DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Republican Citizenship in French Colonial Pondicherry, 1870-1914

Anne Raffin author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Amsterdam University Press

Published:27th Jan '22

Should be back in stock very soon

Republican Citizenship in French Colonial Pondicherry, 1870-1914 cover

Republican Citizenship in French Colonial Pondicherry, 1870-1914 revisits and analyses the earlier part of the Third Republic, when France granted citizenship rights to Indians in Pondicherry. This work of historical sociology explores the nature of this colonial citizenship and enables comparisons with British India, especially the Madras Presidency, as well as the rest of the French empire, as a means of demonstrating how unique the practice of granting such rights was.
The difficulties of implementing a new political culture based on the language of rights and participatory political institutions were not so much rooted in a lack of assimilation into the French culture on the part of the Indian population. Rather, they were the result of political infighting and long-term conflicts over status, both in relation to caste and class, and between inclusive and exclusive visions of French citizenship.

"Anne Raffin’s thoroughly researched and thoughtfully argued book treats citizenship less as a legal category than as a framework for making claims. More complicated than a dichotomy of French citizens and indigenous subjects, politics in French India entailed multisided mobilizations to preserve, reform, or overturn an unequal social order. Raffin raises basic questions about sovereignty, citizenship, and difference in a colonial situation that was both unique and a microcosm of empire."
- Frederick Cooper, Professor at New York University

ISBN: 9789463723558

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

250 pages