Colonial Citizens

Thompson shows how post-WWI Syrians and Lebanese mobilized to claim the terms of citizenship enjoyed in the European metropole. Colonial Citizens highlights gender as a central battlefield upon which the relative rights and obligations of states and citizens were established.

The idea of universal rights is often understood as the product of Europe, but as Laurent Dubois demonstrates, it was profoundly shaped by the struggle over slavery and citizenship in the French Caribbean. Dubois examines this Caribbean revolution by focusing on Guadeloupe, where, in the early 1790s, insurgents on the island fought for equality and freedom and formed alliances with besieged Republicans. In 1794, slavery was abolished throughout the French Empire, ushering in a new colonial order in which all people, regardless of race, were entitled to the same rights. But French administrators on the island combined emancipation with new forms of coercion and racial exclusion, even as newly freed slaves struggled for a fuller freedom. In 1802, the experiment in emancipation was reversed and slavery was brutally reestablished, though rebels in Saint-Domingue avoided the same fate by defeating the French and creating an independent Haiti. The political culture of republicanism, Dubois argues, was transformed through this transcultural and transatlantic struggle for liberty and citizenship. The slaves-turned-citizens of the French Caribbean expanded the political possibilities of the Enlightenment by giving new and radical content to the idea of universal rights.

This open access Pivot book is a comparative study of six early colonial public libraries in nineteenth-century Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. Drawing on networked conceptualisations of empire, transnational frameworks, and ‘new imperial history’ paradigms that privilege imbricated colonial and metropolitan ‘intercultures’, it looks at the neglected role of public libraries in shaping a programme of Anglophone civic education, scientific knowledge creation, and modernisation in the British southern hemisphere. The book’s six chapters analyse institutional models and precedents, reading publics and types, book holdings and catalogues, and regional scientific networks in order to demonstrate the significance of these libraries for the construction of colonial identity, citizenship, and national self-government as well as charting their influence in shaping perceptions of social class, gender, and race. Using primary source material from the recently completed ‘Book Catalogues of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere’ digital archive, the book argues that public libraries played a formative role in colonial public discourse, contributing to broader debates on imperial citizenship and nation-statehood across different geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders.

This is the first book on Italian colonialism that specifically deals with the question of citizenship/subjecthood. Such a topic is crucial for understanding both Italian imperial rule and the complex dynamics of the different colonial societies where several actors, like notables, political leaders, minorities, etc., were involved. The chapters gathered in the book constitute an unprecedented account of a heterogeneous geographical area. The cases of Eritrea, Libya, Dodecanese, Ethiopia, and Albania confirm that citizenship and subjecthood in the colonial context were ductile political tools, which were structured according to the orientations of the Metropole and the challenges that came from the colonial societies, often swinging between submission, cooptation to the colonial power, and resistance. On one hand, the book offers an account of the different policies of citizenship implemented in the Italian colonies, in particular the construction of gradated forms of citizenship, the repression and expulsion of dissidents, the systems of endearment of local people and cooptation of the elites, and the racialization of legal status. On the other, it deals with the various answers coming from the local populations in terms of resistance, negotiation, and construction of social identity.

In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy--a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either "direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third variant--apartheid--as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa. Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. The result is a groundbreaking reassessment of colonial rule in Africa and its enduring aftereffects. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa.

Thompson shows how post-WWI Syrians and Lebanese mobilized to claim the terms of citizenship enjoyed in the European metropole. Colonial Citizens highlights gender as a central battlefield upon which the relative rights and obligations of states and citizens were established.

This work of historical sociology revisits and analyses the earlier part of the Third Republic (1870-1914), when France granted citizenship rights to Indians in Pondicherry. It explores the nature of this colonial citizenship and enables comparisons with British India, especially the Madras Presidency, as well as the rest of the French empire, as a means of demonstrating how unique the practice of granting such rights was. The difficulties of implementing a new political culture based on the language of rights and participatory political institutions were not so much rooted in a lack of assimilation into the French culture on the part of the Indian population; rather, they were the result of political infighting and long-term conflicts over status, both in relation to caste and class, and between inclusive and exclusive visions of French citizenship.