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This chapter looks at the transformation of the French Empire to the French Union. The French Union would not acquire a juridical basis until the finalization of the new constitution in October 1946 and the meaning of the declarations about citizenship and federation were far from clear or generally accepted. However, a new name for empire had been introduced, the formula of federation had been invoked, and the possibility of an inclusive citizenship had been put on the table. Later, events in Indochina and Algeria would shape the debate over extending citizenship to Africans, but in contradictory ways. The conflicts led some to conclude that French control had to be more rigorous and others to emphasize the need to make overseas subjects feel included in an imperial community.

In recent years, historians have become increasingly drawn to consider what were once thought of as national problems in a global context. This chapter is inspired by that approach and seeks to analyse the interaction between the crisis in mainland France and that being experienced by the French colonies in India. The crisis in India directly affected French imperial and commercial aspirations: the circumstances on the subcontinent show how the relationship between the crises around the world overlapped and affected each other, and not necessarily in a single direction emanating from Europe. India was one of the absolute monarchy's greatest lost opportunities for the triumphant assertion of imperial power and for the economic and fiscal rewards which empire and trade might have brought.

This afterword compares and contrasts both the positions of missionaries within the French and British empires, as well as the way historians have conceptualized the relationships between Catholic and Protestant missions and the two imperial states. With reference to a number of the chapters in this collection, the article reflects on the mutual suspicion and anxiety felt by missionaries and colonial officials that permeated both French and British empires.

This introductory chapter examines the unique ways the French empire in the Pacific developed historically in the 19th century. It proposes three basic arguments. First, that the French Oceanic empire was not thought of as a bounded territory, but rather as a web or grid of strategic locations called “points d'appui,” and that this allowed an “empire” to develop even where there were no actual colonies. Second, that the French Pacific empire depended upon an idea of romance, often contrasted with British “indirect rule” which became manifested in strong sentiments of “love of country” imposed upon and negotiated by local peoples. Third, that connected cases can be drawn to illustrate a “French Pacific” from histories that are often studied separately, for example Asia (Japan, Indochina), Polynesia (Tahiti), Melanesia (New Caledonia), Central America (Panama), Europe (France).

This chapter discusses that no corner of the French empire offers a better example of how Catholic missionaries could see republican colonizers as Johnnies-come-lately than Indochina. It explains that historians of French Indochina portrayed missionaries as crucial facilitators of colonial expansion. It notes that debates over Catholic influence heralded significant changes in both long-held missionary and republican attitudes and practices. It discusses past and present religious violence and French colonialism. It also tells of the bishops, officials, and the uncertain history of missionary commitment. It examines the attitudes of the missionaries in one remote Catholic outpost. It also mentions some of the controversies wherein the Catholic missionaries were involved, but were then later cleared from those accusations.

Ideas of the French present were challenged and reframed through colonial discourse. This posed challenging new questions about whose present was being promoted by French political culture; where that present was located; and who should be governed by it. Drawing in part on Johannes Fabian’s critique of anthropology, this essay sees imperialism as a classic test for scholars concerned with understanding how different temporalities may coexist and even clash. Because, for older generations of anthropologists, the observer was naturally assumed to inhabit a different time, there exists a question at the heart of any discussion about the clashing of temporalities within imperial relationships that points to the plurality of time and the constant clash of perspective through different experiences of the present. Colonial administrators often remarked on the differing role of history in the present-times of different parts of the French Empire. France’s civilising mission was upset, on a daily basis, by the difference in present experience as it was reflected in social patterns and working habits. Administrators found that in practice, the path to the European present was full of detours. Ultimately, for leading politicians and colonial administrators, the French Empire remained a symbol of the future destiny of modern French progress; yet across the central swathe of political opinion from which these politicians came, there remained a belief in understanding and administering the colonial present, closer to home and closer to the ‘humanity’ which they believed the Empire to be promoting.

This chapter is divided into three main sections. Firstly, it embraces emergence of a vast American determination to reform the world so as to eliminate the roots of Europe's ability to b ring war and revolution to it. The vision, developed in acts such as Lend Lease and conferences such as Bretton Woods, was based on three key principles: multilateral trade liberalization, reformed collective security, raising living standards everywhere. These ideas of the postwar universe were far more important to Roosevelt than the in's and out's of his relations with Stalin, Churchill, de Gaulle or whoever, and ran through much of the vast American popular debate on the future role of the US in the world. Secondly, the chapter looks at response of the British and French leadership in particular to the emergence of this design. The British understood rightly that it contained a mortal threat to the British Empire; the other colonial powers, including the Dutch, soon fought it too. There was much disdain for American naivety, and at the same time fear of the extreme ruthlessness the Americans brought to dealings over markets, currencies, raw materials, civil aviation etc. Thirdly the chapter considers speculation of European intellectuals on the world after the war and America's possible place in it. In general these people wholly underestimated the new American will to power, and ignored its contents, all agreeing that the age of free enterprise capitalism was finished in any case, and collectivisms of various types would take over. The exile component in America and elsewhere poured scorn on these ideas, but they dominated resistance and anti-fascist movements everywhere. One thing the Europeans all agreed on was that the popular masses would never go back to the miseries of the pre-war era, and that expectations for a better life had risen, not least because America had shown the way.

This chapter highlights the extent of French economic success in the mid-nineteenth century, providing a deeper understanding of the sources of French imperial expansion. The French empire of taste was not a purely capitalistic enterprise. It pursued profit, but also power and prestige. The chapter explores the cultural, political, and economic origins of French specialization in the provision of luxury and semi-luxury commodities, in order to understand how it helped France regain imperial status after 1815. By reconciling economic modernity with the preservation of firm hierarchies, French conspicuous commodities exercised a special kind of fascination on foreign elites and facilitated collaboration with other imperial and indigenous powers. The act of turning economic gains into global political advantages was especially overt during the Second Napoleonic Empire, and the latter's downfall contributed to the eventual decline of the empire of taste after 1870.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the French imperial empire in the nineteenth century. France after Napoleon did not renounce empire. Instead, it became less interested in formal conquest and experimented with novel techniques of imperial domination. French proponents of informal empire usually looked back on the 1789 Revolution with a mixture of disillusion and dismay, while its collaborators outside France were mostly conservatives bent on reconciling economic modernization with the defence of their privileges. This informal civilizing mission was, in many respects, counter-revolutionary. Counter-revolutionary commitment to capitalism went hand in hand with a collaborative style of imperialism. Ultimately, France's largely informal empire made a significant contribution to nineteenth-century globalization, even if it employed subtler mechanisms of coercion and collaboration than the more formal British Empire ever did.

This chapter discusses the role of the travelogue, both as a locus for the safely bound exotic Other, and as the potential conduit for hybrid constructions of identity. It introduces the central concept of vagabondage, the search for identity through motion in women’s travel writing from Olympe Audouard and Isabella Bird to Isabelle Eberhardt. The chapter establishes a composite basis of gender and postcolonial theory, creating a nuanced critique of Edward Said and Judith Butler. It gives a historical overview of the British and French colonial empires from 1850–1950 and their representations in popular culture. It also analyses the persistent structures of Orientalism and their impact on European gender roles and travel writing. A brief biography of the main women travel writers discussed and an outline of following chapters are also given.

Chapter 4 begins in 1878 with American intercessions on behalf of Moroccan Jews during two international conferences, the Madrid Conference of 1880 and the Algeciras Conference of 1906. At the Madrid Conference, these discussions centered on maintaining the protégé system, which many believed was essential in protecting Moroccan Jews from oppression. At the Algeciras Conference, American elites explicitly endorsed the extension of French empire to Morocco. These actions were driven by American Jewish organizations such as the Board of Delegates of American Israelites and later, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, with the aid of prominent Jewish leaders such as Jacob Schiff. But such activism was facilitated by diplomatic and political elites, including Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, and Felix Mathews, who had their own personal and diplomatic interests for participating in these conferences.

The role of Polynesia in the French Empire was more strategic than economic, but its sensitive location was of great interest. Victor Segalen's own first major literary work, Les Immémoriaux, has been recognized as one of the only early twentieth-century attempts to analyse Tahitian difference and to strive towards textual recreation of that very difference. For Segalen, the aesthetic attraction of exoticism is in the struggle to maintain difference rather than in the acceptance of the inevitability of its decline. Segalen's attitude to the role of Empire in the transformation of Polynesian culture and society is muted not only by its displacement into the context of early nineteenth-century evangelism, but also by the author's tendency to consider the processes of colonialism in the wider context of Westernization. The narrative of Les Immémoriaux is both obviously prescriptive and latently normative, suggesting a specifically Maori omniscience without any claims to universality.

This chapter illustrates the manner in which British explorers, promoters, and officials sought ways to overcome the physical and diplomatic barriers to British Pacific navigation. French officials observed these British efforts and contemplated their implications. The question raised was how the French Empire would respond to the prospect of its leading rival's obtaining the South Sea access that the Utrecht settlement and North America's obstinate impermeability had so far denied to France. One response was writing. French evaluations of British South Sea and North American probes appear in the letters and memoirs circulating among mid-eighteenth-century French ministers, ambassadors, and foreign ministry officials, and the availability of these papers allows analysis of the geostrategic considerations driving French diplomats between the two great mid-eighteenth-century European wars.

This chapter deals with the Anglo-French relationship and the British recognition of the French Empire and with it Louis Napoleon's new title of Napoleon III. It discusses the most important foreign policy question, which was how Britain should respond to the anticipated declaration of a new French Empire. Further, it explores the memorandum, which was sent to Austria, Russia and Prussia in November 1852. It had three key points; all of them leading to rejection of the President Louis Napoleon's claim that he had a hereditary right to the imperial throne. This memorandum was laid on the principle of co-operation between the great powers. It raises a discussion on how Aberdeen's ministry was responsible for the greatest failure of nineteenth-century foreign policy.

This chapter explores France’s role in the First World War by keeping “La plus grande France” (or “Greater France,” as the combined entity of the nation and its overseas possessions was known) in focus. n keeping with the volume’s aim to widen the story of the war beyond the Western Front and Europe, the essay examines both the ways the war affected France’s colonies, reaching into the lives and spaces of empire in profound ways, and the contributions of the colonies to the war effort, providing men and other resources to help France prosecute the war on the Western Front and beyond. The participation of more than 500,000 non-European colonial subjects as soldiers, and another 200,000 as workers, in the war effort in Europe is an important and vivid part of this story, but this chapter will also detail the economic and financial contributions of the colonies. These were significant, and had important effects on the war, metropolitan France, and the colonies themselves. Greater France’s war story is critical to an understanding of the Great War as a whole not only because the decisive fighting on the Western Front occurred on French soil, but also because the huge extent of the French colonial empire at the time—then the world’s second largest and stretching from North and West Africa, to Madagascar, Indochina, the Pacific, and the Caribbean — helped ensure that the war was truly global.

The introduction provides a general overview of the history of colonial development policies and practices in Sub-Saharan Africa from the 1890s through to the end of empires in the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses primarily on the British and French colonial empires, but attention is also given to Belgian and Portuguese colonial Africa. The initial section explores what is meant by the term “development”. The heart of the essay focuses on a historical narrative of colonial development ideologies and practices in Africa, beginning with the French civilising mission in the late 19^th century and Joseph Chamberlain's doctrine of constructive imperialism. The interwar period is described as a transitionary phase during which the classic ideologies of La mis en valuer and the “dual mandate” reach their height. In the wake of the Depression of the 1930s, colonial development in British and French Africa begins a new departure as the need for metropolitan funding and direction becomes more apparent. By the 1940s, both colonial powers established new imperial assistance programmes and administrative structures aimed at the social and economic development of their African colonies. This sets the stage for the final phase of colonial development in Africa following the Second World War, what has been termed the “second colonial occupation”.

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (1808–73), nephew of Napoleon I, came to power in 1851 after a coup d’étatreplacing the short-lived Second Republic (1848–51). His eighteen-year reign (1852–70) provided a respite to a series of internal political turmoil and changes in the French regime that had slowed France’s economic development. Under his leadership, economic prosperity and modernisation were promoted as a means to compete with France’s newly industrialised neighbours, while a desire to emulate past colonial glories and his determination to restore France to its rightful place in the world led to a significant overseas expansion that extended across Africa, Asia, the Americas and the South Pacific. The new colonial acquisitions also included a programme of colonial embellishment modelled on the modernisation of Paris that created proud French colonial cities reflecting personal prestige and national grandeur.