Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T02:13:28.621Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Undercover Colonialism, Coups and Chaos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

Nicholas W. Stephenson Smith
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois
Get access

Summary

Chapter 4 moves westward, to the French settlement in the Gulf of Tadjoura, recounting the career of the French merchant Henry de Monfreid, which spanned the early decades of the twentieth century. Henry de Monfreid is most widely recognised for his writing. He told the stories of some of the southern Red Sea’s most memorable and archetypal characters: the old men who manufactured pearls on remote uninhabited islands, where the poor and wretched fished sea snails, where blind Somali captains navigated treacherous reefs and rocky shores, and where pirates preyed on the unwitting. But as we see in this chapter, beneath the surface de Monfreid was a protagonist of the same destabilising geopolitical forces unleashed by colonial conquest we saw at work in earlier chapters. De Monfreid sought to further his own and France’s interests in the region by perpetrating violence at sea and adding parts of the Arabian Peninsula to the French empire. He helped transform international politics and diplomacy in the region into an anarchic scramble for influence and power. His example shows the extent to which the culture of international relations was transformed, with private individuals vying for influence and recognition in the colonial system of sovereignty.

Type
Chapter
Information
Colonial Chaos in the Southern Red Sea
A History of Violence from 1830 to the Twentieth Century
, pp. 127 - 160
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×