farming ventures, among many others.2 Like their counterparts in other late colonial empires, these projects were often based on designs derived from earlier landuse planning models and policy objectives, but were implemented on a much larger scale and with far greater speed after the war, enabling colonial bureaucratic power to extend into rural areas as never before. The magnitude and intensity of postwar government activity in nearly 300

every aspect of rural colonial people’s lives amounted in all but name to what D. A. Low and John Lonsdale have strikingly termed “the second colonial occupation” (1976, 13). Despite the vast influx of financing, expertise, and state bureaucracy, however, many of the new development ventures of the early postwar years proved to be disappointingly unsuccessful. As colonial regimes increasingly resorted to heavy-handed state measures and compulsory legislation to solve rural problems, they inadvertently deepened social discontent and anticolonial resistance in many territories.3 Structural inadequacies ignited bureaucratic tensions and policy debates, not only between metropolitan ministries and local colonial administrations but within the colonial state itself, creating what often amounted to a governmental impasse. The enigmatic aims of policy also generated much friction and paralysis, as authorities strove to balance the imperatives of reasserting order and stability on the one hand, and intensifying production and productivity on the other; of raising colonial living standards and welfare while also maintaining soil fertility and the conservation of colonial resources. Although these late colonial development initiatives were often ineffective, or even outright failures, the ideological and structural biases implicit in them would live on long after the formal transfer of colonial power. Though the new, independent governments of the 1960s repudiated many of the former colonial policies, especially conservation measures, in favor of more-extensive plans or high-profile projects, the principal effect was often the same: the expansion and entrenchment of bureaucratic state power in the name of development.4 Indeed, one of the major legacies of the late colonial era, as Christophe Bonneuil has recently argued, was the large-scale prepackaged settlement and social engineering schemes, which, although first initiated by colonial rulers, continued to hold currency among development practitioners and national elites until the post-1980 crisis of the state in Africa and elsewhere (2000, 260–61). In fact, the early post-independence years saw a bold renewal of large, technocratic programs as the new ruling elites sought to triumph where the old colonial guard had failed, launching huge mechanization schemes and subsidizing the widespread use of artificial fertilizers. Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines | 

At the center of these schemes was the growing power of the state and scientific experts over the lives of literally hundreds of thousands of African or other former colonial people. The planning and management of these projects created demands for new kinds of knowledge and expertise, stimulating the emergence of scientific communities and research services, and elevating technical officers and advisers to positions of greater status and influence in government. This chapter looks at the crucial role British tropical agriculture and natural resource experts played in the dissemination and institutionalization of scientific knowledge and authority in the late colonial and early postcolonial epoch. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the fact that much of the received wisdom about development and environmental problems today has been historically constructed, reproduced, and translated into public policy paradigms that serve specific institutional and political purposes.5 This study examines some of the key assumptions and biases that informed colonial advisers and technical officers during the last decades of European rule. Many of these men and women would go on to subsequent careers with the United Nations and other international organizations, bringing with them the earlier colonial vision of integrated rural development. The agrarian doctrines of development they advocated would help set the pattern for much of the postindependence era, forming part of the conventional knowledge of development professionals and practitioners ever since.6

Agrarian Bias in Late British Colonial Development Thinking, 1935–1960 The years just before the Second World War constitute a critical watershed in the history of British metropolitan policy toward the colonial empire. As riots, strikes, and work stoppages spread across the vital ports and communication centers of British colonial Africa and the West Indies, there was candid reckoning in the corridors of Whitehall over the mistakes of past colonial interventions and the consequences of unfettered economic exploitation. Colonial authorities and experts grew alarmed over the signs of “surplus population” in various parts of  | Joseph M. Hodge

the empire, as evidenced not only by the “unwanted drift” of migrants leaving the countryside for the towns, but also by the fragmentation of holdings, peasant indebtedness, and land shortages in rural areas. At the same time, awareness was growing among Colonial Office advisers of the distinct climatic and environmental constraints of tropical development, and of the need for greater state action to tackle the complex and interrelated problems being identified by scientific practitioners and researchers in the field, such as deforestation, malnutrition, overgrazing, and soil erosion. The pressure of these events, together with the added urgency and weight of the war, precipitated the passing of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940, which, along with subsequent acts, committed the government in London to providing direct subventions of imperial aid to help improve colonial living standards. The CD&W Acts signaled a new commitment by the British government to integrated planning and coordination, led by a bureaucracy that was increasingly scientific in composition. The Colonial Office was augmented by the inclusion of many new principal advisers, consultants, and specialized advisory bodies, while more than eleven thousand new colonial service appointments were made between 1944 and 1953, of which, significantly, 65 percent held posts in the technical departments and services.7 The aim of much of the new planning and coordination was to ensure the proper utilization of the empire’s natural resources. Indeed, as the agriculture, animal health, and forestry advisers at the Colonial Office argued, the future prosperity of the colonies would largely depend on the proper use of the soil through the effective coordination of all government agencies involved. There was a sense that development in the past had proceeded along ad hoc lines, based on preconceived ideas and inappropriate practices that had been applied without modification. There had been an overconcentration on exports and a lack of attention given to the production of foodstuffs for local consumption. Within administration, there had been a subordination of the technical services and an unwillingness to see the interconnectedness of different departments’ work. Abrupt changes and a lack of continuity in policy, combined with outbreaks of disease, malnutrition, soil erosion, and deforestation, had been the unfortunate and often unforeseen Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines | 

result. What was needed most of all, they argued, was an integrated policy of land utilization and rural development, one that was suited to local conditions and took into account the full effect of any changes on a colony’s welfare and environment.8 By conceptualizing the social and ecological distress plaguing the colonies as symptoms of a lack of knowledge and inadequate government services, colonial experts and advisers were confronting colonial poverty and disorder not as structural or political questions, but rather as technical problems that were remediable by large-scale governmental planning and state-directed welfare schemes (Cooper 1996, 68–69). Officials and experts were trying to assert control over what appeared to them an impending imperial crisis by subsuming it and depoliticizing it under the framework of development and welfare. This depoliticization of poverty and unrest was closely tied to another salient feature of late colonial development thinking and practice: its deeply entrenched rural bias (Shenton 1998; J. Lewis 2000, 125n2). “Agriculture,” as the 1943 Memo on Agricultural Policy began, “is by far the most important industry in the Colonial Empire, and upon it rests the material well-being of Colonial peoples.”9 The work of the technical departments—agricultural, veterinary, irrigation, forestry, nutrition, public health, and education—was to be coordinated in order “to establish agriculture as a way of life . . . to make the individual realize that he is a member of community, to encourage him to take part in community activities, and to discourage aimless drift from the land into urban areas. This involves the encouragement not only of cooperatives in the narrow and technical sense of the term, but also of a cooperative spirit in the daily life of the farming community.” The provision of welfare services for rural communities and the instilling of a “rural bias” in the schools would do much “to make rural life more attractive.” An overwhelmingly agrarian vision was being projected onto the future of colonial, and soon to be “third-world,” peoples. Colonial experts and advisers could not imagine that colonial peoples might live any other than a rural, agricultural life, and therefore, the aim of colonial policy was the more efficient reorganization of peasant agriculture with the intent of forming or reforming stable, contented, and  | Joseph M. Hodge

prosperous local communities that they believed were rapidly dissolving in the face of environmental devastation, burgeoning population pressures, and growing class divisions. The first objective was to preserve and improve the fertility of agricultural lands and other natural resources, taking into account the future rate of population and its social and economic consequences. The paramount obligation of the soil, it was agreed, was food production, especially foods of high nutritional value, in order to reduce the prevalence of disease due to malnutrition and the dependence of local communities on international markets.10 Development was imagined not as an attempt to remake colonial peoples in the image of the West by replicating the material conditions present in metropolitan Britain, but rather to prevent it, to manage and even forestall the process of transformation by mitigating the contradictions thrown up by private capitalist enterprise and colonial rule, namely the emergence of a surplus population of rural and urban unemployed and the loss of productive resources. In the steady stream of reports and memoranda issued by the CO’s advisory bodies at the time, the dangers of social disorder and growing rural-urban migration were directly linked to the problem of “detribalization”; that is, the social breakdown of rural village life brought on by the penetration of Western influences and the growth of population, and consequent desiccation of land and other natural resources. Events in the West Indies provided a timely warning of the shape of things to come elsewhere in the empire.11 All the talk of African distinctiveness could not hide the fact that it was descendants of African slaves, whose “tribal” systems and customs had been irretrievably broken, that were now crowding into the tropical slums of Kingston, Port of Spain, and Bridgetown, swelling the ranks of the embittered and unemployed. Frank Stockdale, who was the Colonial Office’s principal agricultural adviser from 1929 until he was appointed comptroller of the West Indies Development & Welfare Organization in 1940, was one of the first to make the connections and sound the alarm. “In the past,” he noted in his first report as comptroller, the needs of the town dwellers have been given greater attention than those of the country, and it is not surprising therefore Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines | 

that the increase of the populations of the urban areas throughout the West Indies . . . is taking place. It is already becoming an embarrassment and its dangers should be publicly recognized. . . . It is important that progressive measures should take full account of the present West Indian background, the drift to the towns, particularly of workers in the prime of their life, and the tendency to limit work to that which will provide a living at the present standards. To follow blindly western patterns of social security or of education is likely only to lead to disappointment. In schemes of development, the highest priority should be given to those which will help to improve conditions in the rural areas. . . . The greatest asset of the West Indies is its land, and it is the land which must continue to be the major and primary basis of employment.12

If it was not possible to make the land support the burgeoning population, Stockdale warned, then other means of providing employment would have to be considered, including greater industrialization. “Much will depend,” Stockdale noted in the case of Jamaica, “upon whether those who have transferred to the towns and have become urbanized can be induced to return to agricultural undertakings and employment in the country districts. If this retransfer to the country cannot be achieved, increased local industrial development must be contemplated and efforts made to encourage a greatly expanded tourist trade.”13 And this is exactly what W. Arthur Lewis, one of the pioneers of development economics, advocated while he was secretary of the Colonial Economic Advisory Committee (CEAC) during the war (Farrell 1980; Ingham 1992). The problem for the West Indies, as Lewis (1950, 73) diagnosed it, was rural unemployment and underemployment, which demanded a far-reaching, “agrarian revolution” to raise capital expenditures for health programs and educational schemes, and for investment in new technologies, irrigation works, chemical fertilizers, and conservation methods to make peasant agriculture dramatically more efficient. But more than this, Lewis argued, there was an urgent need for planned industrialization through state inter | Joseph M. Hodge

vention to absorb the “surplus” labor from the overpopulated agricultural sector. The islands could turn their large supply of cheap labor to their advantage by specializing in the production of labor-intensive manufactured goods for the export (meaning metropolitan) market. Such proposals were anathema to senior CO staff, who were willing at most to pay lip service to the idea of secondary, “import replacement” industries producing mainly light consumer goods for the local domestic market. But the idea of export promoting industrialization was sheer heresy. Not surprisingly, Lewis resigned in frustration from the CEAC in November 1944, putting on record the “touchy and uncooperative” attitude of the Colonial Office as the main reason for his abrupt departure.14 As far as CO officials and advisers were concerned, agriculture was, and would necessarily remain, the primary basis of economic life for the bulk of colonial peoples. Lewis’s annoyance with what he described as “the traditional emphasis of one of the oldest departments of the British Government” was indicative of the impatience and confidence that underscored so much developmental practice in the growth years of the 1950s and 1960s. The thinking behind much of the new idealism, as Lewis argued, was that an agricultural revolution was needed to break through the impervious structure of agrarian societies; that subsistence farming had to be transformed in order to absorb the necessary inputs such as fertilizers and mechanical equipment that were essential for increased yields; that ancillary industries were necessary to provide inputs and processing, and to draw off the “surplus population” on the land; that substantial increases were needed in credit provision, infrastructure, marketing facilities, and technical assistance. And, indeed, in the last years of empire, colonial authorities began experimenting with bolder schemes that envisioned significant changes in land tenure and organization. In Kenya, the “Swynnerton Plan” for intensive African agricultural development was introduced in 1954, which actively sought to introduce cash crops, especially coffee, and to consolidate existing land units into individual farms with legal title in the high-potential zones of Central Province and later Nyanza.15 In doing so, planners hoped to stabilize rural class relations through the consolidation of a significant group of more “energetic” or “rich” Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines | 

(Berman 1990, 366–71) farmers together with a predominant mass of secure and prosperous middle peasants. Similar if less dramatic “impact schemes” were also adopted by agricultural officers in other parts of East and Central Africa in the 1950s.16 Again, attention was directed to areas of high development potential, and bonus payments were used to encourage selected farmers to consolidate and enclose their holdings and adopt more intensive, mixed farming practices. While these schemes clearly benefited some and in many areas stimulated greater agricultural output or the adoption of more intensive agricultural and conservation measures, in other cases farmers found that without the bonuses and financial support provided by the state, their holdings were too small or their labor costs too high to both meet their family’s subsistence needs and produce a reasonable cash income.

Rupture and Continuity in the Early Postcolonial Era, 1960–1990 In the years following independence, many technical officers and researchers who began their careers in the colonial professional and research services went on to become tropical resource and development advisers with the World Bank and the UN’s Specialist Agencies or were hired as consultants under the UN’s Development and Environment Programs, bringing with them the models and strategies first devised during their formative years in the late empire.17 Many former colonial technocrats also reincarnated themselves as policy or project advisers and consultants operating within the expanding network of British overseas aid agencies such as the Overseas Development Administration (ODA) and the Ministry of Overseas Development (ODM), while others still found new employment working for various third-world governments, plantation companies, international charities, or private consultancy firms.18 Beyond the vast network of professionals who shaped development practice in the field, many pioneering theoretical and conceptual contributions were also made by those who went on to occupy important academic and research appointments.19  | Joseph M. Hodge

The remobilization of former colonial personnel constitutes an important and hitherto-neglected legacy of the late European colonial empires. The many investigative reports, international missions, projects teams, and seminal texts that these former colonial experts produced or contributed to provide a crucial thread of continuity across the seemingly fundamental rupture of the colonial-postcolonial divide. For while it is clear that postcolonial conditions shifted the emphasis of developmentalist thinking toward the exigencies of economic growth and international technical and monetary assistance, the central problem around which the practice of development had been framed since the 1930s remained: concern for the emergence of a surplus population with all the potential political, social, and ecological ramifications that this implied. Underlying and informing much of this work were the developmental and environmental narratives and frameworks that were first laid out by scientists and technical officers during the final decades of colonial rule. Through the lingering presence and influence of these experts, colonial narratives and frameworks became embedded within the expanding network of international aid agencies and organizations in the years following the formal demise of late imperialism. This is not to say that decolonization did not represent an important break. For the generation of nationalist leaders who led the former colonies to independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the late colonial development schemes did not go nearly far or fast enough. In capturing the state, they hoped to carry through the tasks that in their judgment the old colonial regimes had failed to deliver. And for many of them, the road to improvement lay not in reforming peasant agriculture, the obvious cause of their “backwardness” and impoverishment, but rather, as Lewis contended, with industrial development. Not surprisingly, Lewis and other development economists were eagerly sought after by the new nationalist governments. Lewis was invited by Kwame Nkrumah’s interim government to write a report on industrialization and economic policy for the soon-to-beindependent nation of Ghana, and he remained Nkrumah’s economic adviser until 1961. Lewis argued that surplus labor from the rural areas could be transferred at subsistence wages to the urban sector, where it Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines | 

would be absorbed by labor-intensive industries. In time, as the modern industrial sector was built up, it would provide the means to develop infrastructure and restructure the agricultural sector. In other words, the Lewis model favored structural change based on industry as the engine of growth. But because most newly independent nations lacked the necessary capital, technology, and managerial skills, he felt the best strategy was to try to induce foreign investment and companies by granting generous tax holidays and other incentives. In the case of Ghana, Lewis’s ideas reinforced plans already afoot for the building of the massive Volta River Dam, which was to supply hydroelectricity for the smelting of the country’s large bauxite deposits into aluminum for the world market and, in turn, provide the catalyst for the country’s rapid industrialization.20 Although the conventional wisdom of today is to censure the “industrialization by invitation” strategies of Lewis as well as the Faustian antics of Nkrumah for their uncritical acceptance of externally generated and unsustainable “Eurocentric” models, it is worth remembering that they were reacting against, as they saw it, years of colonial dithering and obstruction in which their call for dramatic solutions was indeed radical, even revolutionary. Nonetheless, the results were generally disappointing. Such strategies overlooked the problem of capital flight and undervalued the importance of agricultural investment with the result that food imports increased and export earnings did not keep pace with the costs of industrial inputs. The new industries also failed to create effective rural-urban linkages, and most crucial of all, they generated only limited employment opportunities. But if third-world leaders like Nkrumah had lost faith in the old colonial paradigms, there were others who continued to believe. Through the efforts of the FAO’s first director-general, Lord John Boyd Orr—himself a prominent, former Colonial Office adviser—the idea of alleviating world hunger and malnutrition through international scientific cooperation was vigorously taken up after the war. Plans were drawn up in the late 1940s for a World Food Board that would stabilize world prices of the main foodstuffs through guaranteed markets. This, it was believed, would double world food production and thus provide sufficient food and other basic necessities to  | Joseph M. Hodge

meet the needs of the two-thirds of the world’s population dependent on agriculture for its livelihood. The plan was defeated in part because it conflicted with the Labour government’s postwar colonial development drive, but the dream of feeding the world’s rapidly growing poor population would live on. The so-called “Green Revolution” was kicked off with the release of the first high-yielding varieties (HYVs), dwarf wheats in 1963 and dwarf rice varieties in 1966, which by the end of the decade had given a dramatic boost to agricultural production and exports in countries as varied as Colombia, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, and Turkey (Cleaver 1972; R. Anderson 1991). The goal of food self-sufficiency finally seemed to be at hand, sparking some observers to speak of revolutionary “seeds for change” (Brown 1970, chap. 7). But beneath the euphoria, familiar problems loomed (Cleaver 1972; Blyn 1983). Informed by the same diffusionist assumptions as those held by earlier colonial scientists, agricultural experts thought that the new seed-fertilizer package would be adopted by the richer, more “progressive” farmers first and then spread to the poorer farmers, and that the HYVs would substantially raise labor requirements, thus providing employment for the growing numbers of land poor and landless. But the high costs of fertilizer and irrigation proved to be a greater barrier to smaller, poorer farmers than expected, and the anticipated employment creation potential for planting, cultivating, and harvesting much less. Sizable profits were made by many adopters, especially larger, commercial farmers, but they tended to invest those profits into labor-displacing mechanical inputs (often subsidized by aid agencies) and cheap herbicides. The overall effect in many cases was to heighten income inequality and increase rural unemployment. Indeed, by 1970 the specter of rural landlessness and rural-urban migration were once again provoking warnings of a “global employment crisis,” with some economists demanding tariff and land reform.21 Critics also began pointing to the many ecological consequences of the new “green” technology: the highly specialized seed varieties promoted monoculture and reduced biodiversity, while the heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides poisoned local fauna (including Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines | 

humans) and led to the eutrophication of lakes, streams, and rivers. Many of the inputs were also heavily dependent on gasoline or diesel fuel, while surging demands for irrigated water created new pressures for large dam building projects (McNeill 2000, 219–26). By the early 1970s, the social and ecological costs of the “decade for development” were becoming clear to all. One of the first conferences to examine the ecological consequences of international development was organized by the Conservation Foundation and the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University in 1968. Among those to participate were some of the most prominent former colonial experts now turned international consultants, including E. B. Worthington, who had served as scientific adviser to Lord Hailey’s African Research Survey; John Phillips, the eminent South African ecologist who had been the chief agricultural adviser for the East African Groundnut Scheme; and E. W. Russell, the former director of the East Africa Agriculture and Forestry Research Organization. Worthington drew attention to the impact of barrage and dam construction on the Nile catchment area, which had resulted in the creation of large man-made lakes, the barring of flora and fauna up and down the river, the spread of schistosomiasis, and the introduction of alien species, among many other problems. Phillips discussed the complex ecological effects of widespread use of chemical fertilizers in tropical soils, noting that although significant increases in yields had been obtained by field trials under the FAO’s fertilizer program, there had been many detrimental toxic effects including reductions in seed germination, the retarding of the growth rate of young roots and stems, increases in soil acidity, imbalances or leaching of nutrients, and the scorching of foliage, grasses, and other vegetation. Building upon Phillip’s findings, Russell assessed the impact of technological development on soil conditions in East Africa, observing that every long-term fertilizer experiment to date had been harmful, while mechanical cultivation had been found to be ill-suited to the small scale of African agricultural systems.22 With these and innumerable other examples in mind of where the ecological costs of development had been inadequately anticipated, the conference called for new criteria to be used in planning and proj | Joseph M. Hodge

ect design and the greater inclusion of ecological expertise within decision-making processes. The conference’s findings were published in 1972, just as issues of rural poverty, widespread hunger, and environmental degradation were once again being brought to the fore by a series of droughts and famines that swept across the Sahel and South Asia as well as by the 1973 oil embargo, which threatened to wipe out the gains in agricultural output of the previous two decades. Fears of a potential world Malthusian crisis snowballed in the 1970s, fueling the growth of a new global environmentalism embodied in such influential studies as the Club of Rome’s The Limits of Growth, and in important forums like the “Man and the Biosphere” program launched in 1971 and the UN’s Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972. The fundamental message of the Stockholm conference was that the seemingly divergent imperatives of development and environmental protection could be reconciled through rational, integrated development planning.23 The UN and its specialist agencies, along with other leading donor organizations such as USAID, the World Bank, and the private philanthropic foundations, began pouring money into research on the social and ecological impact of the seed-fertilizer revolution as well as a myriad of other problems, from mechanization to desertification to the maldistribution of resources and basic needs. The socioecological critiques of postwar development that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s were rapidly absorbed in development and environmental circles and co-opted by international aid agencies. By the early 1980s they had become official dogma. Forty years after the 1943 Memo on Agricultural Policy in the Colonial Empire, officials at the World Bank were reiterating many of the same agrarian doctrines. The earlier ideas and pioneering studies produced by colonial technical officers and advisory experts found new life in the bank’s Integrated Rural Development Strategies of the 1970s and 1980s. Once again, an array of conservation measures, land-use planning models, and resettlement programs were conjured up in an effort to increase the capacity of the land to absorb a burgeoning surplus population. It was not without some irony that former colonial technical officers, many of whom were still actively involved as Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines | 

international consultants and advisers, noted the striking similarities between the colonial models of rural development devised in the late 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s and the kinds of strategies that once again were in vogue in the 1970s and 1980s.24 It seems the development debate had come full circle, but sadly, few of its participants saw much value in examining the lessons of the past, and what is worse, many of them remained unaware that there were any. The new rural development strategies of the 1970s and 1980s aimed to create the conditions for the long-term social and economic viability of rural communities, and to improve the standards of living of the rural poor by balancing the imperatives of growth and welfare and the distribution of resources between the rural and urban sectors (UN 1971). In the 1980s, the World Bank also added important environmental criteria to the mix, encouraging governments in subSaharan Africa to be more aggressive in developing and implementing sustainable environmental policies and expanding basic health services and female education aimed at lowering family size, as a way of tackling the problem of rapid population growth, which it felt was leading to serious environmental degradation and lower agricultural productivity (World Bank 1986, 1989). The solution to the present population crisis, it felt, lay in raising agricultural productivity through the introduction of improved crop varieties and agricultural technologies, mixed farming systems, and more intensive use of chemical and organic inputs. In the name of sustainability, it also called for a shift from large-scale, high-input, mechanized agriculture to low-input, labor-intensive, and environmentally supportive techniques. Significantly, the failure of many of these later schemes has often been attributed to the incompatibility of the intended objectives.25 The assumption that increasing peasant production for the market will also improve the welfare of rural communities as a whole has proven not to be the case. Despite substantial increases in production and productivity, it seems the rural poor were not usually the beneficiaries of such “integrated rural development” projects, and in many cases, rural poverty persisted and even increased. Resources continued to be channeled to the relatively more affluent farmers while poor peas | Joseph M. Hodge

ants remained untouched or even worse off. The old conundrums remained and so, too, one might add, did the agrarian bias of development’s practitioners. After nearly fifty years of accumulated wisdom and experience, development experts were still dreaming up plans for rural stabilization to ebb the flow of rural migration due to poverty—poverty they continued to depoliticize under the compelling logic of “surplus population” and the environmental scarcity.

Conclusion: Neoliberalism, Postdevelopmentalism, and the Rural Idyll In the late 1980s and the 1990s, a new shift in priorities began to assert itself that would destabilize and ultimately undo the underlying assumptions and framework that had sustained developmental theory and policy since the Great Depression (Helleiner 1994; P. McMichael 2000, 129–50). At the pith of the matter, as Colin Leys observed, were fundamental changes in the “real world” of development that began in the early 1970s but whose full implications were not felt until the mid-1980s. The United States spearheaded this shift with its abandonment of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in 1973. The move to floating exchange rates and unregulated financial markets led to greater instability in the global economy, which was compounded by the related problem of rising oil prices in the wake of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. The result was a period of profound economic crisis marked by recession, inflation, and unprecedented levels of international debt. For most third-world countries, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the subsequent recession of the late 1970s resulted in lower and even negative growth rates, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and North Africa.26 The terms of trade moved sharply against primary product exporters, which led to a dramatic drop in the developing countries’ overall share of world exports and international investment. Faced with stagnating economies and declining per capita income levels, third-world states increased their overseas borrowing Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines | 

until, by the mid-1980s, most were faced with serious debt servicing and balance of payment problems. At the same time, a new orthodoxy asserted itself in development economics, spearheaded by Peter Bauer, Deepak Lal, Bela Belassa, and others, who blamed the retarding of development in the third world on inefficient and excessive state intervention in the economy and called for a “new vision of growth” based on a return to free market principles.27 The “neoliberal counterrevolution,” as it has been called, underpinned the World Bank’s and the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) new market-orientated lending policies and Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) that were conditionally imposed on many developing countries in the wake of the international debt crisis of the 1980s. In order to reestablish their creditworthiness, indebted countries were cajoled into drastic reductions of public spending and subsidies, privatization of state enterprises, and currency devaluations. At the same time, developing countries were encouraged to reorient their economies to export intensification and open participation in the world market. This strategy of liberalization, according to Philip McMichael (2000, 149–65), turned the development state inside out and paved the way for what he terms the “globalization project” of the 1990s. And yet, the “New Global Economy” turned out to be as unstable and problematic as the old one. It did not lead to the restoration of growth rates to early postwar levels.28 The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and the increasing integration of these regions into the international market were accompanied by a marked rise of divisive nationalism, ethnic violence, and social upheaval (B. Anderson 1992, 3–14). In sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, SAPs had a devastating effect, causing even greater levels of inequality, declining per-capita incomes, and increasing debt-service burdens. Even the once rapidly growing Asian markets teetered on the verge of collapse in the mid-1990s, sending shock waves and inciting investor panic throughout the world. The disappointing results of liberalization and stabilization policies did not, however, produce a hasty retreat back to “enlightened” state management. Following the precepts of rational-choice theory with its emphasis on “transactions  | Joseph M. Hodge

costs” and “rule-setting institutions” as important mediators between prices fluctuations and market actor choices, the “new developmentalism” of the 1990s sought a middle ground between market and state in which development efforts were geared to community action and civil society.29 For their part, the World Bank and other international donor agencies turned to a similar set of strategies, cobbling together an increasingly incoherent discourse of both market and state-led policy reforms (Williams 1995). As the curtain rises on the twenty-first century, development seems to be in deep trouble. “There is now overwhelming support,” as the former chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, has written, “that premature capital and financial market liberalization throughout the developing world, a central part of IMF reforms over the past two decades, was a central factor not only behind the most recent set of crises but also behind the instability that has characterized the global market over the past quarter century” (A. J. McMichael 1993). For some, the setbacks of the 1980s and 1990s have proven to be the final straw. The earth is suffering from “planetary overload,” they say, and simply cannot bear the environmental suffering and devastation that a fully industrialized and globalized world would entail.30 Development, it turns out, was an impossible myth, and in its place, alternative gatherings like the World Social Forum and scholar-activists like Arturo Escobar (1995), Majid Rahnema (1997), and Vandana Shiva (2003) dream of a “postdevelopment” world to come. Drawing inspiration from a myriad of grassroots social movements, they reject both the ineluctable forces of the market and the rationalizing power of the nation-state, and look instead to preserve or reassert the primacy and autonomy of local communities. These communities, ideally, will be as self-reliant as possible, employing sustainable systems of production that are well-adapted to local ecological conditions and geared primarily to meeting basic human needs. As admirable as these ideals may be, it is hard not to notice the uncanny resemblance to earlier colonial doctrines, which also intended to bring about a stable, sustainable world, and to reconcile order and progress through cooperation and community. In many ways, it is the logical working out of the agrarian biases that have been inherent in Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines | 

development practice from the beginning, but without the principle of trusteeship in the form of the state or the expert. Or is it? The scientists, planners, and project officers will be replaced, not, it seems, directly by “the people,” who have internalized the developers’ perception of what they need or have been torn apart by conflicting interests created by exposure to modernity, but rather by the wisest, most virtuous and authoritative persons of the group: those whose knowledge of both the old and the new is trusted and respected by everyone, and who through constant dialogue with other active members will be best able to determine “the direction, the quality and the content of changes desired by each community.”31 Time will tell whether these global countermovements will gain further momentum, but in the meantime, uncertainty has generated a growing sense of national and international insecurity, which, in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has renewed pressures on governments around the world to exercise greater effectiveness in managing and stabilizing their “surplus” populations (P. McMichael 2000, 295–97). Even more ominously, the world now faces the prospects of a return to empire. “Now we are living,” as Michael Ignatieff reminds us, through the collapse of many of [the] former colonial states. Into the resulting vacuum of chaos and massacre a new imperialism has reluctantly stepped in—reluctantly because these places are dangerous and because they seemed, at least until Sept. 11, to be marginal to the interests of the powers concerned. But, gradually, this reluctance has been replaced by an understanding of why order needs to be brought to these places. . . . Terror has collapsed distance, and with this collapse has come a sharpened American focus on the necessity of bringing order to the frontier zones. (2003, 50)

Whether this new imperium will lead to a reconfiguration of the “globalization project” remains unclear, but one thing is certain: The old colonial conundrum of how to reconcile order with progress, and how to balance the increasing challenge of environmental scarcity  | Joseph M. Hodge

with the long-overdue promise of better living standards and welfare for all, will continue to haunt development’s contemporary practitioners and “trustees” for many years to come.

Notes This chapter draws on information taken from the conclusion of my book Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 254–76. 1. See van Beusekom and Hodgson, “Lessons Learned?”; Bonneuil, “Development as Experiment”; and Hodge, Triumph of the Expert. 2. See Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies [hereafter BLCAS] Mss Afr. s. 1425 E.B. Worthington Papers, Box 2, Agriculture, 1944–1950: Colonial Office, “Notes on Some Agricultural Development Schemes in the British Colonial Territories,” October 1955. 3. There is now an extensive historiography on local responses to the late imperial initiatives. See, for example, Cliffe, “Nationalism and the Reaction to Enforced Agricultural Change”; Beinart, “Soil Erosion, Conservation and Ideas about Development”; Throup, The Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau; Danquah, “Rural Discontent and Decolonization in Ghana”; and Mackenzie, Land, Ecology and Resistance in Kenya. 4. See Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, 254–56. 5. See, for example, Leach and Mearns, “Environmental Change and Policy”; and Williams, “Studying Development and Explaining Policies.” 6. An agrarian doctrine of development, according to Cowen and Shenton, “consists of proposals, usually associated with official policy, to undertake agrarian schemes of development based on small-farm, household production. The intention is to compensate for mass unemployment, urban poverty and the threat of rural emigration” (“Agrarian Doctrines of Development,” 49). 7. See Thurston, Sources for Colonial Studies; and Kirk-Greene, On Crown Service, 39–61. 8. See Colonial Office [hereafter CO] 852/397/1 Colonial Advisory Council on Agriculture and Animal Health [hereafter CAC]: Papers and Minutes, 1942, “Coordination in Land Utilization Policy and Rural Development.” Prepared by the Agricultural, Animal Health and Forestry Advisers, H. Tempany, J. Smith, W. A. Robertson, March 12, 1942. Colonial Experts, Developmental and Environmental Doctrines | 

9. CO 852/397/2 CAC: Papers & Minutes, 1943, “Principles of Agricultural Policy in the Colonial Empire” (CAC 639), March 31, 1943. 10. CO 993/1 “Native Land Tenure in Africa: Report of an Informal Committee,” Hailey as Chair, 1945. BLCAS, Mss Afr. s. 1872, Box 27 (110B), Dr. T. A. M. Nash, “The Anchau Settlement Scheme,” October 1941. 11. See Macmillan, Warning from the West Indies. 12. Great Britain, Colonial Office, Development and Welfare in the West Indies, 1943-44: Report by Sir Frank Stockdale, Col. No. 189 (London: HMSO, 1945), 12–13. 13. Ibid., 3. 14. CO 852/586/9 Colonial Economic Advisory Committee: minute by W. A. Lewis explaining his resignation as secretary, November 30, 1944, in Imperial Policy and Colonial Practice, 1925–1945, British Documents on the End of Empire, ser. A, vol. 1, ed. S. R. Ashton and S. E. Stockwell (London: HMSO, 1996), 206–11. 15. For details see Thurston, The Intensification of Smallholder Agriculture in Kenya, 45–54. 16. See Kalinga, “The Master Farmer’s Scheme”; Kay, Changing Patterns of Settlement and Land Use, 39–51; and Kay, “Agricultural Progress in Zambia.” 17. BLCAS Mss. Brit. Emp. s. 476, Box 3 (17) Charles W. S. Hartley; Box 3 (28) Sir Charles Pereira; Box 4 (34) M. A. Rosenquist. 18. BLCAS Mss Brit. Emp. s. 476, Box 1 (5) Robert Owen Campbell; Box 1 (6) Donald Vincent Chambers; Box 3 (22) Richard Kettlewell; Box 7 (49) P. G. Thompson. 19. Seminal works were produced by a number of former colonial researchers and technical officers. See, for example, Allan, African Husbandman; Ford, The Role of the Trypanosomiases; Pereira, Land Use and Water Resources; Phillips, Agriculture and Ecology in Africa; Russell, Soils and Soil Fertility in Tropical Pastures; and Savile, Extension in Rural Communities. 20. Kofi, “Arthur Lewis and West African Economic Development.” 21. See, for example, J. P. Grant, “Marginal Men.” 22. See Worthington, “The Nile Catchment”; Phillips, “Problems in the Use of Chemical Fertilizers”; and Russell, “The Impact of Technological Developments on Soils in East Africa.” 23. See Adams, Green Development, 38. 24. BLCAS Mss Brit. Emp. s. 476, Box 1 (2) Anthony Blair Rains; Box 7 (55) Paul Tuley; Box 7 (57) Robert L. Waddell. 25. See, for example, Williams, “The World Bank and the Peasant Problem”; Chambers, Rural Development; and Chipande, “Smallholder Agriculture as a Rural Development Strategy,” 61–97.

 | Joseph M. Hodge

26. The major exceptions to this trend were the Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) of Southeast Asia, which together accounted for almost half of all third-world exports of manufactures between 1980 and 1992; and China and India, which also grew faster in the 1980s. See Preston, Development Theory, chaps. 13 and 14. 27. The best overview of the development debate in the 1980s remains Toye, Dilemmas of Development. 28. According to the United Nations, more than one hundred countries experienced declining living standards in the 1980s and 1990s. See UN, United Nations Development Report. 29. See, for example, Bates, Beyond the Miracle of the Market; Stiglitz, The Economic Role of the State; and Hariss, Hunter, and Lewis, The New Institutional Economics. 30. See also Douthwaite, “Is It Possible to Build a Sustainable World?” 31. See Rahnema, “Towards Post-Development,” 384, 388, 391–92, 394.

Works Cited Archival Sources Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies (BLCAS), Rhodes House, Oxford Mss Brit. Emp. s. 373 Frank L. Engledow Papers Mss. Brit. Emp. s. 476 Oxford Development Records Project (ODRP), Food and Cash Crop Collection Mss Afr. s. 1425 E.B. Worthington Papers Mss Afr. s. 1872 Oxford Development Records Project (ODRP), Medicine and Public Health in British Tropical Africa Collection

National Archives, Kew, London Series CO 852 Economic Department: Original Correspondence, 1942–44. Series CO 993 Colonial Land Tenure Advisory Panel Papers, 1945.

Published Sources Adams, William. 1990. Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in the Third World. London: Routledge. Allan, William. 1965. African Husbandman. New York: Barnes and Noble.

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Anderson, Benedict. 1992. “The New World Disorder.” New Left Review 193 (May/June): 3–14. Anderson, Robert. 1991. “The Origins of the International Rice Research Institute.” Minerva 29 (1): 61–89. Ashton, S. R., and S. E. Stockwell, eds. 1996. Imperial Policy and Colonial Practice, 1925–1945. British Documents on the End of Empire. Ser. A, vol. 1. London: HMSO. Bates, Robert. 1989. Beyond the Miracle of the Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beinart, William. 1984. “Soil Erosion, Conservation and Ideas about Development: A Southern African Experience, 1900–1960.” Journal of Southern African Studies 11, no. 1 (October): 52–83. Berman, Bruce. 1990. Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination. London: James Currey. Blyn, George. 1983. “The Green Revolution Revisited.” Economic Development and Cultural Change 31 (4): 705–25. Bonneuil, Christophe. 2000. “Development as Experiment: Science and State Building in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, 1930–1970.” In Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, edited by Roy MacLeod, 258–81. Special issue of Osiris 15. Brown, Lester R. 1970. Seeds of Change: The Green Revolution and Development in the 1970s. New York: Praeger. Chambers, Robert. 1983. Rural Development: Putting the Last First. London: Longmans. Chipande, G. H. R. 1983. “Smallholder Agriculture as a Rural Development Strategy: The Case of Malawi.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Glasgow. Cleaver, Harry. 1972. “The Contradictions of the Green Revolution.” American Economic Review 62 (2): 177–86. Cliffe, Lionel. 1972. “Nationalism and the Reaction to Enforced Agricultural Change in Tanganyika during the Colonial Period.” In Socialism in Tanzania: An Interdisciplinary Reader, edited by Lionel Cliffe and John Saul, 17–24. Nairobi: EAPH. Cooper, Frederick. 1996. Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cowen, M. P., and R. W. Shenton. 1998. “Agrarian Doctrines of Development: Part I.” Journal of Peasant Studies 25, no. 2 (January): 49–76. Danquah, Francis K. 1994. “Rural Discontent and Decolonization in Ghana, 1945–1951.” Agricultural History 68 (1): 1–19.

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Douthwaite, Richard. 1999. “Is It Possible to Build a Sustainable World?” In Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm, edited by Ronaldo Munck and Denis O’Hearn, 155–77. London: Zed Books. Escobar, Arturo. 1995. “Imagining a Post-Development Era.” In Power of Development, edited by Jonathan Crush, 211–27. London: Routledge. Farrell, Terrence. 1980. “Arthur Lewis and the Case for Caribbean Industrialization.” Social and Economic Studies 29, no. 4 (December): 52–75. Feierman, Steven. 1990. Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ferguson, James. 1991. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ford, John. 1971. The Role of the Trypanosomiases in African Ecology: A Study of the Tsetse Fly. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grant, J. P. 1971. “Marginal Men: The Global Employment Crisis.” Foreign Affairs 50 (1): 112–24. Great Britain. 1945. Development and Welfare in the West Indies, 1943–44: Report by Sir Frank Stockdale. Colonial Report no. 189. London: HMSO. Hariss, John, Janet Hunter, and Colin Lewis, eds. 1995. The New Institutional Economics and Third World Development. London: Routledge. Helleiner, Eric. 1994. “From Bretton Woods to Global Finance: A World Turned Upside Down.” In Political Economy and the Changing Global Order, edited by Richard Stubbs and Geoffrey R. D. Underhill, 163–75. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Hodge, Joseph. 2007. Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism. Athens: Ohio University Press. Ingham, Barbara. 1992. “Shaping Opinion on Development Policy: Economists at the Colonial Office during World War II.” History of Political Economy 24 (3): 689–710. Ignatieff, Michael. 2003. “The Burden.” New York Times Magazine, January 5. Kalinga, Owen J. M. 1993. “The Master Farmer’s Scheme in Nyasaland, 1950–1962: A Study of a Failed Attempt to Create a ‘Yeoman’ Class.” African Affairs 92 (368): 367–87. Kay, George. 1967. Changing Patterns of Settlement and Land Use in the Eastern Province of Northern Rhodesia. Hull: University of Hull Publications.

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———. 1969. “Agricultural Progress in Zambia.” In Environment and Land Use in Africa, edited by M. F. Thomas and G. W. Whittington, 509– 17. London: Methuen. Kirk-Greene, Anthony. 1999. On Crown Service: A History of HM Colonial and Overseas Civil Services, 1837–1997. London: I. B. Tauris. Kofi, Tetteh. 1980. “Arthur Lewis and West African Economic Development.” Social and Economic Studies 29 (4): 202–27. Leach, Melissa, and Robin Mearns. 1996. “Environmental Change and Policy: Challenging Received Wisdom in Africa.” In The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment, edited by Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns, 1–33. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Lewis, Joanna. 2000. Empire State-Building: War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925–52. Oxford: James Currey. Lewis, W. Arthur. 1950. “Developing Colonial Agriculture.” Tropical Agriculture 27 (4–6): 63–73. Leys, Colin. 1996. The Rise and Fall of Development Theory. London: James Currey. Low, D. A., and J. M. Lonsdale. 1976. “Introduction: Towards the New Order 1945–1963.” In History of East Africa. Vol. 3, edited by D. A. Low and Alison Smith, 1–64. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mackenzie, A. Fiona D. 1998. Land, Ecology and Resistance in Kenya, 1880–1952. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Macmillan, William. 1936. Warning from the West Indies: A Tract for Africa and Empire. London: Faber and Faber. McMichael, A. J. 1993. Planetary Overload: Global Environmental Change and the Health of the Human Species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McMichael, Philip. 2000. Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. McNeill, J. R. 2000. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. New York: Norton. Pereira, H. C. 1973. Land Use and Water Resources in Temperate and Tropical Climates. London: Cambridge University Press. Phillips, John. 1959. Agriculture and Ecology in Africa. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1972. “Problems in the Use of Chemical Fertilizers.” In The Careless Technology: Ecology and International Development, edited by M. Taqhi Farvar and John P. Milton, 549–66. New York: Natural History Press. Preston, P. W. 1996. Development Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Rahnema, Majid. 1997. “Towards Post-Development.” In The PostDevelopment Reader, edited by Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree, 377–404. London: Zed Books. Russell, E. W. 1966. Soils and Soil Fertility in Tropical Pastures. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1972. “The Impact of Technological Developments on Soils in East Africa.” In The Careless Technology: Ecology and International Development, edited by M. Taqhi Farvar and John P. Milton, 567–76. New York: Natural History Press. Savile, A. H. 1965. Extension in Rural Communities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shenton, Robert W. 1998. “The Labour Question in Late Colonial Africa.” Review of Decolonization and African Society, by Frederick Cooper. Canadian Journal of African Studies 32 (1): 174–80. Shiva, Vandana. 2003. “The Living Democracy Movement: Alternatives to the Bankruptcy of Globalization.” In Another World Is Possible: Popular Alternatives to Globalization at the World Social Forum, edited by William F. Fisher and Thomas Ponniah, 115–24. London: Zed Books. Stiglitz, Joseph. 1989. The Economic Role of the State. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2001. “Failure of the Fund: Rethinking the IMF Response.” Harvard International Review 23 (2): 14–18. Toye, John. 1987. Dilemmas of Development: Reflections on the Counter-revolution in Development Economics. Oxford: Blackwell. Throup, David. 1987. The Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau, 1945–53. London: James Currey. Thurston, Anne. 1984. The Intensification of Smallholder Agriculture in Kenya: The Genesis and Implementation of the Swynnerton Plan. Oxford Development Records Project, Report 6. Oxford: Rhodes House Library. ———. 1995. Sources for Colonial Studies in the Public Record Office. Vol. 1, Records of the Colonial Office, Dominions Office, Commonwealth Relations Office and Commonwealth Office. London: HMSO. UN (United Nations). 1971. Integrated Approaches to Development in Africa: Social Welfare Services in Africa. New York. ———. 1997. United Nations Development Report. New York. Van Beusekom, Monica, and Dorothy Hodgson. 2000. “Lessons Learned? Development Experiences in the Late Colonial Period.” Special forum in Journal of African History 41 (1): 29–100. Williams, Gavin. 1981. “The World Bank and the Peasant Problem.” In Rural Development in Tropical Africa, edited by Judith Heyer, Pepe Roberts and Gavin Williams, 16–51. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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———. 1995. “Modernizing Malthus: The World Bank, Population Control and the African Environment.” In Power of Development, edited by Jonathan Crush, 158–75. London: Routledge. ———. 2003. “Studying Development and Explaining Policies.” Oxford Development Studies 31 (1): 37–58. World Bank. 1986. Population Growth and Policies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Washington, D.C. ———. 1989. Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth. Washington, D.C. Worthington, E. B. 1972. “The Nile Catchment—Technological Change and Aquatic Biology.” In The Careless Technology: Ecology and International Development, edited by M. Taqhi Farvar and John P. Milton, 189–205. New York: Natural History Press.

 | Joseph M. Hodge

Contributors

Peder Anker is associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the Environmental Studies Program at New York University. His works include Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001) and From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press, 2010). See www.pederanker.net. Christina Folke Ax has a Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and is currently working on a postdoctorial project at the University of Iceland on the Danish minority population in Iceland in the twentieth century. She is the author of several articles on modern Icelandic history, including “Incorporating New Ideas in a Local Community: A Reform Society in Iceland, 1833–1870,” in the Scandinavian Journal of History (2007); and “The Stranger You Know: Icelandic Perceptions of Danes in the Twentieth Century,” in Nordic Perspectives on Encountering Foreignness, edited by Anne Folke Henningsen et al. (University of Turku, 2009). Greg Bankoff writes on environmental-society interactions with respect to disasters, natural hazards, human-animal relation, development, resources, and community-based disaster management. He is professor of modern history at the University of Hull, United Kingdom. 327

David Biggs is an associate professor in the History Department at the University of California at Riverside. His book Quagmire: NationBuilding and Nature in the Mekong Delta (University of Washington, 2011) examines questions of environmental history in modern Vietnam. Niels Brimnes is associate professor of history at Aarhus University in Denmark. His fields of research include colonialism, the history of India, and the history of medicine. His book Constructing the Colonial Encounter: Right and Left Hand Castes in Early Colonial South India appeared with Curzon Press in 1999, and he is presently working on a history of tuberculosis vaccination in late colonial and postcolonial India. Joseph Hodge is an associate professor of modern British and British imperial history and director of graduate studies in the Department of History at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. He is author of Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism, published in 2007 by Ohio University Press, and he has also published several articles in leading historical journals including the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, the Journal of Southern African Studies, Agricultural History, and the Journal of Modern European History. Niklas Thode Jensen is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His research focuses on the history of science and medicine in the former Danish colonies in India and the Caribbean in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His For the Health of the Enslaved: Slaves, Medicine and Power in the Danish West Indies, 1803–1848 appeared with Museum Tusculanum Press in 2011. Julia Lajus is director of the Center for Environmental and Technological History, European University at St. Petersburg, and senior research fellow at the St. Petersburg Branch of the Higher School of Economics. She is interested in application of environmental history and history of science to the problems of resource use in seas, riv | Contributors

ers and polar regions. As a project leader of the Russian team within the History of Marine Animal Populations project (HMAP), she has written on the history of fisheries and fishery science in the White/ Barents and the Baltic Sea basins, including chapters in Oceans Past (2007) and A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries (2009). She has also published on the history of oceanography, marine biology, and earth sciences in the Russian Arctic, focusing on international connections in the field. Elizabeth Lunstrum is assistant professor of geography at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include the politics of conservation, political violence, state and territory formation, and the politics of human mobility. Her current research examines the impacts of transfrontier conservation initiatives on Mozambican migrants who cross through these areas to find work in South Africa. Christopher Morris is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author of Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770–1860; and of The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). Karen Oslund is assistant professor of world history at Towson University in Maryland. Her publications include Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic (University of Washington, 2011) and a coedited volume (with David L. Hoyt) on the history of language in the metropole and the colonies: The Study of Language and the Politics of Community in Global Context 1740–1940 (Lexington Books, 2006). She is now working on a global environmental history of whale hunting and whale protection. Kavita Sivaramakrishnan is assistant professor of the sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. She has been trained in history, political theory, and in population health at Cambridge University, the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Contributors | 

and at the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University. Her interests and expertise are in the history of medicine in South Asia and in the politics of global health and health inequalities, in particular in population aging and reemerging epidemics from a historical and policy perspective. Daniel Rouven Steinbach studied in Tübingen, Berlin, and Trinity College Dublin, and is at present teaching at the University of Exeter. In his research he explores the construction of a European colonial identity in Africa and multinational and multiracial societies during wartime, especially the First World War in British and German East Africa. Phia Steyn is an Africanist who works on the environmental impact of oil in the tropics, apartheid and the environment in South Africa, rinderpest (cattle plague) in the Orange Free State republic in the 1890s, and the history of food in Southern Africa. She is a lecturer in African history and African environmental history at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Andrew Wear is emeritus reader in the history of medicine at University College London. He is the author of Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680, joint author of the Western Medical Tradition, both published by Cambridge University Press, and editor of numerous books. His current interests have moved from the history of medicine to the topic of colonial settlement and the environment.

 | Contributors

Index

Ateneo College, 88 avodire, 289 Ayurveda, 197, 199, 201–5

Adanson, Michel, 140, 147, 154, 157, 159 advisers, 122, 181, 302–5, 307–10, 312, 314, 319 afara, 290 Africa, sub-Saharan, 141, 215–16, 230, 235, 300, 314–16, 326 African Timber and Plywood Company, 288–89 agrovilles, 112, 123, 129 Ahern, George, 86 Aleksandrovsk, xi, 171 Algue, Jose, 90, 98–100, 104 alluvium, 140, 142, 144 alpine ash, 290 Amritsar, 191, 195, 197–200, 205, 210–12 Anderson, Warwick, 95–96, 100 Angkor Wat, 116 Anglo-Americans, 94 anticolonial, 109, 127, 245, 247–48, 253, 256, 301 apartheid, 256, 330 Applegate, Celia, 14–15, 50, 73 aquaculture, 156 Arbousset, Thomas, 217, 223 Arkhangel’sk, 168, 178, 187 Arnold, David, 43, 80, 101, 159–61, 188, 208, 211 Arts and Crafts Movement, 280–81, 283, 285 Ashton, Hugh, 211, 221, 224, 227–29, 233–34

Bac Lieu, 120, 126 Baer, Karl Ernst von, 170 Bakoena, 216 Barents Sea, 4, 8, 165, 168, 169, 171 Barkly, Fanny, 224, 226 barocyclonometer, 89–90 Basuto, 214–34 Bauer, Peter, 316 bauxite, 310 Beersheba, 172 fig. 6.1, 173, 175 fig. 6.2, 180–83 beetroot, 230 Belassa, Bela, 316 Bergholz, Paul, 90 Bernard, Paul, 109 Bewell, Alan, 37 Bigorgne, 124 Blainville, Henri de, 83 Blanche, Paul Vidal de la, 113, 115, 127, 130 Blanco, Manuel, 87 Bohol, Philippines, 85 Bonnet, Charles, 82 Bonneuil, Christophe, 301 Botany Bay, 28 Bowen, Merle L., 264–65, 269 Bradford, William, 21 Bridgetown, 305

331

Brigham, Albert, 94 British Crown, 89, 277, 286, 319, 324 British Empire, 2, 9, 35–36, 39, 150, 275–86, 291–92, 300, 302–5, 307–8, 313, 318 Brook, Rajah, 279, 286–87 Brown, Karen, 284 Buffon, George-Louise Leclerc de, 79, 82, 96 Burtt-Davy, Joseph, 218 Büscher, Bram, 214

countermovements, 318 counterrevolution, 271, 316 Covane, xi, 250, 263, 265 crabwood, 286 crawfish, 156 Crosby, Alfred, 43, 147, 160 Crozat, Antoine, 135, 137, 143, 147, 156–57 Cubo, 250, 257 Cullimore, Daniel Henry, 39, 44 Cuvier, Georges, 83, 96, 101 czar, 167, 169

cadastral, 9, 167 Caledon River, 218 Camel, Georgio, 87 Canhane, 241, 244, 250–51, 253–55, 257, 262–63, 265, 267–68 Cape Malay, 230 Carnatic Plain, 145–46 Casalis, Eugene, 216–20, 222–24, 234 Casariego, Enrique Abella y, 90, 98, 100 catfish, 156 Cebu, Philippines, 85,104 Chalk, Laurence, 283–85, 289, 295 Champion, Harry G., 288–90, 295–96 Chandernagore (Chandannagar), India, 136, 146 chenopod, 142, 157, 159 childbirth, 30 Chirkin, G. F., 177, 179, 186 Claeys, J. Y., 115, 132 Clarke, Marshall, 227 coalfields, 172 Cochin China, 109, 119, 122, 124, 128–32 cochineal, 153 Cold War, 136, 182 Colonial Council, 122 Confino, Alon, 50, 73 cooperatives, 144, 174–75, 180, 187, 252, 254–56, 264, 300, 304 Coromandel Coast, 136, 145–46 Coronas, Jose, 90, 98, 102 Cossigny, Charpentier de, 136–37, 139, 142, 157, 160

Dar es Salaam, 48, 55, 57, 62 Darwin, Charles, 79, 83, 95 Deimling, von (major general), 67 deltas, 10, 12, 110–15, 118, 122, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142, 145, 147, 150, 154–56 Dudley, Thomas, 27 Duffy, Rosaleen, 241, 267 earthworks, 141, 143 Eldredge, Elizabeth A., 216–17, 219–20, 224, 233–34 Elefantes River, 244, 249–51 Ellenberger, D. Fred, 216–18, 220, 228, 233, 235 Elliott, David, 123, 132 Elton, Charles, 279 Elvin, Mark, 144, 158, 160, 163 English Channel, 83 Enlightenment, 10, 99, 104, 106, 155 entrepôt, 199, 205 Escobar, Arturo, 317 Espejo, Zoilo, 87 Euro-Americans, 10, 155 eutrophication, 312 Farmer, John, 281 farming, 3, 25–26, 34, 110, 124, 148, 149, 166, 168, 262, 300, 304, 307–8, 314 farmland, 25, 112 Fascist, 123, 124, 127–28, 256 Faura, Federico, 88–90 Fernanda, 262

 | Index

Fernandez-Villar, Celestino, 87 Filipinos, 79, 94 flood dikes, 12, 112 floodplain, 109, 114 fig. 4.1, 119, 136, 140, 141, 142, 149, 253 floods, 109, 116–19, 121–22, 124, 126, 128, 139, 141, 144, 146, 152, 153, 158 food, Western, 223 foodways, 214–15, 222, 223, 224–26, 229–32 Forster (doctor), 55–56, 57, 71 frailocracy, 79 Frank, Andre Gunder, 136–37 Franz-Josef Land, 182 French Empire, 137 freshwater, 141, 183, 260 German Empire, 51, 71, 99 Gilmartin, Doug, 152, 160 Gnostics, 293 Gonarezhou National Park, 240, 259 Gothic Revival, 281 Gourou, Pierre, 110, 113–14, 116–19, 124, 127, 130–32 Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, xi, 4, 8, 239–40, 242–43, 251, 258–59, 270, 271–73 Gressier, Remy, 119–21, 130 Grove, Richard, 2, 12, 14–15, 93, 97, 103, 158, 160–61, 294, 296, 298 Guangdong, 136, 143–44, 148–50, 155 Guangzhou, viii, 9–10, 135–36, 139, 143 guerrillas, 256 Gulags, 180–81, 186, 190 gurjun, 287 Guyot, Arnold, 94 Handley, W. R. C., 284 Harrison, Mark, 35, 43 haylands, 167 health care, 252, 254, 256 Higginson, Francis, 22–23 high-modernism, 4–5, 14 highveld, 217, 224

Holley, J. Hunt, 289 Hoshiarpur, 194 Howitt, William, 37 Hursthouse, Charles, 32 Huxley, Julian, 279 hydroelectricity, 249, 253, 310 Ignatieff, Michael, 318 immigrants (emigrants), 24, 25, 30, 33, 34, 41, 51, 52, 64, 125, 126, 128, 179, 181, 200, 205 India, 7, 10, 11, 14, 35–40, 42, 43, 80, 86, 136, 137, 143, 145–46, 147, 150–53, 155, 156, 191–213 International Style (architecture), 282 iroko, 289 Jacot-Guillarmod, Amy, 221, 234–35 Jaini, Shiv Chandra, 206 jarrah, 287, 289 Jennings, Eric, 125, 132 J. Gliksten & Son Ltd., 290 Johnson, Harry H., 39 Jullundur, 194–95 Karaikal, India, 136, 139, 145–146, 155 Karikala (king), 145 karri-tree, 287 Keegan, Timothy, 229 Kennedy, Dane, 36, 45, 54–55, 71, 74 Khan, Hakim Majid, 205 Khibiny Mountains, 173 Kilimanjaro, Mount, 57, 63, 68 Kimble, Judith, 222 Kingston, 305 Kliuchevskii, Vasilii, 164, 166, 185, 187 Knox, Robert, 35, 45 kokrodua, 288 Kola Land, 165 Komi Republic, 175 Köstlin, Konrad, 64, 74 Kruger National Park, 239, 250, 257, 259–60

Index | 

Kuhn, Philalethes, 53–54, 74 Kunene River, 47 La Salle, 139 Labaste, Robert, 121 Lagden, Godfrey, 229 Lal, Depak, 316 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 79, 80, 82–83, 95 landholdings, 109, 117, 130 landowners, 31, 33–34, 109, 124, 128, 143, 146, 151, 167 Law, John, 137 l’École nationale des eaux et forêts, 2 Leibniz, Gottfried, 82 Lelingoana, 227 Lephole, Monica ‘Maleabua, 221 Leribe, 224 Lesotho, 215–17, 230 Lewis, W. Arthur, 306 life-forms, 82 Lind, James, 36–37 Livingstone, David, 36 Long Xuyen, 117, 126 Lonsdale, John, 301 Louis XIV, 139 Low, D. A., 301 Lüderitzbucht, 48, 67 Macao, 89 Machel, Samora, 252–53, 268, 271 Madras, India, 6, 45, 137, 139, 162 Mafeteng, 229 maize, 6–7, 24, 142, 147–49, 157, 161, 217–19, 225–31, 233–35, 244, 261–62 makore, 287 Malawi, 36, 322 Malaya, 288, 295 Mamohato (queen), 217 Margaret (princess), 275 Maria, 244, 267 Martin, James Ronald, 38–39, 43, 45 Martin, Minnie, 217–18, 220, 224, 229, 233–35 Martins, Elisio, 249, 272

Maso, Miguel Saderra, 90, 98, 106 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 27, 44 Massingir Dam, 8, 245, 249–50, 252–53, 257–58, 260, 263, 273 Massingir Velho, 241, 244, 250, 253–55, 257, 260–62, 265, 268–69 Massingir, Mozambique, xi, 8, 2 41–42, 244–46, 248–58, 260–63, 265–69, 273 Matsosa, 229 Maury, Matthew, 94 Mavodze, 250 McCann, James, 222, 227, 229, 233, 235 medicine, Western, 43, 193, 198, 204, 209 Mekoatleng, 225 Mekong Delta, 12, 109–10, 117–26, 128–32, 328 melaleuca, 125 mengkulang, 288 merbau, 288 Mercado, Ignacio de, 87, 98, 103 microenvironments, 40 Mindanao, 85–86 Mohale’s Hoek, 224 Mondlane, Eduardo, 248, 272 moneylending, 151 monocropping, 5 Moon, Suzanne, 5, 16 mora, 288 Morera, Ramon Jordana y, 85–86, 98, 104 Morija, 222, 225, 235 Moshi, 55, 57 Moshoeshoe, 216–17, 223, 231, 233–34, 236 Mozambique, ix, xi, 3–4, 8, 218, 239, 241–43, 245–53, 256–59, 261, 264–65, 267, 268–74 Mughal Empire, 6 muninga, 288 Munro, Thomas, 6, 14, 16 mupumena, 286, 289 Murman, 168, 170–73, 175, 178–79, 181–83, 186, 189–90

 | Index

pharmacopoeia, 92, 207 Phillips, John, 312 piastres, 126 Pilgrim Fathers, 21 Poivre, Pierre, 144 polycropping, 5 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 150 Pomorye, 165 Pondicherry, India, 10, 135–37, 139, 146 Popular Front (French), 122, 124 Port of Spain, 305 positivists, 127 postcolonialism, 1, 3, 5, 8–9, 12–13, 153, 155–56, 215, 239, 264, 275, 302, 308–9 Pratt, Mary Louise, 115 Prescott, William Hickling, 78–79 primavera, 287 Punjab, India, 191–96, 199, 200, 205, 207 Puszta, 63

Murmansk, 177–79, 181–82, 185–86, 188–89 Murray, Colin, 229 Muscovite, 167, 187 My Tho, 177 Mysore, 145–46 Nabi, Hakim Ghulam, 202–3, 210 Nam Dinh, 125 Namibia, South Africa 11, 147 Natal, 230, 232 neocolonialism, 1 neo-Darwinism, 94 neo-Lamarckism, 94 neoliberal(ism), 258–59, 264, 315–16 nephoscope, 86 Netherlands East Indies, 5–6, 86, 97 Nicholson, Max, 279 Nkrumah, Kwame, 309–10 North (Russian), 4, 7–8, 164–86 North Borneo, 291 Northern Dvina River 165, 167 Northern Territory, 29 Novaya Zemlya, 168, 172–73, 182 Novgorod, 166–67 nuns, Ursuline, 137 Nyanza, 307 obeche, 290 Occidentals, 9 Ogle, Nathaniel, 30–31, 46 Orange Free State, 215, 223, 226, 330 Orange River, 67, 226 Orientals, 9, 12, 16, 110, 115, 157, 163, 209, 275–76, 284–85, 293–94, 297 Orr, John Boyd, 310 Osseo-Asare, Fran, 230, 235 padauk, 288 parkland, 56 Pasig River, 87 pastureland, 25 peroba, 286 Peshawar, 198

Rahnema, Majid, 317 rain forests, 59 Rajan, Ravi, 277 Realpolitik, 51 Red River, 12, 110, 111 map 4.1, 113, 114 fig. 4.1, 115–16, 118 rimu, 286, 292 rinderpest, 226 riverbanks, 68, 136, 140 rivers, 11, 29, 62, 63, 67, 68, 87, 109, 110–16, 119, 128, 135, 136–50, 152, 154–55, 158, 165, 166, 167, 177, 218, 221, 226, 244, 245, 249–51, 260, 310, 312 Robinet, Jean-Baptiste, 82 Roger, Jean Francois, 153–54 Rollins, William H., 52, 57 Romanov-na-Murmane, 173 Royal Geographic Society, 2 Ruskin, John, 281–82 Russell, E. W., 312 Russian Empire, 164, 169–70, 174, 184 Sahel, 145, 313 Saint-Hilaire, Etienne Geoffroy, 79

Index | 

Saint-Hilaire, Isidore Geoffroy, 79 Salazar, Antonio, 243, 247 salt water, 141 Sanders, Peter, 218, 220, 233–34, 236 sapele, 289 schistosomiasis, 312 science, Western, 204, 293 Scott, James C., 5–6, 14, 16, 98, 107, 150–51, 158, 162, 284, 298 Seaboard Lumber Sales Company, 288 sea level, 166, 138 Semple, Ellen, 94, 107 Senegal, West Africa, viii, 10, 13, 135–43, 146–47, 149–50, 153–61 Senegambia, 145 Sepoy Rebellion, 6 seraya, 291 Service géographique de l’Indochine, 12, 112, 132 Seven Years’ War, 146 Sharma, Thakur Dutt, 200, 203–5, 210, 213 Shingwedzi River Valley, 260 Shiva, Vandana, 317, 325 silkworms, 144, 147 silviculture, 287, 294, 299 Smith, Andrew, 218, 223, 233, 235 Smuts, Jan Christian, 2 Socialists, 8, 127, 243, 252, 255–56, 258, 264–65 Solovetsky, 167 Somerset, Richard, 83, 95, 107 Song (dynasty), 144 Soto, Hernando de, 139, 158, 162, 329 Southern Hemisphere, 286, 288 Southern Rhodesia, 256, 258, 286, 289 Spencer, Herbert, 95, 97, 103 Spitsbergen, 168, 172, 185, 188, 190 state-building, 6, 324 Stiglitz, Joseph, 317, 321, 325 stinkwood, 289 Stockdale, Frank, 305–6, 320, 323 Stow, Jefferson Pickerman, 29–30, 46 sugarcane, 144, 147

Swakopmund, 48, 72 swidden system, 142 Tamega Limitada, 249 Tamil Nadu, India, 136 Tansley, Arthur G., 279 Teisch, Jessica, 152 third world, 304, 308, 310, 315–16 Thistlewood, Thomas, 137 Thomas Worthington & Sons, 281–82 Tonkin, 110, 113, 115–16, 118–19, 121, 123–25, 128–29 Touzet, Andre, 116 Traill, Catherine Parr, 33 train oil, 168 Transkei, 13 Trigo de Morais, Antonio, 247 tropics, 29, 34–42, 53–55, 80 Tropp, Jacob, 12 Troup, Robert Scott, 278, 292 U Minh/Ca Mau, 126 Usner, Daniel, 149 Vaal River, 226 Vaid, Bhai Mohan Singh, 199–204, 206, 209–10 Valdez, Juan Gonzales, 85 Van Amerom, Marloes, 241, 273 Vinh Long, 117 Visayas, 85, 87 Vologda, 165 Wallman, Sandra, 216, 224, 229–30 watchtowers, 49 waterbirds, 82 Webbers Ltd., 282 Weber, Eugen, 12 Welde, Thomas, 22 Wells, H. G., 279 Wentworth, William, 31–32 Western Australia, 30, 287, 289 Western Europe, 81, 93, 231 western red cedar, 288

 | Index

West Usambara, 59 White Sea, 165–68, 169, 173 Windhoek, 48, 58, 66 Windsor chairs, 291 Wittfogel, Karl, 144, 151, 153 woodwork, 276, 285–92, 295 Worster, Donald, 151, 155 Worthington, E. B., 312 Worthington, Hubert, 281–82, 284

Wunderkammern, 293 Xa No, 120, 130 Yale, Elihu, 137 Yunani, 202, 205, 210 Zambezi River, 47 Zimbabwe, 4, 8, 239, 259

Index | 