Professor Martin Thomas D.Phil (Oxon)

Extension: 4183

Telephone: 01392 264183

Professor of Colonial History

My research and teaching focus on the following five main themes:

French colonial empire and European decolonization
Anti-colonial nationalism in North Africa
Colonial security services and state violence
Colonial insurgencies and ’dirty wars’
French international politics since 1919

I am currently conducting research into colonial security services, state violence and oppositional nationalism. My interests centre on the relationships between state intelligence gathering, police power and the political economy of imperial rule. I am especially interested in the policing of colonial dissent and the politics of colonial repression. One of the results of this work is a book, Empires of Intelligence? Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914, published by the University of California Press in 2007.

I was recently awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, which began in October 2009, and the principal aim of which is to carry out a three-year project on 'Political Economies of Empire Violence and Police Repression'. The work centres on comparing the nature and scale of police intervention during colonial labour disputes, urban protests, and anti-colonial violence in the Depression era of the 1920s and 1930s. Ranging from North Africa to French Vietnam, a central proposition of this research is that policing of the colonial workplace and colonial labour markets remained a more significant priority for security forces than repression of anti-colonial nationalism.