A tale of two empires: Models of political community in British and French colonies

Abstract

Since colonial times, many have argued that British and French colonial rule differed in fundamental ways, and recent works exploring colonial legacies build on these claims to suggest that different forms of rule promoted contrasting postcolonial outcomes. Yet many historians and sociologists argue that claims of interimperial differences are inaccurate, overlook important similarities among British and French colonies, and overstate the influence of colonialism. In this article, we test these opposing positions through a multimethod analysis that focuses on the colonial models of political community. Through a statistical analysis of different colonial policies, we provide evidence that the general British model of political community was relatively pluralist whereas the French colonial model was usually highly integrative. And through a comparative‐historical analysis, we offer insight into the different origins of both: The French colonial model was influenced by the dominant model in France and metropolitan political concerns, whereas anticolonialism in India contributed to the rise and proliferation of the more pluralist British model.

Ethnic empowering policies and postcolonial political exclusion in the British empire: An analysis of ethnic police recruitment and communal legislative representation

“…While it may potentially be meaningful to examine all European colonies, or perhaps a combination of British and French colonies as in Blanton et al (2001) and Wucherpfennig et al (2016), we focus our analysis on the former British empire. Policies of ethnicity‐based empowerment were by far the most common in British colonies than in other empires due to the high level of “pluralism” in Britain's model of colonial rule (Lange et al, 2022) and its frequent adherence to divide‐and‐rule tactics (Blanton et al, 2001). As discussed further in the following sections, this means that data are often not available for other empires due to conceptual inapplicability or because they were never compiled with ethnic markers by the colonial administrators.…”