Reviews
A serious, richly detailed scholarly study that has an important place in the historiography of slavery.
An important addition to the literature on Caribbean history and colonial societies in the 17th century.
Boucher writes with full sensitivity to the complex religious politics of France and Europe... fine book.
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.
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.
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.
A new synthesis of the history of the French circum-Caribbean before 1700.
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.
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.
The overarching thesis... is pervasive.
An informed starting point for scholars of all stripes.
Boucher presents a judicious mix of political narrative history and an economic, social, and cultural analysis of the Caribbean social and racial groups—Europeans, Caribs (the original inhabitants), and the African slaves. The book is an important contribution to the history of the Caribbean and to the growing field of comparative Atlantic Empires.
Book Details
Preface
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
Preface
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