Contenu du sommaire : Ressources naturelles et tensions d'empire : Maghreb, Proche-Orient, Afrique (XIXe-XXe siècle)

Since its beginnings in the United States in the 1970s, environmental history has developed a particular focus on empires, thanks to scholars such as Alfred Crosby. In the 1980s, pioneering efforts by Indian scholars brought fresh perspectives into the field, before British historians took the lead in the 1990s. Since then, empires have remained one of the core subjects of environmental history. Nevertheless, the theoretical and methodological innovations gained by combining social history and environmental history have seldom been used in colonial or postcolonial studies. Exploiting a number of case studies from Africa and the Middle East, this thematic issue contributes to a socio-environmental history of empires.

At the crossroads between environmental and economic history, this article examines the Cairo Water Company, which was founded in 1865 to outfit the Egyptian capital with its first modern conveyance system for drinking water. The status of this business, a monopolistic concessionary company responsible for a public service, reveals the central role played by hydraulic infrastructure in Cairo's transformation. The company's infrastructure network was part of a larger urban development project launched by the Khedive Ismail, but also became a vector of European financial imperialism in Egypt. Until the first half of the 20th century, this hydraulic infrastructure continued to spark conflict and negotiations that highlighted the profound environmental, economic and social changes affecting Egypt at the time.

The cult of Jewish, Muslim and Christian saints — considered in a broad sense, including practices dedicated to tombs and the belief in jinns — is intimately linked to a way of living in a landscape, of interpreting it as an inhabited world, both historically and as embodied by its main natural features (mountains, caves, rivers, trees), and ultimately of taming or transforming this landscape. All sorts of practices have historically accompanied this cult of saints, including therapeutic or propitiatory practices generally linked to fertility. Among the major sources of environmental history in the Middle East, one can therefore include a vast hagiographic literature, texts favorable or hostile to such practices, guides to pilgrimages and other pious visits, Muslim travel literature in the medieval and modern periods, and finally ethnographic literature of the colonial period. After a general overview, we shall look at the case of Egypt over a long period of time. We will explain how the cult of Coptic and Muslim saints has long made it possible, in a predominantly rural country, to explain various transformations of the environment: the relationship between the desert and the valley, the frequency of Nile flooding determining the location of cemeteries, the caves occupied by convents and churches, the cult of sacred trees, the wells that determine the location of the saints' tombs, etc. The evolution of the cult of the saints and its relative secularization since the end of the 20th century are intimately linked to the destruction of the Egyptian environment and landscape: population explosion, planned or uncontrolled urbanization, rampant artificialization of soils and the disappearance of arable land, despite expansion into new lands. The desert is populated or controlled by the army, the wells are inaccessible, and trees are cut down. At the beginning of the 21st century, threats to the Nile itself dissolved the link between the environment and the cult of the saints, while at the same time giving rise to a nostalgia for a cult condemned by Muslim reformism.

On the Mediterranean scale, Algeria is a fertile vantage point for historical investigations into the application of environmental standards designed to preserve marine environments. During the second half of the 19th century, protectionist policies in the fisheries sector were based on a number of legal mechanisms aimed at nationalizing the sector, supporting the institutionalization of fisheries science, and ensuring the sustainability of the seabed. Entrusted to naval vessels, fisheries surveillance was operated by agents who described their daily work as fishery guardians, their interactions with maritime professionals and a keen awareness of environmental issues.

In the second half of the 19th century, French elites justified the colonization of Algerian forests by the need to protect these fragile environments from the alleged impact of local forestry practices. This article aims to compare and contrast the discourse of these elites, who established foresters as protectors of the forests, with the actual power practices of these colonial administrators on the ground. Through the study of the career of Guard General Eugène Grené, posted in Algeria between 1873 and 1884, this article will show how the need to protect the forests can be mobilized to justify and reinforce colonial policies based on coercion.

Tunisia experienced a series of poor wheat harvests in the early 1920s, mainly due to drought. While annual production was over 550,000 quintals in 1918, four years of declining production ensued, in a colony already weakened by the First World War. This low harvest had consequences for the price of wheat, flour and bread. Based on correspondence between senior members of the administration (from the General Secretariat of the Government, the Sheikh el Medina, and civilian oversight roles) and the press, this article seeks to understand the transition from an environmental crisis to a social crisis in a colonial context by identifying the negotiations made to manage price increases in the face of pressure from the population, as well as bread professionals.

This article demonstrates how the classification of cultivable land in Palestine became an area of political and social struggle between Arabs and Jews during the first two decades of British rule. The British civil (1920) and then mandatory (1922) administration was driven by a dual obligation: to protect the rights of the Arab majority in the country and to fulfill the promise of the “Jewish national home” as enshrined in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. In order to maintain this precarious balance, the British defined their policy towards Jewish immigration in terms of the country's economic capacity to absorb immigrants, which was associated with cultivable land. The classification of this land became a subject of fervent debate, both regarding how it was defined and its methods of calculation.

Drawing on the professional trajectory of the Belgian entomologist Hans J. Brédo, this article examines early attempts to establish inter-imperial cooperation in the field of locust control in Africa. After overseeing locust control research in the Belgian Congo during the 1930s, in 1941 Brédo became the director of the International Red Locust Control Service of Abercorn (Northern Rhodesia), which involved the Belgian, British and, later, Portuguese governments. His work sheds light on a little-known aspect of knowledge production in a colonial context and illuminates the ways in which European scientists collectively considered the interdependencies between the plant, animal and human worlds. It also reveals how the management of the natural environment contributed to the “modernization of colonialism” and to the developmentalist policies launched after the Second World War. Finally, this micro-historical approach demonstrates that a trans-imperial history of Africa should take into account individual paths and experiences.

This article examines the logic and effects of the budgetary process defined by the Director of the Budget, Paul Déroche, in 1975 and applied until 1984 for the preparation of the 1985 budget. Closely based on national accounting, the procedure aims to secure the financial margins necessary to fulfill the promises of the current government. The legitimacy of the political will is fully recognized as long as it complies with the framework thus defined. At this tenuous boundary between administrative work and political arbitration, we observe the effects of the budgetary mechanism on the evolution of public policies in general, and education in particular, chosen here as an investigation field. As various examples illustrate, the effort made to create space for the fulfilment of current political commitments finds its counterpart in the mechanical devaluation of past commitments. Based mainly on archives from the Budget Directorate, the Ministry of Education and the Prime Minister's office, this study also draws on oral testimonies.

The 1960s and 1970s were a major, yet ephemeral, moment of global interest in Marxist economic literature. This article discusses this ideological and political conjuncture by taking as its focus a heterodox reference in economics in France, the Traité marxiste d'économie politique, le Capitalisme monopoliste d'État, written by the economists of the French Communist Party. Three issues are analyzed: the prosopographical, partisan, and transnational dimensions. The article first analyzes how the FCP's relationship with its economists has changed since the end of Maurice Thorez's secretariat and how the party was involved in the production of this work. It then situates the economic approach of the Traité within the debates of the contemporary international Communist movement. Finally, it demonstrates how the book was also the result of the evolving boundaries between the militant sphere and the academic sphere. Despite a posture displayed as entirely orthodox and militant by the Communist experts, this important change encouraged cross-pollination with schools of economic thought other than Marxism, namely Keynesianism.

This article will analyze, drawing on the archives of the prefect of Algiers, the perturbed course of Prime Minister Michel Debré's visit to Algeria in February 1959. After visiting the monument to the dead of Algiers, the Prime Minister's trip to an Algiers housing estate gave rise to a rather exceptional incident in a codified protocol mechanism. This event, while it upended the ceremonial staging of an official visit in an unprecedented way, first and foremost brought to light the reality of repression in Algeria.