Section 1: Empire of Two Oceans
This section will feature a description of the book’s contents and core arguments (up to 400 words), along with a picture of the cover. Empire of Two Oceans is the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language. It shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. It also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India.
The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Empire of Two Oceans shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, my book also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits.
Archivally rich and rigorously documented, Empire of Two Oceans recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building– and illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world.
Section 2: Ship Journeys Across the Eighteenth-Century French Empire
This section will feature a screenshot of one of the digital projects that support my book, along with a description of the takeaways that can be gleaned from it (up to 400 words). Titled “Ship Journeys Across the Eighteenth-Century French Empire,” this project is an interactive map using arrows to reveal hundreds of large-scale maritime voyages that were performed between 1713 and the Seven Years’ War, between the different French positions across the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. Specifically, this map provides the first-ever visualization of communications between the French Atlantic and Indian Ocean colonies, and between those positions and the metropole in the early modern period. It displays a total of 946 voyages conducted by 311 vessels that transported official papers, 1,790 French administrators, 260,695 free personnel, employees, settlers, military men, and French and South Asian indentured servants, as well as hundreds of enslaved people. This digital project demonstrates the necessity of often using a wide perspective when considering the history of the early modern French colonies and outposts.