Abstract
This introductory chapter provides an overview of how colonial and post-colonial states approached population data. The chapter explores some of the main considerations that influenced colonial and post-colonial regimes including, migration, infant mortality, racial boundaries, public health, housing, fertility rates, and criminality. The chapter shows how population came to be seen as a problematic yet malleable category, one that a range of historical actors hoped could be shaped through biomedical interventions, social welfare projects, and state policies. In addition to providing an overview of the topic, this chapter introduces the themes that will be explored in greater depth in subsequent chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
- 2.
For the French context see, for example, Kamel Kateb, Européens, ‘indigènes’ et juifs en Algérie (1830–1962): Représentations et réalities des populations (Paris: INED, 2001); Margaret Cook Andersen, Regeneration Through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015); George Trumbull IV, An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge, and Islam in Algeria, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- 3.
See for example, Christina Firpo, The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2016); Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Leslie Choquette, Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Jennifer L. Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Julia Ann Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998).
- 4.
See for example, Emmanuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Hannah-Louise Clarke, “Civilization and Syphilization: A Doctor and His Disease in Colonial Morocco,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87, no. 1 (2013): 86–114; Thuy Linh Nguyen, Childbirth, Maternity, and Medical Pluralism in French Colonial Vietnam, 1880–1945 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2016); Richard C. Keller, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Aro Velmet, Pasteur’s Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, Its Colonies, and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
- 5.
Hannah-Louise Clark, “The Islamic Origins of the French Colonial Welfare State: Hospital Finance in Algeria,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 28, no. 5–6 (2021): 689–717; Amelia Lyons, The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Families and the French Welfare State During Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Minayo Nasiali, Native to the Republic: Empire, Social Citizenship and Everyday Life in Marseille Since 1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 6.
See for example: Jean Beaman, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Melissa K. Byrnes, Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon (University of Nebraska Press, 2024); Françoise de Barros, “Contours d’un réseau administrative ‘algérien’ et construction d’une compétence en ‘affaires musulmanes’: Les conseillers techniques pour les affaires musulmanes en métropole (1952–1965),” Politix 76 (2006): 97–120, and “Des ‘Français musulmans d’Algérie’ aux ‘immigrés’: L'importation de classifications coloniales dans les politiques du logement en France (1950–1970),” Actes de recherche en sciences sociales 159 (2005/4): 26–53; Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2006); Paul Silverstein, Postcolonial France (Pluto Press, 2018).
- 7.
On the French civilizing mission see Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). On the connection between humanitarianism and French imperialism see Jessica Lynne Pearson, The Colonial Politics of Global Health France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa (Harvard University Press, 2018); Yan Slobodkin, “Famine and the Science of Food in the French Empire, 1900–1939,” French Politics, Culture and Society 36, no. 1 (2018): 52–75 and J.P. Daughton, “Behind the Imperial Curtain: International Humanitarian Efforts and the Critique of French Colonialism in the Interwar Years,” French Historical Studies 34, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 503–28.
- 8.
On the links between social welfare, race, and surveillance in France, see especially Marc Bernadot, Loger les immigrées (Paris: Croquant, 2008); Melissa K. Byrnes, Making Space; Jim House, “Contrôle, encadrement, surveillance et répression des migrations colonial,” Bulletin de l’Institut d’histoire du temps présent 83 (June 2004), 144–56; and Lyons, The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole. On these connections within the French empire see Jennifer Boittin, Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women’s Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919–1952 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022); Kathleen Keller, Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018).
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Andersen, M.C., Byrnes, M.K. (2023). Introduction. In: Andersen, M.C., Byrnes, M.K. (eds) Fertility, Family, and Social Welfare between France and Empire. New Directions in Welfare History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26024-7_1
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