Description:

Please join the Comparative Historical Social Sciences as they host Simon Bittmann, CNRS Research Fellow, University of Strasbourg.

This presentation will study compensations paid by France’s former colonies to French colonial firms, between 1954 and 1998. Political independence did not, in most cases, entail economic sovereignty, as private capital claimed that concessions (for agriculture, oil and mineral extraction, or infrastructure) acquired under colonial rule remained valid; an argument gradually supported by international law. This meant that any attempts at economic nationalization was to be associated with “prompt, effective, and adequate compensations” of private shareholders, a process strangely reminiscent of the indemnities paid to former slave-owners after the Haitian Revolution. In this research, I built a unique dataset of all expropriations of French capital, as well as associated compensations, to study the power dynamics which shaped French post-colonial capitalism. In doing so, I seek to bring back capital within post-colonial analysis, showing how countries negotiated their economic sovereignty through a shift from colonial control to a world of foreign aid, investment treaties, and geopolitical conflicts.

Simon Bittmann is a CNRS tenured researcher and Professor of Historical Sociology at the University of Strasbourg. His research focuses on the history of global and racial capitalism, studying how finance and capital markets shape inequalities and political change. His first book, Working for Debt (Columbia University Press, 2024), provides a history of wage loans in the United States, showing how financial exploitation first arose from battles over workers credit in the early twentieth century. His new project looks at the political economy of colonization and decolonization in the French empire, through the lens of private capital. It shows how financial firms shaped colonial exploitation and expropriation, as well as fueled anticolonial unrest from the end of the First World War until well after the independences, when economic sovereignty became a major site of postcolonial contention.