Hints and Blueprints: Paperwork and Political Economy between Empires

How did economic ideas move between Europe’s Atlantic empires? We know that European officials carefully studied their imperial rivals, seeking to emulate their successes and avoid their failures. In the eighteenth-century, moreover, notions of empire and political economy, contained in printed pamphlets and treatises, increasingly migrated across political and linguistic boundaries, taking on new meanings as they were translated for new audiences.

This paper examines a different medium of emulation: purloined documents. I focus on the case of Intendant Antoine-Denis Raudot’s “Project to Establish a Colony on Cape Breton Island” (1706). Raudot’s ideas convinced his superiors to adopt the “Louisbourg strategy” as the basis of France’s Atlantic empire. But his proposal also circulated far more widely than most administrative records of its kind. In 1744 the memorandum resurfaced virtually unabridged in a Jesuit history of New France. From there the document found an avid readership in Boston and London, where pamphleteers touted it as proof that Britain must seize Cape Breton if it wished to secure its American colonies against French designs. After the conquest of Louisbourg in 1758, British officials still invoked Raudot’s proposal as the most compelling argument for retaining “this important spot of earth” and reprinted it word-for-word as a blueprint for remodeling their own empire.

The circulation of Raudot’s memorandum offers a rare glimpse into the ways in which state paperwork, once publicized, could become a powerful tool of emulation both across time and between empires. My paper explains how the enduring and widespread appeal of his plan depended upon not only a confluence of heightened geopolitical anxieties with new attitudes about commercial expansion and the role of government in promoting it, but also the burgeoning rhetorical cachet of state secrets made public.