Producing the Imperial Periphery

A useful place to begin considering the production and transformation of different kinds of imperial space is the volume of essays edited by Hélène Blais, Florence Deprest and Pierre Singaravélou published in French as Territories impériaux in 2011 and now translated into English as How Empires Make Territory. This collective work invites historians of empire, firstly, to reflect upon who (often literally) draws the line separating one set of political and social relationships from another and on what basis. Secondly, it urges all historians to give careful consideration to where and how we focus our attention, geographically speaking, once we have understood the colonial construction of geographical knowledge and consequent production of territory. The translation of this significant contribution to historical colonial geography, appearing as it does alongside a spate of works on ‘overseas France’, may herald a new readiness on the part of Francophone and Anglophone historians to give serious historical consideration to geographical areas, sites and actors beyond the more frequently explored terrain of North and West Africa.

Two new works on specific colonies – Eric Jennings’s Perspectives on French Colonial Madagascar and Christopher Church’s Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean – exemplify this pattern. Madagascar, conquered by the French in 1895, and the French Antilles, exploited primarily for sugar and colonised by the French since the seventeenth century, occupied different positions in the French imperial system. Jennings and Church shed new light on how these respective positions were imagined and constructed, and how they evolved. Both authors pay close attention to how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French imperial perceptions of particular places led to powerful fantasies and projections, which impacted both upon these places and on colonialists themselves. Both, moreover, address tensions which emerged as a result of these understandings and projections. Jennings, for instance, tackles the confusion which arose among French colonial observers and later historians because of Madagascar’s neither strictly African nor exactly Asian geography, while Church addresses the tension between perceived geographical and racial differences of the Antilles from France and their political familiarity. Both works pay attention to environment and climate, but each represents a distinct historical approach to understanding and incorporating these themes. Whereas for Church these are ever present as principal actors in Antillean history, Jennings focuses mostly on French schemes intended to apprehend and master them.

When historians have written about Madagascar in recent times, this has most often been to consider it as one node amid a network, with the focus being on colonial ideas and processes. This is the approach adopted in Gwendolyn Wright’s work on architecture and urbanism in Indochina, Madagascar and Morocco (which inspired Jennings’s own work on the Vichy era in Indochina, Madagascar and Guadeloupe).Footnote ¹⁵ Jennings’s new work represents an effort to de-provincialise Madagascar both by exploring it ‘on its own terms’ and by incorporating it into a more comparative view on colonial systems and ‘global configurations’ (6). As the introduction modestly explains, this is a ‘state-of-the-field’ work. By indicating how uncharted the social, political, medical and cultural history of the colonial period actually is – from the first annexations in 1841 to the final relinquishing of power in 1960 – and addressing aspects of this history in a ‘schematic’ fashion, it aims to open the way towards a more fully developed field of study.

Modesty notwithstanding, this clear and logically ordered book tells an engaging set of tales with panache. The careful, delimited and localised analysis of French colonial sources from Madagascar and France allows the work to complement the current move towards transcultural, multilingual perspectives on the wider Indian Ocean area.Footnote ¹⁶ It also presents specific challenges to received historiographical wisdom. Histories of Madagascar written in English have tended to end with the French conquest of 1895, handing it over to the attentions of anthropologists and only occasionally reclaiming it at the time of the 1947 nationalist uprising. Indeed, some have contended that Madagascar’s colonial period was only sixty years long and therefore a relatively brief interlude in the island’s history.Footnote ¹⁷ In fact, Jennings replies, it was crucial in all sorts of ways, primarily to do with power relations and identity formation. The chronological boundaries of the colonial era are in any case not so stable, he argues, given the island incursions prior to 1895 and the continued presence of French institutions (the Pasteur Institute being a notable example) well beyond formal independence in June 1960.

Nor was Madagascar’s colonial experience altogether unique or exceptional. Rather, it was shaped by precedents, influences and policies developed and implemented in other colonies. The island is often overlooked by historians of both the colonial and postcolonial eras, but it played an integral role in the larger, shifting entity that was the French empire.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, one in seven French colonial losses during the First World War was Malagasy, a figure that provides a corrective to the popular representation of French colonial troops as either Algerian spahis or tirailleurs senegalais.Footnote ¹⁹ That said, it is clear that invented traditions and ‘plural meanings’ of sites, colonial or otherwise, are not definable exclusively in terms of their imperial production. Rather, they endure and take new shapes according to the social dynamics of their particular locality. The book’s later chapters illuminate ways in which Madagascar is not merely a product of its colonial history, as they discuss the choice to use an important precolonial site for a war memorial and trace contested interpretations of apparently ancient rock inscriptions.Footnote ²⁰

Christopher Church’s Paradise Destroyed also makes an impressive intellectual contribution while filling some glaring historiographical gaps in French-Caribbean history: most notably when it comes to understanding how successive disasters were both related to one another and inseparable from the colonial contexts in which they occurred. To some extent, it follows the path paved by Laurent Dubois, whose work on the role of catastrophe in Haitian history brought environmental perspectives to the colonial and political history of the Francophone and Creolophone Caribbean.Footnote ²¹ Drawing on archival research in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Aix-en-Provence and Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, Church presents a series of case studies in environmental catastrophe in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Antilles, analysing the effects of the relationship between human activity, geography and political conflict each time. The central argument is that a foundational tension has characterised the France–Antilles relationship: between, on the one hand, the ‘political familiarity’ of the Antilles – with its ‘black Jacobins’, bourgeois republicans and striking workers versus an anti-republican, conservative financier class – and on the other hand, the ‘environmental distinction’ from France perceived by outsiders due to the Antilles’s tropical climate and landscape. Church exposes a second, related tension by analysing French responses to catastrophe, some of which demonstrated recognition of Antilleans as fellow French citizens whilst others focused entirely on economic recovery of this extraction colony at the expense of human lives.

The ‘deadliest natural event in the Western Hemisphere in recent history’ occurred in Martinique in May 1902 when the Mont Pelée volcano erupted, killing at least 30,000 people, displacing over 20,000 others and destroying the city of Saint-Pierre along with much of the northern part of the island.Footnote ²² This event, however, represents the climax rather than the starting point of Church’s narrative. This is not simply a book about a disastrous volcanic event but also about its eruption into a context of civil unrest, political intrigue, the ongoing decline of the cane sugar industry that the Antilles had been built on and a number of smaller catastrophes over the course of the preceding three decades. French responses to these events varied according to how recognisably ‘French’ the victims were presumed to be: for instance, racism played a large part in orienting the recognition of victimhood and distribution of aid to Mont Pelée survivors. Responses were also shaped by the political priorities and identities of donors, and Church develops a fascinating discussion of the politics and economics of humanitarian supply and demand. Interestingly, the most generous supporters were found not in Paris, nor in the port cities having most contact with the Antilles, but in Lorraine, which had been subject to a strong campaign of ‘republicanisation’ following the Franco-Prussian war.Footnote ²³ Third Republic France, we are reminded, was interconnected in sometimes surprising ways, even – perhaps especially – between its peripheries, both in mainland Europe and in the colonies.

Church concludes that the Caribbean environment had, by the turn of the twentieth century, become synonymous with death and destruction in the colonial imagination. Administrators consequently sensed a need to preserve French civilisation against a hostile environment, something which sat uneasily with a republican ‘fantasy of assimilation’ in the so-called ‘old colonies’ (a term used to denote those conquered under the ancien régime). Natural disasters and French responses to them exposed racial and social tensions left unresolved by Antilleans’ accession to a restricted form of citizenship in 1848.Footnote ²⁴ They also exacerbated economic decline as government preference in the sugar industry shifted from Caribbean cane to metropolitan beet. French officials, unable to discriminate on openly racial grounds against Antillean fellow citizens, instead practiced forms of financially and economically ‘reasoned’ discrimination. The legacy for Antilleans was – and arguably remains – an ambiguous form of citizenship, under which the state sometimes allowed demands to be made on it, but at other times invoked images of barbarism, criminality and colonial disorder.Footnote ²⁵

The afterlife of the events and themes that Church is concerned with can be traced through the First and Second World Wars to the consolidation of Antilleans’ French citizenship in 1946 via the law turning the ‘old colonies’ of Martinique, Guadeloupe, La Réunion and Guyane into ‘departments’ of France. Although ‘departmentalization’, as Nick Nesbitt argues, can be viewed in terms of ‘decolonial’ logic rather than only in terms of colonial ‘assimilation’, it by no means marked a break with older imperial practices.Footnote ²⁶ In an excellent new book on the post-war French Caribbean, Kristen Stromberg Childers demonstrates how Martiniquans and Guadeloupians attempted – with mixed results – to compel the Republic to fulfil the promise of equality that departmentalisation had seemed to represent. In doing so, she addresses the economic and geopolitical realities of integrating post-slavery, monoculture based economies and societies of the Caribbean Americas – located in the US sphere of influence during the Cold War – into the modernising French Republic.Footnote ²⁷

Where the enduring republican commitment of people in Martinique, Guadeloupe and other places distant from the ‘Hexagon’ can seem surprising to those not familiar with these islands’ histories, the books by Stromberg Childers and Church allow us to recognise and move beyond the vocabulary of colonial assimilation and ‘attachment’ often used to describe the France–Antilles relationship. This psychoanalytically inspired vocabulary, as Church indicates, was discernible in the responses of the self defining ‘motherland’ (mère-patrie) to Caribbean disasters.Footnote ²⁸ A particular strength of Church’s work is to put forth a nuanced understanding of the relationship of such language to republican ideology on the islands and to explain the sway that the latter still holds there, as well as something of the mixed reception given in ‘metropolitan’ France to French Caribbeans and their republicanism. The historian Myriam Cottias, whom Church quotes, has described the ‘old colonies’ as French national ‘blind spots’. If so, Paradise Destroyed constitutes a vital attempt to render them visible.Footnote ²⁹

Conflict, Sacrifice and Citizenship

The ability of the inhabitants of the old colonies to affirm their French citizenship in 1946 and retain it until the present day has been based, in part, on the idea that France was indebted to them for their ‘sacrifices’ during the two World Wars. Ruth Ginio’s book The French Army and its African Soldiers: The Years of Decolonization explains that, in West Africa, this particular interpretation of ‘blood debt’ represented a reversal of prior French understandings that Africans somehow owed them ‘for bringing civilization … and saving them from local and ruthless tyrants’.Footnote ³⁰ Ginio follows the travails of soldiers and veterans who, like Antilleans, fought in the French army but who, unlike their Caribbean counterparts, were rarely deemed French citizens. Their ties to France were loosened rather than consolidated as their homelands gained independence, yet their lives were deeply affected by the changes in the France–Africa relationship in subsequent decades.

Ginio roots her approach in a political and cultural analysis of military institutions: how people both external and internal to these institutions experienced them, the conditions in which institutional policies regarding the status of Africans were developed and how such institutions both precipitated and responded to decolonisation and its associated transformations in West Africa. In this respect, the book complements others by Richard Fogarty, Gregory Mann and Eric Jennings of the experiences of West African combatants, as well as building on Ginio’s own previous work on the Vichy regime in French West Africa.

Ginio starts with a detailed examination of the French military’s involvement in West Africa prior to the 1958–62 period associated with decolonisation. It then explains ways in which the army’s activities laid foundations for the continued French presence in West Africa post-independence: from the ‘winning hearts and minds’ approach of psychologically oriented civilian interventions such as schools and propaganda, via the military accords signed on the occasion of each country’s formal independence, to the kinds of post-colonial (non-)intervention signified by the term ‘Françafrique’. These activities and their consequences, Ginio argues, were shaped in large part by the fact that so many members of the pre-independence French army were themselves African.

This focus on the army allows for the importance of that institution to be fully brought out. Yet it also suggests new ways of capturing the experiences of those who lived through their own marginalisation, as the political line between ‘African’ and ‘French’ was drawn over the course of the Fourth and Fifth Republics, and as the political affiliations of soldiers’ and veterans’ governments shifted. Neither appreciated by the French, nor entirely trusted by the authorities of their newly independent countries, African veterans of French wars often found themselves in delicate situations. In Guinea, for instance, not only did soldiers repatriated from French wars lose their French salaries in 1958, but they were also put under surveillance at the behest of Guinea’s leader, Sekou Touré. In 1960 a French law froze the base rate of pensions for all veterans outside of the French Community, who then had to struggle to win back rights which had previously seemed secure. New governments with ill-equipped armies may have had good reason to be wary if – as Ginio argues – it was in the French army that African soldiers learnt how easy it might be to overthrow civilian regimes. Ultimately, Ginio’s book sheds light on the long-term processes that underpinned decolonisation and shaped postcolonial regimes. It offers food for thought in light of the on-going debates in territories such as New Caledonia, where the prospect of political independence is being contemplated six decades after the ‘decolonisation years’ and amid a very different set of geopolitical circumstances.

Contemporary Regional Transformations

A further three recent books anchor themselves in current events in order to analyse the historical and contemporary entanglements of French peripheries with the former imperial metropole. At the same time they indicate a new shift in discourse in that they address the relationships between French administered localities – in particular, Guyane and New Caledonia – and the regions in which they are located.Footnote ³¹ Guyane and New Caledonia, though they have markedly different political characteristics and historical relationships to France, nevertheless share two important problematics, broached in all three works. The first is a preoccupation with categories of social and cultural distinction, especially those associated with indigeneity. The second surrounds the politics and economics of resource exploitation in non-sovereign territories.

The legal existence and social dynamics of ‘native’ or ‘tribal’ peoples of France’s South American and Pacific colonies, as opposed to those of those categorised as natives (indigènes) by French law codes in Africa and Asia, long constituted a black hole in French history. Legal aspects in particular have only recently begun to attract sustained attention, notably in the work of Yerri Urban and in the AUTHOCHTOM project.Footnote ³² In the cases of both Guyane and New Caledonia, the cultural and political dynamics of indigeneity are inseparable from two further debates: over the nature and validity of French and other identities, and access to and exploitation of land and resources. This nexus is perhaps most evident in the case of New Caledonia, where the presence of large nickel deposits remains one of the key stakes in discussions over the islands’ future sovereignty. It also features prominently in Guyanais debates over how much and which land should be designated ‘customary’ territory, and the extent to which extractive industries such as goldmining may be permitted in or near such zones.Footnote ³³

The political and legal framework of the Fifth Republic has been reluctant to acknowledge formally the concept of indigeneity.Footnote ³⁴ Hence it is through the lens of ‘custom’ and ‘customary authority’ that the Maroon and Amerindian communities of Guyane and the Kanak communities of New Caledonia still assert their right to political and cultural difference. The key questions posed by Demmer, Trépied and the contributors to La coutume kanak dans l’État are thus particularly timely: what constitutes ‘custom’ and ‘customary’ authority today? How, when and by whom has this been constructed, and whom does it primarily serve? The contributing authors demonstrate ways in which ‘customary’ authority – including recent institutional manifestations such as the Customary Senate (Sénat coutumier, 1998) and related Charter of the Kanak People (Charte du peuple kanak, 2014) – has evolved in an unequal partnership with French colonial and republican legislation and institutions.Footnote ³⁵ As a result, it provides little assurance of democratic process or of gender, generational or regional equality. Since the ‘progressive decolonisation’ envisaged by the 1998 Nouméa Accords was based on an idea of Kanak identity informed by institutionally recognised forms of ‘custom’, these analyses raise the prospect of sovereignty being granted based on a concept that, although enshrined in law, is in practice imperfectly understood.Footnote ³⁶ By subjecting both concept and practices to critique, the essays offer a nuanced counterbalance to pro-independence interpretations which draw overly neat ideological distinctions between neo-colonialist republicanism and a Kanak socialism purportedly rooted in ‘custom’.

In Guyane, Amerindian and Maroon societies were nominally protected by the creation of Inini (‘le territoire d’Inini’), a new territory and thus a new administrative distinction dividing the more populated coastal regions from the sparsely populated interior and limiting development in the latter between 1931 and 1969.Footnote ³⁷ Nevertheless, some French observers unable to integrate such people into their idea of a productive colonial economy assumed them to be ‘pre-modern’ cultures on their way to extinction. Deeming French South America to be a blank canvas, administrators and governments from the eighteenth to the twentieth century conceived ambitious immigration schemes in their attempts to remedy its alleged underpopulation and consequent underdevelopment.Footnote ³⁸

The ‘human resources’ brought by real or imagined immigrants were the primary concern of French colonial administrators, as Serge Mam Lam Fouck makes clear in La société guyanaise à l’épreuve des migrations. Unsurprisingly, the geographical origins of migrants, their actions and the consequences of immigration were never entirely susceptible to governmental control, and sometimes not at all. While many of the more ambitious planned schemes – primarily aimed at attracting Europeans – bore few results, Guyane has hosted increasing numbers of people from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Suriname and Guyana since the 1960s. It has been officially recognised as having a majority immigrant population since the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques; INSEE) reported in 2012 that more Guyanais inhabitants had been born outside the department than within it.Footnote ³⁹ Of course, Mam Lam Fouck rightly raises the question of who should be counted as an immigrant. Should we include the ‘metropolitan’ French functionaries taking a ‘domestic’ flight from Orly to work in Cayenne? Workers from border communities who daily cross one of the rivers dividing Guyane from Suriname or Brazil? Moreover, in a ‘host society’ that has undergone such a process of profound demographic and social ‘recomposition’ (to quote terms employed by Mam Lam Fouck) as a result of immigration, who is ‘Guyanais’?

Readers seeking to understand the history and experiences of immigration to, through and from Guyane since the late 1960s may be better served by seeking out other works.Footnote ⁴⁰ Still, Mam Lam Fouck makes a significant contribution to discussions of the demographic changes taking place in Guyane and the effects of this on local forms of political and cultural expression. More detailed engagement with the wider field of migration history and with scholars attentive to gendered experiences in the region such as Isabelle Hidair and Françoise Guillemaut would have enriched the work.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, a scholarly critique might be levelled at this book for its sparse referencing, but this is perhaps besides its point. With its calls for improved education – including the better integration of ‘Amerindian’ and ‘Maroon’ histories into the local French system – it seems to be intended primarily as a manifesto, or at least an intervention in debates relating to the 2017 political upheaval in Guyane. Mam Lam Fouck is a prolific author of historical works on Guyane, now retired from a long career working as an educator in the department. In this latest work he draws upon personal experience, painting a picture of a society that has undergone enormous change in recent decades, but which nevertheless might be stabilised – and even become a beacon of peaceful, ‘pluricultural’ coexistence given the right economic support and recognition of its history. Without saying so explicitly, Mam Lam Fouck lays groundwork for an interesting argument. Guyane, he implies, could actually be a model for France – and by extension, Europe – thanks to its fairly peaceful reception of very diverse people in a society with no obvious ‘ethnic’ majority. This optimistic analysis reverses the traditional view of Guyane as an anachronistic legacy of empire and places it at the forefront of social change.

It is worth remembering that, as Mam Lam Fouck points out, Guyane’s capacity to receive immigrants has hinged almost entirely on French sponsored infrastructure and social security. A new collection of essays edited by Rosemarijn Hoefte, Peter Clegg and Matthew Bishop examines this state of affairs, comparing Guyane’s economic and political situation to those of its regional neighbours. Contributors take stock of the interactions occurring within and across the borders of the formerly British, Dutch and French colonies which now constitute the Republics of Guyana and Suriname and the department of Guyane. These three relatively small entities are distinguished from other South American countries by size and from each other by language, but their colonial and social histories are more intertwined than the contemporary lack of reciprocal political engagement would suggest. It is through Guyane, moreover, that South America shares a long and largely unmonitored border with the European Union.

The comparative, multidisciplinary approach of Hoefte, Clegg and Bishop’s edited volume is immensely useful, as are its explanations of processes occurring at the edges of Europe that historians have largely not caught up with, such as the influence of China, the cross-border dynamics of the gold industry and the region’s ‘energy potential’. It points the way to possible future work on the role of the illegal narcotics trade in shaping the region’s history and its connections with Europe. The collection ultimately shows the great potential of regionally grounded work to illuminate the international and transnational dynamics of France’s overseas presence.

From the Colonial to the Global

The historical ‘terrain’ of the French peripheries is still being sketched out, but the works reviewed here all demonstrate how detailed analyses of locality can contribute to understandings of wider imperial and postcolonial formations. At the same time as they address forms of connection, they also enhance our understandings of forms of isolation, including those which separate French peripheries from their regional environments, those which distinguish them from each other and those which can exist between people living on the same island or within the same set of political borders. The in-depth monographs are particularly effective, not only because they follow less trodden geographical and historiographical paths, but also because they explain why it is meaningful to do so. Longer term historical perspectives – as demonstrated by Jennings’s nudging of the boundaries of ‘colonial’ Madagascar, Church’s sensitive history of Antillean catastrophe and Demmer and Trépied’s collection on New Caledonia/Kanaky – present opportunities to gain deeper understandings of the cultural dynamics behind economic transformations and the intricacies of local politics.

The complexities newly exposed by these individual case studies from the Americas and the Indian and Pacific Oceans have the potential to stretch – and even some cases break – the historical frameworks used hitherto to understand the French empire and its legacies. Particularly valuable in future would be work which, in the vein of Rosemarijn Hoefte, Matthew Bishop and Peter Clegg, attends both to locality and to the cross-lingual social realities and circulations across territories, especially in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific region and Amazonian South America. A further interesting avenue lies in historical explorations of the relationship between European integration and the production of European ‘peripheries’.Footnote ⁴²

Finally, the works reviewed here invite historians to recalibrate their ideas about the borders of Europe and those who cross them, as well as the chronological and conceptual boundaries of decolonisation. They also demonstrate, to different extents, what imperial and postcolonial histories can achieve by focusing on the depth of place and human–environmental interactions in a specific locality. Still today, the inhabitants of the peripheries are forced to navigate imposed boundaries between French and non-French, European and non-European, immigrant and native, as they negotiate relationships with France and the wider world. The growing historical literature on ‘overseas France’ provides fertile ground from which to revise prevailing contemporary understandings of ‘peripheral’ localities, shifting transnational dynamics and the contemporary nation state.