Preface

Once again, I am pleased to present a collection of essays reflecting the broad scholarly interests of members of the French Colonial Historical Society. This volume of French Colonial History consists largely of articles derived from presentations at the 31st and 32nd annual meetings of the Society in Wolfville, Nova Scotia and Dakar, Senegal. It is not, however, a volume of conference proceedings, and the Society welcomes members to submit articles to the journal not previously delivered at one of our conferences. We hope that this policy will benefit members who are ready to publish their research but unable to attend a particular conference.

The 13 essays that follow are divided by region and arranged in approximately chronological order within each region. The first section, devoted to the Americas, consists of four essays ranging in time from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century and across space from the maritime periphery of New France to Louisiana and Haiti. Yet they are linked by themes of migration and travel. Nicolas Landry looks at the experience of migrant fishermen in Newfoundland, Anne Marie Lane Jonah and Elizabeth Tait at Acadian-born women in Louisbourg, and Nathalie Dessens at Saint-Domingue refugees in New Orleans. Jean-François Brière focuses on the Haitian experiences of one inveterate traveler, a Frenchman best known for his voyage to Senegal.

The next five essays explore French colonization and the post-colonial legacy on the African continent from the standpoint of both social and cultural history. Babacar Bâ examines the French penitentiary system in Senegal and indigenous resistance to it from 1790 to 1960, while Evelyne Combeau-Mari shows how European sports, introduced into Madagascar by colonial troops at the end of the nineteenth century, had become a means to resist French colonization by World War II. Mark Choate and Owen White, focusing on the colonizer, examine, respectively, French and Italian rivalries in Tunisia and the role played by rural France in the colonizing process. In her essay, Éloïse Brière analyzes writers and filmmakers in Senegal and Cameroon who highlight the resistance to French domination that is suppressed in official versions of the history of decolonization.

Section three, on Asia and the Pacific, takes us from the roots of French colonial policy in the region in the early nineteenth century to the end of World War II. Mary Ellen Birkett examines the origins of French involvement in the Pacific Islands during the reign of Louis-Philippe, while Micheline Lessard and Christina Firpo examine aspects of the racial topography of twentieth-century Vietnam; Lessard's essay considers anti-Chinese discourse within emerging Vietnamese nationalism, while Firpo looks at attempts by the colonial government to reclaim Eurasian children for the French population during the Second World War.

With the last essay, by Catherine Hodeir, we return once more to the metropolis, this time to the attitudes and behavior of French big business leaders dealing with former French colonies in the 1960s.

In conclusion, I would like to thank the French Colonial Historical Society for the opportunity to edit this journal for the past two years. Working with authors and reviewers from North America, Europe, Africa, and the Pacific has been tremendously instructive and enriching for me. I would also like to thank Margot Kielhorn and the editorial staff at Michigan State University Press, who have been a great pleasure to work with.