1 - The Rise and Fall of the Mercantilist Empire

Summary

The French gained and lost a vast empire in the New World from the sixteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries. Mercantilism, a set of economic and political practices based on the assumption of limited wealth, underpinned that empire. French explorers founded colonies in North America based on trade in furs and fish. Few French ever to wanted move to the empire throughout its history. The French lost almost all their North American empire by 1763, mostly to Britain. But its colony of Saint Domingue in the Caribbean exploited slave mercantilism as effectively as any in the world. Terror made possible rule by a small white population. The edifice supporting that rule cracked with the French Revolution, beginning in 1789. By 1791, the enslaved population risen, overthrown the slave system, and begun a bloody war of independence that produced the first anticolonial hero, Toussaint Loverture. In the end, the enslaved would win their war, and establish independent Haiti in 1804. Napoleon would find his schemes for a rejuvenated empire based in the Caribbean and the Louisiana territories thwarted. As the nineteenth century dawned, the French empire would need not just new lands, but new ideological foundations.