A Frenchwoman's Imperial Story

A Frenchwoman's Imperial Story PDF

Author: Rebecca Rogers

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2013-01-16

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0804787247

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Eugénie Luce was a French schoolteacher who fled her husband and abandoned her family, migrating to Algeria in the early 1830s. By the mid-1840s she had become a major figure in debates around educational policies, insisting that women were a critical dimension of the French effort to effect a fusion of the races. To aid this fusion, she founded the first French school for Muslim girls in Algiers in 1845, which thrived until authorities cut off her funding in 1861. At this point, she switched from teaching spelling, grammar, and sewing, to embroidery—an endeavor that attracted the attention of prominent British feminists and gave her school a celebrated reputation for generations. The portrait of this remarkable woman reveals the role of women and girls in the imperial projects of the time and sheds light on why they have disappeared from the historical record since then.

French Mediterraneans

French Mediterraneans PDF

Author: Patricia M. E. Lorcin

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2016-05

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0803288778

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While the Mediterranean is often considered a distinct, unified space, recent scholarship on the early modern history of the sea has suggested that this perspective is essentially a Western one, devised from the vantage point of imperial power that historically patrolled the region’s seas and controlled its ports. By contrast, for the peoples of its southern shores, the Mediterranean was polymorphous, shifting with the economic and seafaring exigencies of the moment. Nonetheless, by the nineteenth century the idea of a monolithic Mediterranean had either been absorbed by or imposed on the populations of the region. In French Mediterraneans editors Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Todd Shepard offer a collection of scholarship that reveals the important French element in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century creation of the singular Mediterranean. These essays provide a critical study of space and movement through new approaches to think about the maps, migrations, and margins of the sea in the French imperial and transnational context. By reconceptualizing the Mediterranean, this volume illuminates the diversity of connections between places and polities that rarely fit models of nation-state allegiances or preordained geographies.

French Women and the Empire

French Women and the Empire PDF

Author: Marie-Paule Ha

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-05-08

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0191662739

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French Women and the Empire is the first book-length investigation of colonial gender politics in Third Republic France, using Indochina as a case study. Its departure point is the interrogation of the dramatic change in the French colonialist view of the empire as an exclusively male preserve where women feared to tread. At the turn of the century, a reverse discourse emerged in the metropole, forcefully arguing that colonial female emigration was essential to " colonisation. The study begins by analysing the highly complex web of interconnected factors underlying this radical transformation in the representation of the empire from being a " into a " Then, drawing on a large body of hitherto little examined sources, the study continues by reconstructing the experiences and activities of French women in Indochina from the fin-de-siècle to the interwar era. The most significant finding from this study is that contrary to the image propagated by promotional literature of the colonial woman as essentially a bourgeois homemaker, the class and ethnic make-up of the French female population in the Asian colony was in fact remarkably heterogeneous, with a sizeable contingent of them, married or single, actively engaging in a variety of paid employment outside the home. By thus foregrounding the diversity and complexity of colonial female experiences, French Women and the Empire seeks to move the story of French women and the empire beyond the narrow confines of the imperial family romance to the wider arena of the colonial public sphere.

The Limits of Empire: European Imperial Formations in Early Modern World History

The Limits of Empire: European Imperial Formations in Early Modern World History PDF

Author: William Reger

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 1317025334

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This volume, published in honor of historian Geoffrey Parker, explores the working of European empires in a global perspective, focusing on one of the most important themes of Parker’s work: the limits of empire, which is to say, the centrifugal forces - sacral, dynastic, military, diplomatic, geographical, informational - that plagued imperial formations in the early modern period (1500-1800). During this time of wrenching technological, demographic, climatic, and economic change, empires had to struggle with new religious movements, incipient nationalisms, new sea routes, new military technologies, and an evolving state system with complex new rules of diplomacy. Engaging with a host of current debates, the chapters in this book break away from conventional historical conceptions of empire as an essentially western phenomenon with clear demarcation lines between the colonizer and the colonized. These are replaced here by much more fluid and subtle conceptions that highlight complex interplays between coalitions of rulers and ruled. In so doing, the volume builds upon recent work that increasingly suggests that empires simply could not exist without the consent of their imperial subjects, or at least significant groups of them. This was as true for the British Raj as it was for imperial China or Russia. Whilst the thirteen chapters in this book focus on a number of geographic regions and adopt different approaches, each shares a focus on, and interest in, the working of empires and the ways that imperial formations dealt with - or failed to deal with - the challenges that beset them. Taken together, they reflect a new phase in the evolving historiography of empire. They also reflect the scholarly contributions of the dedicatee, Geoffrey Parker, whose life and work are discussed in the introductory chapters and, we’re proud to say, in a delightful chapter by Parker himself, an autobiographical reflection that closes the book.

Imperial Paradoxes

Imperial Paradoxes PDF

Author: Robert James Merrett

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2021-08-15

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0228007968

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At war for sixty years, eighteenth-century Britain and France experienced demographic, social, and economic exchanges despite their imperial rivalry. Paradoxically, this rivalry spurred their participation in scientific and industrial developments. Their shared interest in standards of living and cultural practices was fuelled by migration and philosophical exchanges that reciprocally transmitted the values of urban geography, medicine, teaching, and the industrial and fine arts. In Imperial Paradoxes Robert Merrett compares British and French literature on those topics. He explains how food, wine, fashion, and tourism were channels of interdisciplinary relations and shows why authors in both nations turned the notion of empire from commercial and military expansion into a metaphor for exploring self-knowledge and pleasure. Although cognitive science has come to the fore only in the past two generations, eighteenth-century writers tested problems in the dualist and faculty psychology of Western rationalism. Themes of embodiment and embodied thought drawn from recent theorists are applied throughout this book, along with dialectics and models of the senses operating together. Imperial Paradoxes avoids the limitations of strict chronology, weaving together multiple narratives for a more complete picture. Applying major works in the fields of cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and pedagogical theory to prose, poetry, and drama from the eighteenth century, Merrett shows how attention to eating, drinking, dressing, and travelling gives important insights into individual literary works and literary history.

Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power

Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power PDF

Author: Julia Bush

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2000-01-01

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9780718500610

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Bush (arts and social sciences, Nene University College, Northampton) analyzes aristocratic and upper-middle-class women's involvement in imperialist associations, and investigates their relationship with male imperialist leaders and the male-dominated patriotic leagues during the early 20th century. She also looks at their work with female emigration, education, colonial hospitality, and imperial race- thinking. She concludes that personal motivation, organizational methods, and patriotic faith were embedded in a social and political context that empowered elite women in selective, gender-related ways.