Shades of Fraternity: Creolization and the Making of Citizenship in French India, 1790–1792
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On October 16, 1790, a group of topas men wrote a petition to the Colonial Assembly at Pondichéry, protesting the decision of September that year to exclude them from the electoral list of active citizens on the basis of “race.” These propertied, free men of color demanded to have the same rights as Europeans and the métis. While historians of the French empire have long considered how mulatto and creole people in the French Caribbean negotiated the boundaries of citizenship after the Revolution, the debate that emerged in India offers a different view. This essay argues that the topas drew on precedents from other French colonies, as well as on the status of foreigners in France itself, to argue that domicile (ius solis) rather than bloodline (ius sanguinis) formed the basis of what it meant to be French. Hence skin color could not be a barrier to citizenship rights. Le 16 octobre 1790, un groupe d'hommes topas ont rédigé une pétition adressée à l'Assemblée coloniale de Pondichéry pour protester contre une décision prise au mois de septembre de la même année visant à les exclure de la liste électorale des citoyens actifs en raison de leur « race ». Ces hommes de couleur libres et propriétaires ont exigé les mêmes droits que les Européens et les métis. Tandis que les historiens de l'empire français se penchent depuis longtemps sur la manière dont les mulâtres et les créoles ont négocié les frontières de la citoyenneté aux Caraïbes français après la Révolution, le débat suscité en Inde offre une vue différente. Cet essai soutient que les topas se sont inspirés de précédents dans d'autres colonies françaises ainsi que du statut des étrangers en France elle-même pour affirmer que c'était le « domicile » (ius solis) plutôt que la « lignée » (ius sanguinis) qui constituait la base de ce que voulait dire être français. Ainsi, la couleur de la peau ne pouvait pas être une barrière aux droits liés à la citoyenneté.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".