Dr Xavier Guégan: French Algeria and British India

The Department of Historical Sociology, Faculty of Humanities is pleased to invite you to the lecture „French Algeria and British India: Comparing the Mechanisms of Colonial Cultures and Identities“ which will be delivered by Dr Xavier Guégan, University of Winchester, UK.

Annotation: In the mid-nineteenth century, British and French colonisation led to distinct legislative and governmental models in India and Algeria. Following the defeat of the Sepoy Rebellion (1858) and the dismantling of the East India Company, Britain established direct rule in India. Similarly, in 1848, after several tumultuous decades of conquest and settlement, Algeria became administratively part of France. During this second wave of empires building (the first one finishing with the end of the eighteenth century) new justifications for imperial and colonial motives and enterprises emerged. In the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, in post-Enlightenment and industrial France and Britain, political schemes and their related colonial discourses had to change to convince populations that there was a ‘duty’ to colonise. The two imperial powers thus sought to legitimise their established colonial structures by different political and cultural means. This paper will compare both colonies by exploring a variety of these types of cultural mediums, their mechanisms, their origins, targets, and their short and long-time impact.

Dr Xavier Guégan is a Senior Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial History at the University of Winchester. Dr Guégan researches, publishes and lectures on South Asian history under British colonial rule and North African history under French colonial rule, including imperial culture and ideologies, as well as on violence and anti-colonial resistance. Dr Guégan also has expertise on the correlation between photography and history. He is on the editorial board (Book Review Editor) of Britain and the World, an academic journal published by Edinburgh University Press, which focusses on Britain’s relations with the wider world since the seventeenth century. Dr Xavier Guégan is also the convenor of the Modern History Research Centre, based at the Department of History at the University of Winchester.