Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 18801 [Hardcover]

Faith in Empireis an innovative exploration of French colonial rule in West Africa, conducted through the prism of religion and religious policy. Elizabeth Foster examines the relationships among French Catholic missionaries, colonial administrators, and Muslim, animist, and Christian Africans in colonial Senegal between 1880 and 1940. In doing so she illuminates the nature of the relationship between the French Third Republic and its colonies, reveals competing French visions of how to approach Africans, and demonstrates how disparate groups of French and African actors, many of whom were unconnected with the colonial state, shaped French colonial rule. Among other topics, the book provides historical perspective on current French controversies over the place of Islam in the Fifth Republic by exploring how Third Republic officials wrestled with whether to apply the legal separation of church and state to West African Muslims.

This book is an innovative exploration of French colonial rule in Senegal between 1880 and 1940, through the prism of religion and religious policy.

French Catholic missionaries, Foster argues, were important interlocutors, along with colonial officials, the French metropole, and Senegalese themselves, in the shaping of French colonial policy. Her account adds depth to the trend in colonial studies to deconstruct the hegemonic power of colonialism and to reinsert the agency of competing nodes of power. Zachary Wright,The Historian

Elizabeth Foster's well-written bookFaith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940takes readers on a thoughtful journey though Senegal to explore how some of the underlying questions related to these recent conflicts played out during France's Third Republic . . . What makesFaith in Empireunique is the innovative use of religious debate to bring in perspectives from a range of stakeholders. Lorelle D. Semley,Journals