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An examination of France’s Atlantic and Indian Ocean empires through the stories of the little-known people who built it This book is a groundbreaking evaluation of the interwoven trajectories of the people, such as itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistrates, who built France’s first empire between 1680 and 1780 in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. These imperial subjects sought political and legal influence via law courts, with strategies that reflected local and regional priorities, particularly regarding slavery, war, and trade. Through court records and legal documents, Wood reveals how courts became liaisons between France and new colonial possessions.
An examination of France's Atlantic and Indian Ocean empires through the stories of the little-known people who built it This book is a groundbreaking evaluation of the interwoven trajectories of the people, such as itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistrates, who built France's first empire between 1680 and 1780 in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. These imperial subjects sought political and legal influence via law courts, with strategies that reflected local and regional priorities, particularly regarding slavery, war, and trade. Through court records and legal documents, Wood reveals how courts became liaisons between France and new colonial possessions.
Histories of French Sexuality contends that the history of sexuality is at a crossroads. Decades of scholarship have shown that sexuality is implicated in a wide range of topics, such as studies of reproduction, the body, sexual knowledge, gender identity, marriage, and sexual citizenship. These studies have broadened historical narratives and interpretations of areas such as urbanization, the family, work, class, empire, the military and war, and the nation. Yet while the field has evolved, not everyone has caught on, especially scholars of French history. Covering the early eighteenth century through the present, the essays in Histories of French Sexuality show how attention to the history...
The primary aim of Listening to the Caribbean: Sounds of Slavery, Revolt, and Race is quite ambitious: to open up the Caribbean to a “sound studies” approach, and to thereby effect a shift in Caribbean studies away from the predominantly visual biases of most scholarly works and towards a fuller understanding of early Caribbean societies through listening in to the past. Paying close attention to auditory elements in written accounts of slavery and revolts allows us to unlock the sounds that are registered and recorded there, so that not only does one gain a more sensorially full understanding of the society, but also to a considerable extent, the voices and subjectivities of the enslaved are brought out of the silence to which they have been largely consigned. Reading texts in this way, listening to the sounds of language, work, festivity, music, laughter, mourning, and warfare, for example, allows one to know better the lives of the enslaved people, and how, counter to the largely visual power of the planters, the people developed a highly sophisticated auditory culture that in large part ensured their survival and indeed their final victories over the institution of slavery.
If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Mederic Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Mery is bound to appear. As a lawyer, philosophe, and Enlightenment polymath, Moreau created and compiled an immense archive that remains a vital window into the social, political, and intellectual fault lines of the Age of Revolutions. But the gilded spines and elegant designs that decorate his archive obscure the truth: Moreau's achievements were predicated upon the work of enslaved people and free people of color. Their labor afforded him the leisure to research, think, and write. Their rich intellectual and linguistic cultures filled the pag...
Vols. for 1837-52 include the Companion to the Almanac, or Year-book of general information.
A compelling reexamination of how Britain used law to shape its empire For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on the peoples it conquered, and English common law usually followed the Union Jack. But the common law became less common after Britain emerged from the Seven Years' War (1754-63) as the world's most powerful empire. At that point, imperial policymakers adopted a strategy of legal pluralism: some colonies remained under English law, while others, including parts of India and former French territories in North America, retained much of their previous legal regimes. As legal historian Christian R. Burset argues, determining how much English law a colony received depended...