Developing the Environment, Nurturing the State: Wetland Reclamation, Agricultural Technological Development, and Inequality in the British Gambia, 1945–80

This paper tracks agricultural and environmental transformations in the rice-growing areas of the Gambia from 1945 to 1980. Through the lens of environmental and technological schemes such as wetland reclamation and irrigation technologies, this paper offers fresh insights into processes of colonial consolidation, decolonization, postcolonial statecraft, and structured inequalities in the Gambia. Moving beyond the labor-centric theorization of colonial and postcolonial environmental and technological projects, I argue that successive environmental management schemes designed to maximize food security produced and reproduced states for the powerful classes and reinforced structured inequalities among people differentiated by class and gender. While male powerful chiefs, village headmen, traders, and landowners monopolized fertile reclaimed wetlands and agricultural technologies throughout colonial and postcolonial periods, the poor and marginalized men and women endured land dispossession and food insecurity. By emphasizing the environmental and technological knowledge ordinary farmers contributed to colonial and postcolonial agricultural schemes and their environmental resilience, this paper contributes new insights not only on the histories of environmental injustice in Africa, but also to the broader histories of technology in the Global South.