Banks defines and applies the concept of communications in a far broader context than previous historical studies of communication, encompassing a range of human activity from sailing routes, to mapping, to presses, to building roads and bridges. He employs a comparative analysis of early modern French imperialism, integrating three types of overseas possessions usually considered separately - the settlement colony (New France), the tropical monoculture colony (the French Windward Islands), and the early Enlightenment planned colony (Louisiana) - offering a work of synthesis that unites the historiographies and insights from three formerly separate historical literatures. Banks challenges the very notion that a concrete "empire" emerged by the first half of the eighteenth century; in fact, French colonies remained largely isolated arenas of action and development. Only with the contraction and concentration of overseas possessions after 1763 on the Plantation Complex did a more cohesive, if fleeting, French empire first emerge.

Drawing on a vast array of official correspondence, merchant's letters, ship's logs, and graphic material from archives and research libraries in Canada, France, and the United States, Kenneth Banks details how France, as the most powerful nation on the Continent and possessing a tradition of maritime interest in the Americas and West Africa dating back to the earliest years of the sixteenth century, seemed destined to take a leading role in exploiting and settling the Americas and establishing posts in West Africa. That it largely failed to do so can be explained in large part by problems emanating from information exchange in an early modern authoritarian state. Banks provides a historical context for the role of communications in the development of the imperial nation-state and offers an Atlantic World perspective on the growing body of literature revising the historical role of absolutism.

"This volume developed out of a 2010 conference on New Perspectives on Legal Pluralism organized by Lauren Benton and Richard Ross through the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History ... under the auspices of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago" -- Acknowledgments.

This is the story of a city that shouldn’t exist. In the seventeenth century, what is now America’s most beguiling metropolis was nothing more than a swamp: prone to flooding, infested with snakes, battered by hurricanes. But through the intense imperial rivalries of Spain, France, and England, and the ambitious, entrepreneurial merchants and settlers from four continents who risked their lives to succeed in colonial America, this unpromising site became a crossroads for the whole Atlantic world. Lawrence N. Powell, a decades-long resident and observer of New Orleans, gives us the full sweep of the city’s history from its founding through Louisiana statehood in 1812. We see the Crescent City evolve from a French village, to an African market town, to a Spanish fortress, and finally to an Anglo-American center of trade and commerce. We hear and feel the mix of peoples, religions, and languages from four continents that make the place electric—and always on the verge of unraveling. The Accidental City is the story of land-jobbing schemes, stock market crashes, and nonstop squabbles over status, power, and position, with enough rogues, smugglers, and self-fashioners to fill a picaresque novel. Powell’s tale underscores the fluidity and contingency of the past, revealing a place where people made their own history. This is a city, and a history, marked by challenges and perpetual shifts in shape and direction, like the sinuous river on which it is perched.

In 1682 the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle claimed the Mississippi River basin for France, naming the region Louisiana to honor his king, Louis XIV. Until the United States acquired the territory in the Louisiana Purchase more than a century later, there had never been a revolution, per se, in Louisiana. However, as Jennifer Tsien highlights in this groundbreaking work, revolutionary sentiment clearly surfaced in the literature and discourse both in the Louisiana colony and in France with dramatic and far-reaching consequences. In Rumors of Revolution, Tsien analyzes documented observations made in Paris and in New Orleans about the exercise of royal power over French subjects and colonial Louisiana stories that laid bare the arbitrary powers and abuses that the government could exert on its people against their will. Ultimately, Tsien establishes an implicit connection between histories of settler colonialism in the Americas and the fate of absolutism in Europe that has been largely overlooked in scholarship to date.

The role of proprietorships or ‘private’ colonies in imperial development has not received the attention it deserves, notwithstanding recent scholarly emphasis on ‘state-building’. The continued use of these ‘private’ devices, even as early modern European nation-states grew more potent, is not only interesting, but is indeed normative though invariably missing from modern studies of empire. This collection provides in-depth analyses of the workings of the proprietorships themselves (rather than proprietary colonies) and in studies ranging from South Carolina to Nieuw Nederland to French West Africa to Brasil, broadens this discussion beyond British North America. Contributors include: Mickaël Augeron, Kenneth Banks, Sarah Barber, Philip Boucher, Olivier Caporossi, Leslie Choquette, David Dewar, Jaap Jacobs, Maxine N. Lurie, Debra A. Meyers, L.H. Roper, James O’Neil Spady, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Cécile Vidal, and Laurent Vidal.

In this deeply researched and engagingly argued work, Jeffers Lennox reconfigures our general understanding of how Indigenous peoples, imperial forces, and settlers competed for space in northeastern North America before the British conquest in 1763.

Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of scientific networks – local and long-distance, informal and institutional, religious and secular – as one of the important phenomena of the early modern world. It seeks to answer questions about what role these networks played in making knowledge, how information traveled, how it was transformed by travel, and who the brokers of this world were. Bringing together an international group of historians of science and medicine, this book looks at the changing relationship between knowledge and community in the early modern period through case studies connecting Europe, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. It explores a landscape of understanding (and misunderstanding) nature through examinations of well-known intelligencers such as overseas missions, trading companies, and empires while incorporating more recent scholarship on the many less prominent go-betweens, such as translators and local experts, which made these networks of knowledge vibrant and truly global institutions. Empires of Knowledge is the perfect introduction to the global history of early modern science and medicine.

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.

From the beginnings of colonial settlement in Illinois Country, the region was characterized by self-determination and collaboration that did not always align with imperial plans. The French in Quebec established a somewhat reluctant alliance with the Illinois Indians while Jesuits and fur traders planted defiant outposts in the Illinois River Valley beyond the Great Lakes. These autonomous early settlements were brought into the French empire only after the fact. As the colony grew, the authority that governed the region was often uncertain: Canada and Louisiana alternately claimed control over the Illinois throughout the eighteenth century. Later, British and Spanish authorities tried to divide the region along the Mississippi River. Yet Illinois settlers and Native people continued to welcome and partner with European governments, even if that meant playing the competing empires against one another in order to pursue local interests. Empire by Collaboration explores the remarkable community and distinctive creole culture of colonial Illinois Country, characterized by compromise and flexibility rather than domination and resistance. Drawing on extensive archival research, Robert Michael Morrissey demonstrates how Natives, officials, traders, farmers, religious leaders, and slaves constantly negotiated local and imperial priorities and worked purposefully together to achieve their goals. Their pragmatic intercultural collaboration gave rise to new economies, new forms of social life, and new forms of political engagement. Empire by Collaboration shows that this rugged outpost on the fringe of empire bears central importance to the evolution of early America.