France's Modernising Mission: Citizenship, Welfare and the Ends of Empire

by Ed Naylor (Editor)

Overview

This volume explores how France’s ‘modernising mission’ unfolded during the post-war period and its reverberations in the decades after empire. In the aftermath of the Second World War, France sought to reinvent its empire by transforming the traditional ‘civilising mission’ into a ‘modernising mission’. Henceforth, French claims to rule would be based on extending citizenship rights and the promise of economic development and welfare within a ‘Greater France’. In the face of rising anti-colonial mobilization and a new international order, redefining the terms that bound colonised peoples and territories to the metropole was a strategic necessity but also a dynamic which Paris struggled to control. The language of reform and equality was seized upon locally to make claims on metropolitan resources and wrest away the political initiative. Intertwined with coercion and violence, the struggle to define what ‘modernisation’ would mean for colonised societies was a key factor in the wider process of decolonisation. Contributions by leading specialists extend geographically from Africa to the Pacific and to metropolitan France itself, examining a range of topics including education policy, colonial knowledge production, rural development and slum clearance. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137551337
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	12/12/2017
Series:	St Antony's Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	258
File size:	933 KB

About the Author

Ed Naylor is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Languages and Area Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He completed his PhD in History at Queen Mary, University of London and held the Deakin fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, before joining the University of Portsmouth in 2014. 
Contributors: Tony Chafer, Françoise de Barros,  Liz Fink, Abdellali Hajjat, Jim House, Neil MacMaster, James McDougall, and Benoît Trépied.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction; Ed Naylor.- Part I) Rethinking Education and Citizenship.-  Chapter 2. Conflicting Modernities: Battles over France’s policy of adapted education in French West Africa;  Tony Chafer.- Chapter 3. Institutional Terra Non Firma: Representative democracy and the chieftaincy in French West Africa; Liz Fink.- Chapter 4. Decolonisation Without Independence? Breaking with the colonial in New Caledonia (1946-1975);            Benoît Trépied.-Part II) Mental Maps and the Territory.- Chapter 5. Rule of Experts? Governing modernisation in late colonial French Africa; James McDougall.- Chapter 6. From Tent to Village regroupement: The Colonial state and social engineering of rural space, 1843 to 1962; Neil MacMaster.- Chapter 7. Shantytowns and Re-housing in Late Colonial Algiers and Casablanca; Jim House.- Part III) Metropolitan Legacies.- Chap

ter 8. Promoting ‘Harmonious Cohabitation’ in the Metropole: The Welfare charity ‘Assistance to Workers From Overseas’ (1950-1975); Ed Naylor.- Chapter 9. Protests Against Shanty-towns in the 1950s and 1960s: Class logics, clientelist relations and ‘colonial redeployments’; Françoise de Barros.- Chapter 10. Colonial Legacies: Housing policy and riot prevention strategies in the Minguettes district of Vénissieux; Abdellali Hajjat.

 

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This outstanding collection of essays makes original interventions in the related fields of French imperial history, the study of decolonisation, and its legacies in contemporary France. Some contributors tease out the contradictions intrinsic to reformist thinking within the authoritarian constraints of colonial governance. Others expose the colonialist thinking that informed the construction and the characterisation of social housing in France’s major cities. Every chapter has important things to say.” (Martin Thomas, Professor of Imperial History, University of Exeter, UK)

Editorial Reviews

This rich collection builds on fruitful conversations in the study of the French empire, presents innovative conceptual tools, and points out promising new terrain to mine. … With its multidisciplinary perspectives, archival rigor, and the conceptual innovation of the essays, this book will be valuable to scholars in fields as diverse as French colonial and postcolonial history, the European welfare state, mass social movements, and housing and education policy.” (Anndal Narayanan, H-France Review, Vol. 18 (197), 2018)

From the Publisher