French Colonial History

This month’s blog post is by Charlotte Walker-Said on history of law and religion in West-Central Africa, and touches upon current issues as well. Charlotte is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York). Apart from researching the transnational character of Christianity, and its influence on gender politics and family law in Africa, she has also published on human rights in Africa. More information can be found on her website. 

As always, if you would like to contribute a blog post, email me at wlhblawg

Our first blog post of 2017 is by fellow Hurst Summer Institute alumnus and true blue world legal historian Laurie Wood, Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University. (http://historydev.fsu.acsitefactory.com/person/laurie-wood). 

Laurie writes on a part of the Indian Ocean that is often overlooked - the Francophone realm which mainly consists of the French Mascarenes (Mauritius and Réunion). By tracing fraught long-standing relations within diasporic families and later succession trustees, her recent article in Journal of Social History lies at the interrsection of business

I've just started digging into Masters of Empire, Michael McDonnell's new history of the Odawas, and I suspect it will become an influential work. The book boasts highly competent research, clarity of style, and an appealing argument: that the Anishinaabeg, not the French or British, called the political shots in the eighteenth-century Great Lakes country. In partial support of his thesis, McDonnell employs Brett Rushforth's interpretation of the Fox Wars, the most pronounced episode of internecine violence in the “French-era” Lakes region. Following Rushforth, McDonnell argues that the