Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in the French and British Colonies, 1541-1954 by Saliha Belmessous

JUDGES' COMMENTS

This ambitious and scholarly book is a major contribution to the comparative history of the British and French empires from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. It focuses on the relationship between official attitudes and policies favouring assimilation, and intellectual and popular ideas promoting the racial inferiority of colonised peoples. The book makes extensive use of official archival material, contemporary newspapers and published reports.

Particularly in the first section, the book succeeds in demonstrating how race relations in French North America differed markedly from official policy. It also explores the influence of Saxe Bannister as an advocate of assimilation (and the rights of Aboriginal people) in colonial New South Wales. The final section argues that assimilation was less a tool that promoted equality in Algeria than one that enforced and justified Empire. The book ends with the insight that while the idea of assimilation was originally motivated by a quest for perfection, in the end it was used to impose hegemonic and racist policies on the colonised peoples of the two empires.