Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France
Global Economic Crisis and the Racialization of French Citizenship, 1870–1910

Reveals how empire and global economic crisis redefined republican citizenship and laid the foundations of a racial state in France.

Elizabeth Heath (Author)

9781107688582, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 5 March 2020

326 pages, 1 b/w illus. 2 maps 2 tables
15 x 23 x 2 cm, 0.48 kg

'The story Heath tells about an earlier moment of globalization is an important lesson for our times, when arguments about agricultural standards are simultaneously about quality and about supply, competitiveness and price, not to mention our way of life … Read this book. Its story may be about France, but is lesson is universal.' Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Reviews and Critical Commentary (councilforeuropeanstudies.org/critcom)

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.

Introduction: of wine and sugar
Part I: 1. Wine, sugar, and the new global economy
2. Defining Republican citizenship on the peripheries
Part II: 3. Propertied elites and a new liberal citizenship
4. Socialism and the rise of worker politics
5. Small holders and the promise of rural democracy
Part III: 6. Union member and citizen
7. Defining French citizenship in a global age
Conclusion: globalization, empire, and the making of modern France
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD], General & world history [HBG]