France had the second largest empire in the world after Britain, but one with very different origins and purposes. Over more than four centuries, the French empire explained itself in many different ways through many different colonial regimes. Beginning in the early modern period, a vast mercantile empire based on furs and fish in the New World and sugar cultivated by the enslaved in the Caribbean rose and fell. At intervals thereafter, the French seemed to have an empire simply as an attribute of a Great Power, generally in competition with Britain. Relatively few French people ever moved to the empire, even to the settler colony of Algeria. Under the Third Republic, the French construed a “civilizing mission” melding selectively applied principles of democracy and colonial capitalism. Two world wars and two anticolonial wars broke French imperial power as it had previously existed, yet numberless traces of the French empire lived on, both in the former colonies and in today's French Republic. This narrative history recounts the unique course of the French empire, questioning how it made sense to the people who ruled it, lived under it, and fought against it.

'This fine book emerged from an undergraduate course that Leonard Smith taught at Oberlin College beginning in 2017. It is no easy task to put into a single semester the many iterations of French empire covering 500 years across five continents. Getting it all into one book is even more difficult.… Smith has done a great service in giving the field a compact and engaging account. His book will easily fit into other courses, as well as serve as a reference for scholars working in one part of the French empire who need to understand how things unfolded in different places and times.' Benjamin Brower, The Journal of Modern History

Leonard V. Smith is the Frederick B. Artz Professor of History at Oberlin College, Ohio. He has written four previous books, most recently Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (2018).