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"Selling French Sex challenges contemporary understandings of trafficking by exploring the discourses and experiences surrounding the migration of French women for work in the early-twentieth-century sex industry. It will interest students and scholars of French, immigration, women's and gender, and world history"--

In Reproducing the French Race, Elisa Camiscioli argues that immigration was a defining feature of early-twentieth-century France, and she examines the political, cultural, and social issues implicated in public debates about immigration and national identity at the time. Camiscioli demonstrates that mass immigration provided politicians, jurists, industrialists, racial theorists, feminists, and others with ample opportunity to explore questions of French racial belonging, France's relationship to the colonial empire and the rest of Europe, and the connections between race and nati

This article presents a genealogy of historical studies of women, gender, intimacy, and empire from the late 1970s to the present day, with specific reference to modern European imperial formations. It begins with the problem of "additive histories," in which empire is merely affixed to a nation-based story and white women are inserted into historical accounts of empire. The article argues that work on intersectionality and colonial intimacy have complicated the additive history paradigm; in the first case, by complicating the rigid binaries of colonizer and colonized to include gender and sexuality, and in the second, by highlighting how corporality, desire, hybridity, and exchange function in imperial narratives. In turn, this historiographic trajectory questions the categories of (colonial) modernity and problematizes the (colonial) archive.

Books reviewed in this article: Selma Botman, Engendering Citizenship in Egypt Margaret L. Meriwether and Judith E. Tucker (eds), A Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon

This essay examines how, in the context of depopulation and mass immigration, members of the French pronatalist movement advanced a policy favouring immigrants from Italy, Spain, and Poland. Because the 'demographic crisis' created a shortage of citizens as well as workers, pronatalists held that foreign workers must also be assimilable, and able to produce French offspring. While the racial difference of colonial subjects was deemed immutable, pronatalists called for the immigration of white foreigners whose less 'modern' condition promoted fecundity, traditionalism, and gender dimorphism. Evidence is drawn from demographic studies, the press of France's largest pronatalist movement, and a pronatalist advisory committee created by the Ministry of Health in 1920.