Everyone is welcome to the next installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. UCLA’s Ethan Mefford, will be presenting “Tīrs, the Moroccan chernozem: soils, epistemologies and empires (1900-1930)”

In 1900, as European empires eyed Morocco, a dark soil known locally as tīrs created a sensation among European observers, sparking commentaries on its great fertility and theories as to its genesis. As an object of local experience and thought and of fast-cohering colonial knowledge, tīrs traces contrasts and convergences between two epistemologies each oriented to its own conceptions of climate and agriculture. In 1908, the geologist Louis Gentil (1868-1925) applied the factorial model of soil genesis developed by the Russian soil scientist V.V. Dokuchaev (1846-1903) and declared tīrs to be akin to the famed chernozem or “black earth” of southern Russia and Ukraine. Gentil’s theory, though mistaken, prevailed and became part of an authoritative discourse that supported French agricultural and political goals. This talk explores the relationship between science and empire, and how the salient “fact” that tīrs was another chernozem reverberated through cohering French and Spanish conceptions of Morocco’s physical and human geography.

See you in the History of Science Room or via Zoom https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/7eHDPkZiQlCkoT-U3x9BiQ.