In 1953 the proprietor of the chateau of Bonneval at La Haye-Aubrée par Routot in the Norman department of Eure presented the French National Archives with a collection of eighteenth-century papers. They had been brought to the chateau by previous owners at the time of the French Revolution. The proprietor was unrelated to these shadowy figures, and the papers concerned neither his family nor the estate. Now deposited at the Archives Nationales in Paris, the 45 cartons of letters and business papers tell the story of the business activities of the Dugard family of Rouen. The earliest item in the collection is a bill of exchange dated 3 January 1658/59, and the last letter is from 1794. Most of the papers concern Roben Dugard, 1704-70, and a number of companies formed by him and several other Rouen merchants, among them the societé du Canada. Dugard and Company, as the societé may be called with less formality, was founded in 1729 to exploit the trade of Canada with France and the West Indies. Soon it directed its attention to the development of a Franco-Caribbean trade independent of its North-Atlantic commerce. The present history is a case study of a business partnership. The size and structure of eighteenth-century French business enterprises, the nature of French business finance, methods and maritime insurance, French commodities of trade and markets, and the relation of French business to government are all examined. So too is the manner and extent of the penetration of French business into Canada and the West Indies.

In considering the pattern of emigration in the context of migration history, Choquette shows that, in many ways, the movement toward Canada occurred as a by-product of other, perennial movements, such as the rural exodus or interurban labor migrations. Overall, emigrants to Canada belonged to an outwardly turned and mobile sector of French society, and their migration took place during a phase of vigorous Atlantic expansion. They crossed the ocean to establish a subsistence economy and peasant society, traces of which lingered on into the twentieth century.

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.