Changing Strategies in an Era of Imperial Crisis: The French Tropics and the Seven Years’ War

“Changing Strategies in an Era of Imperial Crisis” hones in on the strategies of French law court participants to account for the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763) as an era of significant imperial and sociolegal change. Though historians have amply examined the military and geopolitical ramifications of this conflict, far less scholarship has attempted to explain its sociolegal dimensions. This paper surveys British occupations of French territories—and by extension legal institutions—during the Seven Years’ War, a drawn-out conflict whose outcome of French territorial losses on the North American and Asian continents precipitated a shift in French imperial strategy to concentrate on its tropical island possessions, the Mascarenes in the Indian Ocean and Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Atlantic. The Atlantic colonies both experienced sustained episodes of British occupation (including the imposition of British law and substitution of British legal institutions), while the Indian Ocean colonies saw a surge in the arrival of personnel from the now-former colony of Canada.

This paper assesses three areas of transformation. First, though historians such as Christopher Hodson have explored post-1763 designs for new colonies, little scrutiny has addressed these zones of occupation and especially the reactions of court participants under occupation. Second, the cross-pollination of sociolegal traditions from within France’s overseas empire (as with Canada) and without (as with British occupation) thus offers a unique site in which to examine the scale and extent of legal blending, or pluralism, as described more generally by scholars such as Lauren Benton. Finally, a holistic assessment of legal practices during this period exposes changing sociolegal strategies by colonial residents, such as forum-shopping (per Sharafi) and family specialization (per Trivellato), over time.