Preface

To be found in the pages of this edition of French Colonial History are four articles that examine and analyze the complexities of the French colonial world as well as the diffıculties of categorization of this world. Barbara Traver’s article provides insight into the ways in which the Eurafricans of Gorée who migrated to French Guiana were confronted there with a colonial structure and society quite different from that they had known in Africa. The presence of Goréens in French Guiana resulted in conflicts as to how they should be classifıed or categorized within a particular, constructed racial hierarchy. Debates over the racial identity and the work capacities of the Goréens revealed deep-seated colonial fears of the “taint” of Africans, as well as fears of revolts and the potential destruction of French Guiana’s colonial order—an order that rested upon a fıction of white superiority and that was maintained through the construction of a rigid racial hierarchy. The exigencies of a colonial economy, the end of the slave trade, and Franco-British relations, as Virginie Chaillou-Atrous’s article illustrates, prompted some colons of Réunion to call for African immigration to meet the labor needs of their plantations. The end of the migration to Réunion of Indian laborers in 1882 forced its colons to reconsider their previous policies pertaining to African immigration and to formulate justifıcations for bringing back African workers to the island. To that end, colons couched their arguments in racialized terms, referring to Bengali laborers as weak, lazy, demanding, and whiny. Africans, they maintained, were more docile and robust, and their immigration to Réunion, their employment on the plantations