Writings on Empire and Slavery

Review
"A highly useful collection."--Daniel Lazare, The Nation


Review
"A very fine piece of historical sociology. It is surprising that Tocqueville's views on empire and slavery have not been translated before; they shed light on a rather different Tocqueville -- always perceptive, but here very much the empire-builder with a chauvinism not untinged with a form of racism. Here we learn not only about this new side of Tocqueville but also about Algeria as a case study in European colonization. An excellent introduction to Tocqueville the man, sociologist, and civil servant and to the early history of French Algeria."--Robert Forster, The Johns Hopkins University


Book Description
After completing his research for Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville turned to the French consolidation of its empire in North Africa, which he believed deserving of similar attention. Tocqueville began studying Algerian history and culture, making two trips to Algeria in 1841 and 1846. He quickly became one of France's foremost experts on the country and wrote essays, articles, official letters, and parliamentary reports on such diverse topics as France's military and administrative policies in North Africa, the people of the Maghrib, his own travels in Algeria, and the practice of Islam. Throughout, Tocqueville consistently defended the French imperial project, a position that stands in tension with his admiration for the benefits of democracy he witnessed in America.Although Tocqueville never published a book-length study of French North Africa, his various writings on the subject provide as invaluable a portrait of French imperialism as Democracy in America does of the Early Republic period in American history. In Writings on Empire and Slavery, Jennifer Pitts has selected and translated nine of his most important dispatches on Algeria, which offer startling new insights into both Tocqueville's political thought and French liberalism's attitudes toward the political, military, and moral aspects of France's colonial expansion. The volume also includes six articles Tocqueville wrote during the same period calling for the emancipation of slaves in France's Caribbean colonies.


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French


About the Author
Jennifer Pitts is an assistant professor of political science at Yale University.


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While extolled as a champion of freedom for his (1835), Tocqueville contradicted that image in later writings defending French imperialism in Algeria. Pitts (political science, Yale U.) introduces biographical details; his Arabic studies; initial liberal views on the pluralistic integration of Algerians and French settlers; and later reports defending military colonization, though also calling for abolition of slavery in the French West Indies. Most selections have not previously appeared in English; some are newly translated for the first time in some 20 years. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)


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