British and French Colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Middle East Connected Empires across the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries

This book examines the connections between the British Empire and French colonialism in war, peace and the various stages of competitive cooperation between, in which the two empires were often frères ennemis. It argues that in crucial ways the British and French colonial empires influenced each other. Chapters in the volume consider the two empires' connections in North, West and Central Africa, as well as their entanglement at sea in the Mediterranean Sea, Persian Gulf and South China Sea. Also analysed are their mutual engagement with Islam in both the Hajj and various religiously inflected colonial revolts, their mutually-informed systems of administration in the New Hebrides and generally, and the interconnected ways the two empires fought World War II and decolonization. By uniting historians of France and her colonies with historians of Britain and her colonies, this volume speaks to a broad international and imperial history audience.

Chapter 1. Introduction. Britain and France, Connected Empires.- Part I: Empire in Africa.- Chapter 2. “From Slaves to Gum: Colonial Trade and French-British Rivalry in Eighteenth-Century Senegambia.” Cheikh Sène.- Chapter 3. “'Our Anglo-Saxon Colleagues:' The Constraining Embrace of British Northern Nigeria." Barbara Cooper.- Part II: Empire and Islam.- Chapter 4. “Anglo-French Connections and Cooperation against ‘Islamic’ Resistance, 1914-1917” John Slight.- Chapter 5. “Sacred Surveillance: Indian Muslims, Syrian Waqf, and the Evolution of State Surveillance in Syria under the French Mandate.” James Casey.- Part III: Empire at Sea.- Chapter 6. “A Shared Sea: The Axes of French and British Imperialism in the Mediterranean, 1798-1914”.- Chapter 7. “A Second ‘Fashoda?’: Britain, India and a French ‘Threat’ in Oman at the End of the Nineteenth Century” Guillemette Crouzet.- Chapter 8. “Imperial Interdependence on Indochina's Maritime Periphery: France and Coal in Ceylon, Singapore and Hong Kong, 1859-1895” James R. Fichter.- Chapter 9. “French Kwang-Chow-Wan and British Hong Kong: Politics and Shipping, 1890s-1920s” Bert Becker.- Part IV: Empire and Administration.- Chapter 10. “Sharing Colonial Sovereignty? The Anglo-French Experience of the New Hebrides Condominium, 1880s-1930s” Hélène Blais.- Chapter 11. “British and French Colonial Statistics:  Development by Hybridization from the Eighteenth to the mid-20^th Centuries” Béatrice Touchelay.- Part V: Imperial Ends.- Chapter 12. “Britain and Free France in Africa, 1940-1943”.- Chapter 13. “The End of Empires and Some Linguistic Turns: British and French Language Policies in Inter- and Post-War Africa” Diana Lemberg.

James R. Fichter is Associate Professor of European Studies at the University of Hong Kong. His next book, Suez Passage to India: Britain, France, and the Great Game at Sea, 1798-1885, examines the Anglo-French relationship in Asia as mediated by the Suez Canal.