French Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 1900-1945. Jean Suret-Canale , Till GottheinerRulers of Empire: The French Colonial Service in Africa. William B. Cohen

1973 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-334
Author(s):  
Martin A. Klein
1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Le Gall

The historiography of the Sanusiyya, if one can apply such a term to the literary crop of roughly a century dealing with this North Africantarīqa(pl.turuq, Sufi brotherhood), falls into three distinct categories. The earliest writings appeared in the 1880s, thirty years after the tariqa had taken root in Cyrenaica (then the Ottoman province of Benghazi). The works of French authors such as Charmes, Rinn, Duveyrier, Le Chatelier, and co-authors Depont and Coppolani were all marked by the concerns of the French colonial and protectorate authorities in Algeria and Tunisia. According to Duveyrier, a Saharan explorer of repute and the crudest exponent of this group's views, not only were the Sanusis a band of fanatics given to murdering innocent missionaries and explorers, but they were also in the vanguard of the turuq inspired by the Pan-Islamic rhetoric of the Ottoman sultan and aligned against French colonialism in Muslim North Africa. Only this combination of factors could account for the pervasive and determined resistance to French policies in the region. Along with the Sanusiyya, Duveyrier singled out for attack a North African sheikh and confidant of the Ottoman sultan, Muhammad Zafir al-Madani. Charmes, Rinn, Le Chatelier, and Depont and Coppolani, while less vitriolic in their tone, certainly had the same general approach. The analysis of this “Algerian school” was dismissed at the turn of the century by two eminent Orientalists, Christiaan Snouck Hugronje and Carl Heinrich Becker.3A generation later, European fears of the turuq diminished in the wake of World War I, as new ideologies and forces came to dominate a transformed Pan-Islamism. This notwithstanding, some of the suppositions of the early French authors were adopted by later scholars and have since been quoted and requoted.


1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathew Burrows

Mission civilisatnce was one of the bywords of French colonial expansion under the Third Republic. Unfortunately until now there have been few works devoted to its study. Indeed, the notion itself has not been taken very seriously by scholars. As long ago as 1960 when Henri Brunschwig published his seminal work on French colonialism, he stated quite categorically: ‘en Angleterre la justification humanitaire l'emporta’ while ‘en France le nationalisme de 1870 domina’ even if that nationalism ‘ne s'exprima presque jamais sans une mention de cette “politique indigène” qui devait remplir les devoirs du civilisé envers des populations plus arriérées.’ Since then academics both in France and outside have tended to concentrate (in what few works have been written on French colonialism) on the political and economic aspects of the French Empire to the detriment of its cultural components.


2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-307
Author(s):  
Lorelle D. Semley

Soon after Marc Kojo Tovalou Houénou hurried from his tour of the United States to the French West African colony of Dahomey in 1925 to be at his dying father's side, the French governor there launched an inquiry to find out whether Houénou was the French citizen he claimed to be. Houénou had been born in Dahomey in 1887, but had spent most of his life studying and residing in France. Alhough he had only returned to Dahomey briefly in 1921, with his father's death in 1925, Houénou wanted to claim what he saw as his rightful position aschef de familleor head of his extended family in Dahomey. With this title, Houénou would have gained administrative control over his father's expansive wealth in land and property in several towns in Dahomey, and would have been the official representative for his family, especially in interactions with the French colonial government. However, Houénou was already emerging as a thorn in the side of French colonial authorities because of a series of critical articles he had written in Paris about French colonialism. Therefore, when Governor Gaston Fourn found that Houénou had, in 1915, obtained his French citizenship rights, literally permission “to enjoy (jouir) the rights of French citizen,” why was the governor relieved?


1972 ◽  
Vol 82 (327) ◽  
pp. 1097
Author(s):  
J. M. Lonsdale ◽  
Jean Suret-Canale ◽  
Till Gottheiner

1987 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 461-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Roberts

European technology, both practical and managerial arts, had an impact on the well-established cotton and handicraft textile industries of the Western Sudan during the first twenty-five years of colonial rule. But French efforts to shape cotton production for export did not always have the intended results. Indigenous historical processes as well as French colonial policy account for the changes in these industries.


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