Mélanie Lamotte’s innovative and dynamic new volume charts several new directions for the study of France’s overseas colonies. In straddling the genres of synthesis and research monograph, the author presents much new research on early French settlements in Madagascar, Ile Bourbon (modern-day Réunion), and trading ventures in India, and urges scholars to adopt a “transoceanic” and “pan-imperial” (10) perspective as a corrective to the conventional focus on the better-known French colonial endeavors in North America and the Caribbean. Over a span of time extending roughly from the 1650s to 1750, through a dialogue between Atlantic and Indian Ocean French colonial sites, it provides compelling evidence for the critical importance of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries for the formulation of a set of critical policies on race, marriage, and assimilation by the French state. In this way, it offers a critique of a historiography that has invested heavily in the idea that the period after the Seven Years’ War marked a sharp policy transformation in the management of France’s overseas societies. On this score alone, Lamotte’s work deserves praise for its questioning of the long-standing scholarly caesura between “first” and “second” French empires, marked by the military defeat and losses of 1763.

However, a work of such temporal breadth and geographic scope, encompassing French societies in New France, Lower Louisiana, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Gorée and Senegal in West Africa, as well as Anosy (Madagascar), Ile Bourbon, Ile de France (Mauritius), and several outposts in French India, faces a number of serious methodological challenges that are compounded by the author’s decision to adopt a “bird’s-eye view” (10) blending synthetic and monographic approaches. Is the intention to write a comparative history of French colonialism in these various societies, or to elucidate a series of connections, either between these colonies, and/or with the French metropole? And why choose these particular colonies and not others? Indeed, the decision to omit Saint-Domingue, France’s wealthiest plantation colony, on the grounds that it was “less representative of wider French Caribbean processes because it shared a border with a Spanish colony” (11) seems specious at best when it confronted the same challenges of intermarriage, racialized labor, and the intersection of metropolitan law and local practice.

Rather than pursuing comparisons informed by granular analysis between all or some of these colonial societies, the author adopts the method of rapid shifts in geographic and thematic focus. Chapter 1 builds upon Saliha Belmessous’s excellent earlier study of France’s assimilation policies, exploring the promotion of intermarriage with indigenous peoples as a way of achieving French ambitions in New France and Madagascar. While there is much to be learned from such a comparison, New France largely disappears from the scene after Chapter 1, despite the stated assertion that New France “influenced wider pan-imperial strategies” (10), a contention with which the book does not consistently engage. Surprisingly, it also does not figure in the otherwise excellent treatment the author offers in Chapter 6 on systems of racialized labor. Puzzled readers might ask the question, however, did not economic extraction in New France also depend upon racialized labor of indigenous people, both free and enslaved, following the excellent work of Brett Rushforth on indigenous slavery, and did not generations of peasant farmers, along with their wives, sons, and daughters, also toil in the service of France’s North American empire? If the focus is on plantation regimes and racialized labor, why include New France, if only at the opening, but omit Saint-Domingue?

By Flesh and Toil advances the following two key arguments: first that “transoceanic exchanges and legal standardization” produced greater unity among French colonial outposts by 1730, and that interracial sex and labor played a critical role in the making of the early French empire. The second of these arguments is relatively uncontroversial, as historians of both the British and Iberian colonial worlds have long accepted the role played by racial hybridity and the work of subaltern peoples in the making of empires. Over the past three decades, Frédéric Régent, Dominique Rogers, Stewart King, Jessica Pierre-Louis, Jennifer Spear, and Cécile Vidal, to name but a few, writing in both English and French, have explored Louisiana, Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique, and laid the conceptual and evidential foundations for the author’s conclusions. However, the central methodological difficulty of this book lies in the first contention, evidence for which is mainly presented in Chapter 4. Lamotte relies heavily on the 1723 Letters Patent for the Mascarenes and the 1724 Louisiana Code as demonstrating the emergence of a “coherent body of racial policies … across the French Atlantic and Indian Ocean,” (133) asserting a “transoceanic standardization” and pan-imperial circulation of legal knowledge. Further proof of this legal coherence is provided in the Appendix, offering the reader a collection of “Policies Targeting People of Non-European Ancestry, 1603–1758” (236–46). The author’s guiding assumption, despite a nod to “legal pluralism,” is that all of these policies, formulated in Versailles, were, with minor modifications dictated by local circumstances, applied and enforced across the empire as stated. Such causal emphasis and prominence assigned to state-made law has fallen out of favor among legal historians of both early modern Europe and the colonial world. Indeed, Tamar Herzog has recently characterized this formalistic approach, which views state-generated legislation as a unifying mechanism, as “anachronistic.”Footnote ¹ The author’s approach also flies in the face of two decades of research on the practice of early modern French law. As summarized by Michael Breen, this “new legal history” emphatically decenters royal and codified law in favor of a host of local equity-based jurisprudences, generated by the litigations of ordinary men and women.Footnote ² Why then would scholars assume that law in France’s colonies would exhibit greater coherence and adherence to statutes than in the metropole? If the author thinks this is so, despite the findings of other scholars, it would be very interesting to know why and to see the evidence to support this claim.

Despite its major contention, law is the missing dimension from By Flesh and Toil. Indeed, there is no coherent account of how policies on race, marriage, and enslaved labor were formulated by bureaucrats at Versailles, nor whether these flowed from some overarching ministerial vision of imperial coherence or were ad hoc responses to local needs. Lamotte’s reliance on travel accounts means that neither has she engaged in any systematic engagement with local jurisprudence, nor has she offered a sustained analysis of the correspondence of colonial administrators, whose understandings gave meaning to royal decrees. Despite these methodological difficulties, By Flesh and Toil raises important questions for previous scholarly assumptions about the periodization of French imperial policies, and offers a compelling alternative to a prevailing overemphasis on the North Atlantic as the centerpiece of the French colonial world.