In this superbly researched and handsome book, Gauvin Alexander Bailey presents ?a groundbreaking assessment of three and one-half centuries of rampant French colonialism, as well as its physical impact on cultures scattered around the Atlantic Ocean. Although academic studies have thoroughly covered British, Spanish and Portuguese ?political, military and economic ambitions, there is a less profound understanding of the French old Atlantic Empire, which spanned the 16th to mid-19th centuries and developed into one of the largest political entities in the Western Hemisphere.
Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire: State, Church and Society, 1604-1830, by Gauvin Alexander Bailey
The richness of the historical context is fascinating. The French Atlantic world?which included West Africa, the greater Caribbean region, and the continental Americas?covered vast territories, and enslaved and dispossessed many Indigenous peoples. By the late 17th century, French architecture and urbanism dominated Europe, as its high-minded urban ideals were parachuted into remote and hostile environments. Bailey very thoughtfully unpacks this historic development, while maintaining a nuanced understanding of colonial dynamics and vernacular culture. Driven by the Crown and the Church and fueled by rapacious economic expansion, the French Empire was massive and influential, but also ?poorly organized, hopelessly unrealistic, plagued by mad utopian schemes, underfunded and underpinn...