RESEARCH IN SAHARAN HISTORY

Abstract

Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850. By JAMES L. A. WEBB JR. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Pp. xxvi+227. £40.95 (ISBN 0-299-14330-9); £17.95, paperback (ISBN 0-299-14334-1).

In contrast to the desert itself, the Sahara as subject of historical (re)construction is currently displaying signs of health and vitality. It is enticing historians into a range of theoretical and methodological domains deriving from other disciplines, and simultaneously attracting scholars from other disciplines to play out their own explorations around its contours. For a space which seems to have no difficulty occupying well-delineated and identified areas in every genre of cartographical representation, the Sahara is surprisingly difficult to ‘locate’ in academic discourse. Its identity, in current parlance, is a popular focus of speculation and debate, challenging conventional notions of its location, both in time and in space. One of these challenges is engagingly articulated in the recent publication of economic historian James Webb Jr. His Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850, invites wider participation in this ‘search for the Sahara’ and in so doing, encourages broader understanding of just where ‘Saharan studies’ and in particular Saharan history and Saharan society stand in these so-called post-colonial times.