Empire on the Seine
The Policing of North Africans in Paris, 1925-1975
Series: Oxford Studies in Modern European History;
- Publisher's listprice GBP 30.00
-
13 545 Ft (12 900 Ft + 5% VAT)
The price is estimated because at the time of ordering we do not know what conversion rates will apply to HUF / product currency when the book arrives. In case HUF is weaker, the price increases slightly, in case HUF is stronger, the price goes lower slightly.
- Discount 10% (cc. 1 355 Ft off)
- Discounted price 12 191 Ft (11 610 Ft + 5% VAT)
Subcribe now and take benefit of a favourable price.
Subscribe
13 545 Ft
Availability
Estimated delivery time: In stock at the publisher, but not at Prospero's office. Delivery time approx. 3-5 weeks.
Not in stock at Prospero.
Why don't you give exact delivery time?
Delivery time is estimated on our previous experiences. We give estimations only, because we order from outside Hungary, and the delivery time mainly depends on how quickly the publisher supplies the book. Faster or slower deliveries both happen, but we do our best to supply as quickly as possible.
Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 29 August 2025
- ISBN 9780198976134
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages288 pages
- Size 235x155x15 mm
- Weight 442 g
- Language English 616
Categories
Short description:
Amit Prakash draws on extensive archival materials to understand the colonial legacy of how minority populations have been policed in twentieth-century Paris, showing how colonial racism was integrated into the policing of Paris, and that architecture, urbanism, and social housing contributed to this legacy.
MoreLong description:
Why are relations between minorities and the police in France so fraught? Stripping away the myth that this tension is a sudden and recent disruption of its universalist republican tradition brought on by the presence of North African immigrants, Amit Prakash locates the origins of contemporary conflicts in race and empire in France's history. In Empire on the Seine, Prakash argues that the métropole and the colony dynamically co-developed a policing regime over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to manage colonial and racial difference. With the North African community emerging as a sizable and durable presence in Paris after World War I, this policing became a key state practice in imagining and administering the immigrant population. Prakash shows that despite the French state's current reluctance to use race as an official category, racial thought and racial targets animated police services, social services, and urban planning schemes from the 1920s until the 1970s.
Using police archival records, reports from colonial officials, urban planning and housing studies, and the records of French social workers and immigrant associations, Prakash shows that colonial racism was integrated into the policing of Paris and that architecture, urbanism, and social housing assumed police functions for colonial and postcolonial migrants. In light of this history, contemporary social and racial segregation, periodic protests and rioting against police violence, and the aggressive posture of the Parisian police emerge as the material traces of French colonialism in the métropole. The city of Paris was the capital of an empire and its imperial shadows are long.
In this wonderful, wide-ranging book, Amit Prakash uncovers the many layers of French anxiety over North African immigration. With great theoretical sophistication and thorough archival detective work, he takes the reader through police efforts to come to terms with, to understand, a process that consistently baffled them, to make North African immigration to Paris comprehensible and, ultimately, manageable. While their efforts famously failed, they laid the foundation for durable patterns of discrimination and inequality that remain of urgent concern.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Policing Imperial Paris
The Police Conception of North Africans
The Police Production of Space
The Coming of the Algerian Revolution
Imperial Sentinels
Droit de Cité(s)
The Quest for 'Autonomy'
Conclusion: Imperial Shadows
