Assimilation and empire : uniformity in French and British colonies, 1541-1954 / Saliha Belmessous.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Belmessous, Saliha.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Assimilation (Sociology)--Colonies--France--History.

Assimilation (Sociology).

Assimilation (Sociology)--Colonies--Great Britain--History.

Assimilation (Sociology)--New France--History--17th century.

Assimilation (Sociology)--New France--History--18th century.

Assimilation (Sociology)--Australia--History--19th century.

Assimilation (Sociology)--Algeria--History--19th century.

Assimilation (Sociology)--Algeria--History--20th century.

History.

Colonies.

Algeria.

Australia.

Great Britain.

France.

Physical Description:

viii, 231 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Other Title:

Assimilation & empire

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013.

Summary:

While many studies of empire have concentrated upon the understanding of difference, assimilation was an ideology central to European expansion and colonisation, an ideology which legitimised colonisation for centuries. Assimilation and Empire shows that the engine of assimilation was found in the combination of two powerful ideas: a utopian conception of human perfectibility, and the idea of the modern state. Europeans attempted to create, through their empires, political, and cultural forms to which they aspired in then own societies, but which did not exist. Saliha Belmessous examines three imperial experiments-seventeenth and eighteenth-century New France, nineteenth-century British Australia, and nineteenth-and twentieth-century French Algeria-and reveals the complex interrelationship between policies of assimilation and the greatest challenge to those policies, discourses of race, which were based upon perceptions of difference. Neither colonised nor European peoples themselves were able to conform to the ideals given as the object of assimilation. Yet the deep links between assimilation and empire remained because at no point since the sixteenth century has the utopian project of perfection-articulated through the progressive theory of history-been placed seriously in question. The failure of assimilation pursued through empire, for both colonised and coloniser, reveals the futility of the historical pursuit of perfection. Book jacket.

Contents:

Assimilation in early modern French America : from francisation to racialism

Assimilation in the nineteenth-century British Empire : the rule of law as an engine of civilization

Assimilation against colonialism : the struggle of the Muslim natives in French Algeria.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [212]-223) and index.

ISBN:

9780199579167

0199579164

OCLC:

819519245