If the word ‘strategy’ is now essential for us, it was however absent from French vocabulary of the eighteenth century. At that time no theorist of naval war considered anything than ‘tactics’, that is to say ‘the art to arrange the Navies in the order which is appropriate for the object that one proposes & to regulate their movements’. It meant a science of naval evolutions, or, in other words, operations, which a squadron could carry out. This science is the general officer's one, but, reading the French theorists, from the P. Hoste to the vicomte de Grenier via Bigot de Morogues, it is clear that its subject was not yet a ‘universal science of the war’ including the art of preparing a plan of campaign. That was the task, not of the seaman, but was the monopoly of the king and some of his ministers. On the other hand, the vocabulary then of use in France strained to catch a reality of this. Although the neologism ‘la stratégique’ appears in 1771 from the quill of the Lieutenant-Colonel Joly de Maizeroy, the erudite translator of Byzantine military writings, and it was useful to name such a science which forms and prepares the projects before directing them, the word, nonetheless, remained rare and was not yet applied to the sea.

To this first linguistic difficulty is added a second, related to the frequent absence of sources in archives on the discussions and the methods of decision making by the king in his council. Generally, the design of a plan of operation remains opaque to us. Only the orders given as a result are directly known; all the former stages remaining a state secret. At most we can guess that the development of a plan of campaign was conditioned by political objectives of the Bourbon monarch, by the theoretical structure of the naval forces, fixed on different occasions during the century, and by the concrete constraints amongst units available or likely to be so a few months later. Everyone always expected a short war, such as only one campaign at sea, of a few months, would be enough to confirm the decision.

Refoulement in the French Colonial Conception of the City

The two decades from 1914 to 1934 saw increasingly heightened concern in the colonial state's perception of Africans as the principal undesirable element of the capital of France's important West African colony. Administrators adhered to a race-driven concept of urban modernity, one that was threatened by Dakar's growth even as that growth brought the city to greater prominence. State vision was for a grand capital, major Atlantic port, and modern city. This was expressed throughout the years of high colonialism— key decades for the development of Dakar—but was also accompanied by a current of concern among officials that the capital's African setting and social makeup could compromise its potential. As the men who staffed the colonial state attempted to hone their professional approach to urban management, they brought into their work a rhetoric around Africans that was embedded in the language of modernity. Within it, the majority of Africans were cast as inappropriate to city dwelling, making the generation of strategies to discourage them from coming to or remaining in town a vital aspect of running the capital. Part of the project of making Dakar what they believed was modern was dealing not only in the technical details of urban planning but also in the social attributes of the city. Yet, these ideas did not correspond to realities on the ground. Ultimately, the energy and effort devoted to making Dakar a modern European city did little to wrest the day-to-day power to shape urban life from the hands of those who lived it. The way in which this was perhaps most obvious was in the simple fact of Dakar's growth from the 1910s through the 1930s to an African-majority city, a process that stood in deep contrast to the goals and visions of the state.

In France, a reconceptualization of urban space began in the 1850s with Haussmann's transformation of Paris, but it was in the early decades of the twentieth century that its relationship to urban life, human development, and modernity was more explicitly drawn out in circles of urban planners, architects, and sociologists. As colonial administration of FWA congealed, the concept of professionalized rule took shape in Dakar, informed not only by colonial imperatives but by global trends.

The Second World War as a Window

By the time of the Second World War, Dakar had become a city that coupled unique opportunities and specific barriers for those who lived there. Its fluidity, which frustrated officials, was an attribute that contributed not only to its diversity but also to the types of activities Dakarois pursued and the ways in which they did so. The war brought about two shifts in the dynamics of transactions in the colonial capital. War brought about shortages and rationing, which aggravated the “just enough” world in which Dakarois lived and catapulted the issue of daily needs to the forefront of city dwellers’ minds and actions. The terms of transactions and access to resources were central to urban everyday public discourse. The grievances of the urban population regarding their daily lives also moved into a new place of prominence in the state's spectrum of concerns. Wartime generated intensified surveillance, with greater attention to the happenings of daily life. The war thus serves as a window with a special view of the city; it permits an understanding of the depth and flexibility of the transactional culture. The state became more vigilant about tracking public sentiment and activity, raising their prominence in official documentation. Those sentiments and activities put even greater pressure on Dakarois in their transactional lives. As urgency set in, a growing range of unauthorized actions emerged in the city, and preexisting illicit practices became more prominent.

As the seat of the government of colonial French West Africa, Dakar took on particular roles during World War II. It served as a strategic base and, with the regime change in France, as a Vichy stronghold outside of France.1 Dakar became entrenched in the political and military struggles of the war, especially as it became a target of Allied and Free French efforts to erode Axis power in Africa.2 Amid a global war, France also relied on its African colonies to bolster its forces, bringing about new experiences for African servicemen and shifting dynamics between soldiers and the French colonial state.

The War that Britain fought between 1739 and 1748 has not been considered one in which the strategic, operational, or tactical abilities of its statesmen and military leaders blossomed. In London, Sir Robert Walpole, the duke of Newcastle, the earl of Carteret and almost all their colleagues in the highest positions of state, are usually seen as ill-informed, misguided, and fractious. On the battlefields the likes of the duke of Cumberland, the earl of Stair, Sir John Cope, Henry Hawley, seem to have little grasp of the broader purpose of their campaigns. At sea, Edward Vernon, Thomas Matthews, Charles Knowles, Henry Medley, and John Byng were unable to make good use of Britain's greatest strategic advantage – sea power. At best the war, which for Britain ended with the status quo ante, was solid training for those lights were going to burn brightly eight years later in the Seven Years War – most obviously, the secretary of state for the Southern Department, William Pitt, but also the illustrious commanders, George Anson, Jean-Louis Ligonier, Edward Hawke, Edward Boscawen, Jeffrey Amherst, and James Wolfe.

The transformation of Britain's performance in the two wars has long been associated with the emergence of this new generation of leaders. That they played important roles in the victories is undeniable, but locating the causes of success almost exclusively in the characters of the leaders, throws much else into the shade.

This chapter will focus less on the performance of individual leaders than on the social process of leadership itself. This way of looking at leadership shows that it is not rigidly hierarchical, nor bureaucratically determined. Nor are its outputs the product of a purely scientific rational process. It is not confined to formal organisational ‘commanders’ nor the preserve of a single brain. Leadership at all levels is a social process that exists between people – the leaders and the led – who are in a constant process of renegotiating that relationship and may be changing roles at any time. Even the output of the strategy formulation process – strategic policy – is only one step in actual performance of the organisation.

Urban Spaces and Selves: The Cape Verdean Community of Dakar

Urban life in colonial Africa involved forging selves and opportunities. Carving out economic spaces in which to operate was critical to the task. In a colonial context that foregrounded questions of race and identity, deployment of those concepts was inherent to the process of creating and maintaining economic opportunities. The jobs people occupied were significant motors of urban growth, and the holders of a vast number of such jobs were not autochthonous Dakarois. In the capital of FWA, wage earners and merchants came not only from Senegal and the larger colony but from other colonies, particularly the nearby Portuguese holdings, and from other zones of French control, such as Syria and Lebanon. Whereas those from Senegal and its region often built Dakar into a wider network of geographies of work and residence, those from Portuguese colonies and the Levant were immigrants whose intent was to stay. In many ways, the creation of permanent immigrant communities in Dakar stood in contrast to the city's tendency toward transience while contributing to the expansion of the city through the arrivals of people from elsewhere.

The transactional culture of colonial Dakar relied on factors such as proximity, origin, trust, opportunity, movement, and flexibility, and communities coalesced around those. It also was shaped by the attitudes and actions of the colonial state. Cape Verdean success in Dakar has much to reveal about colonial urban niche economies and the dynamics of categorization that existed under colonialism. Most important is the simultaneous prominence and pliability of colonial exercises in identity definition. In his study of colonial Dar es Salaam, James Brennan has pointed to a “particular ambivalence at the heart of British interwar policy” as pertained to understanding what the colonial state perceived as native and nonnative identity categories. He argues that application of categories was neither consistent nor well defined and that “the process of identity formation had multiple if unequal participants” whose motivations varied in nature. The dynamic he describes was present across colonial contexts as the very act of seeking to know, define, and control identity was one that could only be fraught with assumptions and unintended consequences. Steven Fabian argues that the specificity of place is a significant factor to consider in any analysis of urban identity formation and self-perception.

In 1783, after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which brought the American Revolution (1776–1783) to an end, the land area of Spain's possessions in the Americas was larger than at any other point in history. Covering more than 16 million square kilometers, the Spanish Empire included a large part of both the North American and the South American continents. It extended all the way from California in the north Pacific, through the powerful viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, to Tierra del Fuego, and the viceroyalty of Río de la Plata in the south Atlantic, and included the provinces of New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida; the viceroyalty of Nueva Granada and several captaincies general; and the large Caribbean islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo, in addition to the archipelago of the Philippines.

However, in spite of all it had achieved, after the war this huge empire was faced with a number of challenges. Historians today point to the end of the reign of Carlos III (1759–1788) as the beginning of a period of crisis for the Spanish monarchy. The Bourbon Reforms, as they are known, were reaching their limits. This was due in part to factors internal to the Spanish monarchy. But there was a later phase characterized by renewed attempts at reform. This is the period between 1783 and 1792, during the tenure of the Count of Floridablanca as secretary of state – the most powerful position in the government – which coincides with the creation of a new political institution: the Junta de Estado (1787–1792), a council of state that functioned as a true cabinet.

In the present chapter, I focus on the aspects of reform that involved the navy. I attempt to analyze the importance of the support given by Floridablanca to the secretary of the navy, Antonio Valdés (1783–1795), a naval commander who played a leading role in the junta.

In a society based on privilege, like Spain's in the eighteenth century, in which there was no separation between the public and private spheres, power networks were vital. This was true for the exercise of political governance as well as naval leadership. It is important to keep in mind that the court in Madrid, as the embodiment of the absolute monarchy, was the epicenter of power relations between the ruling elites in Spain and its overseas empire.

It is easy to conclude that over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries France did not develop the naval leadership needed to compete effectively with Britain in the eighteenth, and this despite the many outstanding individual exceptions and successes that can be identified along the way. This relative weakness, it seems, was due to a series of deep contradictions within the French navy. Separate Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, for example, presented practical problems of coordination and command, but also quite distinct cultures of leadership: one sea where traditions of noble, military command stretched back centuries and the other where any such traditions had to be invented. A gulf could also be said to have existed between the maritime periphery and the centre in Paris or Versailles, separated not just geographically but also by contrasting maritime and continental strategic outlooks. Similarly, it was difficult to integrate a typically jealous, privileged, and Catholic nobility with the body of active and able seamen in coastal communities, a great many of whom were Huguenots. Thus, the conflict within the naval hierarchy (traditionally said to be divided between the noble officiers rouges and the officiers bleus of the lower orders) was made all the more intractable by the wider confessional division in France. If some of these contradictions now seem less stark than they were once believed to be, they nevertheless still contribute to the perception that the navy suffered from a debilitating imbalance due to the separation of civil and military authority. The history of the navy was dominated by a succession of high-profile and powerful ministers of state which appears to have come at the cost of strong naval leadership and command. The admiralty of France seems irrelevant in comparison. That this was a larger political failure in France is reinforced by the popular image of an ineffective or uninterested monarchy acting as something of an emblem of this wider structural dysfunction. This civil-military division needs to be considered more carefully, however. Far from just the effect of serial mismanagement, it was the product of careful attempts to manage the balance between another, far more relevant, contradiction. Historically, the navy was shaped by its twin functions as an aspect of governance and as a military arm of royal power.

Foreigners, Intermediaries, Dakarois

Dakar attracted many immigrants from origins beyond sub-Saharan Africa— notably, those from Europe, North Africa, and the Levant. During the inter-war period, the Lebanese became the most prominent—and most fiercely debated—immigrant, or “foreign,” community in Dakar, as they established themselves in various parts of West Africa.1 Over those decades, Lebanese Dakarois placed themselves in sectors that made them relevant to other city dwellers’ needs and integral to the fabric of the city's transactional culture. The more locally entrenched the Lebanese became, the sharper became the exter-nal focus on their status as foreigners. It was the very ability of the Lebanese to harness local economic opportunities by serving the African clientele that not only made them integral to the urban sectors of retail and credit but also singled them out to the French. Their direct commerce with African commu-nities generated hostility among French commercial stakeholders toward the Lebanese, especially during a time of global economic downturn.

French business interests pointed most directly and aggressively to the role of Lebanese traders in rural areas, where the peanut trade was of great interest and importance to colonial commerce. However, the role of Lebanese merchants in Dakar was not fully understood or interpreted as predatory in that way. The urban setting presented transactional options that were broad and often hidden. Like Cape Verdean Dakarois, Lebanese came to occupy a position in the colonial capital's transactional culture that was difficult for colonial administrators to classify. They operated in an economic space both French businessmen and administrators had neither truly grasped nor fully controlled, seen as neither European nor African. The state, but most frequently French commercial interests, turned to the notion of the intermediary to define the Lebanese. The concept of the intermediary as applied to the Lebanese in Senegal became infused with negative overtones for French stakeholders and, at times, the colonial state. The concept was a powerful one, as it appealed to the impulse to classify and know populations. In scholarship on the Lebanese in Senegal and other West African sites, the term intermediary has persisted as a descriptor of the community's role.

Residence and Transience

Despite colonial ambitions for a European city stabilized through segregation that privileged whites, the realities of Dakar included a flexible, fluid model of residence. Living in town was broadly conceived. City dwellers of diverse backgrounds adopted of a range of strategies—including varying degrees of mobility—in this regard. Transience became a mode of residence, and as Dakar evolved, transience became more expansively infused into various aspects of urban life. The nature of transience makes it inherently elusive, and locating it in various aspects of city life requires a close look into the spaces city dwellers occupied. In urban settings, the most prominent of those spaces were places of residence, which in the colonial capital also entailed places of work. City dwellers formulated creative residential strategies in which movement and transience were useful. Likewise, Dakar's diverse residential landscape developed many features that catered to mobility and its consequence, transience. The commonplace nature of transience in the city instilled a fragility into housing arrangements, including those that were at places of employment.

Dakar's main civil court cases provide a window into the sorts of considerations and dynamics that often were hidden from view yet integral to urban life in Dakar. As disputes arose, matters surfaced in the Tribunal that revealed how city dwellers formulated their approaches to residence and maintaining working situations. The records show a flexibility in the practices of Dakarois as they navigated their pragmatic arrangements. While the colonial administration attempted to draw clear lines between city dwellers and everyone who belonged in other areas of the territory, Africans in Dakar pursued their own strategies with little need to define urban residence in precise terms. Many considered themselves to be from elsewhere, but this had little bearing on the fact that they lived and worked in the capital as Dakarois.

The civil court cases that Dakarois lodged from the mid-1910s through the mid-1930s reveal a number of traits in the city's transactional culture around housing. First, the arrangements made between property owners and renters were devised as needed and with no parameters at an official level regarding renting. Second, the housing market consistently suffered from shortages.

Transactional Relationships and State Racism1

In colonial Dakar, the intersection of urban African networks and colonial policies concerning African fiscal lives produced a local transactional culture in which informality was central. These dynamics were very apparent in Dakarois’ everyday money management. Colonial administrations in Africa created a system in which most financial resources such as credit were available through official channels over which the state had control and were limited or inaccessible to colonized populations. In Dakar, part of the mechanism of ensuring the exclusivity of the formal economy and the exploitative economic basis of colonialism was an ideological framework that cast Africans as fiscally immature, severely restricting access to funds other than the most necessary. At the height of its colonial rule in West Africa, the French state pursued the rhetoric of African fiscal responsibility to a granular level in its wage policy, marrying a paternalism that proposed a need for tutelage to shape Africans into savvy economic actors with an overt urgency to produce more and more reliable labor.

Colonial policies were fraught with unintended consequences, and as state efforts to keep permanent African settlement in town at bay ultimately encouraged expanding informal settlement, the French administration's efforts to curb African accumulation merely encouraged creative fiscal practices to flourish in colonial Dakar. In the context of racist constraints, which limited formal fiscal management and a wage regime aimed at limiting any form of real earnings, Dakarois focused on quick, adaptable, and flexible strategies of resource access. Social networks were key to such a system. People in the colonial capital forged opportunities with one another, placed in a colonial schema meant to create perpetual need among African city dwellers and retain them in the low-paid labor force. The many transactional court cases individuals brought to the Tribunal reveal that the ability of Dakarois to turn toward other city dwellers as financial resources was a key necessity in the colonial city. Particularly within the context of concerted state efforts to entrench Africans in a form of poverty prior to the end of the Second World War, maximum flexibility among city dwellers in their monetary dealings was necessary and commonplace. The French colonial state, in fact—and contrary to its own goals—helped create a vibrant informal system.