For more than five centuries France has been both a European and a global power. French explorers, traders, settlers, soldiers, and missionaries journeyed to the world's farthest reaches establishing colonies, bringing millions of people under French influence and claiming vast expanses of forests, jungles, deserts, and rich mineral and maritime resources. Through continued wars with rival powers, including Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, and Germany, France lost large portions of its empire and gained others. This is a story of colorful personalities and dramatic events: Cartier's exploration of Canada, Richelieu's and Colbert's global trading companies, Champlain the colonizer, the French presence in Louisiana, the vast but short-lived French empire in India, the nefarious slave trade, and France's defeat in its prosperous Caribbean colony, St. Domingue. Century-long conflict with some of its most valued possessions, such as Vietnam and Algeria, further hastened the empire's demise after World War II.

This study explores the shared history of the French empire from the perspective of material culture in order to re-evaluate the participation of colonial, Creole, and indigenous agency in the construction of imperial spaces. The decentred approach to a global history of the French colonial realm allows a new understanding of power relations in different locales. Providing case studies from four parts of the French empire, the book draws on illustrative evidence from the French archives in Aix-en-Provence and Paris as well as local archives in each colonial location. The case studies, in the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, and India, each examine building projects to show the mixed group of planners, experts, and workers, the composite nature of building materials, and elements of different ‘glocal’ styles that give the empire its concrete manifestation. Building the French empire gives a view of the French overseas empire in the early modern period not as a consequence or an outgrowth of Eurocentric state-building, but rather as the result of a globally interconnected process of empire-building.

Through an explanation of forty figures in European culture, ^The Seduction of the Mediterranean argues that the Mediterranean, classical and contemporary, was the central theme in homoerotic writing and art from the 1750s to the 1950s. Episodes of exile, murder, drug-taking, wild homosexual orgies and court cases are woven into an original study of a significant theme in European culture. The myth of a homoerotic Mediterranean made a major contribution to general attitudes towards Antiquity, the Renaissance and modern Italy and Greece.

How France's elites used soft power to pursue their imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century After Napoleon's downfall in 1815, France embraced a mostly informal style of empire, one that emphasized economic and cultural influence rather than military conquest. A Velvet Empire is a global history of French imperialism in the nineteenth century, providing new insights into the mechanisms of imperial collaboration that extended France's power from the Middle East to Latin America and ushered in the modern age of globalization. David Todd shows how French elites pursued a cunning strategy of imperial expansion in which conspicuous commodities such as champagne and silk textiles, together with loans to client states, contributed to a global campaign of seduction. French imperialism was no less brutal than that of the British. But while Britain widened its imperial reach through settler colonialism and the acquisition of far-flung territories, France built a "velvet" empire backed by frequent military interventions and a broadening extraterritorial jurisdiction. Todd demonstrates how France drew vast benefits from these asymmetric, imperial-like relations until a succession of setbacks around the world brought about their unravelling in the 1870s. A Velvet Empire sheds light on France's neglected contribution to the conservative reinvention of modernity and offers a new interpretation of the resurgence of French colonialism on a global scale after 1880. This panoramic book also highlights the crucial role of collaboration among European empires during this period—including archrivals Britain and France—and cooperation with indigenous elites in facilitating imperial expansion and the globalization of capitalism.

This collection of essays investigates the fundamental role that the loss of colonial territories at the end of the Ancient Regime and post-World War II has played in shaping French memories and colonial discourses. In identifying loss and nostalgia as key tropes in cultural representations, these essays call for a re-evaluation of French colonialism as a discourse informed not just by narratives of conquest, but equally by its histories of defeat.

Greater France provides a comprehensive account of French overseas expansion from 1830 to 1962. After a prologue on the overseas empire of the old regime, chapters examine the conquest of a second empire in Africa, Asia and the islands of the South Seas in the era of the 'new imperialism'. Subsequent chapters explore the ideology behind expansion and the culture of colonialism in France, the migration of French men and women to overseas possessions, the economic history of the colonies, and the phenomenon of decolonisation. An epilogue surveys France's continued links with its former colonies and remaining outposts.