Tropical Nature: Colonial and Post-Colonial Conservation in Africa and Asia

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.

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).

Mathieu Guérin is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian History at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO). His research specializes in the social and economic history of Cambodia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing especially on the history of wildlife conservation since the colonial era.

Grégory Quenet is Professor of Environmental History at UVSQ-Paris Saclay University and holder of the Laudato Si’ Chair Pour une nouvelle exploration de la terre at the Collège des Bernadins. A specialist in environmental history, he has worked on natural disasters in the modern era, written an intellectual history of environmentalism, and helped ecologize the Château de Versailles.