Empire on the Seine: The Policing of North Africans in Paris, 1925-1975

Why are relations between minorities and the police in France so fraught? Stripping away the myth that this tension is a sudden and recent disruption of its universalist republican tradition brought on by the presence of North African immigrants, Amit Prakash locates the origins of contemporary conflicts in race and empire in France's history. In Empire on the Seine, Prakash argues that the métropole and the colony dynamically co-developed a policing regime over the course of the nineteenth...