This book owes its origins to an exploratory seminar held at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford, in October 1983. During the course of this seminar three historians, approaching the subject from very different backgrounds, found that their ideas about the problems of conservation and resource management in Africa were converging to a surprising degree. Furthermore, the participants at the seminar shared the view that a more comprehensive exploration of conservation orthodoxies would be both academically fruitful and practically useful. Consequently, a much larger workshop was organised and held under the auspices of the African Studies Centre at Cambridge University. This workshop took place in April 1985. Biological scientists, social scientists and historians were all well represented at this meeting, at which more than one hundred participants discussed 26 papers covering a very wide range of interests within the general theme of ‘Conservation in Africa’. Thirteen of the papers from that workshop have been revised for publication in this volume, while a further three chapters have been subsequently added.

With the aim of continuing the dialogue between the biological and social scientists that the workshop so successfully stimulated, an interdisciplinary seminar series was begun in 1985 at the African Studies Centre, Cambridge, under the title ‘Reconciling Conservation and Development’. Both the seminar series and this volume aim, quite deliberately, to consolidate and promote a commitment to an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the environmental problems of Africa.