Voices in the Legal Archives in the French Colonial World
Voices in the Legal Archives in the French Colonial World: The King is Listening offers, through the contribution of 13 original chapters, a sustained analysis of judicial practices and litigation during the first era of French overseas expansion.
The overall goal of this volume is to elaborate a more sophisticated social history of colonialism by focusing largely on the eighteenth century, extending roughly from 1700 until the conclusion of the Age of Revolutions in the 1830s. By critically examining legal practices and litigation in the French colonial world, in both its Atlantic and Oceanic extensions, this volume of essays has sought to interrogate the naturalized equation between law and empire, a concept premised on the idea of law as a set of doctrines and codified procedures originating in the metropolis and then transmitted to the colonies. This book advances new approaches and methods in writing a history of the French empire, which view state authority as more unstable and contested. Voices in the Legal Archives proposes to remedy the under-theorized state of Frances first colonial empire, as opposed to its post-1830 imperial expressions, which have garnered far more scholarly attention.
This book will appeal to scholars of French history and the comparative history of European empires and colonialism.
Nancy Christie is Research Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. She has published widely in the fields of empire, gender, law and the state.
Michael Gauvreau is Professor of History at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. He researches in the intellectual, religious and social history of Canada and Quebec.
Matthew Gerber is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado, United States. He specializes in the history of early modern France and its colonies.
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Voices in the Legal Archives in the French Colonial World
The King is Listening
Edited by Nancy Christie, Michael Gauvreau, and Matthew Gerber
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Early-Modern-History/book-series/RREMH
Voices in the Legal Archives in the French Colonial World
The King is Listening
Edited by
Nancy Christie, Michael Gauvreau, and Matthew Gerber
First published 2021
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of Nancy Christie, Michael Gauvreau, and Matthew Gerber to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-50806-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-05136-7 (ebk)
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Contents
NANCY CHRISTIE, MICHAEL GAUVREAU AND MATTHEW GERBER
PART I
Reading Colonial Legal Records Against the Grain
MALICK W. GHACHEM
JENNIFER L. PALMER
PART II
Between Metropole and Periphery
MARIE HOULLEMARE
ARNAUD BESSIRE
EMILY RAP
PART III
Chains of Property and Obligation
MATTHEW GERBER
MEREDITH GAFFIELD
MICHAEL GAUVREAU AND NANCY CHRISTIE
PART IV
Circuits of Power and the Testimony of the Marginal
RIC WENZEL
DOMINIQUE DESLANDRES
SUE PEABODY
PART V
Divided Sovereignties, Legal Hybridities
HEATHER FREUND
NANCY CHRISTIE AND MICHAEL GAUVREAU
Guide
This book had its inception in 2017 with the planning of a conference entitled Voices in the Legal Archives in the French Colonial World, held in May 2018 in the splendid atmosphere of Manoir Hovey, North Hatley, Qubec, Canada. We are very grateful to the participants, whose energy and commitment helped make our gathering a success, and we wish to particularly thank Paul Cheney and Sophie White for their advice and encouragement. We also owe a great debt to those who offered their research and insights for this volume and who have thereby contributed so much to opening up new interpretations of law in the French empire. This project would never have been launched without the generous financial assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through its Connections Grants Program; the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; the McNeil Center for Early American Studies; the Wilson Institute for Canadian History, particularly its director, Professor Ian McKay; the Office of the President, McMaster University; Dr. Grace Pollock, Research Facilitator for the Faculty of Humanities, McMaster University; the Departments of History at both McMaster University and the University of Western Ontario. At Routledge, Max Novick, Senior Editor for European History, solicited the manuscript with great interest, while he and his editorial board enthusiastically approved its publication for the Routledge Research in Early Modern History Series. We thank everyone at the press for bringing the book to fruition. We also wish to extend our great appreciation to Jonathan Dewald, Megan Armstrong and Michael Breen for generously reading and commenting upon an earlier version of our introduction. Their expertise on early modern France helped enhance our thinking greatly, while their positive response to the revisionist path we were charting helped sustain our spirits during a lengthy process of developing a perspective that would at once integrate 13 fine chapters and at the same time highlight a number of new themes that would extend and complicate existing understandings of the nexus between law and state-building in the early modern French empire.
