This dissertation explores the development of environmental inequalities among various agropastoral groups and individuals differentiated by class, religion, and gender in the Gambia River region between 1600 and 1960. For centuries before the mid-nineteenth century, the powerful Soninke ruling class produced and reproduced kingdoms by seizing well-watered lands and river tributaries from politically marginalized Jola, Bainunka, Wolof, Mandinka, and Fulɓe people, and at the same time, recruited forced labor among these lower-class groups and enslaved people to cultivate those lands. By the mid-nineteenth century, disinherited Muslim leaders and their followers ended the Soninke monopoly over environmental resources through a series of wars, transforming rural landscapes and dispossessing underclass non-Muslims of these productive resources. Throughout the late-nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, the British officials and their appointed local chiefs engaged in colonial statecraft by alienating and appropriating the best parcels of rural lands from Muslim leaders, common men and women, reinforcing chiefly authority over land, water, and people. Drawing on oral and archival evidence, I argue that environmental resource control by precolonial and colonial rulers and elites subjected lower-class groups, marginalized non-Muslims, and ordinary men and women to environmental dispossession and injustice. While environmental crises presented unique challenges for socially marginalized people like lower-class men, non-Muslim refugees, and ordinary women, unequal power relations and political oppression largely hindered the ability of the poor and disenfranchised from adequately producing food from the environment. Yet, even as the powerful classes barred marginalized people from independently benefiting from the environment, the dispossessed demonstrated remarkable creativity and resilience by constantly developing new ways of interacting with the environment to improve their conditions.By analyzing precolonial and colonial elites’ control of environmental resources as a powerful instrument of statecraft, this study reveals new sources of political power grounded in control of diverse environments, motives for the exercise of state power, and a variety of strategies elites deployed to manipulate and control marginalized people and to reproduce social differentiations. In doing so, this study shows that differences in human relationships with the environment were shaped and reshaped by power rooted in the dynamics of class, religion, and gender. The dominant classes acquired power through control of the environment and used their position to restrict the abilities of marginalized people to benefit optimally from land- and rivers-based resources. By tracing historical patterns evident in powerful classes’ control of environmental resources and apparatuses of state power, this study uncovers historical continuity in the ways human interactions with the environment were shaped by social differences from precolonial to colonial periods, while revealing often unrecognized historical dynamics that transformed human relationships with the natural world.
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