Economic History Seminar

Du 07/04/2021 de 12:30 à 14:00

via Zoom

WOKER Madeline (IEA Zurich)

Empire of inequality: the politics of taxation in the French colonial empire, 1900-1950s

I will present an outline of my current book project, Empire of inequality: the politics of taxation in the French colonial empire, 1900-1950s, which provides a comparative and connected political history of taxation in the French colonial empire during the first half of the twentieth century. Based on multilingual research conducted in 11 archival repositories in France, Vietnam and Algeria, the book examines the ways in which colonial tax regimes were debated, resisted, reformed, and transformed. To do so, it draws upon the archives of the French metropolitan state, various French colonial states in Southeast Asia, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, the writings of colonial theorists, the publications of imperial watchdog organisations, literary production as well as settler, reformist, and anticolonial press outlets. Using the lens of colonial taxpayers and imperial policymakers as they navigated the material and moral consequences of colonial fiscal segregation, the book seeks to offer both an unprecedented dynamic study of imperial fiscal hierarchies from 1900 to the 1950s and a new analysis of anti-colonial resistance as tax resistance.