![]() ![]() Manning 1988 is a good reference in English, focusing only on sub-Saharan Africa and extending into the postcolonial period, while Coquery-Vidrovitch and Goerg 1992 offers a more African perspective on the history of French colonial rule and examines each of the territories of the two federations in sub-Saharan Africa. ![]() 1990 remains the standard, if largely narrative, reference for scholars. In French, the two-volume series Mayer, et al. Among histories of French imperialism, Aldrich 1996 is a concise, readable overview of French colonial empire in the 19th and 20th centuries, presented in thematic chapters. The books in this section belong to the first two categories. General information on French colonial rule in Africa can be found in works dealing with French imperialism as a whole, in specific regional or national histories, as well as in general and comparative studies of European colonialism in Africa. Although formal French rule in Africa had ended by 1962, the ties it forged continue to shape relations between France and its former colonial territories throughout the continent. In North Africa, Tunisian and Moroccan nationalists were able to force the French to negotiate independence in the 1950s, but decolonization in Algeria, with its million European settlers, came only after a protracted and brutal war (1954–1962) that left deep scars in both postcolonial states. Efforts by French authorities and some African leaders to replace imperial rule with a federal organization failed, and following a 1958 constitutional referendum, almost all French territories in sub-Saharan Africa claimed their independence. Frustrated in the interwar period, these demands for change spurred the process of decolonization after the Second World War. After the First World War, new and more organized forms of contestation emerged, as Western-educated reformers, nationalists, and trade unions pressed by a variety of means for a more equitable distribution of political and administrative power. As in all empires, colonized people throughout French Africa developed strategies to resist or evade French authority, subvert or co-opt the so-called civilizing mission, and cope with the upheavals of occupation. At the same time, French domination was never as complete as the solid blue swathes on maps of “Greater France” would suggest. Throughout Africa, French rule was characterized by sharp contradictions between a rhetorical commitment to the “civilization” of indigenous people through cultural, political, and economic reform, and the harsh realities of violent conquest, economic exploitation, legal inequality, and sociocultural disruption. Within this African empire, territories in sub-Saharan Africa were treated primarily as colonies of exploitation, while a settler colonial model guided colonization efforts in the Maghreb, although only Algeria drew many European immigrants. 1905), the western Maghreb, the Indian Ocean islands of Madagascar, Réunion, and the Comoros, and Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. ![]() ![]() 1895) and French Equatorial Africa (AEF, f. By 1930, French colonial Africa encompassed the vast confederations of French West Africa (AOF, f. To these were added parts of German Togo and Cameroon, assigned to France as League of Nations mandates after the war. The French presence in Africa dates to the 17th century, but the main period of colonial expansion came in the 19th century with the invasion of Ottoman Algiers in 1830, conquests in West and Equatorial Africa during the so-called scramble for Africa and the establishment of protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco in the decades before the First World War. ![]()
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