French colonial exploitation shifted from plunder to state-managed rational development

Evidence

Second, the term also connoted an exploitation different from what had occurred in the first half of the century. As Michael Osborne has recently put it, the end of the nineteenth century witnessed a shift in French colonial sensibility from an ethos “of unlimited exploitation to one where exploitation is married to rationality, progress and conservation.” The overseas territories were not to be plundered, as they might have been in the past, for whatever short-term riches they could yield. Such unlimited exploitation was inefficient and potentially undermined the long-term economic value of the colonies to the metropole. Instead, a more systematic management of French overseas resources was needed-one in which the state would have a key role. It was this more rational and progressive development that the term mise en valeur apparently designated. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 145

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows mise en valeur encoded a new marriage of exploitation with rationality, progress, and conservation, stressing a central state role.