Preface

This volume of French Colonial History, entitled "Colonial French Encounters: New World, Africa, Indochina," contains a selection of papers delivered at three of the annual meetings of the French Colonial Historical Society: the 24th, held at Monterey, California, in 1998; the 25th, convened in New Orleans in 1999; and the 26th, which met in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2000. The thirteen articles are grouped into a roundtable and three themes that reflect the temporal span, geographical breadth, and diversity of subject matter that characterize the scholarly interests of the Society's members. In the roundtable, the author and two specialists on New France, Dale Miquelon and Catharine Desbarats, discuss Leslie Choquette's Frenchmen into Peasants. An imaginative transatlantic study that situates immigration to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century St. Lawrence and Acadia firmly within the context of French regional history, Frenchmen into Peasants was the 1998 winner of the Society's Alf Heggoy Prize, awarded annually for the best book published during the previous year dealing with the French colonial experience from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. The four papers in "Confronting the New World" explore some of the ways that métropole and colonists came to terms with the Americas between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Laura Fishman outlines a French missionary's attempts to understand the Tupinamba of Brazil as "natural men"; James Pritchard analyzes the significance of French military activity in the late seventeenth-century Caribbean; A. J. B. Johnston examines authorities' persistent efforts—and just as repeated failures—to limit drinking in Ile Royale (Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia); and Chaela Pastore delineates strategies of consumption of personal and household goods in Saint-Domingue (Haïti) that helped colonists define their place within the new society "The Making and Unmaking of French North Africa" turns to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. AU of the papers cast light on Algerian viiiFrench Colonial History policies and problems. Stacey Renee Davis discusses the Second Empire's abortive attempt to turn unruly political prisoners into model agrarian colonists; Lizabeth Zack probes the constitution of political identities on the basis of mass anti-Semitic mobilization; Anny Wynchank surveys the disruptive results of French decisions in Algeria for Moroccan Jews; and Phillip C. Naylor, disputing the consensus view, contends that de Gaulle's decolonization built importantly upon the Fourth Republic's policies. In the final section, "Colonial State and Colonial Subjects in TwentiethCentury French Indochina," David W Del Testa and Erica Peters investigate practices of resistance, negotiation, and accommodation on the part of privileged railroad workers and ordinary villagers that illuminate the complex relationships between colonizers and colonized. Assembling this volume has been the work ofmany people, so the editor would like to express his gratitude to the authors, the referees, and the staff of MSU Press for their promptness, patience, and perseverance. Robert S. DuPlessis, Editor Swarthmore College ...