New in paperback. Hardcover was published in 2014. As the French public debates its present diversity and its colonial past, few remember that between 1946 and 1960 inhabitations of French colonies possessed the rights of French citizens. This book examines momentous changes in notions of citizenship, sovereignty, nation, state, and empire in a time of acute uncertainty about the future of a world that had earlier been divided into colonial empires. It shows how both France and its former colonies backed into more "national"conceptions of the state than eiter had sought.