Liberalism in Texas and French Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s

Seminar with Leonard V. Smith.

Texas and French Algeria, two settler colonies both self-styled as “liberal” and annexed to their metropoles at about the same time, sought to articulate and instrumentalize the legacy of revolution in the eighteenth century. Liberalism at this time revolved around constructing rule through rather than over society.

Settler liberalism sought to build civil society in “new” lands through a kind of secular covenant linking each included member to every other included member. Yet inclusion carried with it exclusion, which grew increasingly strident as these two settler communities grew in size and strength.

Bio

Leonard V. Smith is the Frederick B. Artz Professor of History at Oberlin College (Ohio, USA).  He is the author of five books, most recently French Colonialism from the Ancien Régime to the Present (Cambridge, 2023) and Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford, 2018).  He began research on Texas and French Algeria in the 19th century as Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence in 2023.