“Enacting Exception: Rights and Citizenship in French Algeria”
Osama Abi-Mershed
The presentation will focus on the early legal instruments and institutional mechanisms by which colonial authorities sought to delimit the rights of citizenship in French Algeria. Specifically, it will examine colonial legislation in the 1850s-1860s with regard to education, property rights, and civil status, and illustrate the rules of exception by which individual and communal rights were enacted into the broader categories of “subject” and “citizen”. Finally, the presentation will consider briefly the relevance of such colonial antecedents for contemporary debates on immigration, integration, and national identity in France. (n.b.: not sure I’ll have time for this last part, but it can be an interesting point for general discussion.)
“From Objective Sociology to Action: Charles Le Coeur’s Utopian Colonialism in the Protectorate of Morocco (1928-1944)”
Alice Conklin
Largely forgotten today, Charles Le Coeur (1903-1944) was a talented French teacher, ethnologist and Durkheimian sociologist who worked for sixteen years in the Protectorate of Morocco designed by Marshal Lyautey. Perhaps Marcel Mauss’s favorite student, Le Coeur not only observed colonialism’s effects scientifically, but supported Lyautey’s modernizing colonial project while also mobilizing against colonial racism. Among other initiatives, Le Coeur encouraged his French and Muslim students to write short ethnographies of each other and fought for interethnic Scouting in Morocco; in 1943 he chose to join the Free French and died fighting in Italy. This paper seeks to make sense of Le Coeur’s complex trajectory by considering the historical circumstances that shaped his oeuvre, in particular the global crisis of the 1930s. In this fraught context, Le Coeur’s defense of Lyautey, his concern with moving from thought to action, and his faith in empire’s ability to reform itself more generally, becomes more understandable. As George Steinmetz, Helen Tilley and I have recently argued, scholars have ignored as tainted much of the science that was produced under the conditions of imperial rule. Yet the messy truth is that « good science » and an oppressive colonial system were not mutually exclusive. In this sense Le Coeur’s engaged scholarship on the challenging question of how Muslims, Christians and Jews could live together harmoniously while preserving their differences – and what the social scientist’s proper role in fostering such understanding might be while remaining objective – is worth revisiting.
“The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s in its Imperial Context”
James Gelvin
This paper will look at the so-called human rights revolution of the 1970s within the context of the American battle against the Third World, particularly as a strategy for undermining the post-colonial state in the Middle East and elsewhere and Third World demands for a New International Economic Order.
“The Limits of Indirect Rule: Internal Colonialism, Non-State Revenue and Mounting Nationalism in Corsica”
Michael Hechter
Indirect rule is an important institution of governance in large and multicultural polities. Recent studies have shown how it can contain nationalism and why governments adopt it to manage some of their sub-state regions. This paper explores the limits of indirect rule; that is, it develops and tests a theory specifying the conditions under which indirect rule falls apart. We suggest that the efficacy of indirect rule depends upon the principal’s monopoly over the regional agent’s revenue. Since economic dependence enables peripheral agents to distribute both public and clientelistic goods to local subjects, this imbues the agent’s power with legitimacy and underpins the principal’s prerogative to rule indirectly. This quells nationalist fervor and the demand for more regional autonomy. However, when alternative sources of revenue arise, new principals and new agents emerge. This weakens the indirect ruler’s legitimacy, which in turn creates an opportunity for nationalist parties to gain political ground. We illustrate and examine our theory using municipal-level quantitative data and field research from Corsica.
“Setting Up the Nation State for Failure: Colonialism, Missionaries, and Ethnic Violence”
Matthew Lange
This paper recognizes that colonialism and missionaries helped to bring the nation-state model to large parts of the world. At the same time, it describes how both commonly intensified ethnic divisions and competition before political elites pursued the nation-state model. This particular sequence made the nation-state model untenable in several regions and contributed to ethnic violence, suggesting that the porters of the nation-state contributed to its failure. To make these claims, the paper draws on a variety of cases, highlighting mechanisms and describing the contexts in which colonialism and missionaries were most likely to have these effects.
“Direct and Indirect Rule in European Empires”
Adria Lawrence
When the British and French established formal empire in Africa, they drew on two available approaches to colonial governance: direct and indirect rule. Direct rule was explicitly interventionist: it defended and justified colonial rule as a “civilizing” project that would modernize and transform colonial territories; the conquering state itself provided the model to be emulated. Accordingly, colonial rulers sought to implement changes in a variety of domains – transportation, housing, education, law, health, citizenship, and religion. In contrast, proponents of indirect rule framed the colonial project in preservationist terms. They advocated avoiding intervention in local societies, portraying the imperial project as one that would protect culture, tradition, and existing structures of authority. Both ideologies were paternalistic, reflecting a belief in European superiority, but they had very different implications for how the colonies would be governed, who would count as a leader, and where the boundaries of the political community would be drawn. This paper examines how the concepts of direct and indirect rule have been defined and measured in the social science literature. It advocates investigating what these approaches meant in practice, rather than attending primarily to colonial aims and justifications. The paper provides some preliminary arguments against claims that indirect rule was implemented because it was both cheaper and more acceptable to local populations, proposing instead further investigation into the coercive and legal consequences of varying forms of colonial governance.
“Selective States: Legibility and Legitimacy in Southeast Asia’s Colonial Opium Registries”
Dan Slater and Diana Kim
As a general principle, states seek to attain “legibility” over the populations they govern by imposing a simplifying grid over society through practices of administrative standardization. Yet a growing body of literature has established that states vary greatly, along multiple dimensions, in how consistently they seek to construct such standardizing grids. Attaining legibility is a costly task that some states undertake while others opt against. Furthermore, even states that eagerly seek legibility tend to do so over some groups more than others, in some domains of activity more than others, and at some times more than others. What explains such selective behavior? When do states seek legibility and when do they not?
This paper begins to locate the answer to this puzzle by stressing that states seek not only legibility, but legitimacy. States are more likely to extend direct forms of administrative rule when they face legitimacy challenges from the diverse array of influential elites whose backing they most prize. States also vary in their practices of legibility seeking depending on their shifting need to shore up political support and moral credibility with this audience of elites. Influential theories of comparative state formation focus their attentions on efficient revenue extraction or social control, assuming that states are driven to “arrange the population in ways that simplif[y] the classic functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.” By contrast, we argue that states want not only to simplify governance, but to justify it as well. At the end of the day, states seek esteem as well as wealth and social control. Our account emphasizes the processes through which a state’s need to defend and substantiate official claims to rightful rule generate a diverse range of appetites and aversions toward legibility.
“From Sétif to Moramanga: Identifying Insurgents and Ascribing Guilt in the French Colonial Post-War”
Martin Thomas, University of Exeter
Between 1945 and 1948 localized insurgency in three regions of the French colonial empire triggered extreme counter-violence by state security forces. Banned since 1939, Algeria’s foremost nationalist movement, the Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA) orchestrated protests in early May 1945 to disrupt French celebrations of the end of war in Europe. In the colony’s North East these demonstrations were the prelude to an organized uprising. White settlers, targeted in the initial violence, turned to vigilantism, joining French gendarmerie and army units in suppressing this regional rebellion. Violence actors on both sides drew on the vernacular terminology, the symbolic accoutrements, and the paramilitary methods of resistance when organizing their activities and explaining them to local and transnational audiences. Three months later, in French Indochina, the Vietnamese Communist party seized power in Hanoi. Reconfigured as a clandestine resistance movement during the wartime years of Japanese occupation, Vietnam’s Stalinists chose a universalist language of citizens’ rights and legitimate self-defence against foreign oppression to explain their political choices and revolutionary violence. In April 1947 the leaders of Madagascar’s self-proclaimed ‘national movement’ also rebelled against French colonial rule. In this instance, the covert methods of resistance organization came blended with the idealism of African cultural renewal, or Négritude. The prevalence of resistance tropes and resistance practices in all three cases presented unique dilemmas to the resurgent republican democracy in post-Liberation France. Prominent figures in government, colonial administration and the security forces owed their post-war primacy to personal or institutional connections with French resistance movements, whether at home or within the empire. How, then, would they respond to outbreaks of anti-colonial violence that appropriated the claims to legitimacy and the associational forms of popular resistance? Reflecting on this upsurge in anti-colonial insurgency, this paper explores critical transitions in colonial state violence in the French colonial postwar.
“Separate Electorates and Political Mobilization in British India”
Maya Tudor
In brief, the colonial decision to grant ‘separate electorates’ to Muslims in British India in 1909 ensured that only Muslims could vote for reserved Muslim seats, thereby incentivizing Muslim communities in British India to forgo political organization and to defaulting to class and religious hierarchies to represent communal interests in all-India politics. By contrast, the granting of reserved seats but not separate electorates for lower Hindu castes in 1932 ensured that such groups were still incentivized to mobilize and organize. The long-term effects of these institutional tweaks have continued to reverberate throughout modern-day South Asia.
“Rules of Colonial Difference”
Jonathan Wyrtzen and Nicholas Hoover-Wilson
A central concept in the study of modern colonialism is the “rule of colonial difference”–the strategy used by some officials to claim a cultural or social “difference” essential to the populations they govern. In this paper, we suggest that while this strategy was historically common to many political formations, at the turn of the 19th century it began to grow into a distinctly colonial (as opposed to state) strategy. Drawing examples from the British presence in India between 1757 and 1858 and French colonialism in Algeria between 1830 and 1870, we further suggest that this strategy became predominant because mid-level officials sought to legitimate themselves to newly-attentive metropolitan audiences.