The Imperial Citizen: British India and French Algeria

This chapter explores empire as a historical context for understanding what activities are deemed to constitute citizenship and by what characteristics or identities it is supposed to be conferred. It broadly examines the ways in which such ideas were applied through the government of societies under imperial rule with reference to British India and French Algeria between the 1830s and mid-twentieth-century independence. These are not simply sig-nificant examples. They represent the most widely discussed and theorized sites of British and French imperial control. The historical contingency of these two sites has shaped differences and similarities between Anglophone and Francophone critiques of the effects of colonialism and orientalism on the postcolonial subject. The problem of inclusion and exclusion inherent to political theory of citizenship must therefore be analysed in terms of the complex and conflicting interplay between national and imperial histories rather than treating them as separate or even opposite trajectories. The apparent novelty of the concept of imperial rather than national citizenship is simply one example of the way mainstream Western political theory has both been shaped in the context of extra-European expansion and, at the same time, failed to acknowledge the extent or full consequences of this connection. This chapter is intended as a historical contribution to the question of what the political theory of citizenship after orientalism might look like.