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The Starving Empire traces the history of famine in the modern French Empire, showing that hunger is intensely local and sweepingly global, shaped by regional contexts and the transnational interplay of ideas and policies all at once. By integrating food crises in Algeria, West and Equatorial Africa, and Vietnam into a broader story of imperial and transnational care, Yan Slobodkin reveals how the French colonial state and an emerging international community took increasing responsibility for subsistence, but ultimately failed to fulfill this responsibility. Europeans once dismissed colonial famines as acts of god, misfortunes of nature, and the inevitable consequences of backward races livi...
In Automotive Empire, Andrew Denning uncovers how roads and vehicles began to transform colonial societies across Africa but rarely in the manner Europeans expected. Like seafaring ships and railroads, automobiles and roads were more than a mode of transport—they organized colonial spaces and structured the political, economic, and social relations of empire, both within African colonies and between colonies and the European metropole. European officials in French, Italian, British, German, Belgian, and Portuguese territories in Africa shared a common challenge—the transport problem. While they imagined that roads would radiate commerce and political hegemony by collapsing space, the pre...
"Examining little-known policing archives in France, Senegal, and Cambodia, Jennifer Boittin unearths the stories of hundreds of women labeled "undesirable" by the French imperial police in the early twentieth century. These undesirables were often women traveling alone, women who were poor or ill, women of color proclaiming their "Frenchness" to move throughout the empire, or women whose intimate lives were deemed unruly. Undesirability often brought alongside it immobility or imposed migration; French officials routinely either denied passage throughout the empire or attempted to relocate women as they saw fit. To refute the label, women wrote impassioned letters to police and ministers th...
Revolutionary Warfare investigates how efforts to counter a revolution could also be revolutionary. The Algerian War fractured the French Empire, destroyed the legitimacy of colonial rule, and helped launch the Third Worldist movement for the liberation of the Global South. By tracing how French generals, officers, and civil officials sought to counter Algerian independence with their own project of radical social transformation, Terrence G. Peterson reveals that the conflict also helped to transform the nature of modern warfare. The French war effort was never defined solely by repression. As Peterson details, it also sought to fashion new forms of surveillance and social control that could...
A study of Indian indentured labor in Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad that explores the history of indenture’s normalization. In this book, historian Jonathan Connolly traces the normalization of indenture from its controversial beginnings to its widespread adoption across the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Initially viewed as a covert revival of slavery, indenture caused a scandal in Britain and India. But over time, economic conflict in the colonies altered public perceptions of indenture, now increasingly viewed as a legitimate form of free labor and a means of preserving the promise of abolition. Connolly explains how the large-scale, state-sponsored migration of...
"Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals: A Historical Companion enables professionals, scholars and students engaged with the SDGs to develop a richer understanding of the legacies and historical complexities of the policy fields behind each goal. Each of the seventeen chapters tells the decades or centuries-old backstory of one SDG, including an examination of how the SDG problem impacted past societies and the various attempts at understanding and addressing it. Collectively, the chapters reveal the multiple and often interwoven histories that have shaped the challenges later encompassed in the SDGs. The book's chapters, written in an accessible style, are authored by international experts from multiple disciplines. The book is an indispensable resource and a vital foundation for understanding the past's indelible footprint on our contemporary sustainable development challenges"--
This book presents a Marx that is in many ways different from the one popularized by the dominant currents of twentieth-century Marxism. The dual aim of this edited volume is to contribute to a new critical discussion of some of the classical themes of Marx’s thought and to develop a deeper analysis of certain questions to which relatively little attention has been paid until recently. Contributions of globally renowned scholars, from nine countries and multiple academic disciplines, offer diverse and innovative perspectives on Marx’s points of view about ecology, migration, gender, the capitalist mode of production, the labour movement, globalization, social relations, and the contours of a possible socialist alternative. The result is a collection that will prove indispensable for all specialists in the field and which suggests that Marx’s analyses are arguably resonating even more strongly today than they did in his own time.
Thanks to their economic and military strength, the European empires had achieved global supremacy by 1900, with large parts of the world under their dominance in the wake of colonial expansion. This situation fuelled ideas of Europe's permanent, almost natural global superiority, especially among the middle classes. However, as early as the First World War, such claims came under increasing pressure. This volume explains the role played by modern nationalism and anti-imperial movements, the competition between different political orders, changes in the economy and society, and the great ideas and utopias. Their interplay gave rise to enormously destructive forces in Europe. From the Boer an...
Foregrounding African women’s ingenuity and labor, this pioneering case study shows how women in rural Mali have used technology to ensure food security through the colonial period, environmental crises, and postcolonial rule. By advocating for an understanding of rural Malian women as engineers, Laura Ann Twagira rejects the persistent image of African women as subjects without technological knowledge or access and instead reveals a hidden history about gender, development, and improvisation. In so doing, she also significantly expands the scope of African science and technology studies. Using the Office du Niger agricultural project as a case study, Twagira argues that women used modest ...