This dissertation examines race-making from below, from the perspective of West African colonial soldiers and Lebanese Syrian migrants within the context of the French Empire, as it remade both modern-day Senegal and Lebanon in the early-to-mid twentieth century. It connects the geographies of the Eastern Mediterranean and West Africa, which few scholars have bridged before, and I show how these are fundamental to understanding race and racism in both locales. My research situates the cross-colonial encounters between West Africans and Arabs, Lebanese and Senegalese, at the core of debates about colonial intermediaries and race-making under empire. But I depart from dominant metropole/colony frameworks of colonial race-making by centering how Senegalese soldiers and Lebanese migrants, based on pre-colonial understandings of race and slavery, positioned themselves and others within shifting French colonial racial hierarchies that concurrently diverged and intersected with those very orderings. Weaving together micro and macro histories, I make the case for why the relationship between Lebanese and Senegalese, was uniquely forged through the racialized institution of French colonialism and continues to define who can be considered African and Arab in both Senegal and Lebanon, West Africa and the Levant, even though lived experience and self-identification often belies these categories.