Frantz Fanon's

The Wretched of the Earth

(1961) is one of the founding works of postcolonialism. However

his perception in this magnum opus has seldom been put back into the context of English and French colonial history

from which the work originated. This essay historicizes Frantz Fanon's

The Wretched of the Earth

(1961). Firstly

two dialogical texts from the nineteenth century

Ernest Renan's "The Poetry of the Celtic Races" (1854) and Mathew Arnold's

On the Study of Celtic Literature

(1867)

are read against each other. A comparative reading of the two texts reveals that nineteenth-century English and French Celticism were each involved in the production of different models of imperial governance

with English imperialism being liberal or informal and French imperialism formal. By the time of the wave of decolonization wave during the 1950s

when Fanon wrote

The Wretched of the Earth

these two types of governance were scrambling for Algeria. Fanon's work on the liberation of Algeria in this sense conducted an anachronistic dialogue with Arnold and Renan of the previous century.