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Jeff Schauer, Guillaume Blanc, trans. Helen Morrison. The Invention of Green Colonialism., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 377–378, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaf005
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In The Invention of Green Colonialism, Guillaume Blanc investigates place-based conservation injustices in Ethiopia against a broader analysis of the unrelentingly colonial character of conservation work and thought across Africa. The Simien Mountains in Ethiopia might seem a curious place to start a work on “green colonialism”: Ethiopia was notably spared all but a brief occupation during Europe’s colonization of Africa. But Blanc argues that the broader colonial era saw the crafting of a set of narratives about Africa and its nature that endured, expanded, and perpetually renewed themselves after formal decolonization. Their reductive treatment of Africa meant that even Ethiopia was not spared their consequences.
Blanc documents the origins of colonial conservation and then traces the broad persistence of the framework, and its particular Ethiopian iterations, across the period of decolonization, through significant changes in Ethiopia’s own political economy, and into an era of “sustainable development.” It is this long arc that gives The Invention of Green Colonialism much of its power for readers new to dimensions of this story, but which might frustrate others. Chapters 1 and 2 are based on existing scholarly literature and retell how Western visions of and assumptions about Africa and its landscapes amounted to the “naturalization” or “dehumanization” of Africa, with “catastrophic consequences” for people (1–2).
