Between 1400 and 1800, the people of Europe, Africa, and the Americas grew more connected by overseas trade and colonization. According to historians Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth, accounts of this transformative era have been dominated by Iberian and British experiences, overlooking the reach of the pre-Napoleonic French Empire. Yet by the mid-18th century, France claimed nearly a third of North America, ruled over the Caribbean's most profitable and brutal plantations, and controlled a substantial proportion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Hodson and Rushforth examine the influential role that France played in the history of the Atlantic world and the ways it shaped France in return. They offer an interpretation of French colonialism that recovers the complexity of a misunderstood empire—influenced as much by Native Americans and West Africans as by kings and bureaucrats—to reveal its significance to the interconnected Atlantic basin and the early modern world.
Hodson and Rushforth’s book, Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions (Oxford University Press), is available for purchase.
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