Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank remind us that empires constitute a far older form of rule than the nation-state. As they note, the historical “endurance of empire challenges the notion that the nation-state is natural, necessary and inevitable.” In settings including the French Caribbean, Spanish South America, and British North America, they stress that the fight for rights began as struggles for reform within an imperial framework, before they reached a revolutionary tipping point.1 This complicates standard ways of thinking in which nations, born of the eighteenth century, simply replaced empires. This chapter examines the entangled relationship between different kinds of nationalism, on the one hand, and a nebulous and multitiered French Empire, on the other hand. It suggests both the endurance and unexpected influences of imperial structures and ideas, as well as the significance of paths not taken, such as federalist alternatives to nationalist frameworks.

Chapter 7 focuses on the 1970s, when anti-colonial movements sought to turn global hierarchies upside down. Their efforts moved from the US civil rights movement to expose the racism and sexism embedded in professional work, as in education, social work, and medicine. Teachers observed their ‘hidden curriculum’, which excluded those they long claimed to help. Lawyers noted their close alliance to capital and sought, for the less-powerful, alternative routes to legal service. Engineers, who up to this point claimed that they had literally built civilization, began to ask whether they had in fact condemned society to live in concrete boxes and breathe polluted air. Even accountants were not immune. The high and fluctuating inflation that characterized the end of the moral-economic order established after the Second World War produced a legitimation crisis that required, in Britain, a Royal Commission on something as fundamental to capitalism as the calculation of profit.