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This edited volume focuses on social welfare and medicine within the French Empire and brings together important currents in both imperial history and the history of medicine. The book covers a broad period from the ‘first colonial empires’ that existed prior to 1830, the ‘new imperialism’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the process of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century, and the ‘afterlives’ of colonial regimes in France and newly-independent states. Building on recent scholarship, this volume examines the extension of imperialism into the post-colonial period. The chapters examine a range of topics developing our understanding of the reasons why colonial states saw the family as a site for biopolitical intervention. The authors argue that experts built a racialised body of knowledge about colonial populations through census data and medical understandings of problems such as child mortality and infertility. They show that by analysing and compiling data on fertility, population growth (or decline), and health, this fuelled interventions designed to ensure a stable workforce, and that protecting children and mothers, vaccinating vulnerable populations, and creating modern, sanitary housing were all initiatives also aimed at serving larger goals of preserving colonial rule. Finally, the book shows that social welfare projects during the French Empire reflected concerns about race, differential fertility, and migration that continued well after decolonisation.
Following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71,
French patriots feared that their country was in danger of becoming
a second-rate power in Europe. Decreasing birth rates had largely
slowed French population growth, and the country's population was
not keeping pace with that of its European neighbors. To regain its
standing in the European world, France set its sights on building a
vast colonial empire while simultaneously developing a policy of
pronatalism to reverse these demographic trends. Though
representing distinct political movements, colonial supporters and
pronatalist organizations were born of the same crisis and
reflected similar anxieties concerning France's trajectory and
position in the world. "Regeneration through Empire" explores the intersection between
colonial lobbyists and pronatalists in France's Third Republic.
Margaret Cook Andersen argues that as the pronatalist movement
became more organized at the end of the nineteenth century,
pronatalists increasingly understood their demographic crisis in
terms that transcended the boundaries of the metropole and began to
position the French empire, specifically its colonial holdings in
North Africa and Madagascar, as a key component in the nation's
regeneration. Drawing on an array of primary sources from French
archives, "Regeneration through Empire" is the first book to
analyze the relationship between depopulation and
imperialism.
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