The Dust Bowl was felt across the world. In 1914, a British government committee on South Africa discussed a “general consciousness of the gravity of the problems presented by soil erosion in almost every country where recent settlement or the growth of the population had led to an intensification of agriculture.” Another official in Ceylon pointed out that the removal of the forest to create space for tea, meant “little or no provision was made at the time to retain in situ the fine soil of the original forest… the loss of soil has been enormous.” By the 1930s, colonial soil scientists described the massive soil erosion problem then plaguing colonies and regions such as the U.S. Southern plains, as the result of the “rape of the earth” of preceding decades. An article in the Journal of the Royal African Society in 1938 even stated that "this soil erosion question is not one of Africa alone. It is one that affects the whole world, and in particular the British Empire." In short, it was experienced in places that were colonies with agricultural economies that revolved around monocultures.

Ecology

Even though the United States experienced dust storms in the late nineteenth century, the clearing of grasses that normally trapped soil during droughts exacerbated the impact of dust storms in the 1930s. After the 1920s, rainfall diminished significantly, with the summer months seeing a rainfall shortage of 60,000 tons for each 100-acre farm. Along with this great drop in rainfall, states also had to contend with scorching heat. Many farmers in the Great Plains and the southeast regions also lacked an understanding of their region’s ecology to curb soil erosion. Grasses that normally trapped soil and moisturized it were removed, making this unusually dry period even harsher. In the case of the Canadian prairies, semi-arid lands that should have never been open to grain production were often ploughed.

Attitudes

At the heart of the Dust Bowl was the belief that white businessmen, policymakers, and settlers could move into any area they wanted and do whatever they wanted to it. As Teddy Roosevelt said concerning American settlers, “when he exhausted the soil of his farm, he felt that his son could go West and take up another…. When the soil-wash from the farmer’s field choked the neighboring river, the only thought was to use the railway rather than the boats to move produce and supplies.”

With colonization came more monocultures of agriculture. The anonymous author of a nineteenth-century instructional text on tea cultivation encouraged planters to go deep into forests to clear areas of bamboo, remove larger trees, and to keep local animals and insects at bay that would normally replenish soil.

In conclusion, soil erosion and drought was not unique to America. Aggressive monocultures of colonial agriculture caused depletion of soils, which exacerbated droughts when they did happen.

Primary Sources

Tea Cultivation. 1865. Calcutta: Military Orphan Press.

Jacks and White, The Rape of the Earth, a world survey of soil erosion. 1939

Theodore Roosevelt, “Opening Address by the President,” Proceedings of a Conference of Governors (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909), 9. Conference of Governors on the Conservation of Natural Resources held in Washington, D.C., May 13–15, 1908.

Secondary Sources

Geoff Cunfer, "Scaling the Dust Bowl," in Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholrship, Anne Kelly Knowles, ed. (Redlands, Calif.: ESRI Press, 2008), 95-121.

Hannah Holleman. Dust Bowls of Empire. Yale University Press, 2019.

Donald Worster***.*** Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.