Militarizing marriage: West African soldiers’ conjugal traditions in modern French empire

Research on the military history of empires and their expansion is permeated by accounts of military operations, tactics and manoeuvres. Through her remarkable, multi-source research Sarah Zimmerman has complemented such descriptions with the history of women associated with the military campaigns staged by the French military in the previous two centuries. Putting together the study of gender, race and militarism, Militarizing Marriage describes and analyses how the French military managed African soldiers’ conjugality and intimate relations, as their ‘sexuality and their households were crucial to the operation of French colonialism’. In particular, Zimmerman traces the various deployments of the tirailleurs sénégalais, the umbrella term through which the African soldiers serving in the French colonial army were known during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Starting from 1857, the year when that corps was established, the book covers the developments occurred until 1962.