‘La clef de commerce’—The changing role of Africa in France's Atlantic empire ca. 1760–1797

Røge, Pernille

doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2008.08.003

Cited by 13 publications

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References 2 publications

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“…Long a source of food and slaves for the colony, government officials both in Port Louis and Paris were anxious to have a detailed chronicle of its natural resources for future exploitation. 60 But while Poivre hoped to harness Madagascar's documented wealth for the benefit of the Isle de France, the military adventurer and colonial administrator Louis Laurent Fayd'herbe de Maudave was lobbying his Parisian patrons for support to establish a permanent colony there, which might compete with the Isle de France rather than serve as a field of exploitation. Despite Commerson's report that Madagascar's environment was too hostile for permanent European habitation, both Maudave and the adventurer Maurice Benyowsky gained ministerial support for their colonizing efforts.…”

Section: Between the Management And Governance Of Knowledge Accumulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Le centre de toutes choses’: Constructing and managing centralization on the Isle de France

Roberts

2014

Hist Sci

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In their recent book The colonial machine, James McClellan III and François Regourd detail how ancien regime France's government marshalled science in the service of colonial expansion. By focusing on the local and long distance struggles to make the Isle de France (present day Mauritius) a globally significant centre during the long eighteenth century, this essay suggests an alternative to McClellan and Regourd's geography of metropolitan centre and colonial periphery, as well as their claim that the investigation of nature was tied to colonial expansion by state centralization. Rather than view centralization as a double process whereby a metropolitan state is able to dominate increasingly peripheral territory by concentrating power and the means of its production and management under state authority, this essay argues that centralization occurred in numerous places and involved the organization, pursuit and management of various sorts of accumulation, with geographically extensive consequences. The goal is to present centralization as historically open and multi-centred, inviting examination of both its local dynamics and long-distance entanglements from various perspectives, which in turn reveals the multi-centred dynamics of empire building and governance, including the organization and pursuit of natural inquiry.

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Section: Between the Management And Governance Of Knowledge Accumulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Le centre de toutes choses’: Constructing and managing centralization on the Isle de France

Roberts

2014

Hist Sci

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The Dynamics of History in Africa and the Atlantic ‘Age of Revolutions’

Miller¹

2010

The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840

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Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire

Røge

2019

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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.

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‘La clef de commerce’—The changing role of Africa in France's Atlantic empire ca. 1760–1797

Cited by 13 publications

References 2 publications

‘Le centre de toutes choses’: Constructing and managing centralization on the Isle de France

‘Le centre de toutes choses’: Constructing and managing centralization on the Isle de France

The Dynamics of History in Africa and the Atlantic ‘Age of Revolutions’

Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire

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