Empire's Children

Europe’s imperial projects were often predicated on a series of legal and scientific distinctions that were frequently challenged by the reality of social and sexual interactions between the colonized and the colonizers.When Emmanuelle Saada discovered a 1928 decree defining the status of persons of mixed parentage born in French Indochina—the métis —she found not only a remarkable artifact of colonial rule, but a legal bombshell that introduced race into French law for the first time. The decre