Understanding colonial institutions requires grounding in the colonized land and peoples

Evidence

Because West Africa’s geography, history, and peoples are as essential as metropolitan priorities and feuding administrators to the history of the Government General and its ideology, it is with a brief overview of the physical and social landscape of West Africa that a description of the federation must start. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 93

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”