France's Modernising Mission

Ed Naylor is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Languages and Area Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He completed his PhD in History at Queen Mary, University of London and held the Deakin fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, before joining the University of Portsmouth in 2014.  Contributors: Tony Chafer, Françoise de Barros,  Liz Fink, Abdellali Hajjat, Jim House, Neil MacMaster, James McDougall, and Benoît Trépied.

Chapter 1. Introduction; Ed Naylor.- Part I) Rethinking Education and Citizenship.-  Chapter 2. Conflicting Modernities: Battles over France’s policy of adapted education in French West Africa;  Tony Chafer.- Chapter 3. Institutional Terra Non Firma: Representative democracy and the chieftaincy in French West Africa; Liz Fink.- Chapter 4. Decolonisation Without Independence? Breaking with the colonial in New Caledonia (1946-1975); Benoît Trépied.-Part II) Mental Maps and the Territory.- Chapter 5. Rule of Experts? Governing modernisation in late colonial French Africa; James McDougall.- Chapter 6. From Tent to Village regroupement: The Colonial state and social engineering of rural space, 1843 to 1962; Neil MacMaster.- Chapter 7. Shantytowns and Re-housing in Late Colonial Algiers and Casablanca; Jim House.- Part III) Metropolitan Legacies.- Chapter 8. Promoting ‘Harmonious Cohabitation’ in the Metropole: The Welfare charity Aide aux Travailleurs d’Outre Mer (1950-1975); Ed Naylor.- Chapter 9. Protests Against Shanty-towns in the 1950s and 1960s: Class logics, clientelist relations and ‘colonial redeployments’; Françoise de Barros.- Chapter 10. Colonial Legacies: Housing policy and riot prevention strategies in the Minguettes district of Vénissieux; Abdellali Hajjat.

“This rich collection builds on fruitful conversations in the study of the French empire, presents innovative conceptual tools, and points out promising new terrain to mine. … With its multidisciplinary perspectives, archival rigor, and the conceptual innovation of the essays, this book will be valuable to scholars in fields as diverse as French colonial and postcolonial history, the European welfare state, mass social movements, and housing and education policy.” (Anndal Narayanan, H-France Review, Vol. 18 (197), 2018)