Abstract
No issue is more emotive in the history of overseas expansion than relations between Europeans and the populations of the countries which they invaded, conquered and settled: relations between the colonisers and the colonised. Colonialists proclaimed that Europeans replaced savagery with civilisation, backwardness with modernity; the creation of economic infrastructures, the opening of schools and infirmaries, and the establishment of modern law codes and institutions immensely improved the lives of Africans, Asians and islanders. Anti-colonialists presented evidence that the slavery, warfare, violence, taxation, exploitation of labour and destruction of local cultures which accompanied European expansion wreaked brutal and irreparable damage on non-European societies.
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Notes
See Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, ‘Villes coloniales et histoire des Africains’, XXe siècle: Revue d’histoire, No. 20 (1988), 49–73; Yves Marguerat, ‘La Naissance d’une capitale africaine: Lomé’, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 81:302 (1994), 71–95.
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© 1996 Robert Aldrich
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Aldrich, R. (1996). The French and the ‘Natives’. In: Greater France. European Studies Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24729-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24729-5_8
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