The role of French security policy and cooperation in Africa has long been recognized as a critically important factor in African politics and international relations. The newest form of security cooperation, a trend which merges security and development and which is actively promoted by other major Western powers, adds to our understanding of this broader trend in African relations with the industrialized North. This book investigates whether French involvement in Africa is really in the interest of Africans, or whether French intervention continues to deny African political freedom and to sustain their current social, economic and political conditions. It illustrates how policies portrayed as promoting stability and development can in fact be factors of instability and reproductive mechanisms of systems of dependency, domination and subordination. Providing complex ideas in a clear and pointed manner, France and the New Imperialism is a sophisticated understanding of critical security studies.

Now in its second edition, Tyler Stovall’s Transnational France takes a transnational approach to the history of modern France that draws the reader into a key aspect of France’s political culture: universalism. Beginning with the French Revolution and its aftermath, Stovall traces French history right up to the present day and examines France’s relations with three other areas of the world: Europe, the United States, and France’s colonial empire. The book shines a light onto both French identity and the history of the world more broadly, which allows the reader to engage with French history in a much wider context. This new edition features an additional chapter on France in the twenty-first century that offers an analysis of current events and issues as seen through historical perspective. Issues addressed include anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the gilets jaunes, as well as the impact of Brexit, the maturation of the National Front under Marine LePen, and the administration of Emmanuel Macron. Giving a global view of France’s history, this is the perfect volume for students of modern France and French history courses.

Arguing about Empire analyses the most divisive arguments about empire between Europe's two leading colonial powers from the age of high imperialism to the post-war era of decolonization. Focusing on the domestic contexts underlying imperial rhetoric, Arguing about Empire adopts a case-study approach, treating key imperial debates as historical episodes to be investigated in depth. The episodes in question have been selected both for their chronological range, their variety, and, above all, their vitriol. Some were straightforward disputes; others involved cooperation in tense circumstances. These include the Tunisian and Egyptian crises of 1881-2, which saw France and Britain establish new North African protectorates, ostensibly in co-operation, but actually in competition; the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, when Britain and France came to the brink of war in the aftermath of the British re-conquest of Sudan; the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911, early tests of the Entente Cordiale, when Britain lent support to France in the face of German threats; the 1922 Chanak crisis, when that imperial Entente broke down in the face of a threatened attack on Franco-British forces by Kemalist Turkey; World War Two, which can be seen in part as an undeclared colonial war between the former allies, complicated by the division of the French Empire between De Gaulle's Free French forces and those who remained loyal to the Vichy Regime; and finally the 1956 Suez intervention, when, far from defusing another imperial crisis, Britain colluded with France and Israel to invade Egypt -- the culmination of the imperial interference that began some eighty years earlier.

This book explores the interplay between liberalism and imperialism in Second Empire France. By examining the political dimension of imperial expansion and the power of words in shaping public opinion, it sheds light on the ways in which liberal ideas developed in the nineteenth century. In contrast to Britain, French imperialism in the third quarter of the nineteenth century was fostered by a Bonapartist regime that liberals needed to fight in order to build their own political brand. The author argues that the 1860s were not so much a period of ‘liberal empire’ in France as has traditionally been suggested, since liberals were in fact more conveyers of political change rather than supporters of the regime. To demonstrate how French liberals succeeded in configuring an alternative political option, the book explores their attitudes to the expanding colonial empire of Napoleon III in the 1850s and 60s through the analysis of parliamentary debates, the press and published texts. Providing three in-depth case studies on Bonapartist expansion projects in Algeria, Cochinchina and Mexico, the book provides new insights on the foundations of the liberal position on imperialism, and the intellectual outlooks and belief systems that informed these views. Analysing discourses and ideas, as opposed to facts and policies, this book presents a new perspective on the nature of the French Second Empire and illustrates how this shaped a specific liberal political culture in France.

Examines, through the lives of five important English and French figures, the history of the exploration and colonization of Africa between 1870 and 1914, and the role the mass media played in promoting colonial conquest.

European empires were commonly depicted in bright color-coded maps printed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that conveyed the expanse of European power across the globe. Despite this familiar image of a world divided up into neat imperial enclaves, the reality of empire-building often told a different story. Empire Unbound argues that European empires were never the bounded, stable entities that imperialists imagined. In examining Mediterranean empire-building in a comparative context, Gavin Murray-Miller demonstrates that the era of 'new imperialism' which arose in the late nineteenth century fostered connections and synergies between regional powers that influenced the trajectories of imperial states in fundamental ways. Breaking with conventional national approaches, Murray-Miller traces the development of France's North African empire, noting how empire-building relied upon transnational networks and cooperation with Muslims elites across borders just as much as military conquest. By looking at the inter-connected relationships linking the French, British, Italian, and Ottoman empires from the 1880s through the First World War, Empire Unbound proposes a novel spatial framework for imperial studies, showing how migrations, extraterritorial legal regimes, and cross-border interactions both abetted and frustrated imperial designs at the turn of the century.

In this title, originally published in 1920, Leonard Woolf traces the history of economic imperialism and explores the relations of Europe and Africa since 1876. This analysis of economic imperialism helped to shape attitudes to colonialism for more than one generation of radicals and socialists, and still has the power to influence and inform today.

In 1800, Europeans governed about one-third of the world's land surface; by the start of World War I in 1914, Europeans had imposed some form of political or economic ascendancy on over 80 percent of the globe. The basic structure of global and European politics in the twentieth century was fashioned in the previous century out of the clash of competing imperial interests and the effects, both beneficial and harmful, of the imperial powers on the societies they dominated. This encyclopedia offers current, detailed information on the major world powers and their global empires, as well as on the people, events, ideas, and movements, both European and non-European, that shaped the Age of Imperialism.

Spanning from the West African coast to the Canadian prairies and south to Louisiana, the Caribbean, and Guiana, France's Atlantic empire was one of the largest political entities in the Western Hemisphere. Yet despite France's status as a nation at the forefront of architecture and the structures and designs from this period that still remain, its colonial building program has never been considered on a hemispheric scale. Drawing from hundreds of plans, drawings, photographic field surveys, and extensive archival sources, Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire focuses on the French state's and the Catholic Church's ideals and motivations for their urban and architectural projects in the Americas. In vibrant detail, Gauvin Alexander Bailey recreates a world that has been largely destroyed by wars, natural disasters, and fires – from Cap-François (now Cap-Haïtien), which once boasted palaces in the styles of Louis XV and formal gardens patterned after Versailles, to failed utopian cities like Kourou in Guiana. Vividly illustrated with examples of grand buildings, churches, and gardens, as well as simple houses and cottages, this volume also brings to life the architects who built these structures, not only French military engineers and white civilian builders, but also the free people of colour and slaves who contributed so much to the tropical colonies. Taking readers on a historical tour through the striking landmarks of the French colonial landscape, Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire presents a sweeping panorama of an entire hemisphere of architecture and its legacy.