This work is the first comprehensive history of the Lebanese migrant communities of colonial French West Africa, a vast expanse that covered present-day Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Guinea, Benin and Mauritania. Where others have concentrated on the commercial activities of these migrants, casting them as archetypal middlemen, this work reconstructs not just their economic strategies, but also their social and political lives. Moreover, it examines the fraught responses of colonial Frenchmen to the unsettling presence of these interlopers of empire - responses which, with their echoes of metropolitan racism, helped to shape the ways in which Lebanese migrants represented themselves and justified their place in WestAfrica. This is a work - but also to challenge the way we think about empires, and the relations between their constituent territories and diverse inhabitants. | Interlopers of Empire by Andrew Arsan, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters