Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book reimagines the history of France’s first overseas empire, tracing its roots from medieval crusading ventures to the revolutionary upheavals of the late eighteenth century. Rejecting top-down narratives of imperial design, the book emphasizes the decentralized, contingent, and negotiated nature of French expansion. Across twelve chapters, it follows merchants, mariners, missionaries, enslaved people, Indigenous nations, and royal officials as they forged connections linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The story begins with crusader colonialism in the Mediterranean, then turns to early modern encounters in West Africa, Brazil, Canada, and the Caribbean, where commerce, cultural translation, and political alliances shaped emerging colonial worlds. Seventeenth-century patterns of trade, settlement, and slavery intertwined with the rise of absolutism, producing both the reach and the fragility of French power. In the eighteenth century, imperial fortunes rose and fell through wars, economic experiments, and shifting coalitions of Indigenous allies, planters, free people of color, and royal administrators. The book culminates in the entangled histories of the French and Haitian revolutions, when the largest slave revolt in human history forced the temporary abolition of slavery across the empire and recast the meaning of liberty itself. Spanning nearly a millennium, Beyond the Ocean reveals an Atlantic world made and remade through conflict, adaptation, and enduring struggles over sovereignty, labor, and belonging. It highlights France’s underappreciated influence on Atlantic history and reveals the many ways that the Atlantic transformed France in return.</jats:p>