"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"--
Historians, since the 1960s, argue that the French economy performed as well as did any economy in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thanks to the opportunities for profit available on the market, especially the large consumer market in Paris. Whatever economic weaknesses existed did not stem from the social structure but from exogenous forces such as wars, the lack of natural resources or slow demographic growth. This book challenges the foregoing consensus by showing that the French economy performed poorly relative to its rivals because of noncapitalist social relations. Specifically, peasants and artisans controlled lands and workshops in autonomous communities and did not have to improve labor productivity to survive. Merchants and manufacturers cornered markets instead of being subject to the market’s competitive imperatives. Thus, distinctive features of capitalism—primitive accumulation (the dispossession of peasants and artisans) and the competitive obligation faced by merchants and manufacturers to reinvest profits in order to keep the profits—did not prevail until the state imposed them in a process lasting for a century after the 1850s. For this reason, it was not until the 1960s that France caught up to (and in some cases surpassed) its economic rivals.
In the wake of the First World War, in which France suffered severe food shortages, colonial produce became an increasingly important element of the French diet. The colonial lobby seized upon these foodstuffs as powerful symbols of the importance of the colonial project to the life of the French nation. But how was colonial food really received by the French public? And what does this tell us about the place of empire in French society? In Colonial Food in Interwar Paris, Lauren Janes disputes the claim that empire was central to French history and identity, arguing that the distrust of colonial food reflected a wider disinterest in the empire. From Indochinese rice to North African grains and tropical fruit to curry powder, this book offers an intriguing and original challenge to current orthodoxy about the centrality of empire to modern France by examining the place of colonial foods in the nation's capital.
Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne. The names of these and other French regions bring to mind time-honored winemaking practices. Yet the link between wine and place, in French known as terroir, was not a given. In The Sober Revolution, Joseph Bohling inverts our understanding of French wine history by revealing a modern connection between wine and place, one with profound ties to such diverse and sometimes unlikely issues as alcoholism, drunk driving, regional tourism, Algeria’s independence from French rule, and integration into the European Economic Community. In the 1930s, cheap, mass-produced wines from the Languedoc region of southern France and French Algeria dominated French markets. Artisanal wine producers, worried about the impact of these "inferior" products on the reputation of their wines, created a system of regional appellation labeling to reform the industry in their favor by linking quality to the place of origin. At the same time, the loss of Algeria, once the world’s largest wine exporter, forced the industry to rethink wine production. Over several decades, appellation producers were joined by technocrats, public health activists, tourism boosters, and other dynamic economic actors who blamed cheap industrial wine for hindering efforts to modernize France. Today, scholars, food activists, and wine enthusiasts see the appellation system as a counterweight to globalization and industrial food. But, as The Sober Revolution reveals, French efforts to localize wine and integrate into global markets were not antagonistic but instead mutually dependent. The time-honored winemaking practices that we associate with a pastoral vision of traditional France were in fact a strategy deployed by the wine industry to meet the challenges and opportunities of the post-1945 international economy. France’s luxury wine producers were more market savvy than we realize.
"A fascinating book that belongs on every wine lover’s bookshelf."—The Wine Economist "It’s a book to read for its unstoppable torrent of fascinating and often surprising details."—Andrew Jefford, Decanter For centuries, wine has been associated with France more than with any other country. France remains one of the world’s leading wine producers by volume and enjoys unrivaled cultural recognition for its wine. If any wine regions are global household names, they are French regions such as Champagne, Bordeaux, and Burgundy. Within the wine world, products from French regions are still benchmarks for many wines. French Wine is the first synthetic history of wine in France: from Etruscan, Greek, and Roman imports and the adoption of wine by beer-drinking Gauls to its present status within the global marketplace. Rod Phillips places the history of grape growing and winemaking in each of the country’s major regions within broad historical and cultural contexts. Examining a range of influences on the wine industry, wine trade, and wine itself, the book explores religion, economics, politics, revolution, and war, as well as climate and vine diseases. French Wine is the essential reference on French wine for collectors, consumers, sommeliers, and industry professionals.
Science, Vine and Wine in Modern France examines the role of science in the civilization of wine in modern France. Viticulture, the science of the vine itself, and oenology, the science of winemaking, are its subjects. Together they can boast of at least two major triumphs: the creation of the post-phylloxera vines that repopulated late-nineteenth-century vineyards devastated by the disease; and the understanding of the complex structure of wine that eventually resulted in the development of the widespread wine models of Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne. This is the first analysis of the scientific battle over the best way to save the French vineyards and the first account of the growth of oenological science in France since Chaptal and Pasteur.
The Mediality of Sugar probes the potential of reading sugar as a mediator across some of the disciplinary distinctions in early twenty-first century research in the arts, literature, architecture, and popular culture. Selected artistic practices and material cultures of sugar across Europe and the Americas from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century are investigated and connected to the transcontinental and transoceanic history of the sugar plants cane and beet, their botanical and cultural dissemination, and global sugar capital and trade under colonialism and in decoloniality. The collection contributes to the vision of a Transnational and Postdisciplinary Sugar Studies.
In the familiar tale of mass migration to France from 1880 onward, we know very little about the hundreds of thousands of women who formed a critical part of those migration waves. In Reproductive Citizens, Nimisha Barton argues that their relative absence in the historical record hints at a larger and more problematic oversight—the role of sex and gender in shaping the experiences of migrants to France before the Second World War. Barton's compelling history of social citizenship demonstrates how, through the routine application of social policies, state and social actors worked separately toward a shared goal: repopulating France with immigrant families. Filled with voices gleaned from census reports, municipal statistics, naturalization dossiers, court cases, police files, and social worker registers, Reproductive Citizens shows how France welcomed foreign-born men and women—mobilizing naturalization, family law, social policy, and welfare assistance to ensure they would procreate, bearing French-assimilated children. Immigrants often embraced these policies because they, too, stood to gain from pensions, family allowances, unemployment benefits, and French nationality. By striking this bargain, they were also guaranteed safety and stability on a tumultuous continent. Barton concludes that, in return for generous social provisions and refuge in dark times, immigrants joined the French nation through marriage and reproduction, breadwinning and child-rearing—in short, through families and family-making—which made them more French than even formal citizenship status could.
Offers a detailed history of Cape wine from the late nineteenth century to the present, exposing how race has shaped patterns of consumption through statistics, marketing and advertising materials. Considers how regulation of the industry arose, why it failed, and what the impact of this has been locally and globally.