Miranda Frances Spieler. Empire and Underworld

Although Miranda Frances Spieler's remarkable book concerns a marginal place, its insights and implications should be of compelling interest to historians across a wide range of subfields and regional specialties. It is precisely because Guiana was such a marginal territory within the French Empire that Spieler is able to articulate a provocative new perspective on central and critical issues, especially how the changing relationship between forms of legal subjectivity and imperial sovereignty shaped the transition from subjecthood to modern citizenship. Her study collapses standard analytical structures both geographically, challenging a sharp division between metropolitan and colonial France, and chronologically, pursuing a line of thinking from the slavery through the post-slavery period. During the French Revolution, the term déportation acquired a new meaning as “deportees needed both to live outside the boundaries of metropolitan France and to remain in the custody of the French government” (p. 19). This need for a legally defined yet extraterritorial space provided the vector for Guiana's fascinating and extraordinary trajectory from “late-arriving slave colony” (p. 2) to a penal colony that seemed to engulf all inhabitants of its territory within a decade or two of abolition.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Empire · Ethnology · Geography · Humanities · Meaning (existential) · Metropolitan area · Political science · Politics · Sovereignty · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies