A collection of original essays by leading scholars in the field, In God's Empire examines the complex ways in which the spread of Christianity by French men and women shaped local communities, French national prowess, and global politics in the two centuries following the French Revolution. More than a story of religious proselytism, missionary activity was an essential feature of French contact and interaction with local populations. In many parts of the world, missionaries were the first French men and women to work and live among indigenous societies. For all the celebration of France's secular "civilizing mission," it was more often than not religious workers who actually fulfilled the daily tasks of running schools, hospitals, and orphanages. While their work was often tied to small villages, missionaries' interactions had geopolitical implications. Focusing on many regions - from the Ottoman Empire and North America to Indochina and the Pacific Ocean - this book explores how France used missionaries' long connections with local communities as a means of political influence and justification for colonial expansion.
In God's Empire offers readers both an overview of the major historical dimensions of the French evangelical enterprise, as well as an introduction to the theoretical and methodological challenges of placing French missionary work within the context of European, imperial, religious history, and world history.

The surprising story of the wine industry’s role in the rise of French Algeria and the fall of empire. “We owe to wine a blessing far more precious than gold: the peopling of Algeria with Frenchmen,” stated agriculturist Pierre Berthault in the early 1930s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had displaced Algerians from the colony’s best agricultural land and planted grapevines. Soon enough, wine was the primary export of a region whose mostly Muslim inhabitants didn’t drink alcohol. Settlers made fortunes while drawing large numbers of Algerians into salaried work for the first time. But the success of Algerian wine resulted in friction with French producers, challenging the traditional view that imperial possessions should complement, not compete with, the metropole. By the middle of the twentieth century, amid the fight for independence, Algerians had come to see the rows of vines as an especially hated symbol of French domination. After the war, Algerians had to decide how far they would go to undo the transformations the colonists had wrought—including the world’s fourth-biggest wine industry. Owen White examines Algeria’s experiment with nationalized wine production in worker-run vineyards, the pressures that resulted in the failure of that experiment, and the eventual uprooting of most of the country’s vines. With a special focus on individual experiences of empire, from the wealthiest Europeans to the poorest laborers in the fields, The Blood of the Colony shows the central role of wine in the economic life of French Algeria and in its settler culture. White makes clear that the industry left a long-term mark on the development of the nation.

This book vividly recreates the lives and identities of the children born of relationships between French men and African women in colonial French West Africa. The book shows how colonial policies and attitudes influenced the lives of this mixed-race population, and analyses their responses to living in a racially divided society.

This collection brings together twenty-one articles that explore the diverse impact of modern empires on societies around the world since 1800. Colonial expansion changed the lives of colonised peoples in multiple ways relating to work, the environment, law, health and religion. Yet empire-builders were never working with a blank slate: colonial rule involved not just coercion but also forms of cooperation with elements of local society, while the schemes of the colonisers often led to unexpected outcomes. Covering not only western European nations but also the Ottomans, Russians and Japanese, whose empires are less frequently addressed in collections, this volume provides insight into a crucial aspect of modern world history.