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Needs and Opportunities in French Colonial History*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2011
Extract
If anything is clear to the student of the history of the early modern French colonial enterprise, it is the need for a general overview to equal Boxer's and Parry's fine volumes on the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish seaborne empires, or George Winius' volume in the Minnesota series. Not that such volumes on the French colonies do not exist, in French. Indeed, there has not been a decade since the 1920s without some such publication. None of them, however, appears to me to be wholly satisfactory. The glorification of the French ‘mission’ characterizing the earlier works nowjars; the more recent works are more balanced, but still, on the whole, too descriptive. This is particularly the case for the Histoire de la France coloniale, des origines à 1914. While the authors responsible for the period which interests us, Jean Meyer and Jean Tarrade, have produced distinguished works on the French overseas empire, their survey remains somewhat uncritical and, at least for the seventeenth century, very thin. As to the treatment of New France, it draws on a rather unreliable series of monographies.
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References
Notes
1 Boxer, Charles, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (London 1965)Google Scholar and The Portuguese Senbome Empire, 1415–1825 (London 1969)Google Scholar; Parry, J.H., The Spanish Seaborne Empire (London 1966).Google Scholar All are in the History of Human Society series, J.H. Plumb ed. A parallel volume on the French seaborne empire was planned in the same series, curiously assigned to Leo Gershoy; it never saw the light of day.
2 Diffie, Bailey W. & Winius, George D., Foundation ofthe Portuguese Empire, 1415–1580 [Europe and the World in the Age of Expansion, Shafer, Boyd C., ed., I] (Minneapolis 1974).Google Scholar
3 Meyer, Jeanet al, Hisloire de In France coloniale, des origines a 1914 (Paris 1991).Google Scholar
4 Pluchon, Pierre, Hisloire de la coknisation francaise I, Le premier empire colonial, des origines a la Restauration (Paris 1991).Google Scholar
5 See his highly-contested Toussaint Louverture: un révolulionnaire noir d'ancien regime (Paris 1989).Google Scholar His earlier, Negres etjuifs au 18e siecle: le racisme au siecle des Lumieres (Paris 1984) accurately presents an unusual case of black slaves seeking their freedom from a Jewish master; unfortunately, it can also be read as excusing antisemitism on the basis of the anti-black views expressed by one Jew and his lawyersGoogle Scholar.
6 Davies, K.G., The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century (Minneapolis 1974),Google Scholar in the Minnesota series already cited, note 2. See also Meinig, D.W., The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History I, Alltmtic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven and London 1986), which takes a global view of the European experience in North America, whether English, French or SpanishGoogle Scholar.
7 Philippe, Haudrere, La Compagniefrancaise des Indesau XVIIIe siecle, 1719–1795 (Paris 1989).Google Scholar
8 The group's title is the Programme de recherche en demographie historique (PRDH); its Registre de la population du Quebec anden is operational to 1765, though parish registers (birth, marriage, burials) can be consulted beyond that date, to 1799.
9 Dechene, Louise, LePartage des subsistancesau Canada sous le régime français (Montreal 1994).Google Scholar
10 Here again, Louise Dechêne is one of the authors who gave the initial push for this approach, in her pace-setting work, Habitants el marchands de Montréal au XVIIe siécle (Paris and Montreal 1974), finally available in English translation (Montreal 1992). The papers at a recent colloquium, ‘Vingt ans apres Habitants et marchands de Montreal: la recherche sur les XVIIe et XVIIIe siécles canadiens’, Montreal, Centre canadien d'architecture, 13–14 May 1994, made this point vigorously; publication forthcoming.Google Scholar
11 Notarial and other colonial papers were ordered deposited in double in France by an edict of 1776, but the Saint-Domingue collection is much richer, starting in 1685. For a brief description, see France, Archives Nationales, Guide des sources de ITiistoire de I'Amirique laiine et des Antilles dans les archives francaises, dir. Marie-Antoinette Menier (Paris 1984) 282–301; p. 299 for the notarial archives.Google Scholar
12 For example, Perotin-Dumon, Anne, Eire palriote sous les tropiques (Basse-Terre 1985),Google Scholar though much of the documentation is drawn from the Archives Nationales; Wanquet, Claude, Histoire d'une revolution: La Reunion, 1789–1803 (3 vols.; Marseille 1980)Google Scholar.
13 See his summary of this type of research in Les Esclaves aux Antillesfrancaises (Basse-Terre and Fort-de-France 1974).Google Scholar See in particular ch. I (‘Les sources’) where the location of various plantation papers is found. See also Menier's, Guide des sources, cited above, 610–613Google Scholar.
14 Meyer, Jean, L'Armement nantais dans la deuxieme moilie du XVIIIe siécle (Paris 1969).Google Scholar
15 Stein, Robert Louis, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old-Regime Business (Madison 1979).Google Scholar
16 At least in France. A model might be the work of Price, Jacob, Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade: The Viewfrom the Chesapeake, 1700–1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17 See his Dugard of Rouen: French Trade to Canada and the West Indies, 1729–1770 (Montreal 1978).Google Scholar
18 A model might be Riley, James C., International Government Finance and the Amsterdam Capital Market, 1740–1815 (Cambridge 1980), though evidence of investments in private ventures abroad are probably more difficult to locate than that of loans to foreign governments.CrossRefGoogle Scholar