A Miscarriage of History: The Case of Adria K. Lawrence’s Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism: Anti-Colonial Protest in the French Empire

Mohamed Dellal

Volume 16 Issue 3

Global Journal of Human-Social Science

The writing of history, as always, has been subject to biases, most of the time from those who call the shots, but sometimes from factors so insidious that it is very difficult to isolate them. Books of history written by approved authorities as well as by independent ones, are replete with such examples I do not have space for in this work. I need, however, to draw a line between deliberately sidestepped factors and those that, for one reason or another, have been omitted. My concern in this paper is to highlight the factors that, willingly or not, are overlooked by the author of the book under focus for what I think are ideologically motivated reasons. Pragmatists (Donald Davidson 2001b; 2004; Richard Rorty 1979;1982; Willard Van Quine 1969;1990) and language philosophers (Gontard 1981), indeed, speak of a cultural phenomenon, a driving force among intellectuals, constituted by popular ideas (opinions and thoughts or ethical norms) which, quite often act as doxatic1 factors that either favor alignment behind them or condemn dissident voices. It is, therefore, a major concern of this paper to show that Lawrence, the author has fallen victim of such a phenomenon by truncating chunks of vital historical information of the colonies she has studied, and more particularly the Moroccan one.