In studies of race and slavery in the French Atlantic, the end of the Seven Years’ War is commonly recognized as a key moment for the crystallization of racial difference. In the Treaty of Paris 1763, France ceded its territories in North America east of the Mississippi to Britain and committed to playing a much-reduced role in India (p. 9). This forced a refinement of France’s imperial project: the economies of France’s remaining colonies were based on enslaved laborers’ production of commodities like sugar and coffee, both to meet domestic demand and for re-export. The late 1760s also saw a rise in absenteeism among planters in the French Caribbean, which limited sexual unions between French subjects who were white and people of color (Jennifer Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic, 2016, especially pp. 21, 33). Racial classification was inscribed in the law applied within the French hexagon in 1762, when the Admiralty issued a declaration requiring all noirs to be registered if they were disembarked on French soil, using a racial descriptor (“Blacks”) rather than the legal status of “slave” for the first time (Sue Peabody, ‘There Are No Slaves in France’: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime, 1996, p. 74).

In By Flesh and Toil, Mélanie Lamotte unearths an unrecognized, earlier, and equally important inflection point in French imperial strategies. In the seventeenth century, as France first established permanent settlements in Québec, Madagascar, the Antilles, and other regions, colonial officials encouraged intermarriage with people of non-European descent, particularly Catholic marriages between white Frenchmen and local women. These unions were supposed to help persuade local populations to accept Christianity as well as French cultural mores, and eventually to reproduce French subjects who could do the work of building and defending an empire in regions where white women were particularly scarce. In many cases, children with mixed heritage were assimilated into colonies’ “white” populations and could command significant wealth and status (pp. 109–121).

The first sign of change was a 1664 order issued by the French Company of the East Indies compelling Frenchmen to seek approval from the local governor before marrying “women of the country” (p. 61). In the next decades, this order found an echo in policies that attempted to restrict sexual relations between white and non-European people in Isle Bourbon, Senegal, Guadeloupe, and other French positions (pp. 129–130). Behind this heightening of racial policing were common demographic and economic realities: European brides were more available, and many French colonies saw an influx of enslaved Africans and became more dependent on enslaved labor in this period. At the same time, the shift in policy reflected the circulation of colonial officials and of policy ideas between colonies in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans (pp. 136–139).

A particularly convincing example from Chapter 4 of how racial policies conceived in one corner of the French Empire were transplanted to colonies on the other side of the globe is the introduction of the Letters Patent of Isle Bourbon and Isle of France (1723) and the Code Noir of Louisiana (1724). These two edicts contained almost identical articles that prohibited white subjects and Blacks (regardless of enslaved or free status) from marrying, living together as unmarried couple, or having children together, prescribing fines as penalties, and threatening white slaveowners who fathered children with enslaved women with the loss of their property rights over the mother and children. (Leaving no doubt that erecting racial boundaries was the purpose of these codes, there were exceptions for Black slaveholders who fathered children with enslaved women. Black fathers were permitted to marry the mothers in Catholic ceremonies; these rites effected the manumission of the women and their progeny.) A second section in these royal edicts forbade Black people (even those who were manumitted or free by birth) from inheriting or receiving inter vivos gifts from whites. (Lamotte compares the language of the Letters Patent of the Mascarenes and the Code Noir of Louisiana in Tables 4.2 and 4.3.)

These edicts, of course, did not put a stop to sexual intimacy between white and Black people, but they deterred Frenchmen from recognizing people of color as their heirs and ensured that the devolution of property continued through European lineages. They also failed utterly to protect enslaved people from sexual violence, as Lamotte demonstrates through examples from French court records (pp. 170–177).

Previously, scholars had thought that racial policies such as bans on interracial marriage were first introduced in the French Caribbean. Lamotte shows that the precedents for the racial policies introduced in the 1720s were actually orders issued in Madagascar and Isle Bourbon from 1664 to 1709 (p. 140). Although the preparatory work for drafting the 1723 and 1724 laws is not preserved, they were issued directly on the heels of the monarchy receiving an inventory of regulations in the Indian Ocean and Atlantic colonies (p. 141). The views of colonial governors in Louisiana who wanted to restrict intermarriage were also informed by their previous postings in New France (p. 132).

The introduction of these new racial laws is only one example that supports Lamotte’s broader argument that “France’s early modern Atlantic and Indian Ocean legal regimes were far more connected than previously acknowledged” (p. 5). It is one of many instances in the book where Lamotte points out that a policy that historians believed to be unique to a particular colonial context was actually a way the French Empire operated across multiple hemispheres and part of a project to apply “a coherent set of imperial policies that targeted peoples of non-European ancestries” in all French territories (p. 3). She is able to perceive the full dimensions of this project of legal standardization because of her methodological choice to adopt a “pan-imperial perspective” (p. 7), comparing multiple sites of French settlement and bringing into the foreground the Mascarene Islands, Senegal, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, which fewer local or regional studies have focused on.