Fin-de-siecle sociology shaped decisions to adapt education and justice in the colonies

Evidence

Yet France’s civilizing discourse since the founding of the Government General had always had another dimension. Fin-de-siecle science also framed Dakar’s vision, whether in the guise of social evolutionary theory, improved communications technology, modern hygiene, or bacteriology. That societies change only slowly, that they are organic wholes whose parts can and should be known before the larger entity can be improved: these foundational ideas of modern sociology were current in Dakar and Paris. While hardly giving rise to any genuine French understanding of Africans, they did contribute to the decisions to adapt education and justice to the colonies. In the case of technology and the germ theory of disease, the transfer from Paris to Dakar was more direct; if anything, metropolitan trends were exaggerated overseas. Roume made the spread of railroads and preventive hygiene an integral part of the mission civilisatrice in West Africa. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 487

Categorization

• QUESTION: Wonder how social evolutionary theory’s ‘organic whole’ framing concretely changed which education and justice adaptations were chosen in Dakar.