The Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize

2008 Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize (for books published in 2007)

Emma Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert (Harvard University Press)

The Betrayal of Faith recreates the life and culture of Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan, an Innu born around 1608 along the St. Lawrence River near Tadoussac. While he was still a boy, he was brought to France by the Recollet missionaries who had made him one of their earliest converts to Catholicism in Quebec. After five years in France he returned to Quebec, and his missionary sponsors had high hopes that Pastedechouan would spread the Catholic faith among his own people. But the conflicting expectations of two widely differing cultures proved too heavy a burden for him to carry, and his story ends up being one of cultural alienation and premature death.

Though the book documents a relatively early moment in the history of French overseas expansion, Anderson’s story of cultural collision and its sometimes tragic consequences will resonate with historians of later periods and contexts. The book is beautifully written and elegantly constructed, making creative but always judicious use of its sources. In short, it is a pleasure to read, and a substantial contribution to French colonial studies.

Other books nominated (in alphabetical order, by name of author)

- Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853-1913 (Ohio University Press)

A fascinating and important study that focuses on the role of Amadu Bamba in the creation and early years of the Muridiyya Sufi order in Senegal. The book makes particularly effective use of internal Murid sources and helps us to re-evaluate the role of the French in early Murid history.

- Pierre Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh (Cambridge University Press)

An excellent translation (by Claire Duiker) of a highly accomplished biography by one of France’s leading Vietnam specialists. The book is packed with illuminating detail about Ho Chi Minh’s early life and radicalization, the consolidation of the Indochinese Communist Party, and the Viet Minh’s descent toward war with France and the United States.

- Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (Palgrave)

With careful attention to the experiences of French and Muslim participants in the conflict, Cole weaves a cautionary tale of the first modern encounter between a Western army and a Middle Eastern society.

- Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Ohio University Press)

This significant contribution to colonial environmental history dissects what the author calls the “declensionist narrative,” whereby French scientists and administrators held North African peoples responsible for environmental decline. This narrative fed into various French schemes in North Africa and, Davis argues, continues to influence projects in the region.

- Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (University Press of Florida)

A comprehensive study of an important multiracial migration (15,000 to 20,000 immigrants between 1791 and 1815) that contributed much to the persistence of Gallic Creole culture in Louisiana in the crucial years after the Louisiana Purchase.

- Penny Edwards, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860-1945 (University of Hawai’i Press)

A substantial contribution to the historiography of a relatively understudied part of the French colonial empire, this book vividly captures an intricate web of interactions between Cambodian and French men and women that proved instrumental in fashioning the modern Khmer nation.

- Carl J. Ekberg, Stealing Indian Women: Native Slavery in the Illinois Country (University of Illinois Press)

This fascinating examination of Native slavery in colonial Illinois uses judicial records to illuminate a frontier society that defies stereotypes: it was neither lawless nor racially segregated, despite its reliance on African and Native slavery.

- Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (Yale University Press)

Well informed and accessible, a searing indictment of Algeria’s one party state that makes missed economic opportunities, cronyism, and popular marginalization central to the rise of political Islam and the internecine violence of the 1990s.

- Benoît Grenier, Seigneurs campagnards de la Nouvelle France (Presses Universitaires de Rennes)

This meticulously researched study of resident seigneurs in preindustrial Quebec challenges both of the two dominant paradigms in the historiography of Canadian seigneurialism, describing instead a system that blended paternalism and exploitation.

- A.J.B. Johnston, Endgame 1758: The Promise, the Glory, and the Despair of Louisbourg’s Last Decade (University of Nebraska Press)

A colorful synthetic narrative, Endgame recounts Louisbourg’s fateful last decade from the perspectives of both social and military history.

- Richard C. Keller, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (University of Chicago Press)

A panoramic study that uses detailed analysis of the development of French medical practice and psychiatric analysis in North Africa to shed fresh light on colonial constructions of Muslim identity and social behavior.

- Jeremy Rich, A Workman is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary (University of Nebraska Press)

This stimulating and strikingly original book reveals the impact of colonialism on food supply and food preferences in the Gabon Estuary around Libreville, showing how the French presence helped to shape some of the most basic details of everyday life for Africans.

- Emmanuelle Saada, Les Enfants de la Colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et
citoyenneté (Éditions La Découverte)

A wide-ranging examination of the cultural, institutional, and legal discrimination endured by mixed-race children throughout the colonies (but emphasizing Indochina in particular) from the late nineteenth century to the decolonization era. The book is full of insight into attitudinal shifts—official and popular—regarding permissible integration and citizenship rights for those deemed less than French because of their mixed racial heritage.

- Elizabeth Schmidt, Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946-1958 (Ohio University Press)

Guinea’s vote for early independence in 1958 has long appeared an anomaly that defies easy explanation, but by emphasizing grass-roots pressure on local political leaders to adopt a more militant stance Schmidt fundamentally reorients our understanding of figures like Sékou Touré. In doing so we gain a much fuller picture of the politics of decolonization in West Africa.

- Julija Sukys, Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (University of Nebraska Press)

Vivid and humane, this account of the life, writings, and violent death in 1993 of one of Algeria’s leading “public intellectuals” holds a mirror to the traumatic splintering of Algerian society during the long years of the 1990s “dirty war."