Andrea E. Williams, Planting Politics: French Forestry, Pastoralism, and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World

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My book manuscript investigates the relationship between Mediterranean mobile pastoralism and nineteenth-century French forestry through case studies in Provence, French colonial Algeria, and Ottoman Anatolia. It is both comparative and connective, exposing themes of climate and environmental change as well as the evolution of discourse about such changes. In these three Mediterranean contexts, the application of French forest science reflected environmental concerns as well as French imperial ambitions. Aimed largely at regulating and marginalizing Mediterranean mobile pastoral traditions, forest administration in these regions ultimately became a process of negotiation in which local pastoralists played an active role. The encounters of French foresters and pastoralists in Provence, Algeria, and Anatolia affected inhabitants and the environment in significant and often unforeseen ways. At the same time, they transformed forest science and forest practices within France and around the world.  

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