Beyond citizenship. Recovering the electoral institution in colonial situations

How can one renew the study of the electoral institution in a colonial situation? This paper offers a synthesis and a research programme on voting in the European colonial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is based on a review of the literature on the social history of voting and on colonial history, as well as on a study of the Senegalese case. It stresses the need to move away from a single history of the globalisation of the secret ballot towards a more polycentric history of voting and elections. To this end, it invites to uncover forms of voting that are usually neglected in order to focus on the question of the superposition of electoral forms that have characterised colonised spaces. It shows that such a perspective can enrich the understanding of the mechanisms of domination in colonial situations, to help deepen the work of identifying colonial electorates and to refine the analysis of colonial institutional legacies in electoral matters.