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A Counter-History of French Colonization
- GenresHistory
302 pages, Paperback
Published November 7, 2024
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February 28, 2025
Ghali offers an insightful, riveting, and constructive overview of the French colonial projects spanning North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. He does what so many people categorically refuse to do now, which is actually reflect on the history with all of its faults and successes considered in equal measure. He does some moralizing, but only in ways that are utterly fair like condemning the colonial project, colonial abuses, and the reprisals of the natives.
As he emphasizes in the beginning and the end, this project seems to be in the effort of emphasizing to everyone in France and everyone in the former colonies that the future is where the focus should be placed and not the past. He confirms to the reader that the colonialist project was misguided from the outset but was also just not the same across the specific colonies, over the years, or even among the individuals within the colonies. To understand anything about this subject you have to be willing to treat it with the nuance the modern anti-colonialists refuse to do.
Ghali professes in the beginning that he is not an academic or a historian but a journalist, so this allows him to be biased but also honest in his reflections on the pre-colonial, colonial, and modern actions of all those involved. This lends the book to being incredibly readable and entertaining, I had no problem downing 50 to 60 pages in a day and his formatting of the book was a great help. As always, I'm very much a fan when the author includes a conclusion section that serves as quick reaffirmations on his main points and summing things up.
I found last section, Part VI: What is to be Done? Mourn the Past or Smile Upon the Future?, to maybe be the the best section in the whole book. While he doesn't present concrete policy recommendations on how to move forward, he provides concrete mindset changes that need to occur if anything will come of it all. I'd recommend anyone with a care to history or that cares to have anything beyond a cartoonish understanding of European (mainly French in this case) colonization to give this a read.
As he emphasizes in the beginning and the end, this project seems to be in the effort of emphasizing to everyone in France and everyone in the former colonies that the future is where the focus should be placed and not the past. He confirms to the reader that the colonialist project was misguided from the outset but was also just not the same across the specific colonies, over the years, or even among the individuals within the colonies. To understand anything about this subject you have to be willing to treat it with the nuance the modern anti-colonialists refuse to do.
Ghali professes in the beginning that he is not an academic or a historian but a journalist, so this allows him to be biased but also honest in his reflections on the pre-colonial, colonial, and modern actions of all those involved. This lends the book to being incredibly readable and entertaining, I had no problem downing 50 to 60 pages in a day and his formatting of the book was a great help. As always, I'm very much a fan when the author includes a conclusion section that serves as quick reaffirmations on his main points and summing things up.
I found last section, Part VI: What is to be Done? Mourn the Past or Smile Upon the Future?, to maybe be the the best section in the whole book. While he doesn't present concrete policy recommendations on how to move forward, he provides concrete mindset changes that need to occur if anything will come of it all. I'd recommend anyone with a care to history or that cares to have anything beyond a cartoonish understanding of European (mainly French in this case) colonization to give this a read.
Displaying 1 of 1 review