In this wonderful, wide-ranging book, Amit Prakash uncovers the many layers of French anxiety over North African immigration. With great theoretical sophistication and thorough archival detective work, he takes the reader through police efforts to come to terms with, to understand, a process that consistently baffled them, to make North African immigration to Paris comprehensible and, ultimately, manageable. While their efforts famously failed, they laid the foundation for durable patterns of discrimination and inequality that remain of urgent concern. * Clifford Rosenberg, Associate Professor of European History at The City College of New York * Empire on the Seine is a lucidly written and incisive study of how, from the 1920 through the 1970s, police in Paris fixated on 'North African' inhabitants, a racialized surveillance that also shaped urban space. Prakash's innovative and interdisciplinary approach to spatiality bridges histories of empire and of the city and will prove useful to scholars in many fields. At the same time, the book's extended chronology and deep archival anchor reveal the blind-spots of existing work on the French police and Algerians that more circumscribed chronologies-notably around the Algerian War and October 17, 1961-encourage. * Todd Shepard, Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University * In Empire on the Seine, Amit Prakash has produced not only a lucid, fine-grained historical study of the policing of North Africans against the backdrop of the Algerian war of independence, but a genealogy of a carceral regime that continues to curb the freedoms of French citizens of North African origin. * Adam Shatz, author of The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Franz Fanon * Prakash's book succeeds in positioning Paris as an imperial capital, but it also moves back and forth from metropole to colony when needed, showing how the two were deeply intertwined in terms of ideas, policy, and actions. Empire on the Seine succeeds in showing that the violence of colonialism, from the earliest conquest to the wars of independence, constantly intruded on the metropole. * Kathleen Keller, The American Historical Review * What makes Prakash's treatment so valuable is the skill with which he untangles the trans-Mediterranean colonial connections, the political controversies, and the vicious French police practices that made it so. * Martin Thomas, The English Historical Review * Well-written and superbly researched account of the long-term history of French policing of racialized minorities and its imperialpedigree. Students interested in the metropolitan repercussions of the French Empirewould be well advised to read it carefully. * Michael Goebel, Journal of Modern History * [ A] well-written and superbly researched account of the long-term history of French policing of racialized minorities and its imperial pedigree. Students interested in the metropolitan repercussions of the French Empire would be well advised to read it carefully. * Michael Goebel, Journal of Modern History *
