James S. Pritchard

It’s interesting to contrast J.H. Elliott’s book ”Empires of the Atlantic World”, which discusses the British and Spanish colonies in America, with this book on French colonies in America. The former takes a broad view and effectively explains the historical roots of modern South and North American society; why colonial societies on each subcontinent developed the way they did. This book, on the other hand, explains nothing about American society in general. Although the author is clearly knowledgeable on his subject, he deliberately avoids all forms of large-scale explanation. Instead, his motivation for writing this book seems to lie merely in refuting a few earlier opinions in French historiography which he happens to disagree with.

The author goes about his corrective historiographical task primarily by citing a lot of statistics. So and so many people lived on this island in this decade, so and so many tons of products were shipped from here to there, and so on. The only persons who might be interested in this much data are indeed his colleagues who specialize in the same field. In the chapter on Government and Politics the author discusses the personal motivations of specific colonial governors at some length, but he fails to say anything general about how colonial government worked or didn't work. The next 150 pages of the book then discuss how French wars played out in the colonies, again in excruciating detail; this general sailed his ships over there and lost so and so many men in the ensuing battle, and then so and so many ships sailed to the next battle. All of this is extremely boring because it teaches the reader absolutely nothing of general interest.

Even in the concluding chapter, where the wisdom-deprived reader would finally hope to learn something of value, the author continues to cite how many tons were shipped this way and that, and what the motivations of various minor colonial and continental players were when they acted the way they did. I guess he simply conceives history in this way: as a series of small events which are not linked in any meaningful way to each other, and which are indescribable in general terms except for the statistical data which happened to be recorded at the time, or the individual motivations that diaries reveal. This is an intellectually poor and unsatisfying view of history, so I wouldn't be surprised if the author's lectures don't gather much attendance at his university. Elliott’s book, on the other hand, is the exact opposite: it shows that historical explanations which go deeper than the surface can be both interesting in themselves and pertinent for understanding the present.… (plus d'informations)