Description
Book SynopsisThis original narrative demonstrates that the transition to sugar and the plantation complex was more gradual in the French properties than generally depicted-and that it was not inevitable.
Trade ReviewA serious, richly detailed scholarly study that has an important place in the historiography of slavery. -- Bernard Moitt World Sugar History Newsletter 2008 An important addition to the literature on Caribbean history and colonial societies in the 17th century. Choice 2008 Boucher writes with full sensitivity to the complex religious politics of France and Europe... fine book. -- J. R. McNeill Journal of American History France and the American Tropics to 1700 draws on its author's lifelong study of France in America. It offers an authoritative and readable account of the period which is sure to become recognised as the standard work on the subject in English. It is a very valuable contribution to the historiography of the Caribbean. -- Peter Hulme Society for Carribean Historical Review 2008 This book is a rich-indeed invaluable-resource, one which will hopefully spur on a new generation of historians to wander back into this fascinating and startling period of encounter, devastation, change, and creation. -- Laurent Dubois H-France 2009 A number of strengths are evident in this book. Boucher is at his best narrating the Caribs in their glory and gradual demise and the political history of French colonization... forms a fundamental and reliable entry to the political establishment of French colonization in the Antilles and Guiana. -- Sue Peabody Slavery and Abolition 2009 A new synthesis of the history of the French circum-Caribbean before 1700. -- Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall American Historical Review 2009 It will be of great help to anyone seeking to work on the French circum-Caribbean in the Old regime, as well as the scholars of the Atlantic World in general. -- Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall American Historical Review Boucher's volume provides an important counter-weight to the Canada-focused surveys... Much more so than the English or Spanish Atlantic, studies of different areas of French Atlantic provide staggeringly different impressions of the role of family life, the nature of immigration, and the importance of the state in French colonial life. It is good to finally have a report on this quarter. May this volume pave the way for much future work on the seventeenth-century Caribbean. -- Robert Taber Itinerario: European Journal of Overseas History 2009 The overarching thesis... is pervasive. -- Keith McLay French History 2009 An informed starting point for scholars of all stripes. -- James E. McClellan III Journal of World History 2010
Table of ContentsPreface
List of French Colonial and Commercial Companies Discussed
Introduction
1. At the Dawn of French Colonization: The Greater Caribbean
2. French Challenges to Iberian Hegemony in America up to 1625
3. Frontiers of Fortune? The Painful Era of Settlement, 1620s to 1640s
4. Frontiers of Fortune? The Era of the Proprietors, 1649 to 1664
5. Frontier-Era Free Society: The 1620s to the 1660s
6. Frontier-Era Society: The World of Coerced Labor
7. The Transformation from Settlements to Colonies Begins: The 1660s to the 1670s
8. The Sun King Asserts Control: The 1680s to the 1690s
9. Island Society from the 1660s to the 1690s: The Habitants
10. Island Society from the 1660s to the 1690s: The World of Coerced Labor
Conclusion
Notes
Index
