The colonized shaped French imperial ideas rather than merely receiving them

Evidence

France had achieved unparalleled supremacy in the moral, cultural, and social spheres as well. And although Paul Rabinow’s and Gwendolyn Wright’s view of the colonies as laboratories for policies originating in the metropole has shed new light on the history of the Third Republic, their studies have suffered from a conceptual blind spot as well. In focusing on the colonies as an extension of France, they have tended to ignore the impact of the colonized upon French ideas and actions. The colonies were never just laboratories; they were sites, however unequal, of conflict and negotiation between colonizer and colonized, where French assumptions about the ability of Africans to evolve, and of France to civilize them, were contested and periodically reshaped. … Indeed, in the French-African encounter, ideas and cultural practices did more than simply emanate from the metropole. The empire also had an impact upon the culture of metropolitan France. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 33

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the contemporary scholarship debate (Conklin vs. Rabinow/Wright’s ‘laboratory’ model) already familiar from postcolonial studies reading.