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Writings on Empire and Slavery

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After completing his research for Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville turned to the French consolidation of its empire in North Africa, which he believed deserving of similar attention. Tocqueville began studying Algerian history and culture, making two trips to Algeria in 1841 and 1847. He quickly became one of France's foremost experts on the country and wrote dozens of essays, articles, official letters, and parliamentary reports on such diverse topics as France's military and administrative policies in North Africa, the people of the Maghrib, his own travels in Algeria, and the practice of Islam. Throughout, Tocqueville consistently defended the French imperial project, a position that stands in tension with his admiration for the benefits of democracy he witnessed in America. Although Tocqueville never published a book-length study of French North Africa, his various writings on the subject provide as invaluable a portrait of French imperialism as Democracy in America does of the Early Republic period in American history. In Writings on Empire and Slavery, Jennifer Pitts has selected and translated nine of his most important dispatches on Algeria, which offer startling new insights into both Tocqueville's political thought and French liberalism's attitudes toward the political, military, and moral aspects of France's colonial expansion. Also included in this collection is Tocqueville's influential call for the abolition of slavery in the French West Indies, an action he felt would regain for France the moral high ground taken by Britain when it abolished slavery in its colonies--even as the conquest and settling of Algeria would unify the French nation and gain for it international respect. Tocqueville, Pitts writes, ''was quick to appreciate the novelty of colonial warfare and administration, and he devoted careful and sometimes chillingly dispassionate study to questions about the means of colonization.'' Pitts points out the ''remarkable mixture of cruelty and sensibility'' in Tocqueville's writings on empire, which often seems at odds with the popular image of Tocqueville as the champion of democracy. Writings on Empire and Slavery provides a provocative and important counterbalance to Tocqueville's reportage in Democracy in America, complicating and enriching our understanding of his views on power and race.

""A highly useful collection.""

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