Anthropology, Colonial Policy and the Decline of French Empire in Africa

Anthropology, Colonial Policy and the Decline of French Empire in Africa
Author: Douglas W. Leonard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2019-12-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786726130

Conceived as both a vehicle to national prestige and as a civilizing mission, the second French colonial empire (1830-1962) challenged soldiers, scholars, and administrators to understand societies radically different from their own. The resultant networks of anthropological inquiry, however, did not have this effect. Rather, they opened pathways to political and intellectual independence framed in the language of social science, and in the process upended the colonial political system and reshaped the nature of human inquiry in France. While still unequal, French colonial rule in Africa revealed the durability and strength of non-European modes of thought. In this influential new study, historian Douglas W. Leonard examines the political and intellectual repercussions of French efforts to understand and to dominate colonial Africa through the use of anthropology. From General Louis Faidherbe in the 1840s to politician Jacques Soustelle and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1950s, these French thinkers sowed the seeds of colonial destruction.

Anthropology, Colonial Policy and the Decline of French Empire in Africa

Anthropology, Colonial Policy and the Decline of French Empire in Africa
Author: Douglas W. Leonard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2022-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350337323

Conceived as both a vehicle to national prestige and as a civilizing mission, the second French colonial empire (1830-1962) challenged soldiers, scholars, and administrators to understand societies radically different from their own. The resultant networks of anthropological inquiry, however, did not have this effect. Rather, they opened pathways to political and intellectual independence framed in the language of social science, and in the process upended the colonial political system and reshaped the nature of human inquiry in France. While still unequal, French colonial rule in Africa revealed the durability and strength of non-European modes of thought. In this influential new study, historian Douglas W. Leonard examines the political and intellectual repercussions of French efforts to understand and to dominate colonial Africa through the use of anthropology. From General Louis Faidherbe in the 1840s to politician Jacques Soustelle and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1950s, these French thinkers sowed the seeds of colonial destruction.

Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa

Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa
Author: Andrew W.M. Smith
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2017-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1911307746

Looking at decolonization in the conditional tense, this volume teases out the complex and uncertain ends of British and French empire in Africa during the period of ‘late colonial shift’ after 1945. Rather than view decolonization as an inevitable process, the contributors together explore the crucial historical moments in which change was negotiated, compromises were made, and debates were staged. Three core themes guide the analysis: development, contingency and entanglement. The chapters consider the ways in which decolonization was governed and moderated by concerns about development and profit. A complementary focus on contingency allows deeper consideration of how colonial powers planned for ‘colonial futures’, and how divergent voices greeted the end of empire. Thinking about entanglements likewise stresses both the connections that existed between the British and French empires in Africa, and those that endured beyond the formal transfer of power.

African History: A Very Short Introduction

African History: A Very Short Introduction
Author: John Parker
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2007-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192802488

Intended for those interested in the African continent and the diversity of human history, this work looks at Africa's past and reflects on the changing ways it has been imagined and represented. It illustrates key themes in modern thinking about Africa's history with a range of historical examples.

Empire Unbound

Empire Unbound
Author: Gavin Murray-Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022
Genre: Africa, North
ISBN: 0192863118

Empire Unbound argues that European empires were not the bounded, stable entities that imperialists imagined. Gavin Murray-Miller demonstrates that the era of 'new imperialism' which arose in the late 19th century fostered connections and synergies between regional powers that influenced the trajectories of imperial states in fundamental ways.

The End of Empires and a World Remade

The End of Empires and a World Remade
Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 672
Release: 2024-03-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691190925

A capacious history of decolonization, from the decline of empires to the era of globalization Empires, until recently, were everywhere. They shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of empire came a fundamental reorganization of our world. Decolonization unfolded across territories as well as within them. Its struggles became internationalized and transnational, as much global campaigns of moral disarmament against colonial injustice as local contests of arms. In this expansive history, Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration. The End of Empires and a World Remade shows how profoundly decolonization shaped the process of globalization in the wake of empire collapse. In the second half of the twentieth century, decolonization catalyzed new international coalitions; it triggered partitions and wars; and it reshaped North-South dynamics. Globalization promised the decolonized greater access to essential resources, to wider networks of influence, and to worldwide audiences, but its neoliberal variant has reinforced economic inequalities and imperial forms of political and cultural influences. In surveying these two codependent histories across the world, from Latin America to Asia, Thomas explains why the deck was so heavily stacked against newly independent nations. Decolonization stands alongside the great world wars as the most transformative event of twentieth-century history. In The End of Empires and a World Remade, Thomas offers a masterful analysis of the greatest process of state-making (and empire-unmaking) in modern history.

Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures - Continental Europe and its Empires

Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures - Continental Europe and its Empires
Author: Prem Poddar
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 847
Release: 2011-09-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748650970

The first reference work to provide an integrated and authoritative body of information about the political, cultural and economic contexts of postcolonial literatures that have their provenance in the major European Empires of Belgium, Denmark, France, G

The French Colonial Mind: Violence, military encounters and colonialism

The French Colonial Mind: Violence, military encounters and colonialism
Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2011-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0803220944

Violence was prominent in France?s conquest of a colonial empire, and the use of force was integral to its control and regulation of colonial territories. What, if anything, made such violence distinctly colonial? And how did its practitioners justify or explain it? These are issues at the heart of The French Colonial Mind: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism. The second of two linked volumes, this book brings together prominent scholars of French colonial history to explore the many ways in which brutality and killing became central to the French experience and management of empire. Sometimes concealed or denied, at other times highly publicized and even celebrated, French violence was so widespread that it was in some ways constitutive of colonial identity. Yet such violence was also destructive: destabilizing for its practitioners and lethal or otherwise devastating for its victims. The manifestations of violence in the minds and actions of imperialists are investigated here in essays that move from the conquest of Algeria in the 1830s to the disintegration of France?s empire after World War II. The authors engage a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from the violence of first colonial encounters to conflicts of decolonization. Each considers not only the forms and extent of colonial violence but also its dire effects on perpetrators and victims. Together, their essays provide the clearest picture yet of the workings of violence in French imperialist thought.

Policing the empire

Policing the empire
Author: David Anderson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2017-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 152612369X

From the Victorian period to the present, images of the policeman have played a prominent role in the literature of empire, shaping popular perceptions of colonial policing. This book covers and compares the different ways and means that were employed in policing policies from 1830 to 1940. Countries covered range from Ireland, Australia, Africa and India to New Zealand and the Caribbean. As patterns of authority, of accountability and of consent, control and coercion evolved in each colony the general trend was towards a greater concentration of police time upon crime. The most important aspect of imperial linkage in colonial policing was the movement of personnel from one colony to another. To evaluate the precise role of the 'Irish model' in colonial police forces is at present probably beyond the powers of any one scholar. Policing in Queensland played a vital role in the construction of the colonial social order. In 1886 the constabulary was split by legislation into the New Zealand Police Force and the standing army or Permanent Militia. The nature of the British influence in the Klondike gold rush may be seen both in the policy of the government and in the actions of the men sent to enforce it. The book also overviews the role of policing in guarding the Gold Coast, police support in 1954 Sudan, Orange River Colony, Colonial Mombasa and Kenya, as well as and nineteenth-century rural India.