Liberating Youth: Age, Generation and Anti/Colonialism

With Stacey Hynd

This project responds to calls to take youth seriously. With a comparative emphasis of British and French empires across the twentieth-century Global South, we trace how “youth” became a politically intelligible category through the encounter of imperial social engineering and anti-colonial mobilisation. We argue that constructing “youth” was integral to empire-building, as colonial authorities governed populations through age-focused institutions and practices to produce “good” colonial subjects.