Association doctrine carried a civilizing dimension from its start

Evidence

Ever since the publication of Raymond Betts’s Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, r89D-1914, historians have been familiar with the theoretical content of the doctrine of association, as elaborated in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Recently, Gwendolyn Wright has shown how associationist ideas influenced colonial architecture and urban design in French Morocco, Indochina, and Madagascar between 1900 and 1940. Neither account, however, explored the relationship between the idea of association and the ideology of the mission civilisatrice. The example of French West Africa in the 192o’s suggests that the rhetoric and policy of association had an important civilizing dimension from the outset. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 737

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Useful historiographic anchor connecting Betts’s and Wright’s work on association to the book’s own argument about the mission civilisatrice.

Related

• Historians had not connected association doctrine to the mission civilisatrice (similarity 0.96)
• The early mission civilisatrice carried an egalitarian current that interwar association policy abandoned. (similarity 0.84)
• French colonial ideology and governance policy shifted together toward association in the interwar period. (similarity 0.84)
• France was simultaneously assimilationist and associationist as colonial doctrine (similarity 0.84)
• French colonial policy shifted from emancipation to gradual political initiation (similarity 0.83)
• French colonial policy in West Africa was republican, not assimilationist or associationist (similarity 0.83)
• French rule after 1918 shifted from assimilation to associating African elites. (similarity 0.83)
• Associationism predated 1919 but was rejected under earlier governors (similarity 0.83)
• French colonial ideology shifted in step with metropolitan political changes. (similarity 0.82)
• Postwar French officials newly framed power sharing as part of the civilizing mission (similarity 0.82)
• France’s association policy was meant to unite old chiefly and new educated elites. (similarity 0.82)
• Focus on African agency made French colonial rule seem more monolithic than it was. (similarity 0.82)
• French republican ideology in the colonies mirrored and shaped domestic Third Republic politics (similarity 0.81)
• Postwar French colonial doctrine shifted in response to African resistance. (similarity 0.81)
• French interwar association policy left few proud legacies because it was highly coercive (similarity 0.81)