Imperial Context Research Articles

Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South by Andrew Zimmerman (review)

Reviewed by: Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South by Andrew Zimmerman Udo J. Hebel Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South. By Andrew Zimmerman. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. Alabama in Africa follows the promising paths opened up in American Studies and American History by transnational approaches and comparative perspectives. Zimmerman’s profound study traces the circumatlantic convergence of American and German ideologies of race, agricultural labor, and family farming in early twentieth-century West Africa. Focusing on an expedition of Tuskegee Institute cotton experts to the German colony of Togo in the 1910s, it explores the symbiosis intended by German authorities of Booker T. Washington’s concepts of “industrial education” with their own economic goals and political ambitions in the larger contexts of global imperialism. Zimmerman bases his astounding trajectory of the transfer of knowledge and paradigms of labor control from the U.S. to German-colonized Africa on affinities between the implications, ideologies, and interests of the historical transition from serfdom and slavery to free, yet controlled labor in Prussia after 1807 and in the American South after 1865. In view of the mutual influences between German and American social science and social policy especially in the later decades of the nineteenth century, Alabama in Africa examines the role of the cotton experts from the Tuskegee Agricultural Department in the subordination of previously independent African farmers to the coercive programs of the German colonial system. Zimmerman uncovers the participation of the model farms of the Tuskegee experts in the “civilizing mission” of the German colonial authorities in Togo and problematizes the position of the Tuskegee expedition of reproducing the American South in Africa while inspiring Pan-African notions of anticolonialist solidarity. Zimmerman’s narrative raises new questions in connection with Booker T. Washington’s complicity with Southern racism and puts Lenin’s and the Communist International’s contemporary criticism of independent small farming and the “Negro question” into unexpected perspectives. The Tuskegee expedition to Togo and its connection with German imperialist interests serves Zimmerman well as a multifaceted prism to analyze the extension of “the mutually sustaining constructs of ‘cotton’ and ‘Negroes’ to an international level” (65) and to discuss the globalization of “the New South of segregation, disfranchisement and sharecroppoing” (237). The volume contains hitherto unpublished photographs of colonialism at work which make for a significant illustration of the book’s very topic but may have warranted closer interpretation for their specific visual framing of the colonizing venture under scrutiny here, especially with regard to similarities with photographs of Southern slavery and post-Civil War sharecroping. The thorough research in U.S. American, German, and African archives which also projects further work on the circumatlantic transfer of knowledge during a time of global imperialism is borne out by close to one hundred pages of very informative notes, followed by another fifty pages of bibliographical documentation. Alabama in Africa, with its focus on the particular moment of the synthesis of “three of the most powerful forces in the Atlantic world—German social science, African cash cropping, and the racial political economy of the New South” [End Page 138] (248), is a paradigmatic case study in the transnational dimensions of U.S. American, German, and African histories. The book fully succeeds in exposing, in the words of the author’s own conclusion, the implications and power of “transnational networks of capital, social science, racial ideologies, and empire” (239). Udo J. Hebel University of Regensburg, Germany Copyright © 2013 Mid-America American Studies Association

Cretan Muslim Immigrants, Imperial Governance and the ‘Production of Locality’ in the Late Ottoman Empire

This study is an attempt to shed light on the issue of Cretan Muslim emigration from Crete to the Ottoman Empire in order to analyse the multiple connections among the Ottoman state, immigrants and different localities in the Eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth century. Following the Cretan revolts of 1896 and 1897, the establishment of autonomous government on the island of Crete and the withdrawal of Ottoman armies from the island, Cretan Muslims began to emigrate from Crete to various places in the Ottoman Empire. Specifically, this article aims to deal with the migration of Cretan Muslims and to focus mainly on the year 1899, during which large numbers of Muslims were forced to leave their homes. The article suggests that Cretan Muslim emigration provides a good case for understanding the attitudes and policies of the Ottoman state towards migration, and the relationship between the state and immigrants, as well as for analysing the broader connections between Crete and the other localities of the Eastern Mediterranean. The working hypothesis is that in order to understand certain socio-political and demographic changes and transformations experienced within the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century, it is important to study the issue of Cretan Muslim immigration to Ottoman Anatolia. This presents an opportunity to investigate certain questions with regard to the dynamics of migration and also to discuss certain facts associated with migration within the late imperial context.

The history of cybernetics in McOndo

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Volpi, El Insomnio de Bolívar, 68. 2. Ibid., 74–75. 3. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 9. 4. Ibid., 98. 5. Márquez, Cien Años de Soledad, 23. 6. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 2. 7. Ibid., 98. 8. Ibid., 99. 9. Ibid.,139. 10. For a general discussion of this literature, see Roberts, ‘Situating Science in Global History.’ 11. Exemplary cases of such tradition are: Raj, Relocating Modern Science; Delbourgo and Dew, Science and Empire; Fan, British Naturalists; Schaffer et al., Brokered World. 12. Schaffer et al., Brokered World, xxxvii. 13. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 59. 14. Ibid., 56. 15. Sivasundaram, ‘Science and the Global,’ 157. 16. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 30–31. 17. Edgerton, The Shock of the Old. 18. I also follow here David Edgerton’s suggestion of replacing global south with poor countries for sake of historical accuracy. 19. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 7. 20. Ibid. 21. I have addressed this issue already in Saraiva, ‘Inventing the Technological Nation’. The article is part of a special issue of this journal edited by Konstantinos Chatzis dedicated to the national identity of engineers. 22. For an introduction to this historiography in English see, Saldaña, ‘Introduction: Latin American Scientific Theater’. 23. See for example, Glick, ‘Science and Independence;’ Peset, Ciencia y Libertad; Arboleda, ‘Ciencia y nacionalismo.’ For the specific case of Chile the literature is not so rich. See, nevertheless, Jaksic and Serrano, ‘In the Service of the Nation.’ 24. Saldaña, ‘Introduction: Latin American Scientific Theater.’ 25. Ibid. 26. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 7. 27. Lafuente, ‘Enlightenment in an Imperial Context.’ 28. Ibid., 173. 29. It is certainly also worthy to place Medina’s book in the context of the current reevaluation of the role of computers from instruments of bureaucratic oppression into materializations of liberating utopian visions as the one undertaken in Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. 30. Saraiva, Fascist Pigs. 31. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, 223–34. 32. Ibid., 18. 33. John McNeill following malaria mosquitoes in the greater Caribbean or Andrew Zimmerman following the new South in the USA, Togo, and Germany, are excellent examples. McNeill, Mosquito Empires; Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa. 34. Unexpectedly there are only a few truly transnational accounts in the edited volume, Hecht, Entangled Geographies. 35. Notable exceptions are Lopes and Podgorny, ‘Shaping of Latin American Museums;’ McCook, States of Nature.

GREEK LOVE, ORIENTALISM AND RACE: INTERSECTIONS IN CLASSICAL RECEPTION

Classics has been characterised as both a radical and a conservative discipline. Classical reception studies has enjoyed exploring this paradox: antiquity has provided an erotic example for modern homosexual counter-culture as well as a model for running exploitative empires. This article brings these aspects of reception studies together, to examine how the Victorian homosexual reception of the ancient Greeks was framed and worked out in a particular imperial context at the end of the nineteenth century.

Indian Migration and Diaspora in the Persian Gulf, 1820–1947: An Inquiry into the British Imperial Context

Indian Migration and Diaspora in the Persian Gulf, 1820–1947: An Inquiry into the British Imperial Context

Imperial frameworks of religion: Catholic military chaplains of Germany and Austria-Hungary during the First World War

This article argues for a more nuanced cultural history of religion for the losing powers by looking comparatively at Catholicism in two different imperial frameworks. The article supplements imperial and national perspectives with local and supranational elements, thus contributing to a new historiographic generation of transnational conceptualization. The study of Catholicism allows one to examine the category of the nation, but also to get above and below it with imperial, ecclesiastical and local elements. By probing the similarities and differences of wartime Catholicism for the losing powers, a transnational history of religiosity allows scholars to go beyond standard histories of religion during the war that unjustly merge individual religious belief with ultimate collective defeat. The essay examines the figure of the Catholic military chaplain as a symbolic focal point of discussions of religion and warfare, both in literature and in scholarly discourse. The article begins by reconsidering the position of Catholicism in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Next, the essay examines the literary portrayal of chaplaincy during the war. From here, the essay looks at military chaplaincy in comparative imperial contexts. The heavily Catholic region of Tyrol serves as a case study highlighting many of the issues under consideration. Finally, the article suggests ways to move beyond chaplains towards a cultural history of religion for the losing powers.

The Prehistory of Possessive Individualism

One of the central tenets of liberal individualism holds that property rights and citizenship rights are based in self-possession, which is often defined as an original ownership of one's own labor potential. In this short essay I propose that the concept of self-possession rests on a prior assumption that selves are possessable objects—an assumption that was generated, before and alongside liberal political theory, in the practice of Atlantic slave capitalism. I will first consider how John Locke formulates the theory of possessive individualism in one of the most-cited passages of hisSecond Treatise of Government(1690). To shed light on that theory's implications, I will turn toA Narrative of the Life and Adventures ofventure, a Native of Africa(1798), which recounts how Venture Smith, an eighteenth-century man enslaved as a child, came to possess himself, quite literally, by purchasing himself. Smith's account illuminates the tacit precondition of Locke's self-possessing individual: to be owned, the self must first be alienated, entered into the market, “thingified.” Juxtaposing Locke and Smith provides a snapshot of a larger project, in which I argue that Enlightenment thought was founded on—not merely proximal to—the Atlantic imperial context out of which it arose.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 3: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820–1880 ed. by John Kucich, Jenny Bourne Taylor (review)

Reviewed by: The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 3: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820–1880 ed. by John Kucich, Jenny Bourne Taylor Beth Palmer (bio) The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 3: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820–1880 edited by John Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor; pp. 592. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. $224.00 cloth. This significant book is part of a truly ambitious series that, its general editor Patrick Parrinder tells us, offers “a comprehensive, worldwide history of English-language prose fiction” (xv). The editors of this volume have brought together chapters on the writers, texts, and contexts central to scholarship on Victorian fiction. But Jenny Bourne Taylor and John Kucich have also opened out the definition of the novel to include short works of fiction, highlighted the reader alongside the author, and set the British novel in an international as well as an imperial context. Importantly, the volume focuses on the nineteenth-century, rather than the Victorian, novel. Reaching back to the 1820s allows Bourne Taylor and Kucich to locate Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821) as the inaugurator of the three-volume novel but also to see Scott and his early-century contemporaries as pioneers in the professionalization of authorship, empowered rather than overwhelmed by expansions in the publishing industry and in literacy. This approach differentiates this work from a previous Oxford History of English Literature volume on the Victorian novel by Alan Horsman (1991), which began [End Page 137] with the Great Reform Act in 1832, although it too finishes in 1880, agreeing that this point marked the end of the novel’s cultural centrality and ushered in aesthetic and material changes. The decision to end the volume in 1880, well justified as it is, sets this volume in contrast to other recent histories, such as James Eli Adams’s A History of Victorian Literature (2009) in the Blackwell History of Literature series and Kate Flint’s The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature (2012), both of which escort their reader into the fin de siècle. The volume is not structured chronologically but opens with the section “Novelists, Readers, and the Fiction Industry,” in which Joanne Shattock, Deborah Wynne, and Graham Law examine publishers, readers, and authors to provide an outline of the expanding and shifting nature of the fiction industry in this period. This section is followed by eight chapters providing histories of a variety of subgenres, from the Newgate novel to the silver fork novel. Interesting conversations are set up, for example, between the domestic and the sensation novel, with Nancy Armstrong suggesting that sensation “assaulted all that domestic realism stood for” (138) and Susan Fraiman concluding that the domestic novel itself is drawn to the domestic as a “particularly rich site for exploring gender and its discontents” (184). These, and others of the subgenres in this section, come across as interconnected rather than antagonistic. As one might expect, Dickens is a frequent touch-stone, and Lyn Pykett’s chapter “Charles Dickens: The Novelist as a Public Figure” provides a wider context for these references. This chapter, along with those on the Brontës, by John Bowen, and on George Eliot, by Dinah Birch, form a short but dynamic section entitled “Major Authors in Context.” A section of five chapters is devoted to the significance of place in relation to the novel. James Buzard’s “Nationalism and National Identities” follows on neatly from Elaine Freedgood’s contention in her chapter, “The Novel and Empire,” that the novel “colonizes our imaginations” (391). Josephine McDonagh’s chapter traces the trajectories of the regional novel, and Walter Scott again provides a historiographical starting place as well as a cultural stimulus for later writers like George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, whose sense of provincial space was vital to their understanding of realism. The final section of the book, “Contemporary Contexts,” explores the novel’s engagement with a variety of topics, including radicalism, the state, science, religion, psychology, and gender. The writers of these sections work hard to offer detailed and meaningful historical contextualization that might function both to introduce students to such contexts and to spark new questions about the relationships among them...

The Hong Kong Fever of 1843: Collective Trauma and the Reconfiguring of Colonial Space

AbstractThis paper adds to a relatively new line of research investigating inadvertent transformations of urban colonial space generated by collective trauma. To the now classic iterative, and racial dynamics of Neild's ‘accommodation’ in the development of Madras,1 and of Yeoh's ‘contesting’ of the built environment in Singapore2—specifically in the tugging and pulling between local and colonial influences within the spatial discourse of colonial port cities—needs to be added that of single or multiple-event collective trauma. Such trauma, perceived as brought upon by unexpected external causes, might consolidate, perhaps accelerate, or even sever a previous sequence of spatial negotiation, particularly if that sequence was politically vulnerable or immature. The paper is a focused account of such an occurrence: the small-scale yet intensely traumatic events of Hong Kong Island while still in its colonial infancy in 1843, the year of the ‘Hongkong Fever’. It argues that a new conception of malaria—considered then a miasma—now linked both to location and construction, led to the first reactive, yet decisive, reconfiguring of a previously improvised urban colonization process, consequently salvaging Hong Kong's position within a wider imperial context.

‘The Catholic Mahdi of the North West’: Louis Riel and the Metis Resistance in Transatlantic and Imperial Context

Abstract: The authors examine the transatlantic press coverage of the Metis resistance in Saskatchewan in 1885. The article documents that there was extensive international coverage of this ostensibly Canadian conflict and traces the evolution of narratives about it from their origins in French and English Canada to the United States, Great Britain, and France. The article resituates Riel and the Metis resistance within this international framework, demonstrating how the story of Riel and the Metis was reshaped by commentators in the transatlantic world to suit local, national, and imperial contexts.

“We Never Could Understand Why the Black Man Did Not Come to Us”:

“We Never Could Understand Why the Black Man Did Not Come to Us”:

'The Catholic Mahdi of the North West': Louis Riel and the Metis Resistance in Transatlantic and Imperial Context

The authors examine the transatlantic press coverage of the Metis resistance in Saskatchewan in 1885. The article documents that there was extensive international coverage of this ostensibly Canadian conflict and traces the evolution of narratives about it from their origins in French and English Canada to the United States, Great Britain, and France. The article resituates Riel and the Metis resistance within this international framework, demonstrating how the story of Riel and the Metis was reshaped by commentators in the transatlantic world to suit local, national, and imperial contexts. Les auteurs examinent la couverture de presse transatlantique de la résistance des Métis de la Saskatchewan en 1885. L'article révèle que ce conflit, canadien en apparence, reçu une attention médiatique soutenue à l'étranger, puis il fait remonter l'évolution des récits que le Canada français et le Canada anglais en firent dès le départ aux États-Unis, en Grande-Bretagne et en France. Ce cadre d'analyse international permet aux auteurs de réévaluer Riel et la résistance des Métis en montrant comment des commentateurs au sein du monde transatlantique ont refaçonné le récit sur Riel et les Métis pour le faire correspondre aux contextes locaux, nationaux et impériaux.

Besmirched with blood: an emotional history of transnational romance in colonial Singapore

In 1900, in the British colony of Singapore, a Siamese man, Manit, shot his beloved British wife, Maude, and allegedly attempted suicide. Several competing interpretations of the incident exist. In one, Manit is considered a deranged and treacherous fraud; in another, he is a pitiable cuckold; in the third, he is a respectable gentleman suffering from unrequited love. Surprisingly, given the racialized context of high imperialism in Southeast Asia, the British in Singapore came to empathize with the Asian Manit as a lovelorn gentleman and to disavow their own countrywoman. The court ultimately acquitted him of any wrongdoing. This article considers the competing interpretations and explains why a seemingly race-blind one prevailed. It reviews genealogical records, personal letters, newspaper accounts of court proceedings, and internal Thai government internal records, which provide unusually rich documentation of a romance that crossed national, cultural, and racial boundaries and created surprising transnational affiliations based on emotional empathy. Maude and Manit's relationship and court case provide a captivating glimpse into the sentimental, dramatic, and sometimes brutal details of daily life; the emotional and subjective aspects of history that are often discarded as mere embellishment to more ‘substantive’ histories focused squarely on political and economic power. However, it is precisely the emotive aspects of their relationship and their interpretation that highlight the existence of a transnational, transracial alliance between Manit and British elites in Singapore, based on shared notions of upper class masculinity, common educational experiences, and a mutual spatial and power relationship with the imperial metropole in London. The case cuts across racial divisions and highlights a transracial emotional style. Approaching history through a study of emotional discourse sheds light on a broader racial, sexual, and gendered organization of power in late colonial Southeast Asia.

Indian Migration and Diaspora in the Persian Gulf, 1820–1947: An Inquiry into the British Imperial Context

This article deals with the Indian migratory and diasporic aspects in the Gulf countries with special reference to the British imperial context. Basing itself upon an interdisciplinary approach, it...

“We Never Could Understand Why the Black Man Did Not Come to Us”:

“We Never Could Understand Why the Black Man Did Not Come to Us”:

Ordering the Disorderly Slum

During the post–World War II boom, France implemented a comprehensive urbanism program intended to modernize and rationalize the nation by putting the city, the home, and the citizen in order. Local modernization efforts were part of the state’s broader postwar reconstruction initiatives implemented in both the metropole and the colonies. Local techniciens (technocratic experts such as urban planners and public health officials) were charged with assessing and classifying diverse populations in terms of centrally defined standards of need. By situating local modernization efforts in a broader imperial context, this article examines how government officials produced and reinforced social and racial hierarchies within developing postwar welfare institutions.

An Unexpected Resonance: Exploring Gender through Victorian Literature in the Middle East

An Unexpected Resonance:Exploring Gender through Victorian Literature in the Middle East Elyssa Warkentin (bio) In 2007, the University of Calgary opened a nursing branch campus in Doha, Qatar, offering the first accredited bachelor of nursing program in the country. Qatar is a tiny Islamic state on the Persian Gulf; the progressive educational policies of its hereditary emir have made it a leader in the fields of higher education and research in the Middle East. As the new nursing program matured, it became apparent that students both desired and required a breadth of educational opportunities parallel to their Canadian counterparts. In 2009, I was hired to teach literature “option” courses to ucq’s nursing students (“option” faculty members from other disciplines were also hired). I arrived in the middle of a sweltering Doha summer with significant professional trepidation and more questions than anyone already on the ground was able to answer. I work in the areas of Victorian studies and gender theory. How, I wondered, could I interest my students in a time period and a literature so far removed from their own experiences and their chosen discipline? How could I approach gender issues in my classroom while respecting local taboos surrounding public discussions of gender and sexuality? Should I even try? How could I teach British literature in the Middle East, given the dangerous historical context of Orientalism and imperialism? And perhaps most basically, how could I convince students from a rich oral culture—many of whom had never studied English literature before, nor even read an English novel—the value of reading itself? My task, it seemed, was large. I spent my first semester orienting myself, teaching general composition courses, and getting to know the students, while simultaneously considering and discarding endless ideas for themes for my first literature course the following semester. In the end, I alighted upon the idea of a nursing-in-literature course. The subject matter, I hoped, would appeal to our nursing students and since the professionalization of nursing occurred during the Victorian period, I would have a chance to teach some of the texts I love. Happily, I compiled a course book packed with text excerpts of every Victorian nurse I could think of (Dickens’s Mrs. Gamp is a favourite), as well as more contemporary examples. The course should start, I thought, with a unit on Florence Nightingale, the reformer of Victorian practices and undisputed mother of modern nursing—though I greatly feared that beginning the course with what I considered to be rather dry historical texts would put the students off. Our students are largely Arabic speakers with varying degrees of fluency in English, and I expected mid-Victorian medical diction to challenge and perhaps frustrate them. [End Page 9] As it turned out, I need not have worried. I had hoped that students might be mildly interested in Nightingale’s then-revolutionary belief in evidence-based nursing practice, or her writings on power relations between doctors and nurses. To my great surprise, however, students responded immediately and viscerally to Nightingale’s life story, and her 1859 nursing textbook Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not was the unquestioned favourite of the entire semester. “Florence,” as they called her with affectionate familiarity, resonated profoundly with my students in ways that often surprised me. The discussions taught me much about my students’ lives—and also about a text I thought I had thoroughly understood. And fascinatingly, for me, our discussions about Nightingale’s life opened a safe space in the classroom for consideration of gender issues to which I, as a Western authority figure, might never otherwise have had access. We began our Nightingale unit with a lecture on the historical and social context of the Victorian era and then moved on to read excerpts from several biographies. Students read about Nightingale’s life-long desire for education and her career ambition, as well as the dismay of her family when she announced her intention of becoming a nurse. In one biography, Gamaliel Bradford writes, She had the battle with family prejudice which so many ardent reformers have to go through. Public nursing? The idea was horrible...

Globalizing St George: English associations in the Anglo-world to the 1930s

AbstractWhile English nationalism has recently become a subject of significant scholarly consideration, relatively little detailed research has been conducted on the emigrant and imperial contexts, or on the importance of Englishness within a global British identity. This article demonstrates how the importance of a global English identity can be illuminated through a close reading of ethnic associational culture. Examining organizations such as the St George's societies and the Sons of England, the article discusses the evolving character of English identity across North America, Africa, Southeast Asia and the Antipodes. Beginning in the eighteenth century, when English institutions echoed other ethnic organizations by providing sociability and charity to fellow nationals, the article goes on to map the growth of English associationalism within the context of mass migration. It then shows how nationalist imperialism – a broad-based English defence of empire against internal and external threats – gave these associations new meaning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article also explores how competitive ethnicity prompted English immigrants to form such societies and how both Irish Catholic hostility in America and Canada and Boer opposition in South Africa challenged the English to assert a more robust ethnic identity. English associationalism evinced coherence over time and space, and the article shows how the English tapped global reservoirs of strength to form ethnic associations that echoed their Irish and Scottish equivalents by undertaking the same sociable and mutual aspects, and lauded their ethnicity in similar fashion.

Science and the Atlantic World in Early American Literary Studies

Although scientific literatures by British American colonists have not traditionally been included in studies of early American literature, recent work has begun to pay closer attention to the literary elements of natural, medical, and cartographic texts produced in the long 18th century. New approaches have expanded Eurocentric and nation-based paradigms by positioning colonial science in an imperial and Atlantic World context that focuses upon transatlantic exchanges between the British Americas and England. These studies have investigated colonists’ efforts to obtain credit for their scientific contributions in England and the strategies with which colonists resisted metropolitan biases regarding their knowledge. Studies of the literature of place show how natural histories, cartographies, and nature writing rendered the New World familiar, even while establishing colonists’ relationship to and possession of the land. Meanwhile, an emerging focus on anxieties regarding mental and physical degeneration, spurred by theories of America’s degrading influences, offers new directions for investigating colonial subjectivity and racial theories of difference. Finally, examining the various roles that Native Americans and New World Africans played in colonial encounters may facilitate new approaches to non-European contributions to colonial science.

The Mediterranean, a territory between France and Colonial Algeria: imperial constructions

The geographical concept of the Mediterranean, born during the nineteenth century, has often been the object of scholarly attention. Many works have highlighted the progressive adjustments in the learned representations of this maritime space. From the Classical concept of a dividing border, which prevailed until the end of the eighteenth century, arose the idea of a junction sea, in the late nineteenth century. Though these studies all set the rise of the concept of a Mediterranean territory within the imperial context of the nineteenth century, such as the scientific and military explorations of Morea and Algeria, they do not explore the hypothesis that the Mediterranean was invented because it had become a colonial sea. Was the emergence of the Western Mediterranean, as an area of practices and representations, directly linked to the context of Algerian colonisation, to the chronology of its appropriation and to the evolution of French settlement on the banks of the Maghreb? This paper explores how, within the Franco-Algerian colonial situation, the Mediterranean was initially fashioned as a bridge between Europe and Africa, as a suture between the Orient and the Occident. The Mediterranean became a structuring feature of the French Empire.