This work analyses the transition to majority rule in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa, not as a simplistic transformation of a colony into a nation, but as a process, spanning a decade and a half, in which numerous possibilities for Africa's future were debated by French and Africans alike. In this richly detailed book, Frederick Cooper explores overlapping and often conflicting visions of citizenship and sovereignty, and, in so doing, sheds new light on nationalism and the end of French rule on the African continent.

The first two chapters address how Africans became part of the debates that took place in the latter stages of the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath about the position of empire in a reformed and reconfigured, yet still fragile, French Republic. Chapter 1 explores how and why, as efforts were made to redefine the relationship between metropole and colony, the idea of a federation became part of the vocabulary in both France and Africa. ‘Turning France into something other than the empire it had been’ (p. 43) was, for the French, a means of rebuilding the nation after the defeats and disappointments of the Second World War, and restoring the French mission civilisatrice. For Africans, it formed part of a wider campaign to attain equality with metropolitan France, also evident in African mobilization around the question of female suffrage in the Four Communes and the strikes by workers from across French West Africa in 1945–46. Chapter 2 looks in great depth at the role played by Africans in the negotiations for a new French constitution, which took place in Paris in late 1945 and 1946. It reveals that, in spite of their small number, Africans successfully voiced and defended their interpretations of citizenship, bringing about a new phase in the struggle for equality between Africa and France.

The next two chapters explore how, once ‘the genie of citizenship was out of the bottle’ (p. 106), the concept was defined and demanded by Africans in the years between 1946 and 1956, as well as the response from the French colonial administration. Chapter 3 examines the political and ideological limitations placed on citizenship by the institutions of the Fourth Republic and subsequent African efforts to claim equality within the legislative framework of the French Union. Africans made use of the voice accorded to them by the constitution throughout this period (p. 164), voting frequently and in growing numbers (p. 146), and calling repeatedly for the single college, universal suffrage and real power for territorial assemblies (p. 147). Chapter 4 analyses African-led strategies on the ground to attain equality with France. These included attempts by the newly established Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) to make political and social citizenship ‘a meaningful construct across French Africa’ (p. 167), and the ways in which the labour movement cooperated with parliamentarians in Paris to improve workers' rights, a process described by Cooper as ‘social citizenship in action’ (p. 185). Consideration is also given to new notions of sovereignty voiced by African intellectuals, with calls for connections with France, and with Europe more widely, to be retained within a reformed federal structure in which Africa was the central component (pp. 202–10).

Enthusiasm for federalism in both Africa and France persisted, albeit in varying forms, even as the empire was territorialized under the loi-cadre (framework law) of 1956 (Chapter 5) and the constitution was rewritten in 1958 (Chapter 6), and following the decision of all Francophone African territories, with the exception of Guinea, to become members of a ‘multinational’ (p. 327) French community in late 1958 (Chapter 7). As Chapter 8 demonstrates, it was only after the collapse of the short-lived Mali Federation in August 1960 that ‘the model of multilayered sovereignty – territorial, federal, Community – ceased to be an option’ (p. 373) in French West and Equatorial Africa. Instead, empire was replaced by a system of ‘independent, sovereign, internationally recognized political units' (p. 428), marking the beginning of new post-independence struggles to create nationalities and citizenships among people who defined themselves first and foremost by their links to France. This was not the decolonization that either France or its former colonies had envisaged (p. 429).

Throughout this impressive work, discussion is concentrated not on a duel between ‘a stubborn French colonialism’ on the one hand, and ‘a strident African nationalism’ on the other, but on the debates taking place in the gaps ‘in between’ (p. 277), particularly concerning federalism in various forms. In this space, for French and Africans alike, sovereignty was ‘complex, divisible and transformable’ (p. 38), with a meaning that shifted over time and only very belatedly became linked to the idea of independent nation states. There was not just one ‘imaginable possibility’ after empire (p. 327) but many ‘alternative pathways' (p. 434). Thus, Cooper's book not only adds to our understanding of the end of empire in French Africa; it also challenges all historians of decolonization to rethink the process by which European colonialism collapsed in the twentieth century, focusing not on the ultimate outcome but on the multiple, connected and competing plans for Africa's future that were voiced by Northern and Southern actors as an alternative to both colonial empires and nation states. As such, this book is an important and innovative contribution to the historiography on decolonization.