A River of Restrictions: Urban Law and Colonial Control in Eighteenth-Century Senegal

Abstract This article sheds light on the highly restrictive legal code that French colonizers established after they regained control of the West African trading post of Saint-Louis in 1783. Covering the ways in which colonial environmental, social, and economic regulations sanctioned Black persons explicitly, the article reveals how both a Senegambian iteration of Black French citizenship and a racialized politics of overseas France emerged through the legal code of the colonial administration. The sources explored include Senegambian archival documents, French maps from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and urban decrees from early modern Saint-Louis, held in the National Archives of Senegal. With the aid of these sources and others held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the essay argues for an architectural history that considers how urban legal codes gave rise to the culture and the early history of overseas France.