“Erudite and compelling… positively sparkles with historical insight… an essential read both for scholars of French empire and gender theorists.”
Sarah C. Dunstan
H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews
Following tirailleurs sénégalais’ deployments in West Africa, Congo, Madagascar, North Africa, Syria-Lebanon, Vietnam, and Algeria from the 1880s to 1962, Militarizing Marriage historicizes how African servicemen advanced conjugal strategies with women at home and abroad, and examines the evolution of women’s conjugal relationships with West African colonial soldiers to show how the sexuality, gender, and exploitation of women were fundamental to the violent colonial expansion and the everyday operation of colonial rule in modern French Empire.
“This book’s invaluable contribution is the demonstration that the sexuality and conjugality of women, particularly African women, were instrumental to global French imperial conquest.”
Bruce Whitehouse
Journal of African History
“Militarizing Marriage’s focus on African soldiers’ conjugal unions, households, and trans-imperial sexual relationships adds exciting new dimensions to the historiography of colonial militaries and their roles in imperial conquest, occupation, as well as in the world wars.”
Michelle R. Moyd
Author of Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa
“A groundbreaking work of scholarship [that] contributes to a wide range of literatures. These include feminist scholarship on gender and militarism in Africa, the extensive historiography on African colonial militaries, and the historical literature of women’s roles in Western European armies.… Not only a significant and sophisticated contribution to the historical literature on the tirailleurs sénégalais and other African colonial armies but also to the growing literature on gender and militarism in Africa. Due to its temporal, geographic, and thematic scope, it will be of interest to scholars of African, global, and military history.”
Lennart Bolliger
Author of Apartheid's Black Soldiers: Un-National Wars and Militaries in Southern Africa
“A massive contribution to scholarship…. I recommend anyone interested in African history, colonial history, military history, or gender studies to read this book and assign it to students. It will contribute a great deal to understanding how we write history and its complex relations with current politics.”
Ruth Ginio
H-France
[A] timely and perspicacious book. . . . a powerful contribution in the field. Undergraduate and graduate students of history, as well as researchers, will find the book most useful. Historians of empire focusing on almost any aspect—gender, violence, war, race, sexuality, empire making, household making, marital traditions, postcolonial discourse—will find this book useful to engage with. Alongside related work produced by historians such as Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Ann Stoler, and Carina Ray, Zimmerman’s book contributes to how we reconceptualize the centrality of women, marriage, militarism, race, and sexuality in the business of empire making, and how we connect the imperial past with the present.
George N. Njung
American Historical Review
“An original, significant contribution to the field of African history, Zimmerman’s thoroughly researched and insightful study on French colonial marital traditions discusses how the conjugal relationships between West African tirailleurs sénégalais soldiers and local women over Africa, Europe, and parts of Asia—and their resulting mixed-race children—represented a challenge to the French colonial racial hierarchy”
Tim Stapleton
Author of Africa: War and Conflict in the Twentieth Century