Lecture: Frederick Cooper - Beyond Empire: France and French Africa in the Post-World War II Context

Frederick Cooper (New York University) will give a lecture on Beyond Empire: France and French Africa in the Post-World War II Context. Empires have come and gone throughout world history, but the situation after World War II was different. New claimants to imperial power and new forms of empire had come onto the scene in the twentieth century, but as the war came to an end the very category of empire as a legitimate form of polity was in question. Nevertheless, the story of French Africa in the post-war years does not fit well into a narrative of global history as a long and inexorable transition from empires to nation-states.

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