Tropical Nature

Colonial and Post-Colonial Conservation in Africa and Asia

Author: Guillaume Blanc, Mathieu Guérin and Grégory Quenet Series: Environment in History: International Perspectives

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Description

Across Africa and South-East Asia, the impulse to protect nature often dovetails with the domination of local people. From mass displacement to severe restrictions on land use and daily acts of violence, conservation work risks reproducing Eurocentric modes of colonialism and worsening the effects of the climate crisis. In this insightful and wide-ranging study of the colonial history of conservation, Tropical Nature seeks to provide a much-needed history of the Global South from its own perspective. Comparing case studies ranging from Ali Bongo’s Gabon, to the postcolonial African itinerary of the agronomist Arthur Bunting, this volume advances a “small-scale global history” that deciphers the relations binding human societies to the non-human world.

Critic Reviews

“The book raises a major issue: social and environmental justice. Those who advocate protection are not those who suffer its constraints.” • Steve Hagimont, 20&21. Revue d'histoire, n° 159, 2023

“The book as a whole insists on a contradiction that seems inherent to conservation: "this policy does not exist alongside destruction but with it". Highlighted by the title of the book, this contradictory association is found in two logics: protecting in order to exploit and exploiting in order to protect.” • Colin Vanlaer, Moussons, n°41, 2023

About the Author

Guillaume Blanc is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Rennes 2 and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France (2021-2026). His work focuses on the global governance of nature, with a particular concentration on Ethiopia and East Africa. He has recently published La nature des hommes (La Découverte, 2024) and The Invention of Green Colonialism (Polity, 2022).