Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa

The modernist fables that underlie the developmentalist states of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have only recently begun to attract the attention of scholars in their own right. As French and British colonial fantasies of recovering the supposed agricultural productivity of Roman North Africa have given way to the similarly delusional dreams of experts who have sought to modernize postcolonial states in the region, the subject of their underlying environmental imaginaries has come to the fore. 1 It is the considerable merit of the studies in this volume to document the continuities in the environmental imaginaries that have shaped the modernization projects of both colonial and postcolonial states over the past two centuries.