“In His Eyes, I Am Foreign to France”: Navigating Social and Geographic Landscapes among Senegambian Migrants in France, 1860–1914

This paper examines how gender and labor relations influenced the way Senegambian migrants living in France during the latter half of the 19^th century managed intra-imperial mobility. From 1860 to 1907, a small group Senegambian women and men came to France to serve as domestic servants, sailors, or industrial laborers. Many of these individuals eventually turned to state agents to get official repatriation when they sought to end their sojourns in France. The way these individuals presented their imperial itineraries to state officials or French interlocutors, and how these narratives were received, provide novel insights into how Senegambian individuals experienced and managed movement across imperial spaces. Examining the way migrants presented their experiences of mobility, and how French interlocutors described these movements, reveals gender and employment as key factors conditioning how Senegambian individuals traversed the Empire. To justify receiving official repatriation, women often spoke of isolation and abandonment by French employers while male migrants often emphasized productive interactions with French men and their relationship to cultural or political ideas of French imperial belonging. This paper argues that these migrants’ itineraries reflected converging forms of social and economic differentiation occurring in both Senegambia and France during the colonial expansion of the late 19^th century. Individuals’ pathways shed light on the social and physical mobility conditioned by the blurry overlap of enslaved and free labor that characterized Senegambia’s economy during the early peanut boom. At the same time, these migrants’ narratives and interpersonal relationships in France reveal the social consequences of emerging imperial logics linking racial identity and geographic belonging within an expanding French Empire. This paper uses these migrants’ itineraries to examine how individuals in France and Senegambia wrestled with what it meant to move across an increasingly connected Empire that was being structured by evolving racial, class, and gender boundaries.