Industry and Empire: The Beginnings of French Industrial Politics in the Colonies under the Vichy Regime

Abstract

After the First World War, the equipping of the colonies was the order of the day. It was a question of remedying the exploitation, typical of the first colonial phase, of an almost exclusively commercial nature by planning infrastructural investments: the Sarraut plan (Sarraut was Minister for the Colonies in 1921) was partially assimilated into the Maginot programme (Maginot had succeeded Sarraut in the same post in 1929); and it finally approached realisation through the great laws of loans to the colonies (1931).