Bibliographical Essay

As this chapter makes clear, the historiography specifically on quotidian violence as perpetrated by non-state actors in the French empire is not extensive. The best sources on such violence remain testimonies and reports written by travellers, journalists and officials in both published volumes and archival collections.

Despite the dearth of work directly on quotidian violence by non-state actors, there is a rich collection of books that deal with administrative responses to various aspects of violence in the French Empire. A very select list would include William Cohen, Rulers of Empire: The French Colonial Service in Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971); Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Phyllis M. Martin, ‘The Violence of Empire', in David Birmingham and Phyllis Martin (eds.), History of Central Africa, vol. ii (London: Longman, 1983), pp. 1-26; the essays collected in Martin Thomas (ed.), The French Colonial Mind, vol. ii (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); and the collection introduced by Samuel Kalman in ‘Colonial Violence', Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 36.2 (2010), 1-6.

The shifting ideas regarding colonial rule, especially the rise of a kind of anti-colonialism and colonial ‘humanism', has been a subject explored by Jean-Pierre Bondi, Les anticolonialistes (1881-1962) (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992); Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1890-1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Raoul Girardet, L'idee colonial en France de 1871 a 1962 (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1972); Claude Liauzu, L'histoire de l'anticolonialisme en France du XVIe si'ecle a nos jours (Paris: A. Colin, 2007); Martin Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics, and Society (Manchester: University of Manchester, 2005); Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). On the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme's engagement with colonial questions, see William Irvine, Between Justice and Politics: The Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, 1898-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006) and Cylvie Claveau, Une selection universaliste de l'alterite: l'autre ala Ligue des Droits de l'Homme et du citoyen en France 1920-1940 (Sarrebrucken: Presses Universitaires Europeennes, 2010).

On shifting norms regarding the treatment of colonial subjects in internationalist circles, see Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); J. P. Daughton, ‘Behind the Imperial Curtain: International Humanitarian Efforts and the Critique of French Colonialism in the Interwar Years', French Historical Studies 34.3 (2011), 503-28; Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Finally, comparisons between French colonial relations with Indigenous populations and the dynamics of Jim Crow America can be contemplated by looking at James Allen (ed.), Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000); Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).