British and French Colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Middle East Connected Empires across the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

This book is part of wave of new scholarship looking at the connections between the French and British Empires. These two empires—which engaged each other on nearly every continent over 400 years—were constantly forming and re-forming in relation to each other: connecting to, depending on, referencing, contrasting to, opposing or in open warfare with, and acting in spite of the other. They were more often rivals than collaborators. Yet even in war, perhaps especially then, each shaped the other. They shaped each other as opponents, as allies, and, perhaps most commonly, as frères ennemis—frenemies who, with one act of competitive collaboration, managed to simultaneously support and undermine. Throughout, they were co-imperialists—not in these sense that they always collaborated but in the sense that their empires grew up, lived, and died entwined. They were, as Barbara M. Cooper suggests in chapter 3 of this volume, “mutually informing and constraining.” Their interconnections were many, and so locally varied as to defy macro-analysis in the space available here. This book, then, takes a smaller approach, collecting a dozen case studies of inter-imperial connections. The contributors conceive of the French and British Empires together, each a point of reference and connection to the other. More than simply the comparative study of two separate units, these connected histories look at the shared experiences of the French and British Empires from the late eighteenth century through decolonization.