Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire

Abstract

Archives nationales d'outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France (hereafter ANOM), Sénégal et Côtes d'Afrique, Sous-série C 6 (hereafter C 6) 15, memo 56. the crown's grip on colonial possessions in the Caribbean and on the North American continent, political economists, policy makers, stakeholders of colonial commerce, administrators, and local entrepreneurs on the ground participated in a wider struggle to reorganise and enhance French colonial commerce. Attention to their myriad efforts to shape the recalibration of empire during the last decades of the Ancien Régime allows us to contextualise the articulation of a republican imperial policy during the French Revolution in ways that get beyond the stale generalizations integral to the division between pre-and post-revolutionary France. It also allows us to broaden our understanding of the dynamics that drove colonial reform. At the radical end of the Ancien Régime reformist spectrum were a group of political economists, known as the Economistes or the Physiocrates. From 4 De Mesnager to Choiseul, undated, Gorée. ANOM C 6 15, memo 24.