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In the past quarter century, France has grappled with the legacies of colonialism, the Algerian War (1954-1962), and the migration and settlement of Algerians and other Muslims from the former colonial empire. The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole explores the roots of these intertwined histories through an examination of the history of social welfare programs for Algerian migrants from the end of World War II until Algeria gained independence in 1962. First colonized in 1830, Algeria fought a bloody war of decolonization against France (1954-1962), as France fought to maintain control over its most prized imperial possession. In the midst of this violence, some 350,000 Algerians settled in France. This study examines the complex and often-contradictory goals of a welfare network that sought to provide services and monitor Algerian migrants’ activities. Historian Amelia Lyons particularly highlights family settlement and the central place Algerian women held in French efforts to transform the settled community. Lyons explores the nature of colonial racism, analyzes and breaks down colonial categories, and exposes numerous paradoxes surrounding the fraught relationship between France and Algeria—many of which continue to echo in French debates about Muslims today.

This book presents the history of southern Iberia and the western Maghrib, and the Strait of Gibraltar between them, as a single bicontinental borderland, from roughly 1850 to 1970. Drawing on primary and secondary sources from several countries, it posits a long historical arc of transformation from a remote and hostile religious frontier into a multilaterally managed regional order. By the nineteenth century, the Strait of Gibraltar was becoming a dynamic focus of imperial positioning, migration, brigandage, and exchange. As a consequence, coastal outposts like Tangier, Gibraltar, and Melilla became centers of an emerging bicontinental society bringing together a kaleidoscope of ethno-religious groups. These developments produced conflict but also drew sovereign powers together to confront common challenges, such as controlling epidemic disease, defeating warlords, and managing borders. Thus, over the course of a century, despite periods of considerable violence, an international order gradually emerged in the western Mediterranean. As European empire withdrew in the late twentieth century, the region did not revert to the hostile frontier of earlier times but inherited the legacy of a relatively stable and resilient regional order. Conceptualizing the borderland in this way provides a single transnational framework to explore connections between Mediterranean geopolitics, colonialism, border formation, smuggling and brigandage, and the civil and international violence of the twentieth century. It also addresses the role of mobility in international relations, the dynamics of Muslim-Jewish relations in the context of European empire, and the ongoing controversies over Gibraltar, Ceuta, and Melilla.

Faith in Empire is an innovative exploration of French colonial rule in West Africa, conducted through the prism of religion and religious policy. It examines the relationships among French Catholic missionaries, colonial administrators, and Muslim, animist, and Christian Africans in colonial Senegal between 1880 and 1940. In doing so, it illuminates the nature of the relationship between the French Third Republic and its colonies, reveals competing French visions of how to approach Africans, and demonstrates how disparate groups of French and African actors, many of whom were unconnected with the colonial state, shaped French colonial rule. Among other topics, the book provides historical perspective on current French controversies over the place of Islam in the Fifth Republic by exploring how Third Republic officials wrestled with whether to apply the legal separation of church and state to West African Muslims.

The book confronts the history of childhood and youth for the light it can shed upon the history of empire more generally. It moves beyond conventional national or imperial frameworks and uses a comparative, trans-colonial approach focusing upon situated entanglements and networked interactions linking Asian centres under colonial rule with global processes. This volume examines children and childhood as both became a key focus of policy making, literary interactions and cultural representations in the commercial and administrative centres that burgeoned in Asia under British and French rule in the age of global empires. The book shows how, as settlers, expatriates, governments, international agencies and indigenous agents mobilised childhood to critique colonialism, children emerged at the heart of debates over the future of Europe's empires. It also provides insights into the lives of children who negotiated expectations that they live up to, or inhabit, certain visions of colonial childhood.