Search results
In the twenty years between the end of the First World War and the start of the Second, the French empire reached its greatest physical extent. At the end of the First World War, the priority of the French political community was to consolidate and expand the French empire for, inter alia, industrial mobilisation and global competition for strategic resources. The book revisits debates over 'associationism' and 'assimilationism' in French colonial administration in Morocco and Indochina, and discusses the Jonnart Law in Algeria and the role of tribal elites in the West African colonies. On the economy front, the empire was tied to France's monetary system, and most colonies were reliant on the French market. The book highlights three generic socio-economic issues that affected all strata of colonial society: taxation and labour supply, and urban development with regard to North Africa. Women in the inter-war empire were systematically marginalised, and gender was as important as colour and creed in determining the educational opportunities open to children in the empire. With imperialist geographical societies and missionary groups promoting France's colonial connection, cinema films and the popular press brought popular imperialism into the mass media age. The book discusses the four rebellions that shook the French empire during the inter-war years: the Rif War of Morocco, the Syrian revolt, the Yen Bay mutiny in Indochina, and the Kongo Wara. It also traces the origins of decolonisation in the rise of colonial nationalism and anti-colonial movements.
Indochina triggered wider unrest that convulsed northern Annam and four provinces of Tonkin during 1930–31. The Kongo Wara (literally, ‘the war of the hoe handle’) in the Haute Sangha region of AEF is the smallest and least well known of these inter-war anti-colonial revolts. Obscure in origin and remote from any urban centres, the Kongo Wara none the less took three years to
had not prepared him for the abject poverty he encountered in Equatorial Africa. The French colonial state had failed. For thirty years it permitted trading companies to exploit the indigenous population without restraint. 6 The Kongo Wara revolt was one direct consequence of this failure, but the litany of brutality, high mortality rates and endemic disease among forced labourers in AEF stands among
colonies. Abd el-Krim merited Communist support in 1924–25, but five years later the ‘uncivilised’ leaders of tribal revolt in the Kongo-Wara did not. 11 Racism remained common among left-voting blue-collar workers, particularly after the sharp increase in immigration during the years 1922–24 and 1925–31. In 1931 the foreign component of the French