Reviewed by Guillaume Aubert | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1

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Reviewed by Guillaume Aubert | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763. By Kenneth J. Banks. (Montreal and Kingston, Can.: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002. Pp. xxii, 322. $65.00.)

Reviewed by Guillaume Aubert , Williams College

All too often, studies of the "Atlantic world" fail to venture beyond British or Iberian lands and waters. Although the reviews and articles published in this journal testify to a growing interest in the French Atlantic colonies, comparative works integrating French North American and Caribbean possessions are hard to come by. This relative disaffection for the French Atlantic may be explained by the ultimate failure of eighteenth-century French imperialism. Indeed, the striking inability of the most powerful nation in Continental Europe "to take a leading role in exploiting and settling the New World" (p. xi) has eluded satisfying explanations. In these respects and others, Kenneth Banks's analysis of the nature and role of communications in the French Atlantic is a very welcome addition to the historiography.

Drawing on a wide array of primary material located in Paris, Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle, and other archival repositories in France, Canada, and the United States, Banks offers an ambitious study of the importance of information exchange in shaping French imperial authority in eighteenth-century Quebec, New Orleans, and Saint Pierre on Martinique. Relying on a concept of communications that emphasizes "the dynamic and even volatile nature of mixing ideas, customs and emotions among people and groups in specific places and times" (p. 11), Banks details how the intricate workings of French Atlantic communications created a cultural rift between metropolitan and colonial leaders that the French absolutist state proved unable to prevent. In all three colonial capitals, he argues, "the challenges posed by transatlantic communications impinged on, modified, and increasingly undermined the French state's control" (p. 13). While French Atlantic colonies never ceased to rely on France for "funding, protection, and cultural cues" (p. 42), an introductory chapter convincingly shows that, following the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in1713, colonial subordination to metropolitan France began to erode as the colonial leadership of Canada, Louisiana, and the Windward Islands increasingly asserted their own economic and political agendas. This argument is developed in six topical chapters exploring the transmission of news across the Atlantic, land and sea transportation routes, the use of state ceremonies in colonial contexts, the role of communications in articulating metropolitan and colonial visions of social order, the crucial role of merchants in shaping transatlantic communications, and the impact of patronage on information exchange.

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