Nomad’s Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World. By Andrea E. Duffy (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2019) 336 pp. $55.00 cloth and e-book

Abstract

A transnational study of Mediterranean pastoralism, Nomad’s Land is also an ambitiously multidisciplinary and comparative study built upon an impressive depth of both published and archival sources found in France, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. While asserting the usefulness of the Mediterranean as a unit of analysis, Duffy does not attempt to paint with too broad a brushstroke; on the contrary, she shows connections and convergences in the modern histories of mobile, pastoral populations across three case studies—Provence, Algeria, and southwestern Anatolia. Duffy draws upon the literature of forestry, ecology, geography, and archaeology to tease out the behaviors and fates of what are surely among history’s most elusive actors. Pastoralists in all three regions shared histories of reciprocity with farmers and the use of forests as intermediate pastures; the three regions are also bound by a French connection.Duffy begins by tracing the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European intellectual currents that cast all mobile pastoralists as barbaric and environmentally destructive. Declensionist narratives attributed the degradation of the entire Mediterranean basin to pastoralism, from putatively wholesale forest clearance to the damage wrought by goats and sheep. Colonial perspectives then differentiated some pastoralists from others; Duffy argues that the newly coined word transhumance was applied to European pastoralists in order to distinguish them from their non-European counterparts, whose practices would be described by the loaded term nomadism. A European critique of the Ottoman Empire took aim at both the Ottomans’ poor use and poor conservation of resources, namely, forests.These critiques and understandings became concretized in French scientific forestry and the Forest Code of 1827. If Duffy’s discussion of these developments and their application to Provençal pastoralists does not break new ground, her emphasis on the highly elastic definition given to forest in the Code and its implications for pastoralists is germane and interesting. Early attempts to apply French forestry and forest law to Algeria foundered on extreme ignorance of the Algerian environment and lack of personnel. Duffy’s Anatolian case study offers a fascinating linkage to developments in France’s metropole and colonies. During the Tanzimat era of reform, Ottoman officials invited well-known French foresters to promote a hierarchical and law-driven forestry administration. From 1857 to 1878, their efforts in the Ottoman Empire, in parallel with the Algerian case, confronted the lack of state funding and the entrenchment of customary rights to the land.Besides the “soft power” (not always so soft) of forest law, the privatization of land contributed greatly to the terminal decline of Mediterranean pastoralism. The parallels between the privatization of the commons in France, colonial appropriation in Algeria, and the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 are striking: Pastoralists either leased expensive private pastures or became sedentary, in both cases intensifying grazing practices. Nineteenth-century officialdom was thus quick to blame imprudent, “malevolent” pastoralists for floods and fires in Provence, and fires in Anatolia and Algeria, where fire suppression became an explicit tool of empire. Having argued differently, this reviewer would have liked to see more evidence that France’s alpine restoration law of 1882 “sealed the fate of an already diminishing mountain population” (146).1Duffy then highlights contrasting reasons for decline that led to similar ecological outcomes across the three regions. If the forest regime was most heavy-handed in France and Algeria, Anatolian pastoralism retreated in the face of sedentarization campaigns, modernization (mining, agriculture, and railroads), and influxes of refugees. Provençal pastoralists uniquely were rehabilitated by sympathetic forester-sociologists and literary figures, yet even in Provence only larger, sedentary sheep enterprises survived. A consistent environmental legacy of soil degradation due to forced intensification and sedentarization underpins the three stories. By contrast with sedentary livestock raising or agriculture, the environmental impact of pastoralism appears minor.Several errors mar the text slightly. Duffy erroneously depicts the Revolutionary decree of June 1793 as securing the commons as such, whereas it allowed for their division and privatization. She misinterprets a law of 1890 as outlawing communal grazing, whereas it forbade grazing on unenclosed fields (vaine pâture). Finally, the seminal role played by rural depopulation in the reforestation of France goes unmentioned.