Ecologizing Regions; Securing Food: Governing Scarcity, Population and Territory in British East and Southern Africa

The focus is on the government of food systems in British East and Southern Africa in the mid-twentieth century, and the influence of ecological science on late colonial governmentality. The aim is to contribute to current debates emphasizing the need to uncover the political and historical specificities of territory, as well as to broaden the concept beyond its legal, political-economic and strategic features, and the bounded scale of the nation-state. It is argued that a focus on colonial problematizations of government, through the lens of food, contributes to these discussions in at least two ways: First, by producing substantive knowledge of a context under-examined in the literature on territory. Second, by contributing to the theorization of territory in broadening its ambit to include ecological knowledge and practices oriented towards the calculative political control of earth processes, and caring for various systemic relations between matter and life. Governing colonial food systems linked a range of economic and ecological problems and hence food provides a suitable lens to study the historical interrelations of biopolitical and geopolitical techniques.