In recent discussions of the settlement of the New World, there are frequent examinations of the colonial empires of the British and the Spanish, with decidedly less on the French and, when the French are analyzed it seems to be more concerned with Canada than the French Caribbean possessions. In France and the American Tropics to 1700, Philip P. Boucher, author of works on French colonial policy and on the earlier interaction of the English and French with the Caribs, focuses on the French Caribbean colonies in the years prior to 1700. Although France did at various times possess other islands (Grenada, Marie-Galante, Saint-Barthèlemy, Saint-Martin, Dominica, Sante Lucie, and Saint-Croix) for limited times, the main attention is given to Martinique, Guadeloupe, Cayenne, Saint-Christophe, and Saint-Domingue. In this period, Martinique and Guadeloupe were France's main colonies, since the major growth of Saint-Domingue to prominence took place after the 1680s, with the growth in sugar production and slave imports. The discussion of this development is to be the subject of a subsequent volume dealing with the eighteenth century.

Boucher, Distinguished Professor of History at the Universty of Alabama in Huntsville, whose most recent book had been Cannibal Encounters (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), which dealt with the earlier contact between Europeans and the natives on the islands. France and the American Tropics is a work of thorough scholarship, drawing on a vast array of primary and secondary sources, including many government archives. The volumes contains 24 figures, drawn mainly from the works of two contemporaries. Father Jean-Baptiste Dutertre (1667–1671, with earlier publication in 1654) and Father Jean-Baptiste Labat (whose work was published in 1722 though written earlier, sometime after 1695). This book is to be read in conjunction with materials on the web, with one additional chapter and a most useful 45-page bibliography to accompany the published volume.

Although French transatlantic migration (including that to Canada) was considerably less than that of the British, Spanish, and Portuguese, Boucher points to “the relative economic success” (p. 8) of the French Caribbean colonies, particularly in the first two decades of settlement, and also notes that exports and imports from these islands greatly exceeded those of French Canada. Militarily, the French were successful vis–vis the British and Spanish through most of the century. In many ways, the French pattern of settlement resembled that of the British, with the early decades of settlement being predominantly of white labor, often indentured labor; with the primary crop being tobacco for export, and only later the plantation production of indigo, cotton, and ginger and, most importantly, sugar based on slave labor; and with much of the settlement based on relatively short-lived companies. Boucher argues that it is probable that slave and free living conditions in the islands (and Cayenne) were better in the French than in the British West Indies and were probably better in the seventeenth than in the eighteenth century, and that white living conditions were possibly more favorable in the Caribbean than in France. In regard to patterns of institutions and behavior in the colonies, he argues that “colonists made conscious cultural selections from a ‘European menu,’ but simplified rather than replicated old ways” (p. 143).

Boucher has presented much detail about the process of settlement of the French Indies, and their development over time, paralleling somewhat the discussion of the French in the Americas between 1670 and 1730 by James Pritchard in his In Search of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). France and the American Tropics to 1700 is an interesting and informative work and will be influential in discussions of France, the French Overseas Empire, and the expansion of slavery into the Americas.