French Colonialism: From the Ancien Rgime to the Present Smith Leonard V.
French Colonialism: From the Ancien Rgime to the Present Smith Leonard V. France had the second largest empire in the world after Britain, but one with very different origins and purposes. Beginning…
Specifikacia French Colonialism: From the Ancien Rgime to the Present Smith Leonard V.
French Colonialism: From the Ancien Rgime to the Present Smith Leonard V.
France had the second largest empire in the world after Britain, but one with very different origins and purposes. Beginning in the early modern period, a vast mercantile empire based on furs and fish in the New World and sugar cultivated by the enslaved in the Caribbean rose and fell. Over more than four centuries, the French empire explained itself in many different ways through many different colonial regimes.
Relatively few French people ever moved to the empire, even to the settler colony of Algeria. At intervals thereafter, the French seemed to have an empire simply as an attribute of a Great Power, generally in competition with Britain. Under the Third Republic, the French construed a "civilizing mission" melding selectively applied principles of democracy and colonial capitalism.
Two world wars and two anticolonial wars broke French imperial power as it had previously existed,