Research
Please find descriptions of my book project and ongoing and published research projects below:
Book Project
A Taxing empire: POwer and taxation in the French colonial empire, 1850s-1950S
Taxation was a fundamental tool of colonial rule. It funded colonial states, guaranteed their credit, projected colonial sovereignty, and was used to mobilize labor. The tax demands of colonial states shaped the experience of colonial populations and furthered the work of political and economic segregation inherent to the French colonial project. Colonial taxation also radically disturbed and remade livelihoods and ecologies, so much so that they remained a symbol of colonial oppression long after the end of the colonial period and helped weaken the fiscal structures of newly decolonized states. In A Taxing Empire: Power and Taxation in the French Colonial Empire, 1850s-1950s, I show that taxation was central to the making, operation, and unmaking of French colonialism and that a focus on taxation is uniquely revealing of the ways in which global relations of political and economic inequality were established and maintained in the modern age.
In ten chapters, I explore the history and politics of colonial taxation in the French empire over one hundred years and cover both the colonial territories which generated the highest levels of revenue (Indochina, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, West Africa, Madagascar) and those where debates about tax policy were particularly consequential at various points in time (the “old colonies” of the Antilles and Indian Ocean, New Caledonia, Syria, Lebanon, French Somaliland).This qualitative and archive-based history of colonial taxation in the French colonial empire argues that taxation was not only a way of raising money for colonial states but also an instrument of rule, a defining feature of life under colonial rule, and a central object of anti-colonial resistance.
Thanks to careful attention to local contexts and historiographies, the book brings out differences in tax regimes across the jurisdictional hodgepodge that was the French empire. Based on research conducted in fifteen archival repositories in Algeria, hexagonal France, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Senegal, Tunisia, and Vietnam, the book examines the ways in which colonial tax regimes were established, debated, resisted, reformed, and transformed. To do so, it draws upon a wide array of sources: the archives of the French metropolitan state, those of various French colonial states in Southeast Asia, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, the writings of colonial theorists, the publications of imperial watchdog organizations, and literary production as well as the European, reformist, and anticolonial press in both European and non-European languages.
Publications and article drafts
Towards the mid- 1920s, a growing number of colonial firms began to transfer their headquarters from the metropole to French colonies to evade taxation on investment capital income. These transfers threatened to transform French colonies into tax havens. Why was this averted? This article explores the politics of corporate tax planning in the French colonial empire and shows that French colonial tax havens could have materialised on a large scale at two critical junctures: first in the interwar period and then in the aftermath of the Second World War. It argues that they eventually did not come into being because successive administrations within the French Ministry of Finance did not let it happen. Broader structural determinants – the relative weakness of the French metropolitan fiscal state in the interwar period and the unwillingness to let international capital dictate French development strategies in the late colonial period - crucially influenced the positions taken by the Ministry of Finance. Post-war dreams of restored grandeur made French authorities much more reluctant to outsource development and let go of state prerogatives. This unrealised possibility sheds light on the role of state power in the making and unmaking of tax havens and contributes to a fast-expanding historiography.
Coordination avec Guillaume Johnson (CNRS) et Lionel Zevounou (Université Paris Nanterre) d’un numéro spécial de la revue Marronnages: les questions raciales au crible des sciences sociales intitulé “Capitalisme racial!?” (publication prévue fin 2024)
“Towards a New International Tax Order for post-neoliberal times: Empire’s shadow, neoliberal present and regionalist futures” (with Martin Hearson and Afton Titus), R&R at Socio-Economic Review
“Y a-t-il eu une économie impériale?” in Arthur Asseraf, Guillaume Blanc, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Mélanie Lamotte and Pierre Singaravélou (Eds.) Colonisations: notre histoire (Paris: Seuil, 2023)
“The cost of thrift: the politics of ‘financial autonomy’ in the French colonial empire, 1900-1914” in Gurminder K. Bhambra and Julia McClure (Eds.) Imperial inequalities: the politics of economic governance across European empires (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022): 37-56
This chapter charts the evolution of French colonial finance at the turn of the twentieth century and draws the lineaments of the French imperial state’s fiscal hierarchy. It focuses specifically on political debates about the “cost” of empire at a time of resurgent imperial protectionism and how they led to the voting of a series of laws in 1900 imposing “financial autonomy” to French colonies and Algeria. From this moment onwards, French colonies were increasingly asked to draw on their own fiscal resources, but this did not equate to financial self-determination for the millions of French colonial subjects living in the empire. Instead, “autonomy” served as a disciplining device which gave the metropole greater control over imperial expenditures. Like other imperial powers at the time, France sought to govern its empire “on the cheap.” In practice, this meant that locally levied taxes became the main revenue source for French colonial states. This chapter argues that this policy emerged out of the necessity to preserve a precarious metropolitan fiscal bargain in a context of extreme inequality and alleviate fears of colonial “profligacy” in the aftermath of massive territorial conquest. The political fallout of this policy was quite immediate and generated a flurry of tax revolts, prompting several reformist colonial officials to rethink colonial financial relations in the wake of the First World War.
“Edwin Seligman, initiator of global progressive public finance”, Journal of Global History, 13 (2018): 352-373.
This article surveys the global acquaintances of Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman, a world-renowned authority on progressive public finance and professor of political economy at Columbia University between 1885 and 1933. Through his published writings, networks, and internationalist efforts, Seligman extended an emerging theory of progressive taxation to an international arena. This empowered his students, especially his Asian students, to build an analysis of the limitations of imperial political accountability and suggest bold financial reform. These links are uncovered for the first time and reveal Seligman’s place in the intellectual and political history of tax reform in American and European formal and informal empires. Consequently, the article also sheds new light on the history of what the legal historian Ajay Mehrotra has called the ‘early Columbia school of taxation and economic development’.
BOOK REVIEWS
The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria by Owen White, French Politics, Culture, and Society (March 2022): 128-131
“Other people’s economies”, a review of Jamie Martin’s The Meddlers for Tocqueville 21