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FREDERICK COOPER , Citizenship between Empire and Nation: remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 . Princeton NJ and London : Princeton University Press (hb $45.95/£30.95 - 978 0 691 16131 0 ). 2014, 512 pp.
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This work analyses the transition to majority rule in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa, not as a simplistic transformation of a colony into a nation, but as a process, spanning a decade and a half, in which numerous possibilities for Africa's future were debated by French and Africans alike. In this richly detailed book, Frederick Cooper explores overlapping and often conflicting visions of citizenship and sovereignty, and, in so doing, sheds new light on nationalism and the end of French rule on the African continent.
The first two chapters address how Africans became part of the debates that took place in the latter stages of the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath about the position of empire in a reformed and reconfigured, yet still fragile, French Republic. Chapter 1 explores how and why, as efforts were made to redefine the relationship between metropole and colony, the idea of a federation became part of the vocabulary in both France and Africa. 'Turning France into something other than the empire it had been' (p. 43) was, for the French, a means of rebuilding the nation after the defeats and disappointments of...