Constructing Race In The French Atlantic World, 1534-1789

This book proposes the first expansive investigation of the emergence of racial idioms and hierarchies in the French Atlantic world from the sixteenth- to the late eighteenth century. Drawing upon a wide variety of colonial and metropolitan sources, the author traces the ways in which early modern French metropolitan conceptualizations of social and religious order were deployed, challenged, and transformed to create new and racialized identities in the varied and evolving contexts of the French colonization of North America, the Antilles, Guiana, and West Africa.