Empires of Intelligence

Authors of historical monographs, attention! In the wake of the technology revolution, publishers now have no justification to insist on grounds of economy that references must be placed at the end of the book. Yet Empires of Intelligence implicitly presents a rationale for notes to find their proper place in the final part of a volume, almost as if in the form of a crescendo: the references and bibliography, which here occupy well over 100 pages, can be read as a fascinating book within a book. To prevent astigmatism, and to avoid having to match references to pages at a vast distance, the reader may prefer first to read the notes straight through as a guide to the French colonial archives at Aix-en-Provence, army documents at Vincennes, and police records at the Archives Nationales in Paris and elsewhere. Most readers will probably find the French side of the notes more engaging than the British sections, and may indeed find the French part of the book in general to be more revealing than the British. French colonial officers, in this case intelligence officers, perfected the art of putting as little as possible on paper, and the French have always proceeded at their own pace in the erratic and unpredictable release of documents. It is therefore useful to have a guide to police reports and intelligence estimates written or shaped not only by police, military officers, and district officers but also by colonial governors, all of whom tended to exaggerate the dangers posed by external threats such as pan-Islamism. Intelligence assessments, in the author's words, characterised colonial subjects as ‘putty in the hands of shrewd political manipulators, whether European or indigenous’. Colonial officials themselves pondered ‘mysterious and occult organizations spreading their tentacles all over the world’

Colonialism · Geography · Media studies · Pace · Political science · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law

• "A "Weapon of the Weak

  Stephen Pascoe•Radical History Review•2019

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