Questions and Answers

 

Pernille Røge (Pittsburgh): You note that your study of French informal empire is in dialogue with Britain's nineteenth-century informal empire. You also mention that France might have set a precedent for the US’s imperial role in the twentieth century. In these cases, you look at contemporary examples and you engage with British and American historiography. I am curious to know if you also look further back in time to consider possible precedents for what you explore in the French context? I'm thinking specifically of the Dutch. Scholars such as Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie have recently shown that the Dutch, while declining as a formal imperial power in the seventeenth-century Atlantic World, nonetheless sustained a powerful presence in the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, for instance through capital investments in and across other colonial empires. Are such possible earlier precedents something that has shaped your book or your thinking about "informal empire" as well?

David Todd: Thank you very much Pernille. My short answer to your excellent question is no. But my intuition is that you’re right and that the Dutch commercial empire, bent from 1700 on peaceful relations with the more powerful British empire, is a good precedent to think with. A few Dutch officials who collaborated with the French occupants under Napoleon, such as Dirk van Hogendorp, moved to Paris after 1815, where they lobbied the French government to sponsor new overseas ventures. But your question raises the broader issue of origins and connects with your own distinguished contribution, in Économistes and the Reinvention of Empire, on the Physiocratic rethinking of European expansion in the late eighteenth century. What I argue in my book is a sort of accentuation of what you analysed for an earlier period. The idea of imperium without sovereignty was a cynical reinterpretation of the eighteenth-century discourse on global commerce, which had been popularized by the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indes. Its main advocates – Talleyrand, Abbé de Pradt (a disciple of Talleyrand, decried by Thomas Jefferson as even more “unprincipled” than his master), the Saint-Simonian economist Michel Chevalier – were stalwart promoters of free markets, but chiefly as a means of developing French global power. Their fascination with racial distinctions, and their enthusiasm for the coercive imposition of free trade, makes it possible to view them as (informal) imperialists.

 

Mary Lewis (Harvard): This question won’t surprise you since you know what I’m working on. Given that in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, the French did try to expand territorial empire in places like Senegal, which went from a trading post to a much bigger territory, in an effort to replicate some of the plantation cash-crop economy they had lost, how do you reconcile this with your suggestion that empire was largely informal in this era?

DT: Thank you Mary. You’re absolutely right that French aspirations to territorial expansion, and to a kind of colonial prosperity akin to the one they enjoyed in Saint-Domingue, did not vanish after Haiti’s independence or the collapse of Napoleon’s empire. But what strikes me is that these ventures often ended in economic failure. The conquest of Algeria after 1830 is a case in point. There were hopes it would become a new Saint-Domingue, easier to defend thanks to geographical proximity. Yet these hopes were sorely disappointed, as climate and the absence of slave labour made it impossible to replicate the colonial cash crop model. Even as French foreign trade soared between 1850 and 1870, imports from and exports to Algeria stagnated. In the book I reinterpret French attempts to collaborate with the leader of Algerian resistance, Abd al-Qadir, in the 1830s, or to transform the colony into an autonomous “Algerian Kingdom” in the 1860s – under the impulse of Ismaÿl Urbain, a Guyana-born, mixed-race, influential advisor of French governments – as efforts to de-formalize the modalities of French domination, at least partially. Only after 1880 did Algeria experience an economic boom, and even then – as Owen White just reminded us in his new book, The Blood of the Colony – it was based on the cultivation of the vine and wine exports, so hardly a tropical commodity unavailable in metropolitan France. Enduring aspirations to territorial empire no doubt played an important part in the eventual resurgence of colonial imperialism in the late nineteenth century, but I don’t think this is a case of linear continuity. For several decades, France also experimented with other imperial options, which were more profitable.

 

Nicolas Barreyre (EHESS): I was really interested in your focus on the "informal" empire in the French case. In the US historiography on the United States, it seems to me, the idea of "informal empire" has often been used to try and defend the wrong idea that the American empire had mostly been exceptional, compared to European empires. I am glad that you can show that informal modes of imperialism were not part of an exceptionalist history. I do have a question about opposing formal and informal empire, though. Building on the previous questions you were asked here, it seems to me that we could understand more or less formal ways to "do" empire as a series of tools countries had to impose their power, or their sovereignty, on others, in much the same way that Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper proposed to understand empires as layers of sovereignty, and how it applied differently in different places. So I wonder if what you describe is a moment in history when France, for reasons that I am sure you develop in your book, chose to rely mostly (but not exclusively, obviously) on those "informal" tools. If so, maybe that would be a way to understand also other empires, and the chronology of Euro-American imperialism that seemed to rush for more formal empires roughly at the same time, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century?

 

DT: Thank you, Nicolas, for giving me an opportunity to return to vexed issue of what Paul Kramer criticized as the “seductive” but often misleading formal vs informal dichotomy. I very much subscribe to Burbank and Cooper’s conception of imperial power as an arsenal of varied tools. The informal and the formal are merely the extreme theoretical poles of a wide spectrum of imperial possibilities. Some informal imperial ventures, such as the attempt to create a French-protected Empire of Mexico in the 1860s, had very formal elements, not least a military occupation that resembled a war of conquest. In the book I chose to focus on the informal part of the spectrum – in Mexico’s case, the legal and financial arrangements designed to subordinate Mexican sovereignty – because they have often been neglected, not least by colonialist historians of the early twentieth century, who tended to portray imperial projects different from their own as dead ends. My focus on the informal is therefore an attempt to complete the picture, not to give the full picture, and it helps resist the equally seductive temptation to treat only the official empire. Recently, even Kramer, in a blistering review of Daniel Immerwahr’s book on American imperialism (“How not to write the history of US empire”, in Diplomatic History), conceded that the danger of reductionism – to the formal aspects of empire – exceeded the risks of dichotomous thinking. And if my book can help dent the belief in American or Anglo exceptionalism I shall be very glad of it.

 

Samir Saul (Montreal): Thank you, David, for your presentation. I have a question about the notion of informal empire. It is usually related to Britain and it should not be forgotten that, implicit in it, is the threat of force. Informal empire is not just ideas and influence; it is backed by coercion or the threat of coercion. Britain had the means, to wit the Royal Navy. “If you don’t buy our exports, we will bombard your main port” summarizes the message. Was France really in a position to exercise informal empire?

DT: Thank you very much Samir. Informal empire is indeed closely connected to military coercion, at least the possible use of it. It is about gunboat diplomacy as much as soft power. But the mid-nineteenth century was precisely a moment when France invested massively in naval power. Some French naval theorists even hoped that new technologies such as steam propulsion and ship armouring would render British supremacy obsolete, and restore a balance of naval power between the two countries. French rearmament caused a last “Invasion Scare” in Britain in the 1850s. But French naval power was mostly used overseas – to wrest an indemnity of 150 million francs from Haiti in 1825, to blockade the Regency of Algiers in 1827 – and often jointly with Britain, to open up extra-European markets – in the Rio de la Plata in the 1840s, in the Ottoman world in the 1850s (Crimean war of 1853-1856, intervention in Lebanon in 1859-1860) and against China during the Second Opium war of 1856-1860. An imbalance of power no doubt persisted, but as John Shovlin suggests in his forthcoming book on earlier aspirations to Anglo-French imperial collaboration, Trading with the Enemy, French inferiority after Trafalgar made cooperation easier, since France could no longer vie for supremacy and Britain could tolerate French activism. After France’s defeat to Prussia, French strategists reappraised the significance of land power: this was another factor behind the resurgence of formal French colonialism after 1880.  

Gareth Stedman Jones (Queen Mary / Cambridge): The question I wanted to ask you concerned the cultural history and reputation of Paris in the c.1815-1960 period in relation to the impact of Evangelicalism in Britain from Boyd Hilton's Age of Atonement through various phases of censorship (Victorianism etc.). Paris became the anti-puritan Other (can-can, Folies Bergères, forbidden novels, Oscar Wilde, Henry Miller, Impressionism, Bohemia etc). I think this contrast was still alive in the 1950s when I was growing up. I remember the excitement of my father and his Rugby-loving friends at the prospect of a weekend in Paris to watch the Wales-France match and having a good (but probably, fairly tame) time in Montmartre or wherever afterwards. I wondered how far Parisians were aware of this reputation and (commercially) played up to it.

DT: Thank you Gareth, this is an important question on religion and economics – I’ll leave the rugby aside, although I always thought the French fervour for rugby, quite unique on the European continent, was suggestive of France’s special relationship with the British imperial world. In an article in The Economist (in 1868) that marvelled at the French capacity to “create desire”, Walter Bagehot also wondered about the role of Protestantism, Catholicism and religiosity in shaping Anglo-French economic contrasts. He ultimately dismissed the idea, pointing instead to France’s lower birth rates as the main reason behind French excellence at leisure and pleasure (parenting two young children while writing the book has given me some sympathy for this Malthusian analysis). But since French lower birth rates owed a great deal to déchristianisation, this does not exclude indirect religious factors. At the same time, French luxury wasn’t always irreverent of religion. The religious revival encouraged by successive French governments after 1800 led to the construction of many new churches, the decoration of which turned the Catholic Church into a major purchaser of luxurious articles. French advertising certainly sometimes played up to the image you allude to. However, it could only do so in subtle, understated ways. And like many other things about my velvet empire it was very much an image, although that’s not to say it did not matter: make-belief and misconceptions were important ingredients of modern imperial and economic life.