Beyond Citizenship. A New Perspective on Elections in Colonial Situations

How can we bring a new perspective to the study of elections in colonial contexts? This paper synthesizes existing knowledge about voting in the European colonial empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and proposes a plan for future research. It offers a review of the literature on the social history of voting and on colonial history and discusses a study of the Senegalese case. It advocates moving away from the linear history of the globalization of the secret ballot toward a polycentric history of voting and elections. To this end, it highlights forms of voting that are usually neglected in order to bring attention to the superposition of electoral forms that characterized colonized spaces. It shows that such a perspective can enrich our understanding of the mechanisms of domination in colonial contexts, help identify colonial electorates, and refine analysis of the impact of colonial institutions on electoral systems in formerly colonized areas.