Fertility, Family, and Social Welfare between France and Empire: The Colonial Politics of Population (New Directions in Welfare History)

This edited volume focuses on social welfare and medicine within the French Empire and brings together important currents in both imperial history and the history of medicine. The book covers a broad period from the ‘first colonial empires’ that existed prior to 1830, the ‘new imperialism’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the process of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century, and the ‘afterlives’ of colonial regimes in France and newly-independent states. Building on recent scholarship, this volume examines the extension of imperialism into the post-colonial period. The chapters examine a range of topics developing our understanding of the reasons why colonial states saw the family as a site for biopolitical intervention. The authors argue that experts built a racialised body of knowledge about colonial populations through census data and medical understandings of problems such as child mortality and infertility. They show that by analysing and compiling dataon fertility, population growth (or decline), and health, this fuelled interventions designed to ensure a stable workforce, and that protecting children and mothers, vaccinating vulnerable populations, and creating modern, sanitary housing were all initiatives also aimed at serving larger goals of preserving colonial rule. Finally, the book shows that social welfare projects during the French Empire reflected concerns about race, differential fertility, and migration that continued well after decolonisation. Series Foreword for Margaret Cook Andersen and Melissa K. Byrnes, eds., Fertility, Family, and Social Welfare between France and Empire: The Colonial Politics of Population 6 Praise for Fertility, Family, and Social Welfare between France and Empire 9 Contents 11 Notes on Contributors 13 List of Tables 17 1 Introduction 18 2 Colonial Reckoning: Population, Power, and Liberty in the French Atlantic, 1660–1787 27 Children of the State 29 1660s: The Soldier-Settler in French Canada 32 1680s: Vauban Considers the Soldier-Settler 36 1760s: The Soldier-Settler Confronts Military Loss 42 Religious Liberty After 1763 47 Conclusion 50 3 Pensioning Pondichéry’s Enfants and Orphelins: Social Welfare and the French East India Company in Eighteenth-Century French India 53 I 57 II 60 III 65 4 “Free and Naturalized Frenchwomen”: Gender and the Politics of Race on Revolution-Era Bourbon Island 74 Defending Whiteness 80 Whiteness Through Marriage 83 Marriage Politics and the Revolution 89 Conclusion 100 Appendix: Documented Marriages Between Blancs and Libres 102 5 Lipiodol and Fertility Medicine in Interwar Colonial Algeria 103 Lipiodol and Fertility Medicine 105 Dr. Laffont and the Sterility Clinic of Algiers 107 Race, Gender, and Fertility Medicine 111 Race, Medicine, and the Origins of Infertility in the Colony 112 Fertility Medicine in Colonial Morocco 116 Infertility and France’s Civilizing Mission 117 Conclusion 120 6 Rituals of the Matrice: Maternal and Infant Protection in French Colonial Cambodia 122 Conceiving the Oeuvre 125 Prenatal Care 129 Early Pains of Colonial Obstetrics 133 At the Roume Maternity 137 Attacks from Across the Tonle 140 Conclusion 142 7 The Colonial Origins of Mass Prophylaxis as a Public Health Panacea 145 Introduction 145 The Interwar Social Hygiene Problem and Its Pastorian Solution 148 The Production of a Successful Yellow Fever Campaign 156 From Colonial to International Mass Campaigns 163 Conclusion 167 8 Categorizing the Maghrib: How Census Data, Demography, and Population Studies Facilitated Governance Strategies and Public Messaging in Colonial and Postcolonial North Africa 170 French Imperial Censuses and Data Gathering in North Africa 173 Demography and One-Party Politics in Tunisia 179 Population Politics and the 1960 Census in Morocco 182 The 1966 Census and the Prominent Role of Social Science in Algeria 186 Conclusion 191 9 Modernizing Migrants: Welfare and the Postwar Transformation of Marseille’s African Communities 194 Preserving Marseille’s African Workers 198 Making Space for Marseille’s African Workers 205 Forging Post-Imperial Lives and Spaces 210 10 Criminal Fertility: Policing North African Families After Decolonization 218 Policing Racial Deviance 220 Planning the Imperial Family 222 Securing Thresholds 225 Crime, Disorder, and Demography in Villeurbanne 231 Conclusion 240 11 Inessential Labor: Reproduction, Work, and Algerian Family Migration After Independence 243 The Family in Migration 246 Reproductive Labor and the Algerian Home 252 Women Who Don’t Work 259 Care and Work: Mutually Exclusive Categories? 264 Index 267