Environment, Entangled Energy Infrastructures, and Agrarian Statecraft in Colonial Gambia, 1894–1965

This article explores how environmental resources and hybrid energy infrastructures shaped the formation and operation of modern colonial power in rural Gambia from 1894 to 1940. While existing theories of imperial expansion emphasize the crucial role of the environment in fueling colonial governance, they overlook how control over both energy infrastructures and environmental resources produced colonial power and inequalities. I argue that Gambian intermediaries and imperial agricultural and development “experts” forged a colonial state through the control and exploitation of fertile lands, farm labor, and mechanical-energy-powered small-scale rice-irrigation cultivation to sustain the colonial cash crop economy in the face of irregular rainfall. Examining how production and reproduction of colonial power depended on the commercialization of land-based resources and local and imported energy systems reveals a fresh and alternative genealogy of power to the much-analyzed concept of “biopolitics” (power over life and population), illuminating how African intermediaries and local elites carved out new paths to power via land dispossession, coercive mobilization of farm labor, and monopolization of new forms of energy systems and agricultural technologies at the expense of marginalized people.