Assimilation and Empire

Saliha Belmessous

An original, engaging, and innovative contribution to a fast growing area of scholarship
Provides the first examination of a major imperial and post-imperial ideology: the resilience of assimilative ideology across centuries, continents, and empires
Challenges the conventional understanding of empire, based since Edward Said's 'Orientalism' on the invention of difference
Demonstrates the failure of assimilation pursued through empire, for both colonised and coloniser, and reveals the futility of the historical pursuit of perfection
Reveals the complex inter-relationship between policies of assimilation and the greatest challenge to those policies: discourses of race
Covers a vast section of the world (two European Empires and three continents) and four centuries

Assimilation and Empire

Saliha Belmessous

Description

Assimilation was an ideology central to European expansion and colonisation, an ideology which legitimised colonisation for centuries. Assimilation and Empire shows that the aspiration for assimilation was not only driven by materialistic reasons, but was also motivated by ideas. The engine of assimilation was found in the combination of two powerful ideas: the European philosophical conception of human perfectibility and the idea of the modern state. Europeans wanted to create, in their empires, political and cultural forms they valued and wanted to realise in their own societies, but which did not yet exist.

Saliha Belmessous examines three imperial experiments - seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New France, nineteenth-century British Australia, and nineteenth and twentieth-century French Algeria - and reveals the complex inter-relationship between policies of assimilation, which were driven by a desire for perfection and universality, and the greatest challenge to those policies, discourses of race, which were based upon perceptions of difference.

Neither colonised nor European peoples themselves were able to conform to the ideals given as the object of assimilation. Yet, the deep links between assimilation and empire remained because at no point since the sixteenth century has the utopian project of perfection - articulated through the progressive theory of history - been placed seriously in question. The failure of assimilation pursued through empire, for both colonised and coloniser, reveals the futility of the historical pursuit of perfection.

Assimilation and Empire

Saliha Belmessous

Introduction
Part I: Assimilation in early-modern French America: from francisation to racialism
1. French colonial justifications
2. Francisation as New France's founding project
3. Defining French distinctiveness in seventeenth-century France
4. Implementing francisation
5. The emergence of race in French political imagination
6. Conclusion
Part II: Assimilation in the nineteenth-century British empire: the rule of law as an engine of civilisation
1. British colonial justifications
2. The colonial career of Saxe Bannister
3. Bannister's colonial philosophy
4. Bannister's civilising scheme for the Aborigines of the British Empire
5. Introducing the rule of law in the colonies
6. Building an empire by treaty
7. The outcomes of the assimilative project in the second half of the nineteenth century
8. Conclusion
Part III: Assimilation against colonialism: the struggle of the Muslim natives in French Algeria
1. French conquest of Algeria
2. Assimilation in French political culture
3. Assimilating Algeria to France
4. Assimilating the Muslim natives through the rule of French law
5. Assimilating the natives through education
6. The rise of racial politics
7. Assimilation in post-First World War Algeria
8. Assimilation in Algeria: the indigenous point of view
9. Conclusion
Conclusion: Assimilation in post-colonial societies
Bibliography

Assimilation and Empire

Saliha Belmessous

Author Information

Saliha Belmessous is a Senior Research Fellow in history at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She studied in France and Canada and has held research positions in the USA and Australia.

Assimilation and Empire

Saliha Belmessous

Reviews and Awards

"Belmessous has opened up new avenues for future research. Although by no means complete, Belmessous certainly succeeds in her aim to present the history of assimilation as a 'singular history', underscored especially through the carefully crafted connections and comparisons across the different sections of this wide-ranging work. The multiple perspectives and methodologies employed in this study, as well as its longue duree approach, underscore the originality of this book and its important contribution to our historical knowledge. Furthermore, the insightful discussion of the resilience of assimilation in contemporary Australia, Algeria and France means that the resonance of Belmessous's work goes beyond the study of the past to the present day."--Modern and Contemporary France

"...Assimilation and Empire is an informative, valuable work. The geographical and chronological range of its inquiry is impressive, and each case is investigated in considerable depth, with evidence drawn from a plenitude of primary and secondary sources. Moreover, Belmessous has much to say that is fresh and illuminating about French and British policies toward indigenous peoples. Above all, her book serves as a useful reminder that the utopian desire to remake other peoples in the idealized image of oneself was an integral aspect of both countries' imperial projects."--American Historical Review

"Rather than using the familiar framework of empire as the construction of 'difference,' she explores the colonising impulse as driven by a search for perfection in uniformity. In so doing, Belmessous posits original and stimulating new directions for the field....Belmessous conceptualises assimilation not just as an ideology of domination but--and this is a crucial distinction--as a utopian vision of perfection for both coloniser and colonised....Belmessous has certainly opened up a fascinating strand of enquiry. Despite the broad geographical and chronological scope, there is a strong narrative and conceptual thread through each section and between sections."--Australian Historical Studies