Spencer D. Segalla is a professor of history at the University of Tampa. He is the author of The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912–1956 (Nebraska, 2009).
Richly sourced and persuasively argued, Empire and Catastrophe weaves together metropolitan and imperial narratives. . . . The book's intellectual rigor is matched only by the clarity of its prose. -Christopher M. Church, author of Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean Similar to Edward Simpson's Political Biography of an Earthquake: Aftermath and Amnesia in Gujarat, India, Spencer Segalla's brilliant book offers an innovative fusion of political, cultural, and environmental history to examine decolonization and the creation of postcolonial Algeria, Morocco, and France. -Michael G. Vann, author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam Engagingly written and richly sourced, Empire and Catastrophe is an important contribution to our understanding of the broader ecosystem of empire. Looking at a series of local disasters across the space of French imperialism, Segalla evokes the ways catastrophe and decolonization shaped, and continue to shape, each other. -Brock Cutler, associate professor of history at Radford University