Dr Ian Coller (History, La Trobe University) on Provincializing France: Rethinking European History through the Local and Global.

It is several decades now since Dipesh Chakrabarty issued a call to “provincialize Europe” by recognising Europe as just one region of the world alongside others, and not as the standard of modern historical development by which all other histories would be measured. New work in imperial, transnational and global history has contributed to this goal. But this work has often been cantoned off in postcolonial history, while the “mainstream” of nationally-based historical work has continued undisturbed. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of France, the “nation-state” par excellence, whose “colonial” history has rarely been treated as more than a transitory supplement to a metropolitan "True France" organised by Paris and the logic of inexorable centralization. This paper will suggest that by dismantling the “constitutive story” of modern French centralisation, and disaggregating our idea of France in space and time, we may be able to see how the internal contradictions and struggles of state-formation contributed to the creation of an imperial, globally scattered state, whose remnants exist even today in the Caribbean, South America, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and not simply in the imagined political and historical unity of the European “hexagon”.

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