The phosphate archipelago: Imperial mining and global agriculture in French North Africa
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Simon Jackson
Simon Jackson (Ph.D. NYU) is Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Birmingham, where he directs the Centre for Modern and Contemporary History. With the support of a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, he is currently completing a book on the global political economy of French rule in Syria and Lebanon after World War One, and editing another, with Alanna O’Malley, on the interrelationship of the League of Nations and the United Nations. His new project examines North African phosphates at local, colonial and global scales across the twentieth century. He has taught at the European University Institute in Florence, where he was a Max Weber Post-Doctoral Fellow, and at Sciences-Po in Paris.
Abstract
This article analyzes the network of phosphate producing sites in French colonial North Africa in the twentieth century. By tracing phosphate flows across the region between mining sites, and by placing the North African network into imperial and global perspective, the article develops the concept of a phosphate archipelago, capable of recognizing the shared specificities of the phosphate mines as extractive spaces and of describing their insertion into adjacent local and regional dynamics. Drawing on political-economic writings after World War One, the article focuses mainly on phosphates’ role in the colonial politics of economic autarky, but also touches on labour migration, the role of phosphates as an actor, and the trajectory of the phosphate archipelago in North Africa across the watershed of independence in the 1950s and down to the present day, when it plays a key role in the politics of global nutrition and food security.
About the author
Simon Jackson (Ph.D. NYU) is Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Birmingham, where he directs the Centre for Modern and Contemporary History. With the support of a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, he is currently completing a book on the global political economy of French rule in Syria and Lebanon after World War One, and editing another, with Alanna O’Malley, on the interrelationship of the League of Nations and the United Nations. His new project examines North African phosphates at local, colonial and global scales across the twentieth century. He has taught at the European University Institute in Florence, where he was a Max Weber Post-Doctoral Fellow, and at Sciences-Po in Paris.
Acknowledgment
I thank the editors of this number – Sebastian Haumann and Nora Thorade – and the journal’s anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments. I also thank Colin Cahill, Valerie McGuire, Vanessa Ogle, Corey Ross and Frank Uekötter for helping me think about resources and archipelagos. I am grateful to Mat Paskins and the participants at the Environmental Histories of Commodities 1800-2000 workshop, held at University College London in September 2015, for their valuable comments on an early draft, and indebted to Hamza Meddeb, with whom I co-presented a paper that developed aspects of this argument, at a workshop on “Making Resources Speak”, held at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Birmingham, June 2015. For financial support I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Fellowship programme.
© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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