Preface

2025 normally marks the end of my four-year tenure—first as associate editor and then as principal editor—of French Colonial History, a period made atypical not only by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our journal usually publishes one volume per year; however, on two occasions several years ago, the journal was unable to go to press. So, my predecessor Caroline Herbelin, associate editor Kathryn Edwards, and I used FCH's new structure—pairing an associate editor with a principal editor—to publish the missing volumes. Unwittingly, we more than doubled our workload by producing four volumes as two double issues in two calendar years while lining up future volumes. Thanks to Herbelin and Edwards for approaching our self-imposed challenge with high spirits, good humor, intellectual rigor, and editorial precision. I also thank our dues-paying members for trusting that the missing volumes would reappear, and our peer reviewers for their invaluable contributions. Scholars-at-large and editorial board members’ bright and exacting peer reviews enrich every article we publish and make this journal possible. Merci.Having offered this behind-the-scene glimpse of the journal's publication process, let us now turn to the intellectual content of these volumes. Volume 23 is a special issue shepherded by Caroline Herbelin and co-coordinated by Eric Guerassimoff, Phuong Ngoc Nguyen, and Frédéric Roustan. It explores the migratory routes and regulations in France's Asia-Pacific colonies and dependencies, as mediated by brokers and intermediaries. Taken together, these histories of labor migration provide a window into recruitment, passage, surveillance, repatriation, and other forms of return, facilitated by so-called “mediating coolies.” This concept recognizes the importance of intermediaries of native, migrant or foreign origin in the region's “colonial regimes of work.” Despite the field's depth—as documented in the bibliography that accompanies the issue's introduction—the authors argue that histories of laborers and employers have often overlooked those who brokered the networks of labor migration.The first article brings readers to China, Madagascar and Île de la Réunion in the Indian Ocean at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1899, Paul Claudel became the French consul in Fuzhou, capital of Fujian, and played a critical role in recruiting migrant Chinese workers. Francis Vetch, a planters’ son from Île de la Réunion, influenced Claudel. Plantation owners struggled to recruit labor in the wake of France's second abolition of slavery in 1848. Thus, rather than dwelling on the well-known love triangle between Vetch, Claudel, and Vetch's wife Rosalie, Guerassimoff instead focuses upon the men's professional relationship. Vetch's Service de l’émigration chinoise de Foutchéou recruitment agency, which sent Chinese workers to the Indian Ocean, ultimately bankrupted. However, its preserved records reveal the roles that consuls played as mediators of labor migration patterns and how privilege or deprivation shaped the movements themselves and the intermediaries involved.“Mediating Coolies” then moves to another form of Chinese labor, through the experiences of “Sino-Annamite” interpreters recruited to serve during World War I. Less studied than their Indochinese and Malagasy counterparts, Chinese workers traveled to France during World War I to serve as laborers in munition plants and other industries once French workers were called to the front. French authorities, needing interpreters for these migrants, worked with the police, with established Chinese communities in Saigon and Hanoi, and with diplomats in China to secure such personnel. Using interpreters’ stories, letters, applications, and death records, Olga V. Alexeeva adds an innovative twist to World War I migration studies with this focus upon agencies’ recruitment practices in China, Asia more broadly, and France.The special issue's final research article is Frédéric Roustan's study of migratory patterns between Japan and Indochina from 1880 to 1920. Roustan reminds readers that, while the term karayuki san has largely been ascribed to daughters of farmers and fishermen who were coerced into or chose prostitution, it also applied to male migrants from the region of Kyūshū, around Nagasaki. Through contracts, certificates, and consular records, Roustan analyzes the roles of zegen, which literally translates to “sellers of women,” as intermediaries in this migratory pattern. From recruiting to kidnapping, from accompanying women during trips to running or owning brothels, their myriad mediating roles shaped these women's migrations.The special issue wraps up with two document analyses. Giang Ngoc Linh introduces us to qiaopi—letters sent home by Chinese living abroad—with a focus on the Saigon-Cholon region in Southeast Asia during World War II. These letters contained news and money. Linh analyzes a single qiaopi, drawn from a collection of fifty-seven letters, to illuminate a period when French, Japanese, and Vietnamese authorities vied for control over the region. “Mediating Coolies” then introduces us to a Vietnamese novel published in 1927, Tây phương mỹ nhơn (La Belle d'Occident, 1927), written by Mme Huỳnh Thị Bảo Hòa (1896–1982). This document analysis takes readers back to World War I by focusing on one of the 90,000 Indochinese soldiers who fought for France. Phuong Ngoc Nguyen shares a preliminary analysis of this novel depicting a love story between a Vietnamese soldier and a French Red Cross worker. Claiming to be historically factual, the novel's storyline will certainly feel familiar to those who have studied how French authorities handled such relationships—and the children they produced—after both world wars. Military and colonial personnel intervened with couples and their families to prevent marriages and family reunifications overseas. Nguyen is currently translating Tây phương mỹ nhơn for publication in French.Volume 24 starts with France's eighteenth-century dragomans, who underwent linguistic and diplomatic training to serve as interpreters and mediators abroad. Dragomans were insiders who enabled French and other states’ consulates to function. Brent Rosenstein explores why, when, and how the policy changed so that dragomans had to both be born French, and born outside of France, to pursue this career. Rosenstein argues that this peculiar tension between jus soli and jus sanguinis, which relates to the still-relevant question of who gets to be French, had as its turning point the curious case of the Roboly Affair, which occurred in Alexandria in the 1760s.Jingzhen Xie's article focuses on Joseph-Marie Callery, exploring the nineteenth-century missionary and sinologist's tenure in Macao. Drawing on diaries and other accounts, Xie examines Callery's work as a translator—including of the Confucian Li Ki—and as a go-between who sometimes made enemies. Xie shows why and how he switched from a career in Sinology to one in foreign affairs, observing and influencing Sino–French relations, in a long tradition that includes Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci's work in Portuguese Macau and Beijing in the late sixteenth century.Philippe Girard then takes us to the 1780s, to examine the story of Marc Boudakan, an aristocrat from the Kingdom of Warri (modern-day Nigeria), who traveled to Saint-Domingue (today's Haiti), via France before returning home. Girard argues that Boudakan's journey reveals both the origins and the particularities of so-called “scientific” racism during its formative phase in France—a time when race was still defined by factors ranging from class and nobility to physical markers.A leap into the twentieth century brings us from scientific racism to antiracist challenges during the Algerian War of Independence. Johannes Heuman explores the effects of decolonization upon the work of the Ligue des droits de l'homme, the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme and the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l'amitié des peuples. Tensions that emerged during decolonization between individual human rights and states’ rights to self-determination reshaped organizations that had previously made antiracism their principal platform. Heuman demonstrates that in the end, these organizations struggled to see self-determination as constituent of antiracism and human rights.The Fashoda crisis is at the heart of Marcella Hennlichová and Jaroslav Valkoun's analysis of French Colonial Undersecretary Théophile Delcassé’s theories of entente, which shaped his foreign policy theories of French relations with Great Britain. They argue that the Fashoda crisis, while on the surface an imperial dispute between Britain and France in East Africa, in fact allowed Delcassé to formally pursue a policy of entente as he shifted from an aggressive to an appeasing diplomatic stance.Maryliz Racine explores France's colonialism in the wake of World War II, after the nation adhered to the United Nations’ charter. Through economic development, France entered a new phase of colonialism, Racine argues—one that continued to undermine overseas’ populations despite the UN charter's emphasis on greater autonomy for peoples under colonial oversight. Using sources tied to the Plan de modernisation et d’équipement of the French Fourth Republic, also known as the Plan Monnet, Racine reveals the paradoxes in the economic and political expressions of France's post-UN colonial culture.Volume 24 wraps up with another exploration of French colonial culture. While many scholars of colonial history know of the colonial expositions staged in cities like Marseille or Paris, fewer have come across the Semaine coloniale française, a global phenomenon this article tracks from 1929 through 1939 with a focus on Madagascar and Morocco. However, because the festival was staged across all French-ruled territories, Vladimir Kapor draws on brochures, press coverage, official decrees, and circular letters to show that these festivals embodied a common and global imperial political rationality.I started—and now conclude—this preface with thanks, this time to Natalie Eidenier and her editorial team at Michigan State University press—including copyeditor Lise Lalonde—and offer a final observation, inspired by Volume 23’s labor theme, on the labor of editing. Most journal editors work pro bono—without payment or course releases—which is impressive, given that editing a scholarly journal is rarely (never, as far as I know) formally taught and thus comes with a steep learning curve. Working in English and French alongside two fellow editors has thus been both an honor and a singular opportunity to learn from their approaches and admire their dedication to our editorial craft. We learn sur le tas (as we go), aided by our peers’ insights and guidance. Moving on from the generosity inherent in this labor of love of history feels bittersweet—a sentiment somewhat softened by its long-farewell form. Indeed, the journal's atypical phase is not quite over. We are delighted to confirm that Robert Englebert will be our new associate editor, albeit starting in July 2026. So just as Herbelin smoothed my transition by working on volumes 23 and 24, I hope to smooth Edwards's by remaining as her co-editor and accompanying the BUMIDOM special issue that will be part of volume 25, a teaser of themes to come, and a certainty that the journal will continue to thrive with Kathryn Edwards, who is now its new principal editor.