(Post)colonial worlding in Jordan's nature reserves: Conservation, racial science, and national identity

The 1960s saw a series of British expeditions to Jordan to establish protected areas. By carefully examining archival material pertaining to these expeditions, I demonstrate how these expeditions, and the protected areas they sought to establish, constituted crucial acts of (post)colonial worlding. These expeditions took place almost twenty years after the end of administrative colonialism in 1947 and reveal how conservation in Jordan remained entangled in colonial knowledge production and spatial control. I trace how conservation agendas in these expeditions were shaped by racial science, environmental orientalism, and geopolitical alliances, influencing both material practices and cultural framings of nature. When turning to the relationship between Jordanian elites and conservation, I demonstrate how (post)colonial identity struggles became central to conservation. A decolonial reading of the archive illuminates not only the dominance of colonial narratives but also the absence of Jordanian archival materials. Yet what is available, offers conservation framings rooted in geopolitics, mobility, and national identity. This paper advances two arguments. First, historical geographical approaches to (post)colonial worldmaking must engage more critically with conservation. Second, decolonial approaches to the archive demonstrate how conservation participates in worldmaking projects. Attending to archival presences and silences is key to forging more equitable conservation futures. • Historical geographical work that attends to the worldmaking project of (post)colonialism must be brought into conversation with conservation more critically. • Naming and understanding contested histories of nature conservation, including the involvement of (post)colonial states, can help to ensure more just and equitable conservation futures. • Conversation agendas are deeply connected to racial science, environmental orientalism, and geopolitical alliances. • Reserves in Jordan started as a testing ground for former colonial powers to continue processes of knowledge extraction and control of space through both material practices and how land is culturally rendered in (post)colonial locations. • (Post)colonial identity struggles and anxieties in Jordan become central to its engagement with conservation. • Decolonial approaches to the archive are a crucial means to understand postcolonial worlding.