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Book Review
Comparative/World
| Kenneth J. Banks. Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2002. Pp. xvi, 319. $65.00.
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| The history of French colonies in the Americas, especially that of the era prior to 1763, is terra incognita to most scholars. True, some progress has been made in the last two decades, in part because of the growing interest in the Haitian Revolution. Scholars interested in comparative colonialism will find that Kenneth J. Banks's work complements historiographical trends in British North American and Latin American studies. Students of the French colonies in the Americas will thank him for his honest and unprecedented effort to examine France's relations with the settlements at Quebec, New Orleans, and Saint Pierre, Martinique, the commercial capital of the French Windward Islands. |
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The central thrust of the book is that although Louis XIV was able to impose on paper "a genuinely absolutist power structure in the French Americas" (p. 22), he and his successors faced difficulties that inhibited their authority. The bureaucracy at Versailles and the hierarchy of the sword and robe establishments in the colonies looked impressive. Louis XIV and especially Jean-Baptiste Colbert demanded that officials produce an ever-increasing volume of information by which the center could govern far-flung and diverse colonial peripheries. Banks gives the impression that the process occurred more quickly than in fact it did. |
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Chapters two and thereafter are the meat of the book. They trace the patterns of communication from Paris to the Atlantic ports and from there to various colonial destinations and then trace flows of information within and between the colonies. Chapter two, for example, discusses how the news of the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 reached the Atlantic settlements. Information reached Martinique very quickly, whereas remote Louisiana did not hear of the peace until early 1714. The king's ship to Quebec never arrived. A subsequent chapter describes the different celebrations that the birth of the dauphin in 1729 occasioned in the colonial capitals, from quite impressive ones at fortress Quebec to none in crisis-ridden New Orleans. |
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Banks details the warp and woof of weaving together an early modern "empire." Accounts of the average times it took to get letters from Paris to the great naval arsenal of Rochefort and from there to the various colonies consume many pages. Dispatches to and from the Caribbean could be completed in six to eight months, but they took far longer elsewhere, leading Banks to conclude that "The state could be only as strong as its recent dispatches" (p. 64). |
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In chapter three, Banks emulates Ian Steele in undermining the notion that oceans provided serious barriers to royal or private mercantile communications with the colonies. Royal orders were far less effective in difficult-to-approach riverine continental North American capitals than in islands easily reached by sailing ships. Banks describes the usual routes taken to the Caribbean, Louisiana, and New France and explains the hazards encountered in each. Table 3.1 gives the sailing times for a variety of eighteenth-century expeditions to these destinations. Despite many such tables stocked with useful if potentially tedious information, Banks's imaginative and anecdotal style carries the reader along. |
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