French Colonialism

From the Ancien Régime to the Present

Bibliographic Data

ID23404366
AuthorsLeonard V Smith (Oberlin College, corresponding author)
Year2023
Publication date2023-07-31
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueFrench Colonialism (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/9781108874489
OpenAlexW4381737117
Open LibraryOL49298360M
ISBN9781108874489
LanguageEN
Citations received3

France had the second largest empire in the world after Britain, but one with very different origins and purposes. Over more than four centuries, the French empire explained itself in many different ways through many different colonial regimes. Beginning in the early modern period, a vast mercantile empire based on furs and fish in the New World and sugar cultivated by the enslaved in the Caribbean rose and fell. At intervals thereafter, the French seemed to have an empire simply as an attribute of a Great Power, generally in competition with Britain. Relatively few French people ever moved to the empire, even to the settler colony of Algeria. Under the Third Republic, the French construed a “civilizing mission” melding selectively applied principles of democracy and colonial capitalism. Two world wars and two anticolonial wars broke French imperial power as it had previously existed, yet numberless traces of the French empire lived on, both in the former colonies and in today's French Republic. This narrative history recounts the unique course of the French empire, questioning how it made sense to the people who ruled it, lived under it, and fought against it.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Capitalism · Cartography · Colonialism · Democracy · Economic history · Empire · Fell · Geography · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · The Republic · World history · African history and culture studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Europe

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