LEARNING TO COLONIZE: STATE KNOWLEDGE, EXPERTISE, AND THE MAKING OF THE FIRST FRENCH EMPIRE, 1661-1715
Embargo until
2020-12-01
Date
2016-08-22
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
As recent scholarship has recognized, administrative knowledge-making was crucial to the formation of “modern” European states. This dissertation explores an important new domain of state knowledge in seventeenth-century France: overseas empire. When King Louis XIV began his personal reign in 1661, France lagged behind its European rivals as a maritime power, and control of its scattered fleets, ports, and colonies lay almost exclusively in private hands. Five decades later, Louis’s empire was the most powerful in Europe, and managed by royal officials according to well-defined protocols. Scholars have tended to cast the governance of France’s empire as an extension of “royal absolutism” to the New World. But in fact, there was no essentialized absolutism to be applied to the Americas in this period, only a rapidly shifting and contested set of practices. The records left behind by leading officials who served in Canada and the Caribbean reveal how administrators on the ground tailored a new suite of policies and procedures for the colonies through a collective process of learning. Their knowledge was rooted in firsthand experience of plantation management, overseas trade, urban planning, imperial rivalry, local jurisprudence, and indigenous diplomacy and warfare, all of which involved daily encounters with the unruly colonists, “barbaric savages,” and African slaves they sought to govern. By regulating and recording affairs for their superiors at court, they transformed the administration of colonies into a distinct realm of expertise, or “science,” controlled by the state. Ultimately, their experience encouraged the Old Regime monarchy to see the colonies as distinct from the metropole—alike in the fact of their difference and therefore comprising, in the eyes of royal officials, a common imperial project.
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Advisor: David A. Bell (History, Princeton University)
Michael Kwass (History, Johns Hopkins University)
Gabriel Paquette (History, Johns Hopkins University)
Bentley Allan (Political Science, Johns Hopkins University)
Chair: Mary Favret (English, Johns Hopkins University)
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Keywords
France, Old Regime, Empire, State Formation: Knowledge, Colonies, Early Modern, Europe, Political Culture, Expertise, Governance, Administration, Cross-Cultural Encounters