Britain's and France's Shared Colonial Policies

This book examines France's choice in the early 1900's to replace its official colonial policy of assimilation with one of association. Why did France exchange an ideology rooted both in its Latin heritage and in its revolutionary past with one espoused by its colonial rival, Great Britain? This book attempts to answer that question by a case study in West Africa: it demonstrates how the French colony of Sngal came to be administered like a British colony, in particular the Gambia. In doing so, it shows that the implementation of "indirect rule" in 1854 and the creation of a protectorate in 1890 by French colonial administrators in Sngal contributed to the National Assembly's decisions in 1895 and 1897 to officially adopt decentralization as France's new colonial policy.