Early colonial advocates endorsed racial intermarriage but later abandoned it

Evidence

Although colonial administrators had assumed that barbarians had no civilization of their own, their recommendation to remedy this situation through intermarriage meant that they were not overtly racist. How widespread this attitude was, like so much else in Enlightenment thought, remains subject to debate. What is clear is that sometime during the first thirty years of French rule, commentators on Algeria began to condemn the concept of racial mixing and, by extension, the universal assumptions that underwrote it. By the 187o’s, when the colonial publicist Leroy-Beaulieu first published his influential tract, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes-a large portion of which was devoted to Algeria-the idea had largely disappeared. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 80

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘On Sacrifice’ and general colonial ideology threads; also echoes the reader’s concern with how French republicanism was imposed in West Africa as racial mixing gave way to separation. — connects to: Colonial racial mixture was permitted locally but barred from the metropole — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1320