Racial Knowledge, Social Science, and Empire in France and Britain, c. 1911

Race is the same word in French and English, suggesting equivalency, portability, and mutual intelligibility of the term. Yet the word has done different work in each language depending on time and place, creating misunderstandings as well as exchanges between Francophone and Anglophone interlocutors on such topics as racism and antiracism. My paper will examine one instance of such divergent “race” histories. In 1911, progressive philanthropists organized a First Universal Races Congress in London. Scholars, statesmen, diplomats, and activists of all races from across the globe gathered to discuss how to diminish the inter-racial tensions then gripping the world. French and Francophone colonial participants were, however, few and far between despite the nation’s claim to universal brotherhood and antiracism. French internationalists nevertheless agreed to host a second universal races meeting in Paris in 1915, which World War I scuttled. A comparison of the London event with French preparations for a second congress reveals one striking difference. By 1911 British, American and Indian sociologists, economists and political scientists were beginning to construct a new object of study known as “race relations” to better manage conflicts between colonizer and colonized. In contrast, French social scientists showed little interest in the same topic. Only in the past thirty years have French sociologists borrowed from Anglophone scholarship to analyze race in France. Through this comparison, I address the larger questions of why modern colonialism produced different racial epistemologies in Francophone and Anglophone spaces and when their particular understandings of race began to converge.