Kourou And The Struggle For A French America

Kourou was to be a wonderful revenge, a French colony in America after the Seven Years War in 1763. However, the fantastic ideal became a grand failure and political disaster, marking the end of the French attempts for an American colony.

This book explores French imperialism in Latin America in the nineteenth century, taking Mexico as a case study. The standard narrative of nineteenth-century imperialism in Latin America is one of US expansion and British informal influence. However, it was France, not Britain, which made the most concerted effort to counter US power through Louis-Napoléon’s military intervention in Mexico, begun in 1862, which created an empire on the North American continent under the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian. Despite its significance to French and Latin American history, this French imperial project is invariably described as an “illusion”, an “adventure” or a “mirage”. This book challenges these conclusions and places the French intervention in Mexico within the context of informal empire. It analyses French and Mexican ideas about monarchy in Latin America; responses to US expansion and the development of anti-Americanism and pan-Latinism; the consolidation of Mexican conservatism; and, finally, the collaboration of some Mexican elites with French imperialism. An important dimension of the relationship between Mexico and France, explored in the book, is the transatlantic and transnational context in which it developed, where competing conceptions of Mexico and France as nations, the role of Europe and the United States in the Americas and the idea of Latin America itself were challenged and debated.

In the wake of the Seven Years' War and the consolidation of British power on the subcontinent, the French monarchy chartered a new East India Company. The Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes was an attempt to maintain French diplomatic and financial credit among European rivals and trading partners within a region integral to the broader imperial economy. Reimagining French power as subsisting through an informal empire of trade, instead of a territorial empire of conquest, officials and intellectuals sought to remake the trading company as a private, "purely commercial" actor, rather than a sovereign company-state. Company Politics offers a new interpretation of political economy, imperialism, and the history of the corporation during the late Old Regime and the French Revolution. Despite its reputation for speculation, corruption, and scandal, Elizabeth Cross argues that the "New Company" emerged from the unique circumstances France faced in India as a weakened imperial power vis à vis the expanding British East India Company. Seeking to control the Company for their own purposes, French government officials, theorists, and private financial actors clashed over differing notions of political economy, debt, and imperial power for Europe and the Indian Ocean world. In doing so, they envisioned new alignments between state and market, challenged the legitimacy of the Old Regime's economic and imperial policies, and sought to revolutionize the underlying corporation itself through progressive demands of corporate self-governance. Thus, the New Company should be seen as an innovative capitalist actor in its own right, not a mere derivative of its Anglo-Dutch competitors. A valuable contribution to scholarship on capitalism, empire, and globalization, Company Politics uses the Company's history to present the Revolutionary Era as one of dynamic economic ideologies, practices, and experimentation, rather than only one of crisis and decline.

In a lively account that spans continents, Jennifer J. Davis considers what it meant to be called a libertine in early modern France and its colonies. Libertinage was a polysemous term in early modern Europe and the Atlantic World, generally translated as "debauchery" or "licentiousness" in English. Davis assesses the changing fortunes of the quasi-criminal category of libertinage in the French Atlantic, based on hundreds of cases drawn from the police and judicial archives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and its Atlantic colonies alongside the literature inspired by those proceedings. The libertine life was not merely a subject for fiction nor a topos against which to play out potential revolutions. It was a charge authorities imposed on a startlingly wide array of behaviors, including gambling, selling alcohol to Native Americans, and secret marriages. Once invoked by family and state authorities, the charge proved nearly impossible for the accused to contest, for a libertine need not have committed any crimes to be perceived as disregarding authority and thereby threatening families and social institutions. The research in Bad Subjects provides a framework for analysis of libertinage as a set of anti-authoritarian practices and discourses that circulated among the peoples of France and the Atlantic World, ultimately providing a compelling blueprint for alternative social and economic order in the Revolutionary period.

A history and theory of settler colonialism and social control Many would rather change worlds than change the world. The settlement of communities in 'empty lands' somewhere else has often been proposed as a solution to growing contradictions. While the lands were never empty, sometimes these communities failed miserably, and sometimes they prospered and grew until they became entire countries. Building on a growing body of transnational and interdisciplinary research on the political imaginaries of settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination, this book uncovers and critiques an autonomous, influential, and coherent political tradition - a tradition still relevant today. It follows the ideas and the projects (and the failures) of those who left or planned to leave growing and chaotic cities and challenging and confusing new economic circumstances, those who wanted to protect endangered nationalities, and those who intended to pre-empt forthcoming revolutions of all sorts, including civil and social wars. They displaced, and moved to other islands and continents, beyond the settled regions, to rural districts and to secluded suburbs, to communes and intentional communities, and to cyberspace. This book outlines the global history of a resilient political idea: to seek change somewhere else as an alternative to embracing (or resisting) transformation where one is.

This study offers a radical reassessment of a crucial period of political and cultural history. By looking at some 400 songs, many of which are made available to hear, and at their writers, singers, and audiences, it questions both our relationship with song, and ordinary Britons' relationship with Napoleon, the war, and the idea of Britain itself.