Governing Rights in La Reunion: Social Legislation, Landholding, Housing and the Making of France in the Indian Ocean, 1946-2009.

Abstract

The study of governance is often divided between formal state institutions and informal types of authority. Some scholars focus on state institutions: engineers, bureaucrats and politicians. Others study so-called “traditional” authority: landed relations and family networks, usually seen as motors for corrupting state resources. Instead of such divisions, this dissertation examines how different modes of governance interacted, to rethink conventional understandings of how state authority works. The peculiar modern history of Réunion Island – a sugar-growing French colony in the Indian Ocean whose multiracial inhabitants were French citizens from 1870, which became a French Department in 1946, and is now the only European Union region in the Southern Hemisphere – creates an opportune site for considering how different ruling practices interact. From 1946 all French laws were to apply in Réunion Island, where Creole agricultural workers were dominated by white landowning minority who also ran the local government. Through historical archive research and ethnographic fieldwork the dissertation examines how Metropolitan French and Réunionnais politicians, civil servants, property owners, landlords, tenants and families claimed and reconfigured French social rights in rural areas, shantytown and social housing neighborhoods in Réunion’s capital St Denis. The dissertation demonstrates how the underlying logics of Réunionnais governance, based on landlord-tenant obligation, reshaped the French administration in Réunion, which became a participant in landlord-tenant relations rather than assimilating Réunion to French forms of governance. The governance of social legislation in Réunion is an important case study combining histories of socialism, the demise of colonial empires and the rise of state interventions overseas. The dissertation extends conventional interpretations of French colonialism by examining how the project of French social rights for colonial political loyalty endured in Overseas France - beyond the 1962 Algerian defeat when France is considered to have “decolonized.” French welfare eventually transformed class and racial divides in Réunion, enabling Creole descendants of Africans, Malagasy, Indians and Europeans to create meanings about being French in Overseas France and eventually to appropriate the governance of French welfare systems themselves. The dissertation provides a new, comparative overseas perspective for understanding racial difference and social equality in contemporary France.