Background
Betts, Raymond Frederick was born on December 23, 1925 in Bloomfield, New Jersey, United States. Son of James William and Cora Anna (Banta) Betts.
( The False Dawn was first published in 1975. Minnesota A...)
The False Dawn was first published in 1975. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. As the author explains, the false dawn that greeted and disappointed the visitors in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India is a literary image that might serve as a value judgment of modern overseas empire in general. Commenting that the term "empire" is now badly tarnished, Professor Betts points out that no bright dawn of understanding has yet appeared on the academic horizon. With this perceptive viewpoint, he traces the course of European imperialism beginning with the Treaty of Paris in 1763 and ending with a final glance toward the Western Front in August, 1914. Reviewing the book in the Historian, Lawrence J. Baack calls it "a clear and concise essay on the nature of European imperialism." In its review Choice says: "Undergraduates and graduate students alike will welcome this book as a readable general introduction to more technical works."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816608520/?tag=2022091-20
( Until the close of the nineteenth century, French colon...)
Until the close of the nineteenth century, French colonial theory was based on the idea of assimilation, which gave France the responsibility for “civilizing” its colonies by absorbing them administratively and culturally. By the turn of the twentieth century, this idea had given way to the theory of association, which held that France’s new empire could be better served by a more flexible policy in which the colonized become partners with France in the colonial project. Raymond F. Betts examines the pivotal shift in colonial theory within the métropole, the debate that it generated, and its intellectual origins. A landmark book in the field of French colonial theory, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914, has served as the central point of reference for every major colonial historian during the four decades since its original publication in 1961. Available in paperback for the first time, with a new preface by the author, this edition will interest all students of colonialism and introduce many younger scholars to what remains the best and most original book in the field.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0803262477/?tag=2022091-20
( Uncertain Dimensions was first published in 1985. Minne...)
Uncertain Dimensions was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. World War I battered the Western imperial systems and destroyed one, that of Germany, but it did not sound the death knell of an empire. The "scramble" for overseas territory ha reached a virtual conclusion shortly before the war; afterwards, the main business of empire was to ensure a pax colonia: the often contradictory goals of a stable government and economic development. It is with the years between world wars—the brief age of administrative empire — that Raymond Betts is chiefly concerned in this book. An unsettled time, when individuals coped with empire of uncertain dimensions, the interwar years nonetheless left a material legacy—railroads, motor roads, public buildings — and an ideological one—the voices of protest that led to independence after World War II. Preeminently a cultural history of the era rather than a political narrative, Uncertain Dimensions centers upon the regions we now call the Third World—Subsaharan Africa and Southeast Asia—and the major colonial powers, Great Britain and France. Betts has structured this book as a group of closely linked interpretive essays, each devoted to a specific aspect of the late colonial experience: World War I and the postwar mandates, colonial administration, the European economic imperative and "technology transfer," urbanization, anti-imperial protest, and decolonization. Throughout, he draws upon the work of novelists, poets, and theoreticians—Aime Cesaire, Claude McKay, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and many others—and recognizes the deep irony at the heart of modern imperialism: that contact between Western and Third worlds was mostly confined to two minorities, the alien European and the socially uprooted African or Asian.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816613095/?tag=2022091-20
Betts, Raymond Frederick was born on December 23, 1925 in Bloomfield, New Jersey, United States. Son of James William and Cora Anna (Banta) Betts.
AB, Rutgers University, 1949. Master of Arts, Columbia University, 1950. Doctor of Philosophy, Columbia University, 1958.
Doctor, University Grenoble, 1955.
Assistant professor Bryn Mawr (Pennsylvania) College, 1956-1961. Associate professor, then professor Grinnell (Iowa) College, 1961-1971. Professor University Kentucky, Lexington, from 1971, director honors program, 1978-1990, director Gaines Center, 1983-1998.
Member National Humanities and Liberal Arts faculty, since 1980. Chairman Kentucky Humanities Council, 1982-1983. Board directors Diedrich Educational Trust, Ashland, Kentucky, since 1985.
Faculty participant Leadership Lexington, 1987-1991, 94—, Elderhostel, Lexington, 1987-1997. Presenter Educational Leadership Lexington, 1987-1996.
( Until the close of the nineteenth century, French colon...)
( Uncertain Dimensions was first published in 1985. Minne...)
( The False Dawn was first published in 1975. Minnesota A...)
(Book by Betts, Raymond)
Trustee Carnegie Center, Lexington, since 1998. With United States Army, 1944-1946, 50-51.
Married Irene Elizabeth Donahue, June 25, 1957. Children: Kenneth, James, Susan.