This edited volume focuses on social welfare and medicine within the French Empire and brings together important currents in both imperial history and the history of medicine. The book covers a broad period from the first colonial empires that existed prior to 1830, the new imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the process of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century, and the afterlives of colonial regimes in France and newly-independent states. Building on recent scholarship, this volume examines the extension of imperialism into the post-colonial period. The chapters examine a range of topics developing our understanding of the reasons why colonial states saw the family as a site for biopolitical intervention. The authors argue that experts built a racialised body of knowledge about colonial populations through census data and medical understandings of problems such as child mortality and infertility. They show that by analysing and compiling dataon fertility, population growth (or decline), and health, this fuelled interventions designed to ensure a stable workforce, and that protecting children and mothers, vaccinating vulnerable populations, and creating modern, sanitary housing were all initiatives also aimed at serving larger goals of preserving colonial rule. Finally, the book shows that social welfare projects during the French Empire reflected concerns about race, differential fertility, and migration that continued well after decolonisation.

Margaret Cook Andersen is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in the USA. As well as having published the book,Regeneration through Empire: Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic(2015), she has written articles for a number of journals, includingFrench Historical Studies;French Politics, Culture, and Society;the Journal of Contemporary History;French History; andthe Journal of Family History.

Melissa K. Byrnes is Professor of History at Southwestern University, in the USA. Her research focuses on migration, race, empire, activism, and human rights. In addition to publishing the bookMaking Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon (2023), she has written articles for journals including Cold War History, French Politics, Culture& Society,French Cultural Studies, andFrench History and Civilization.

1. Introduction;. Margaret Cook Andersen and Melissa K. Byrnes.- 2. Colonial Reckoning: Population, Power, and Liberty in the French Atlantic, 1660-1787; Robert Scafe and Jennifer J. Davis.- 3. Pensioning Pondicherrys Enfants and Orphelins: Social Welfare and the French East India Company in Eighteenth-century French India; Jakob Burnham.- 4. Free and Naturalized Frenchwomen: Gender and the Politics of Race on Revolution-Era Bourbon Island; Nathan Marvin.- 5. Lipiodol and Fertility Medicine in Interwar Colonial Algeria; Margaret Cook Andersen.- 6. Rituals of the Matrice: Maternal and Infant Protection in French Colonial Cambodia; Tara Tran.- 7. The Colonial Origins of Mass Prophylaxis as a Public Health Panacea; Aro Velmet.- 8. Categorizing the Maghrib: How Census Data, Demography, and Population Studies Facilitated Governance Strategies and Public Messaging in Colonial and Postcolonial North Africa; Jennifer Johnson.- 9. Modernizing Migrants: Welfare and the Transformation of Marseilles African Communities; Gregory Valdespino.- 10. Criminal Fertility: Policing North African Families after Decolonization; Melissa K Byrnes.- 11. Inessential Labour: Reproduction, work, and Algerian Family Migration after Independence; Elise Franklin.