Net Werk voor de Geschiedenis van Hygiëne en Milieu, 1994-1996 ...

spread of Mande culture from the
Senegal-Niger River region to areas
closer to the emerging networks
of coastal trade further south and
west.
David Lee Schoenbrun
becommentarieert:
Brooks’ Landlords and Strangers
does not closely argue the evidence
for pre-colonial environmental
change in the extreme western portion
of greater West Africa. He does
so in Western Africa to c. 1860
A.D.; A Provisional Historical
Schema Based on Climate Periods.
Indiana University African Studies
Program Working Papers Series No.
1. An article in Cahiers d’études
africaines (1986) synthesizes the
earlier synthesis.
Th e authority on historical evidence
most likely remains Sharon Nicholson,
“A Climatic Chronology
for Africa: Synthesis of Geological,
Historical, and Meteorological Information
and Data.” Unpublished
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of
Wisconsin, Madison, 1976. In
lieu of the diss, try her article in
Jour. of Afr. Hist. 20,1 (1979), 31-
49. More and more realiable data
come from various archaeological
and paleoenvironmental teams of
researchers. Try Jean Devisse (ed.)
Vallees du Niger (Paris: Reunion
des Musées Nationaux, 1993)
[Reviewed by J Vansina in current
number of JAH].
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For more recent eras the material
thickens up rapidly.
James Webb gaat dieper in op het
thema:
In Desert Frontier: Ecological
and Economic Change Along the
Western Sahel, 1600-1850 (Univ.
of Wisconsin Press: Madison, WI,
1995), I examined the historical
evidence for climatological change
in the western Sahel. I found that
the historical evidence strongly suggested
a long-term trend toward increasing
aridity which began in the
late-sixteenth or early seventeenth
century and continued throughout
the period of study
Desert Frontier might be read
as broadly supportive of George
Brooks’ periodization of climate
change for western Africa, summarized
most recently in Landlords
and Strangers (1992). In it he argued
for a “wet” phase from c.1500
to c.1630, a “dry” phase from c.
1630 to c.1860, and a “wet” phase
from c.1860 to c.1900. Desert
Frontier thus does not support the
periodization advanced by Sharon
Nicholson, who argued for a “wet”
period from the late-fi fteenth to
the late-eighteenth century. But
Desert Frontier also argues that the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
were more humid than the
nineteenth or twentieth centuries,
and thus that the idea of “wet” and
“dry” phases which suggests oscillation
around a long-term stable
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650-651
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Net Werk 50 - maart 1996
mean obscures the fact that there
was a long-term trend toward increasing
aridity which characterized
the period c.1600 to the present.
Desert Frontier argues that during
the period 1600-1850 the
long-term trend toward increasing
aridity had a profound impact on
both farming and herding peoples.
In broad overview, the increasing
aridity caused the expansion of the
great camel zone, pushed the Sahelian
cattle zone ever farther to the
south, and rolled back the zone of
rainfed agriculture. Th e desertifi cation
of the Sahel provoked transformations
in ways of life. Early in this
period, a new ethnic identity, that
of the “Whites” (Arabic: al-Bidan),
was forged. Th e emergence of this
desert-edge identity was the result
of many transformations in identity
among formerly Arab, Berber,
Wolof, Soninke, Fuutanke, and
Bafur groups. Th e desiccation of the
desert edge was accompanied by an
increase in political violence when
competition for scarcer resources
intensifi ed and new economic patterns
came into being.
In my original post on H-ASEH
, I also
mentioned horse cavalry in the
sahel in response to a post from
W.M. Reger IV, a Russianist working
on the Russian army, who was
inquiring after other work on seventeenth-century
environmental
history and the impact of warfare
and cavalry in specifi c. My work
on Sahelian horse cavalry (fi rst
published in the Journal of African
History, vol. 34, no.2 (1993)) argues
for a horse-slave cycle which
sent Black African slaves north both
into the desert and to the Maghrib
in exchange for horses from North
Africa and horses bred along into
the savanna suff ered high mortality;
they were used for military purposes
which produced more slaves for
export to both (1) Atlantic and (2)
Saharan and North African markets.
(For a recent overview of the
recent literature on horse cavalry,
see Robin Law, “Th e Horse in Pre-
Colonial West Africa,” in Cavalieri
Dell’Africa (Centro Studi Archeologia
Africana: Milan, 1995), 175-
184.)
Groen imperialisme
Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism:
Colonial Expansion, Tropical
Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism,
1600-1860 (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge,
1995), xiv + 525 pp., ISBN 0 521
40385 5.
Besproken door Jane Carruthers,
University of South Africa
From its inception as a distinct
branch of historical endeavour,
environmental history has been
dominated by the United States.
Th e publications emanating from
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