The French and the ‘Natives’

Abstract

No issue is more emotive in the history of overseas expansion than relations between Europeans and the populations of the countries which they invaded, conquered and settled: relations between the colonisers and the colonised. Colonialists proclaimed that Europeans replaced savagery with civilisation, backwardness with modernity; the creation of economic infrastructures, the opening of schools and infirmaries, and the establishment of modern law codes and institutions immensely improved the lives of Africans, Asians and islanders. Anti-colonialists presented evidence that the slavery, warfare, violence, taxation, exploitation of labour and destruction of local cultures which accompanied European expansion wreaked brutal and irreparable damage on non-European societies.