Bernie is a PostDoc at the Centre for African Studies, where he works on the Curated Escapes & Derelict Landscapes [CEDEL] project.

His recent monograph, Space is the Ultimate Luxury (co-authored with Luregn Lenggenhager), considers the worrying trend of wealthy private individuals and corporations who are increasingly hoarding land across the Global South, clothing their actions in the language of 'conservation'. The book explores this phenomenon through close attention to local histories and ecologies in Namibia, taking the story across southern and eastern Africa and to the Global North. 

Prior to coming to Basel, Bernie worked as a lecturer at Alma College (USA), where he taught classes in economic history, environmental history, and especially African history. Prior to that, he taught history at the University of Namibia. He received his PhD at Michigan State University. His doctorate, titled Land, Labour & Karakul in Namibia, 1910s-1960s, examined the economic history of sheep farming in southern Namibia, placing this arid periphery within broader transformations in settler colonialism across the southern hemisphere. Bernie maintains a keen interest in central debates in global economic and labour history, and he continues to publish on this.

As part of the CEDEL team at the ZASB, Bernie is working on a large project dealing with the relationship between nature conservation, land tenure, and associated financial implications, with his focus on Namibia and Mauritius. Simultaneously, he is writing a book on the political economy of the final days of apartheid.

Monographs

B.C. Moore & L. Lenggenhager, Space is the Ultimate Luxury: Capitalists, Conservationists, and Ancestral Land in Namibia (Leiden, Brill, 2025).

Edited Volumes

 B.C. Moore, S. Quinn, W. Lyon, K.F. Herzog (eds.), ‘Namibian Labour History’. Special Issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 47, no. 1 (2021).

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

B.C. Moore, ‘The Night Harvests: From Royal Game to Property Rights in Namibian Wildlife Policy’, in U. Dieckmann (ed.) Realising Nature(s) in Germany and Namibia with Protected Areas: Contestations, Complexities and Contradictions of Conservation in Two National Contexts (Basel, Basler Afrika Bibliographien, forthcoming 2025).

B.C. Moore, ‘Swimming Upstream: From “Poor-Whites” to “Coloureds” along South Africa’s Lower Orange River’, in L. Lenggenhager, et al. (eds.), The Lower !Garib/Orange River: Pasts and Presents of a Southern African Border Region (Bielefeld, Transcript Verlag, 2023), pp. 119-144.

T.A. van der Hoog & B.C. Moore, ‘Paper, Pixels, or Plane Tickets? Multi-archival Perspectives on the Decolonisation of Namibia’, Journal of Namibian Studies, 32 (2022), pp. 77-106.

B.C. Moore, ‘Smuggled Sheep, Smuggled Shepherds: Farm Labour Transformations in Namibia and the Question of Southern Angola, 1933-1975’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 47, 1 (2021), pp. 93-125.

B.C. Moore, S. Quinn, W. Lyon, K.F. Herzog, ‘Balancing the Scales: Re-Centring Labour and Labourers in Namibian History’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 47, 1 (2021), pp. 1-16.

R.J. Gordon, J. Swanepoel, B.C. Moore, ‘Complicating Histories of Carnivores in Namibia: Past to Present’, Journal of Namibian Studies 24 (2018), pp. 131-146.