Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France

Reveals how empire and global economic crisis redefined republican citizenship and laid the foundations of a racial state in France.

This is an innovative study of how race and empire transformed French republican citizenship during the early Third Republic. Integrating the histories of metropolitan and colonial France, Elizabeth Heath reveals how global market integration and economic crisis redefined French republican citizenship, creating the foundations of the modern French racial state.This is an innovative study of how race and empire transformed French republican citizenship in the early Third Republic. Elizabeth Heath integrates the histories of the wine-producing department of Aude and the sugar-producing colony of Guadeloupe to reveal the ways in which empire was integral to the Third Republic's ability to stabilize a republican regime that began to unravel in an age of economic globalization. She shows how global economic factors shaped negotiations between local citizens and the Third Republic over the responsibilities of the Republic to its citizens leading to the creation of two different and unequal forms of citizenship that became constitutive of the interwar imperial nation-state and the French welfare state. Her findings shed important new light on the tensions within republicanism between ideals of liberty and equality and on the construction of race as a meaningful social category at a foundational moment in French history.