Alternatives to Nationalism in French Africa, 1945–60

Abstract

At first glance, the decades after World War II constituted the great period of nationalism in the Third World. Yet ideas of political emancipation were more diverse than the claim to a singular state for each nation or people: political leaders were trying to imagine for themselves different political forms that would turn the inequalities of colonial empire into something else. Some doubted whether the territorial state, in the context of extreme poverty, offered much of a solution to colonized people. They recognized the colonial empires were vulnerable and that they had a chance to make good their claims both to political voice and to entitlement to the resources of empire, not as supplicants but as citizens.