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  • The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime by James E. McClellan III and François Regourd
  • Henry Heller (bio)
The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime. By James E. McClellan III and François Regourd. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012. Pp. 694. $102.

The Colonial Machine is an enormous work that describes the relationship between French colonialism and science from the reign of Louis XIV until the Revolution. Marked by great erudition and an encyclopedic scope, it examines the vast range of French colonial ambitions that extended across the New World, Asia, Africa, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The power of French colonialism was reflected in its extraordinary capacity to gather and organize the massive volume of scientific information that streamed in from its overseas possessions. The bureaucratic structure that made this possible was composed of an extensive array of interconnected state institutions ranging from the Company of the East Indies and the Naval Ministry to the Academy of Sciences, Jardin des Plantes, Royal Observatory, Societies of Medicine and Agriculture, Marine Academy, and Dépôt des Cartes et Plans, among others. Based on wide-ranging archival study, the organization and activities of these bodies and their relation to France's colonies are outlined in what amounts to a comprehensive study of the pre-revolutionary French state from the distinct and novel perspective of its colonial involvement.

As the authors explain, this work developed as an offshoot of a growing body of historiographical writing that attempts to describe the role of science in European colonial and imperial expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its distinctiveness lies in its extension of this endeavor back into the early modern period. As such it represents an important breakthrough in understanding the history of Old Regime France overseas. At the same time, it offers nothing less than a new perspective on the nature of the ancien régime, which it convincingly argues maintained the largest and most wide-ranging colonial empire of all the early modern states. The ability of this structure, composed of thousands of officials and scholar-experts, to control and acquire information from its imperial territories justifies the authors in describing it as a colonial machine.

In the first part of the volume the many pieces of the machine are detailed at great length, leaving the reader with a sense of the enormous size of the French colonial bureaucracy. In the second part the authors study the impact of this administrative system on the colonies, looking successively at cartography, navigation, the construction of infrastructure, geography, hydrology, naval technology, the problem of longitude, medical practice, diseases and medicines, the study of weather and tides, botany, and agriculture. French experts consciously investigated and appropriated [End Page 400] a large number of medical remedies from around the world which were carefully collected and sent back to France, including cinchona, ipecacuanha, ginseng, nightshade, and simarouba. Many others were garnered from traditional Chinese medicine. French scholars expressed appreciation for the scholarly achievements of traditional Chinese and Indian science and civilization while taking their measure.

The wide range of this study will open up vistas for research that will certainly inspire more studies. Although not entirely neglected in this volume, one hopes that future scholarship will be devoted to exploring the technological foundations which served to hold this immense overseas empire together. The encyclopedic ambitions of the work likewise lead the authors to pass too quickly over the ethnographic and sexual aspects of French colonial science. Their need to be comprehensive forces them, for example, to give short shrift to the subject of the relationship between Haitian voodoo and mesmerism in the years leading to revolution on that island, a historically fascinating subject that they raise but fail to pursue owing to space limitations.

More problematic is the way the authors deal with the relationship between the French state and colonial science on the one hand and slavery and economic exploitation of colonial resources on the other. While acknowledging the lucrative character of slavery and colonialism, they insist that the colonial machine, including its science, somehow existed in a realm which floated above such...

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