About

J. P. Daughton is a historian of modern Europe, imperialism and colonialism, and global history. His teaching and publications explore political, cultural, social, and environmental history, as well as the modern history of religion, technology, and humanitarianism. His most recent book, In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism (W. W. Norton, 2021), recounts the story of one of the deadliest construction projects in history, where between 1921 and 1934, French colonial interests recruited over 100,000 men, women, and children to work on a 500-kilometer rail line in French Congo, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths due to mistreatment, starvation, and disease. The book examines the experiences of local communities, the violence and suffering associated with colonial economic development, and how the rhetoric of 'civilization' and 'development' justified these atrocities. Daughton’s earlier work includes An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914, which analyzes the complex relations between Catholic missionaries and republican critics, challenging the notion that French colonial and civilizing efforts were solely rooted in Enlightenment secular ideals. His current projects include a book on fraud and corruption in modern imperialism, focusing on a late-nineteenth-century con man who attempted to colonize Papua-New Guinea, scheduled for publication in 2027. Daughton is also the editor of In God’s Empire: French Missionaries in the Modern World and has contributed essays and reviews to various academic journals. His affiliations at Stanford include the Europe Center, the Center for African Studies, and the Center for Human Rights and International Justice. He has received numerous awards and fellowships from prestigious foundations, and he is currently accepting graduate students interested in modern Europe, empire, humanitarianism, international politics, war and society, and environmental history.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Law
• History
• Political economy
• World Wide Web
• Religious studies
• Media studies
• Ancient history
• Library science
• Philosophy
• Art history
• Criminology
• Classics
• Art

Selected publications

• :<i>A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century</i>

  The Journal of Modern History · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Art
  • Art history
  PublisherDOI

• Patrick Boucheron, editor. France in the World: A New Global History.

  The American Historical Review · 2020-05-08

  article1st authorCorresponding

  One spring afternoon, a boy came to a rocky hillside in a region that his family had visited before. Following some men from his community, he climbed through a narrow opening into the dim cool of a cave. The men lit torches, the light dancing on the rough walls, and walked deeper into the liquid darkness of the chamber. At some point, they stopped and one of the men told the boy to close his eyes for a few moments. When he opened them again, the walls before him came alive with images of rhinoceroses, lions, deer, and mammoths, as well as a red handprint left years earlier by his grandmother. The great images he saw on the wall were magical and violent, and the stories they told would forever change the way the boy saw the world. The adventure of this boy, who entered the Chauvet Cave in the French Ardèche more than thirty thousand years ago, opens the first essay, written by François Bon, in the monumental France in the World: A New Global History. The story is necessarily fictional; remarkably little is known about the Aurignacians—not the language they spoke or even why they decided to paint on cave walls. But the child proves to be the ideal guide not only for the chapter but for the entire book that follows. His background seems remarkably contemporary: his people were migrants, the outcome of a “complex biological journey” that began in Africa and ended in what is now France. His people were “the Cro-Magnons, our direct ancestors, a mixed-race people if there ever was one.” His wonder at the mysterious images before him mirror our own uncertainties about the meaning of history today. “It is an imagined picture,” Bon writes, “superimposed upon images from another time, images that are forever mute even though they seem to shout out to us” (9). Like the boy before the ancient frescoes, the reader of France in the World is encouraged to look to the past “as if we are contemplating the source of our history” and marvel (12).

  PublisherDOI

• <i>African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church</i>. By Elizabeth A. Foster. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. x+370. $45.00.

  The Journal of Modern History · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Quotidian Violence in the French Empire, 1890–1940

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Historians of violence in the French Empire have focused primarily on official agents of the state, such as soldiers, policemen, judges, and administrators. Violence perpetrated by non-state actors – that is, by European settlers, merchants, and travelers – remain far less explored in the historiography of French colonialism. In important ways, brutality perpetrated by non-state actors helped perpetuate the Manichean dynamics of colonialism so powerfully described by colonial and post-colonial critics alike. The prevalence of violence suggests that quotidian brutality was central to settlers’ sense of power and identity in regions where they felt under constant threat from larger non-European populations. This chapter examines how civilian mistreatment of colonial populations often differed starkly from the state’s efforts to legitimate its own use of violence in military, administrative, and judicial capacities. Indeed, such daily acts of violence were potentially threatening to the French power. They undermined administrative control of French citizens and destabilized what were often delicate balances of power between officials and subject populations. Equally important, uncontrolled violence jeopardized the central rhetorical claim that colonization brought rationalism and civilization to allegedly less-developed societies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

  PublisherDOI

• The “Pacha Affair” Reconsidered: Violence and Colonial Rule in Interwar French Equatorial Africa

  The Journal of Modern History · 2019-08-21 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Colonial Affair?: Dreyfus and the French Empire

  2016-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  For historians of modern France the image of Alfred Dreyfus's public humiliation is indelible. On a cold January morning in 1895 Captain Dreyfus, wrongly condemned of treason, entered the main courtyard of the Ecole Militaire (Place de Fontenoy) in Paris. Flanked by soldiers and taunted by a jeering crowd, he stood defiantly as the verdict of his guilt was read aloud. Then, with ceremonial solemnity, officer tore the badges and decorations from Dreyfus's uniform and snapped his sword in two. The remnants of the Captain's career, if not his dignity, lay scattered on the cold ground. In Dreyfus's own words the event was a painful martyrdom.2 But the ritual's significance ran even deeper than the pain of the dishonored. Dreyfus's condemnation, imprisonment and eventual release were events loaded with symbolism that shaped French society from the 1 890s to the First World War and well beyond. What followed that January morning at the Ecole Militaire was not merely an affair of society and politics, but rather the Affair episode in French history that witnessed

  Publisher

• ILO Expertise and Colonial Violence in the Interwar Years

  Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2013-01-01 · 22 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In 1925, the Temporary Slavery Commission of the League of Nations was in the midst of investigating how best to end global slavery when a troubling report was submitted for its consideration. Unlike most reports received by the commission that described the existence of slavery primarily in autonomous non-European countries such as China and Abyssinia, this one documented rampant abuses in Portuguese Angola and Mozambique, that is, in territories directly under European control. The report was submitted to the League by a group of distinguished philanthropists, and was written by Edward A. Ross, one of the most prominent American sociologists of his day.1 The report, based on thousands of interviews with residents in both colonies, described how Portuguese officials and white settlers regularly beat, raped and even killed Africans with impunity. At the core of this abuse, Ross argued, was a forced labour system in many ways worse than slavery.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Placing French Missionaries in the Modern World

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2012-08-28 · 2 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This introductory chapter assesses the way in which religious missionaries have been dealt with—and often ignored—in the historiography of modern French colonialism. Missionaries defy many of the categories commonly used to study the history of empires. Religious workers complicate concepts like modernity, nationalism, and even empire since they regularly portrayed themselves as inheritors of a biblical tradition of evangelizing across national and imperial borders for the greater glory of God. The myriad struggles created by missionary work in the age of secular empires only became accentuated with the rise of anticolonialism and national independence movements in the wake of the Second World War.

  PublisherDOI

• Interview with Fr. Pat Moore (Oral History Collection)

  2012-12-14

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• In God’s Empire

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2012-08-28 · 21 citations

  bookSenior author

  A collection of thirteen chapters by leading scholars in the field, this book examines the complex ways in which the spread of Christianity by French men and women shaped local communities, French national prowess, and global politics in the two centuries following the French Revolution. More than a story of religious proselytism, missionary activity was an essential feature of French contact and interaction with local populations. In many parts of the world, missionaries were the first French men and women to work and live among indigenous societies. For all the celebration of France’s secula ... More

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Claire Drevon

  2 shared

• Owen White

  University of Delaware

  2 shared

• Chad Bryant

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  1 shared

• Susanna Barrows

  1 shared

• Margaret Lavinia Anderson

  West Health

  1 shared

• Julian Bourg

  Boston College

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Associa…
• Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize from the French Colonial Histor…
• CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for An Empire Divided
• Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize
• Finalist for the American Library in Paris Book Prize