In the last three decades, the study of colonial knowledge has become central to the scholarship on Western colonialism. The notion that culture, science, literature, and knowledge, or “discourse”, in general was deeply complicit with the violence and politics of Europe’s colonizing endeavours became the flag of “postcolonial studies”—a thriving cross-disciplinary field in the social sciences and humanities, now well established in many universities. This critical scholarship about the colonial has proven in many ways fertile and stimulating. However, some studies in this field have been prone to reductionist approaches that tend to both denigrate and homogenize the complexities of colonial knowledge under the totalizing category of “colonial discourse”. Offering a counterpoint to some limitations of this scholarship is one of the merits of the French historian Pierre Singaravélou’s new work Professer l’Empire, a social history of the eclectic disciplinary world of the sciences coloniales (colonial sciences) in France, during the period of the Third Republic, 1870-1940. Singaravélou takes this world seriously, successfully evading the temptations of presentism and the anathemas that have befallen the colonial disciplines since decolonization.

The book is an insightful account of how “the colonial” came historically into being as a distinctive scientific object around which dynamic academic disciplines, professional careers, scholarly publications, literary works, and research and teaching at the level of higher education were organized in France and its imperial possessions for over seven decades. The point of departure is a “native category”: the coeval definitions of a constellation of scientific disciplines that came under the name of sciences de colonisation or sciences coloniales. During the French Third Republic, the term commonly referred to a specific set of sub-disciplines, a true “scientific microcosmos”, within the emerging human sciences, that was identified by its appended label “colonial”—colonial geography and history, colonial law and economy, and colonial psychology. According to Singaravélou, the historical significance and innovative aspects of these forms of knowledge cannot be simply reduced to “racist and essentializing discourses”. They all achieved institutional recognition as university chairs or courses in the French higher education system, where they became synonymous with “colonial higher education”. Thus centred on universities and high schools, a dynamic pluridisciplinary space came into existence, characterized by a tension between an aspiration for scientific autonomy and the urge to provide actual support and legitimacy to the French Empire. The understanding of this particular colonial Homo academicus and of its institutional spaces lay at the heart of this study, of which the ultimate source of inspiration is Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of science and intellectual production. This paves the way for an analysis that aims at combining the study of the agents and institutions of “production” of colonial knowledge with that of the agents and institutions of “reception” and “circulation” of that same knowledge. This “social history of colonial sciences”, in the author’s terms, compensates for the overemphasis of conventional “colonial discourse analysis” on text and discourse alone. Production and reception of sciences coloniales are then approached within relational social fields where different cultural institutions and social actors—academics, politicians, colonial administrators, students, writers, etc.—interact, cooperate, and compete at metropolitan, imperial, and colonial scales, with a view to secure a special authority to speak about, and act upon, “French colonization”.

The book is organized into two parts corresponding to a social and an intellectual history approach to the sciences coloniales respectively. Part I explores the processes of institutionalization and professionalization of the sciences coloniales in France as the cherished property of a new career and group of experts: the lecturers of colonial sciences, within the higher education system. The author here draws on solid archival research in French institutional archives and on the use of prosopography to offer an account of how the world of colonial administrators and university scholars were brought together in the academic spaces and expertise of colonial sciences. The institutionalization of sciences coloniales—in Paris but also in a number of French provincial cities and in the colonies—articulated virtuous (rather than oppositional) relations and complementarities between academia and political administration. As Singaravélou rightly suggests, such a “structural porosity” (which, however, did not discount some conflicts) between the administrative and academic fields puts at stake the simplistic opposition between “amateurs” and “professionals” that often dominates narratives of scientific institutionalization. The existence of chairs and courses on colonial sciences depended on a diversity of financial funds, and colonial governors and administrations were often directly involved in their creation. Administrative and political capital could be converted into academic capital, and vice-versa. Thus former colonial administrators and officers could achieve academic and scientific recognition by becoming lecturers of colonial sciences. Conversely, academics could later take on careers as colonial administrators overseas, or as parliamentarians, technocrats and high-rank politicians associated with the government of French colonies. This “polyvalence” of the lecturers as experts on colonization prevailed until at least the Second World War. Moreover, the field of colonial sciences was not closed within university walls. It encompassed a network of other cultural institutions of diffusion and recognition, such as scholarly societies, publishing houses and series specialized in colonial topics, prizes and contests of “colonial literature”. This, as Singaravélou demonstrates, reveals the plural dynamics of cultural production about “the colonial”, especially in the period 1920s-1930s—a moment when, coincidentally, the teaching of colonial sciences went through institutional crisis and refoundation.

Part II shifts attention to the internal contents (main theories, methods, authors, and concepts) of each social science (sub-)discipline that came to form part of the disciplinary galaxy of the sciences coloniales. The intention is to offer a disciplinary history of colonial knowledge that takes into account—against monolithic tendencies of “post-colonial discourse analysis”—the epistemological richness, diversity and heterogeneity contained in these disciplines. Four main disciplinary areas are covered : geography, history, law, and psychology. The first chapter considers the complexities of the colonial geography discipline in France, as it developed under the leadership of Marcel Dubois and then Vidal de la Blache. Singaravélou shows here how this geographical science sought to maintain critical distance from a previous form of colonial geographical knowledge: the so-called “cumulative, descriptive, and sensational geography of exploration”, formerly practiced by administrators and explorers. The second chapter analyses the discipline of colonial history. For long condemned to oblivion and seen as little more than an ideological maiden of imperialism, the discipline of colonial history in 1870-1940 is taken seriously and both its tensions and productivities explored. Colonial history was heroic and Eurocentric, yet it also paved the way for new methods: oral history, contemporary history, and an emerging “curiosity” (even if ultimately unrealized) in indigenous histories. Perhaps the most interesting moments in this part of the book concern the disciplines of colonial law and colonial psychology. Singaravélou first reveals the central significance then attributed to the study of colonial systems of legislation as “special” and distinct fields of law, and as part of a scientific approach to colonial government. The acknowledgement of the “speciality” of colonial law as regards general or metropolitan law thus called for theoretical, methodological and political experimentalism as well as for an attitude of “epistemological decentralization”(décentrement épistemologique). In concluding the book, this double gesture of experimentation and epistemological slippage or adaptation caused by the colonial object is interestingly generalized by the author as a characteristic of the colonial sciences overall. The analysis finally brings out the most forgotten and silenced of all colonial sciences: the ephemeral discipline of “colonial psychology” advanced by Georges Hardy at the École coloniale in the 1920s-1930s. Colonial psychology crafted transgressive and innovative linkages between science and literature, particularly with the genre of the colonial novel. An ambitious attempt at a “synthetic science”, it was envisaged as an eclectic meeting point of ethnological, geographical, psychological, and literary languages.

The national focus of the book leaves unanswered the question of whether or not the sciences coloniales constituted a broader transnational field, whose networks extended beyond “France and its empire”. It may be, like other coeval forms of knowledge about “the colonial”, that the world of colonial sciences constituted an international scientific field that would also require a transnational history of sciences. The possibility of this “internationalism” of colonial sciences, however, is not addressed. The author is right in emphasizing the need to approach colonial knowledge from the perspective of both its production and circulation. It seems, however, that Professer l’Empire does not fully live up to this ambitious double challenge. It offers evidence of the connections between colonial science and literature and it analyses with sociological insight the careers of (French) intellectual producers, the contents of disciplines, and their networks of institutions. But it says little about the actual processes and practices of circulation, reception, reading, and appropriation of these knowledge forms. The actual uses of “colonial sciences” in popular culture and within the information networks of administration, to mention but two examples, are not pursued. These critiques should not diminish the worth of this study. Professer l’Empire is an important contribution to the historiography of colonial science and knowledge. It succeeds in rescuing from oblivion a lively academic field of intellectual production about colonialism in the history of human sciences. It draws on solid research and engages critically and productively with colonial knowledge, thus avoiding both the fallacies of anti-colonial contempt and the delusions of apologetic historiography. Professer l’Empire finally interrogates the very genealogy of contemporary academic discourse on the “colonial”. As such, it challenges history and post-colonial studies today to rethink their own present in relation to the prolific legacy of those many academic disciplines that first turned colonialism into a popular scientific object.