Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France: Global Economic Crisis and the Racialization of French Citizenship, 1870-1910

Description

This is an innovative study of how race and empire transformed French republican citizenship in the early Third Republic. Elizabeth Heath integrates the histories of the wine-producing department of Aude and the sugar-producing colony of Guadeloupe to reveal the ways in which empire was integral to the Third Republic's ability to stabilize a republican regime that began to unravel in an age of economic globalization. She shows how global economic factors shaped negotiations between local citizens and the Third Republic over the responsibilities of the Republic to its citizens leading to the creation of two different and unequal forms of citizenship that became constitutive of the interwar imperial nation-state and the French welfare state. Her findings shed important new light on the tensions within republicanism between ideals of liberty and equality and on the construction of race as a meaningful social category at a foundational moment in French history.

Elizabeth Heath is an Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College, City University of New York, having taught previously at Florida International University. She received her PhD from the Department of History at the University of Chicago. She is a former Harper-Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago and the holder of a number of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Newberry Library, the Getty Research Institute, and the Wolfsonian Museum. Her research focuses on modern France and the French empire, and she is particularly interested in the way that colonialism shaped the fundamental features of modern French life, whether citizenship and welfare, or consumer habits, hygiene, and economic tools. She is currently at work on a new book-length project on French colonial commodities entitled Everyday Colonialism: Commodities of Empire and the Making of Modern France.

'The story Heath tells about an earlier moment of globalization is an important lesson for our times, when arguments about agricultural standards are simultaneously about quality and about supply, competitiveness and price, not to mention our way of life ... Read this book. Its story may be about France, but is lesson is universal.' Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Reviews and Critical Commentary (councilforeuropeanstudies.org/critcom)