Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713-1763

by Kenneth J. Banks

Drawing on a vast array of official correspondence, merchant's letters, ship's logs, and graphic material, Kenneth Banks presents evidence on how France seemed destined to take a leading role in exploiting and settling the Americas and establishing posts in West Africa and why it failed to do so.

Genres: France

344 pages, Paperback

First published November 21, 2002

Reviews

[John]

Banks is a student of Pritchard I think, so this book can be read in conjunction with "In Search of Empire." Banks is answering the question - why was there no real coherent empire for the French in the early 18th century? He says communication problems. It was very hard to transfer the kind of top-down but also reciprocal absolutist experimentation (see William Beik) that was going on in France to the colonies, which were quite a distance away. And even if you tried to transfer these practices/ideals, it was so easy for everything to get muddled. All the colonies were different, for one thing. Quebec is not a lot like St. Domingue or Louisiana. The same message hits different people/places differently. And there are so many compexities - the local population of farmers/laborers/slaves is tough to effectively control. Merchant networks operating out of the Americas are very hard to control. Local colonial elites are not united. People aren't always looking to France for information, especially when it arrives from neighboring colonial sources a lot faster. In other words, it was very difficult to get people to toe the party line or even understand exactly what the party line was, or even decide on a party line that made sense for such a divergent set of colonies. All the more justification for France to say the hell with it, we are prioritizing domestic, continental things.

[Poppy]

In Chasing Empire, Kenneth Banks investigates the French Atlantic, and its subsequent downfall, through the role of communications. Employs a comparative analysis of early modern French imperialism, using a settlement colony (Canada), tropical sugar colony (Windward Islands) and a hybrid of both (Louisiana). Argues that despite France’s early and strong footholds in the Western Atlantic world, it ultimately was unable to hold onto these settlements because of a breakdown, (at least in part) of communications and the problems surrounding the exchange of information from the metropole to the colonies. Unfortunately, such claims fall short when you omit the biggest French colony…

[Eric Pecile]

Very original administrative history of French Atlantic Empire. Banks successfully challenges postmodern notions of panoptic empire in the French colonial context.