Professor Martin Thomas
Research Interests
My research interests focus on the following broad themes:
* The French colonial empire and European decolonization
* Anti-colonial nationalism in North Africa
* Colonial security services, policing, and the nature of state violence
* ’Dirty wars’ and counter-insurgency, particularly human rights abuses in asymmetric conflicts
* French international politics since the First World War
I am currently working on political economies of colonial violence and, more specifically, the socio-economic determinants of coercive policing in North Africa, the Caribbean and colonial South East Asia. This is a development of my previous research into the role of information collection and political surveillance in ordering colonial societies.
Recent Conference Papers
July 2011, 'Coolies, Communists and Capital: Policing the Rubber Crash in Malaya and Indochina,' 'Colonial Circulations' Conference, University of Bristol.
June 2011, 'Locating Colonial Violence: The Role of Police and Labour Control,' Workshop on Comparative Colonial Violence, Paris I.
February 2011, 'Ringleaders, Mobs, and Enemies: Defining ‘Minimum Force’ in Colonial Protest Policing after 1914,' International Studies Association Conference, Montreal.
April 2010, 'Fighting ‘Communist banditry’ in French Vietnam: The Rhetoric of Repression after the Yen Bay Uprising, 1930-32,' Society for French Historical Studies Conference, Phoenix, Arizona.
February 2010, 'Policing and Labour Control: Political Economies of Colonial Policing in the inter-war years,' University College Dublin, War Studies Centre Seminar.
March 2009, 'Evaluating British Intelligence Gathering in Colonial South East Asia,' METIS network, Sciences Po., Paris.
February 2009, 'The French Empire and International Politics: Changing Normative Standards of Imperialism in the Interwar Years,' International Studies Association Annual Conference, New York.
November 2008: 'Intelligence & Environment: Mobilizing Geography as an Instrument of Colonial Control,' Canadian Association of Security and Intelligence Studies Conference, Ottawa.
October 2008: 'Intelligence Providers and the Fabric of the Late Colonial State,' Conference on 'Trajectories of Decolonization: Elites and the Transformation from the Colonial to the Post-Colonial,' University of Cologne.
April 2008: 'The Political Economy of Colonial Violence in Interwar Jamaica,' Conference on 'Terror and the Making of Modern Europe: Transatlantic Perspectives on the History of Violence,' Stanford University.
Research Supervision
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French colonial history in the late nineteenth and twentieth century
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colonial conflicts in Africa and Asia and the end of European colonial rule
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colonial policing and intelligence-gathering in colonial societies
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French foreign policy since 1919
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Franco-British relations in the twentieth century.
I am happy to offer research supervision in the following broad areas:
Research Students
I currently supervise PhD students working on various facets of French, French colonial, and international history in the twentieth century. Their research topics include policing and intelligence in colonial Burma; state violence and colonial repression in the Belgian Congo; and colonial counter-insurgency and cultures of violence in wars of decolonization.
