French Colonialism: From the Ancien Regime to the Present

After Britain, France had the second-largest empire in the world, with a diverse history of colonial regimes and a "civilizing mission" under the Third Republic. Despite two world wars and two anticolonial wars, traces of the French empire remain in the former colonies and the French Republic.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 250 pages
Publication date: 06 July 2023
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

After Britain, France had the second-largest empire in the world, but it had very different origins and goals. The French empire explained itself in a variety of ways over more than four centuries through a variety of colonial administrations. A huge mercantile empire based on furs and fish in the New World and sugar grown by enslaved people in the Caribbean began to grow and collapse at the beginning of the early modern era.

The French appeared to have an empire merely as a characteristic of a Great Power at various times after that, typically in rivalry with Britain. Even to the settler colony of Algeria, relatively few French people ever traveled to the empire. The French saw a "civilizing mission" under the Third Republic that combined selectively applied democratic and colonial capitalism principles. As it had previously existed, French imperial power was broken by two world wars and two anticolonial wars, yet innumerable remnants of the French empire persisted in the former colonies and the present-day French Republic. This narrative history describes the distinctive course of the French empire, asking how it made sense to the people who governed it, lived under it, and fought against it.

ISBN-13: 9781108799157