| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

James Pritchard. In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp. xxvii, 484. $75.00.
James Pritchard provides a much-needed synthetic history of the fifteen colonies comprising France's first overseas empire in the most critical decades of their formation. It addresses demographic, social, economic, political, and military developments and contributes explicitly and implicitly to historiographical debates over the nature of French empire and the structure of French colonial societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.	1
Pritchard makes a strong and largely convincing critique of the nationalist tradition in French colonial historiography. While France's first overseas empire has had relatively few historians, they have tended to assume that "colonial and maritime themes occupy a prominent place in French national history and in defining French national interests" (p. 420). In contrast, Pritchard argues that French foreign policy remained largely continentalist throughout the period and that colonial goals, when pursued at all, originated in a policy of prestige—la gloire—rather than a coherent imperial program. Ironically, he concludes that between 1670 and 1730 France scarcely possessed an empire at all: "What came to be called the first French or Bourbon empire proved to be little more than the remnants of dreams, the fragmentary pieces of statesmen's ambitions, and the lonely pleas of colonial authorities for succor against their foreign and domestic enemies" (p. 263).	2
For Pritchard, a corollary of this failure of empire is that "settlers and slaves rather than the metropolitan or even colonial governments largely made their own societies" (p. xxi). This assertion is contentious, as there has been vigorous debate over the respective roles of frontier and metropolis in shaping European colonial societies. Pritchard clearly aligns himself with the frontier historians, but he never directly acknowledges the opposing school of thought, which would have been helpful in a work of this nature.	. . .

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