French Colonial History

Glanced a few articles in French Colonial History.

First of all, it is Takao Abe's "What determined the content of missionary reports? The Jesuit Relations compared with the Iberian Jesuit accounts," French Colonial History, Vol. 3, 2003, pp. 69-83. The former refers to the mission in Canada in the first half of the seventeenth century, the latter in Japan in the second half of the sixteenth/early seventeen centuries. Abe argues, by comparing them, that one cannot entirely count on the published official reports to reveal each priest's profound personality and ideas, especially about non-Christian people; and however personal the written observations may appear to be, the thematic and interpretive descriptions were influenced more by the interests of the Jesuit mission as a religious order than by personal initiatives.

Secondly, Christina E. Firpo's "Lost boys: 'abandoned' Eurasian children and the management of the racial topography in colonial Indochina, 1938-1945," French Colonial History, Vol. 8, 2007, pp. 203-221. The French colonial government's "use" of abandoned Eurasians to augment the colony's white presence amounted to social engineering for the purpose of managing the racial order, and they, who were recognized as social pariahs in the 1930s but later considered French, were used to bolster white authority and domination.

The third one is Ronald S. Love's "'A Passage to China': A French Jesuits perceptions of Siberia in the 1680s," French Colonial History, Vol. 3, 2003, pp. 85-100. Père Philippe Avril (1654-1698)'s, who departed in 1684 on an expedition to find an eastward passage to China but was rejected by the Qing authority to traverse Chinese inland and thus returned six years later to Europe not having found a path to the East, Voyage en divers états d'Europe & d'Asie, entrepris pour découvrir un nouveau chemin à la Chine (Paris: Claude Barbin, Jean Boudot, and George et Louis Josse, 1692), which was translated into English in 1693 titled Travels into divers parts of Europe and Asia, Undertaken by the French King's Order to discover a new way by land into China (London: T. Goodwin, 1693). Having met Père Philippe Couplet (1623-1693) at Paris in 1684, Avril might have met the widely-known Chinese convert Michael Shen Fu-Tsung (Miguel Shen Fuzong), who was brought with him to France in 1684 and later became a Jesuit.

Next one is Frédéric Roustan's "Français, Japonais et Société Coloniale du Tonkin: Exemple de Représentations Coloniales," French Colonial History, Vol. 6, 2005, pp. 179-204. Nice postcards. Japanese residents in Indochine were 192 in 1912, 161 in 1915, 316 in 1925, 234 in 1938 while in Hong Kong were 881 in 1909, 1149 in 1912, 1555 in 1915, 1649 in 1925.

Last but not least, it is Matthew G. Stanard's "Selling the Empire between the Wars: Colonial Expositions in Belgium, 1920-1940," French Colonial History, Vol. 6, 2005, pp. 159-178. To popularize the Belgian Congo.