We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To send content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about sending content to .
To send content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about sending to your Kindle.
Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
This introduction sets the stage, describing the evolution of the international monetary system during the 1930s and the tenets of the Tripartite Agreement, as well as providing a literature review.
Knowledge of the long relationship between gender equality and economic growth is hampered by the lack of information and resources on the various dimensions of gender equality. This paper is a first attempt to assess the size of the gender gap and investigate its relationship with economic growth from a historical perspective. Exploiting a unique census-based dataset of 86 French counties in the mid-nineteenth century, I construct a historical gender gap index measuring the size of the gap between men and women in three critical areas: economic opportunities, educational attainment, and health. A county comparison allows me to identify the strengths and weaknesses of French counties in closing the gender gap. I find that France can be divided into two main areas, the North and the South. In particular, the Northern counties that have done most to narrow the gap display better economic performance. Boys' and girls' education and family structures appear to be crucial determinants of gender equality. Gender equality is positively and significantly associated with economic performance. Accounting for the multi-dimensions of gender equality is crucial for economic development.
The international monetary system imploded during the Great Depression. As the conventional narrative goes, the collapse of the gold standard and the rise of competitive devaluation sparked a monetary war that sundered the system, darkened the decade, and still serves as a warning to policymakers today. But this familiar tale is only half the story. With the Tripartite Agreement of 1936, Britain, America, and France united to end their monetary war and make peace. This agreement articulated a new vision, one in which the democracies promised to consult on exchange rate policy and uphold a liberal international system - at the very time fascist forces sought to destroy it. Max Harris explores this little-known but path-breaking and successful effort to revolutionize monetary relations, tracing the evolution of the monetary system in the twilight years before the Second World War and demonstrating that this history is not one solely of despair.
This introduction opens with an analysis of the way that black intellectuals from throughout the French Empire and the United States understood their relationship to Western civilization more broadly and the Republics of France and America in particular. It positions this book in the heart of contemporary historiographical debates about the relationship between anti-racist and anti-colonial activism and claims to citizenship and human rights. In so doing it brings into conversation the two disparate historiographies of rights and race in the United States and the French Empire and makes an argument for breaking down the division between the “interwar” and “postwar” periods when thinking about these histories.
The decolonization, a process that leads to the nominal independence and international recognition of states, gained momentum in the late-1950s, having its peak in 1960, the African year, when 18 colonies, protectorates, and trust territories became independent. This chapter explores the decolonization of Africa from three perspectives: of the colonial powers, of the colonial states, i.e. the colonies themselves, and of the international system. It argues that there is not one explanation to capture the decolonization. Only if we scrutinize decolonisation from all three perspectives, we are able to comprehend that process in its complexity.
African states have been and are subject to external interference. During the Cold War, the USA and the Soviet Union competed for influence, as did China and France. After the Cold War ended, a decade commenced in which there was fewer external influence but the promotion of a liberal-cosmopolitan order. The rise of China in Africa (and beyond), beginning roughly in 2000 as well as the 9/11 and other terrorist attacks ended that decade of relative calm. A phase of heightened interest in Africa began, particularly in the areas of security, migration, and economic policy, often labelled the “New Scramble for Africa” that continues to the present day.
This chapter outlines the nature of the “Franco-Chadian state” and its early postcolonial political evolution. It highlights the deep embeddedness of French influence in the Chadian economy and security services. It also provides an overview of the broader context of postcolonial Franco-African relations and French strategic aims in its former empire. The chapter then examines the outbreak of civil war in the country. In 1965, communities in central Chad rebelled against abusive governmental taxation. Quickly the revolt spread throughout the country and gradually its disparate factions became more organized under the loose banner of the Front de Liberation Nationale du Tchad (Frolinat). By early 1969, Frolinat elements threatened Fort-Lamy, Chad’s capital. This chapter examines the nature of this rebellion and French President Charles de Gaulle’s decision, in the final weeks of his presidency, to launch a sizeable military intervention on behalf of Tombalbaye’s regime. This intervention included an important statebuilding component, the Mission pour la réforme administrative (MRA). It aimed to address the administrative failures that French policymakers saw as a root cause of the rebellion. The chapter concludes with a description of the MRA’s mission and an analysis of its ultimate failure.
After several months of fighting, it became clear to outside observers that Habré’s forces had gained the upper hand. Goukouni then asked Gaddafi to formalize and escalate the support he had received over the past several months. This culminated in a friendship treaty and a meticulously organized Libyan ground invasion of Chad in December 1980. This forced Habré to disengage from N’Djamena, and flee the country. Most of his forces managed to regroup and withdrawal into neighboring Sudan, from which Habré soon began conducting guerilla operations. In early 1981, Gaddafi and Goukouni announced the “merger” of Chad and Libya. This chapter narrates these events, and questions how French policy failed to prevent the kind of nightmare scenario which had haunted French officials over the previous three years. It also discusses the origins of a growing American role in support of Habré. The chapter further introduces the early approach of Mitterrand's presidency towards Chad and assesses the gradual shift in French policy which helped to encourage Goukouni to expel Libyan forces from Chad.
This chapter centers on Franco-Chadian relations during the “Claustre Affair,” from 1974-1977. This began when the two rebel leaders of a weakened “2nd Army,” Hissène Habré and Goukouni Weddeye kidnapped several French and German citizens, including Françoise Claustre, the wife of the head of the MRA. This set the stage for a nearly three year-long series of negotiations between French officials, the rebel movement, and the Chadian government. During these negotiations, Habré arrested and later executed one of the French negotiators, Captain Pierre Galopin, and Pierre Claustre, Françoise’s husband, himself became a hostage. The chapter also focuses on the weight of French influence in the Chadian regime’s decision-making processes and the role this played in Franco-Chadian relations over the next few years. It discusses the coup d’état that overthrew Tombalbaye in 1975 and the advent of his successor, the Conseil supérieur militaire (CSM) under General Félix Malloum. Finally, the chapter chronicles the way that France’s negotiation strategy facilitated increased Libyan military and diplomatic involvement with different factions of the Chadian rebellion. Ultimately, this support upset the balance of power within the country and facilitated a return to outright war.
This chapter narrates Operation Limousin, France’s first major military intervention in Chad from 1969-1972. It traces shifting French strategies to defeat a widespread Frolinat rebellion, and charts French military successes in central Chad. It also examines the ultimate inability of French arms and diplomacy to defeat Frolinat’s “2nd Army” in the desert north of the country. The chapter also analyzes Limousin’s mixed results and its longer-term consequences for Chad’s subsequent conflicts. In particular, the chapter addresses the counterinsurgency methods employed by French forces and their Chadian allies, and their impact on local populations. These included the fragmentation of state authority through the creation of numerous militias, indiscriminate air attacks, and operational support for an even less discriminating government army. Throughout, the difficult relations between Chadian President, François Tombalbaye, and top Chadian officials with their French patrons remain a central element to the story.
This chapter covers the delicate politics surrounding the integration of Habré’s faction into the CSM. It also describes how French military successes against different rebel factions led to divisions within the northern rebellion, and a split between its main leader, Goukouni Weddeye, and Gaddafi’s Libya. It then covers the fighting which broke out between Habré and Malloum in February 1979. The chapter looks at how the balance of power shifted in favor of Habré as Goukouni’s forces infiltrated the capital and joined Habré’s men. The chapter also analyzes the ambiguous role played by France in facilitating a northern victory, as well as the subsequent debates and recriminations within the French policymaking apparatus. This led to a sharp deterioration in relations between French military officials and diplomats. Meanwhile, by early March 1979, over half of N’Djamena’s population had fled the city towards the south, thus effectively leaving behind an ethnically cleansed capital in the hands of a fragile coalition of Frolinat rebels.
This article traces the influence of Front National (FN) on the transformation of mainstream French narratives of laïcité since 1989, with particular attention to education policy. It argues that the FN’s right-wing populist rhetoric, particularly the systematic securitisation of Islam as a threat to the ‘people’, facilitated the more widespread reframing of laïcité as a Republican defence mechanism, operating primarily through the school system. Laïcité was increasingly deployed in mainstream discourses and legislative measures to address two interrelated security concerns: the immediate safety of the school by the promotion of neutrality, and the overall wellbeing of the Republic via the prevention of radicalisation. Analysing this process in two specific periods (1989–2004 and 2005–2019), the article demonstrates that the FN’s populist agenda came to be in a symbiotic relationship with the centre-right and centre-left parties. While established parties gradually incorporated the FN’s securitisation narrative in their policymaking, the FN went through a process of ‘normalisation’ by claiming ownership of laïcité as a way to frame its anti-Islam stance in a more acceptable Republican discourse.
Examining the continuous French military interventions in Chad in the two decades after its independence, this study demonstrates how France's successful counterinsurgency efforts to protect the regime of François Tombalbaye would ultimately weaken the Chadian state and encourage Libya's Muammar Gaddafi to intervene. In covering the subsequent French efforts to counter Libyan ambitions and the rise to power of Hissène Habré, one of postcolonial Africa's most brutal dictators, Nathaniel K. Powell demonstrates that French strategies aiming to prevent the collapse of authoritarian regimes had the opposite effect, exacerbating violent conflicts and foreign interventions in Chad and further afield. Based on extensive archival research to trace the causes, course, and impact of French interventions in Chad, this study offers insights and lessons for current interveners - including France - fighting a 'war on terrorism' in the Sahel whose strategies and impact parallel those of France in the 1960s–1980s.
The discovery of a multi-chambered long cairn in central Brittany dating to the Middle Neolithic period challenges previous conceptions of the coastal focus of Neolithic society in this region.
Forty per cent of Europeans refuse to have Roma as their neighbours, while 80 per cent of these do not even have direct contact with them. Using these statistics as a point of departure, this study analyzes how attitudes toward Roma are constructed. It proposes to investigate this process in two similar environments but where local integration policies directed toward Roma differ, resulting in disparate forms of intergroup contact. The analysis is premised on two theoretical assumptions: that the integration of migrants is a local public policy issue and that intergroup contact frames attitudes between majority and minority groups. From semi-structured interviews in the French municipalities of La Courneuve and Ivry-sur-Seine, four theories are empirically tested: the contact theory, the halo effect, the impact of local immigrant integration policies and media influence. This study demonstrates that the implementation of municipal policies in favour of Roma integration can improve their living conditions and thus deconstruct prejudices attributable to their precarious situation. In addition, it illustrates how the media activate, maintain or solidify the way Roma are perceived.
Although accountability is touched on in nearly every account of current higher education developments (HE), only a few HE scholars have attempted to further theorize accountability, its forms, implications, and practical significance. In this chapter, we attempt to advance the debate by focusing on European HE in the age of Bologna, international rankings, massification, and underfunding. We begin our analysis by addressing the manifold socio-economic forces which have put accountability centre stage in contemporary HE discourse and reforms. We then outline numerous state-of-the-art conceptualizations of accountability in general, and in HE specifically. Following the lead of Huisman and Currie (2004), we wish to move beyond normative statements and generalized descriptions by analysing the emergence of ‘accountability regimes’ in four large European countries — Germany (North-Rhine Westphalia), France, Poland, and Romania — with distinctly different paths of development in HE. The analysis allows us to identify cross-national cases of convergence and divergence in the emergence of accountability regimes.
A total of 160,000 people, a mix of résistants and Jews, were deported from France to camps in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War. In this compelling new study, Philip Nord addresses how the Deportation, as it came to be known, was remembered after the war and how Deportation memory from the very outset, became politicized against the backdrop of changing domestic and international contexts. He shows how the Deportation generated competing narratives – Jewish, Catholic, Communist, and Gaullist – and analyzes the stories told by and about deportees after the war and how these stories were given form in literature, art, film, monuments, and ceremonials.
Based on a systematic sampling of nearly 2000 French and English novels from 1601 to 1830, this book's foremost aim is to ask precisely how the novel evolved. Instead of simply 'rising', as scholars have been saying for some sixty years, the novel is in fact a system in constant flux, made up of artifacts – formally distinct novel types – that themselves rise, only to inevitably fall. Nicholas D. Paige argues that these artifacts are technologies, each with traceable origins, each needing time for adoption (at the expense of already developed technologies) and also for abandonment. Like technological waves in more physical domains, the rises and falls of novelistic technologies don't happen automatically: writers invent and adopt literary artifacts for many diverse reasons. However, looking not at individual works but at the novel as a patterned system provides a startlingly persuasive new way of understanding the history and evolution of artforms.
This chapter examines the fraught relationship between jihadism in central Mali and an ethnic group, the Peul, that has simultaneously furnished numerous recruits to the jihadists and become a target of collective punishment by the state. The jihadists in central Mali and those in northern Mali, beginning formally in 2017 but informally several years earlier, were part of the same organization. Yet the political approach taken by jihadists in the center differed substantially from that taken by their peers in the north; in particular, jihadists in the center cultivated a starker “ethnicizing” discourse but were simultaneously less interested than their northern counterparts in drawing local politicians into their coalition. The chapter analyzes how Peul politicians have responded to the jihadist leader Amadou Kouffa, highlighting ways in which shared religion and ethnicity provided common ground for communication but ultimately not for compromise, let alone coalition-building. The chapter argues that central Mali represents a case of jihadist coalition-building that, by its implicitly anti-elite stance, offers substantial possibilities for grassroots recruitment while simultaneously foreclosing the possibility of absorbing some of the most important political blocs on the scene.
This chapter investigates the political career of a small Islamic State affiliate operating in this border zone. These jihadists have benefited not just from the stereotypical “porous border” but also from the way that complex conflicts in this region exacerbate animosity between ethnic groups and between civilian populations and national states. This animosity creates openings for jihadists to implicate themselves in local politics and for local communities to use jihadism as a weapon in local politics. The chapter argues, however, that the “Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS)” exemplifies the case of a coalition whose horizons are limited precisely because its religious messaging is highly underdeveloped. Even as ISGS finds some recruits and achieves some military and propaganda victories, such as ambushing a patrol of American and Nigerien soldiers in 2017, ISGS has struggled to build a serious political coalition and therefore may remain, ironically, a partial satellite of its ostensible rival al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).