Domination of Indigenous Peoples 851and Laos, and in Madagascar highland officials dominated the administra
tion of their coastal rivals.
The French government directly ruled Algeria. Algerians could become
French citizens, but with only limited rights. The sultan of Morocco and
the bey of Tunisia still ruled their subjects, at least in name, although gov
ernment and the exercise of justice remained in the hands of the French
colonial administration. In Southeast Asia, the French government created
the Union of Indochina between 1887 and 1893, which included Cochin,
Tonkin, Annam, Cambodia, and Laos under a single governor-general,
although France left pre-existing monarchies intact. The French govern
ment also centralized the administration of West Africa in 1895 by forming
the federation of French West Africa, and in 1910 it established the feder
ation of French Equatorial Africa, made up of its Central African colonies.
Governors-general, based in Dakar and Brazzaville, served as the highest
local administrative authority.
In the colonies, the British lived in isolation from the indigenous popula
tion. The upper class tried to replicate the world of the common rooms of
Cambridge and Oxford Universities (more than a quarter of all graduates
of Oxford’s Balliol College at the turn of the century served in the empire)
and of London gentlemen’s clubs, served by Indian, African, or Asian wait
ers. British colonial women served only English recipes to their guests. In
India, British “hill stations,” which had begun as isolated sanitaria where the
British could recuperate from tropical heat and illness, also provided com
manding heights useful for surveillance. They became part of the imperial
system, both as centers of power and closed British communities, “islands of
white” that replicated the architecture and lifestyle of an English village.
Indeed, in Kenya and Rhodesia, settler communities were organized around
the sense of being “white” in unsettling and even dangerous surroundings;
newcomers were discouraged from crossing racial lines because of the fear
that such contact could undermine settler cohesion. In German African
colonies, German women imagined themselves as cultural ambassadors,
while colonial officials viewed them as representatives and even guarantors
of German culture who would give birth and raise their children in the
colonies as Germans.
Colonial urban architecture reflected the attempt to represent Western
domination. In what became Vietnam in Indochina, the opera house built
in Hanoi copied that in Paris. The French architects who planned the high
Gothic vaulting of the cathedral in Saigon did not consider obvious differ
ences in climate between France and Southeast Asia, providing insufficient
ventilation. Outsized public buildings and long boulevards extended French
authority in the form of architectural modernism into the daily life of
French settlers and the local colonial population. In Madagascar, the med
ical school reflected design more appropriate to Lyon than a tropical island.
Yet one must also nuance the view that imperialists and indigenous peo
ples lived entirely in two different, necessarily antagonistic worlds. Some