Notes on French Sources for African History in the Later Nineteenth Century

Abstract

These notes are published at the request of the editor, but with great diffidence on the part of the author. In 1982, when I was completing a study of the European partition of West Africa — begun quarter of a century earlier, in what seems a different historiographical era — I agreed at short notice to offer some reflections on my French sources to a symposium of the African Studies Association (UK). This was in no sense a systematic survey. Manuscript sources in France are covered supremely well in the two volume Guide published in 1971 by the International Council on Archives, and any attempt to survey printed sources would have been a major bibliographical exercise. My own research was essentially a study of relations between European and African politics in the later nineteenth century, and what I offer here are essentially user's notes and comparisons with British sources.