In this sophisticated monograph, Dawdy provides a ‘historical ethnography’ of New Orleans from its founding in the late seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century. In contrast to those who perpetuate stereotypes of the city and its environs as a haven for historical and contemporary ‘disorder’, Dawdy seeks to uncover what historical New Orleans can tell us about how colonialism, in general, functions ideologically and practically and how the city's petits gens (enslaved individuals, poor whites, Native Americans and free mixed-race individuals) and les grands (elite metropolitan administrators and Creole merchant-planters) conducted their lives in a place where the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate frequently shifted. To provide a Geertzian ‘thick’ description of the city throughout the French period, Dawdy employs a sophisticated interdisciplinary method, exploring how the Enlightenment, the development of a Creole oligarchy and the influence of ‘rogue agents’ – ‘individuals on the ground who pushed colonial frontiers in their own self-interest’ (p. 11) – shaped and were shaped by metropolitan attempts to establish a model colonial outpost at the mouth of the Mississippi River. In a series of thematic chapters, each featuring an eighteenth-century New Orleanian, Dawdy analyses how the intertwining of these three elements affected intellectual life and literary discourse within and about New Orleans, the city's urban planning, licit and illicit trade, the variables contributing to social status, the function of law and the 1768 revolt that ultimately led Spanish authorities to execute elite members of the Superior Council.

Chapter 2 offers a particularly striking example of the benefits of using an interdisciplinary method like Dawdy's. Drawing on watercolours, maps, personal journals, official correspondence and even archeological remains, ‘La ville sauvage: nature and urban planning’, explores ‘the tension between brash imperial planning and pragmatic colonial creativity’ (p. 67). Using as a guide Adrien de Pauger, a French military engineer charged with overseeing the construction of New Orleans, Dawdy walks us through the many factors involved in physically establishing this most important colonial outpost, detailing the successes and failures of this early effort in Absolutist urban planning. Along the way, she introduces us to the cast of characters who played important roles in the city's development, including often-ignored Native Americans who helped to identify an appropriate building site and Africans who physically constructed and agriculturally sustained the area for years to come. The presence of these individuals was just one example of how the local environment disrupted well-crafted plans sent from Paris, for as Dawdy notes the maps and plans of the city initially called for neighbourhoods-by-grid (to separate social groups) and walls (to defend against external enemies and distinguish city from country). Lived experience, however, placed enslaved workers, rather than planned gardens, in wealthy merchants’ backyards near the waterfront, and walls separating individual plots, rather than surrounding the entire city, delineated property lines and kept livestock from wandering the streets of this new supposedly urban space.

Building the Devil's Empire is an engaging narrative that illuminates the complexity of life in eighteenth-century New Orleans and deftly links the history of the port to the North American continent and the Caribbean. Its exploration of the nuts and bolts of the colonial enterprise at the height of the Enlightenment and the dawn of the Age of Revolutions make it of interest to scholars of colonial North America and the Atlantic World as well as historians of colonialism more generally.