Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa
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A01=Christopher J. Gray
Author_Christopher J. Gray
Category=GTM
Category=NHH
Category=NHTQ
Category=NHTR
clan
colonial power
colonial territories
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
French
industrial capitalism
lineage relationships
modern nation-state
postcolonial Gabonese state
Southern Gabon
territoriality
Product details
- ISBN 9781580460484
- Weight: 656g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 25 Jul 2002
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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A look at the encounter between the French and the peoples of Southern Gabon in terms of their differing conceptions of boundaries.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, two very different practices of territoriality confronted each other in Southern Gabon. Clan and lineage relationships were most important in the local practice, while the French practice was informed by a territorial definition of society that had emerged with the rise of the modern nation-state and industrial capitalism. This modern territoriality used an array of bureaucratic instruments -- such as maps andcensuses -- previously unknown in equatorial Africa. Such instruments denied the existence of locally created territories and were fundamental to the exercise of colonial power. Thus modern territoriality imposed categories and institutions foreign to the peoples to whom they were applied. As colonial power became more effective from the 1920s on, those institutions started to be appropriated by Gabonese cultural elites who negotiated their meanings in reference to their own traditions. The result was a strongly ambiguous condition that left its imprint on the new colonial territories and subsequently the postcolonial Gabonese state.
Christopher Gray was Assistant Professor of History, Florida International University.
