Most readers who pick up this book would immediately assume that it is about the ways that Frenchmen efficiently colonized indigenous peoples around the world in the long eighteenth century. The phrase “colonial machine” has a sinister ring to it—something hard, lacking in human feeling, consuming everything it encounters. However, McClellan and Regourd’s machine is not like that—it is more like a clock, and it is almost wholly contained in the world of Frenchmen. Even the “colonial” aspect of this book is highly focused on Frenchmen so that the colonial world seems nearly devoid of indigenous peoples. The authors partially explain this perspective in their introduction: “The Colonial Machine was also hardly engaged with merchants, with the average planter or colonist overseas, with nobles or the nobility, and much less with the peasants of France. Indeed, the Colonial Machine flourished not so much from private interests or initiatives as from metropolitan imperatives” (23). In other words, one must focus just on the “French Science” of the book’s title and it becomes clear that this work is about how French scientific institutions built up a tremendous archive of knowledge, about all kinds of things, many to do with shipping and the overseas world, under the Old Regime. Once one accommodates to this Franco-centric, but broadly scientific vision of the world, McClellan, and Regourd’s weighty book can be appreciated for the meticulous piece of scholarship that it is.

Both authors are tremendous scholars in various aspects of the history of science, particularly as related to Old Regime France, and their interests and scholarly voices fit together seamlessly in this volume. James McClellan III, the senior partner in the collaboration (as explained in the introduction), is a Professor of History at Stevens Institute of Technology and has authored numerous books and articles on French scientific institutions and ways of collecting knowledge of the natural world that could be put to use. François Regourd, of the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre, has written most extensively on French science in the Caribbean. Thus, both authors have a depth of experience with the topic in all its complicated facets, and it shows – in the incredible archival work, rich bibliography and detailed description of both strange and familiar aspects of scientific exploration in the early modern era.

The Colonial Machine is divided into three main parts, with additional subparts, and sub-subparts, which makes this incredibly detailed work relatively easy to follow. (An aside: more and bigger maps would have been welcome, as the authors refer to places all over the world mostly by historical names.) But overall, there is just so much detailed material here—without a particular place in an argument (other than that the French had impressive networks for gaining knowledge about the natural world), that the book starts to feel like an encyclopaedia. The research is excellent; the methods are surprisingly traditional. The authors refer to “a negotiation between science and power” (26) and “we cannot lose sight of the ‘other’”—as this “history is an entangled one, with local informants, usually written out of the story, playing decisive roles” (38). However, the power dialectic, the negotiation, the othering and entangling, never becomes integral to the story that Regourd and McClellan have to tell. Here there is magnificent detail, with only very light applications of theoretical probing. In their conclusions, the authors refer to this book as being like an initial “map” of the Colonial Machine, and they generously express the hope that “it will be useful to other explorers, who can continue to perfect it” (486)—I think there will be proof of this in years to come.

Part one of The Colonial Machine (“Metropolitan Wheels & Gears of a Colonial Scientific Bureaucracy”) provides details about the numerous institutions that constituted the important metropolitan gears of the machine, and from which shafts and pulleys extended. These institutions included, among others, the Royal Navy, the Académie Royale des Sciences (the great “‘research engine’ of the Colonial Machine” [80]), the Société Royale de Médecine, the Compagnies des Indes, and the Church (particularly missionary orders like the Jesuits). The authors also highlight the “biographical trajectories” (486) of important individuals from the various eras of the Colonial Machine. One name that recurs throughout the book, for example, is Duhamel du Monceau (1700-1782), the inspector general of the navy. He was an energetic polymath who had a hand in many things (ship design, natural history, lumber) and played a role in several different institutions of the colonial machine. The authors refer to him as “a great human pivot around which the Colonial Machine and much of contemporary French science turned” (67). Duhamel du Monceau and several other men like him are also referred to as “key individuals pulling the levers of the Colonial Machine” (137). The mental picture is a bit too grandiose!

The second part of the book is certainly the most compelling. Regourd and McClellan provide a feast of information about the natural world collected by Frenchmen overseas. In Part II-A (“The Conquest of Space”—astronomy and cartography) we find, among other things, the French version of solving the problem of determining longitude at sea. The authors make the unexpected claim that “The story of French chronometers is a triumphant chapter in the history of the Colonial Machine” (241)—which certainly alters one’s perspective on that relatively familiar episode in the history of science. In Part II-C (“Cultivating an Empire”—botany and agronomy) the authors provide a virtual map (a real one would have enhanced the chapter) of the botanical gardens scattered across the French Colonial world, and from which they garnered so much knowledge. There is also a surprisingly interesting discussion of how and from where the French were able to get enough lumber to stock their great shipyards. Part II B (“Living and Dying in the Colonies”—medicine) shows the limitations of the authors’ methodology, and yet is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. The authors raise expectations when they open the chapter claiming: “A new note, or at least one not sounded so strongly up to this point, is that colonial administrators and physicians sought out native medicines and medical practices and so looked across the socio-cultural divides separating themselves from the world of the ‘other’” (246). While work in the colonies is at the centre of this chapter, indigenous people, and slaves again provide a mostly passive backdrop, rather than having agency in the Colonial Machine. The closest we get to “others” being involved is the discussion of how materia medica were collected and their properties described. Considering that the authors’ goal is to describe the growth of French science, the silence of illiterate people in these pages is not too surprising, but it is unsatisfying. This critique should not detract from the really fascinating material presented. My favourite is the case of the lizards (Anolis) from Guatemala that became the fad cure for cancer (then smallpox, then venereal diseases, and so on) in the early 1780s (294-300). The idea was first that Anolis themselves should be taken back to France and ingested, freshly killed, just as the indigenous people were said to do. Then it was thought that perhaps any lizard might be efficacious, and then easier methods of ingesting the lizard essence were tried. In the end, the healing claims came to nothing, and the authors note that the episode “illustrates well the construction (and deconstruction) of knowledge that involved the Colonial Machine as it wrestled with medical knowledge and expertise among the world’s peoples. A fact in Guatemala ceased to be one in France” (300).

Finally, the third part of the book (“Limits and Alternatives”) considers the failures or drawbacks of the Colonial Machine, in part to avoid the sense that this book is in any way triumphalist. The discussion focuses on breakdowns in communication between the French institutions and correspondents and agents in the colonies, failures in colonization attempts (the Kourou episode, in French Guiana, in 1763-64), individuals with grandiose, unfeasible schemes (e.g. Philibert Commerson), and animosities between the colonial world and the metropole.

McClellan and Regourd’s metaphor of the Colonial Machine is ultimately remarkably compelling, with its roots in the era it illustrates and its power as a descriptor in the present. It will surely join the arsenal of terms that help us understand the European reach into the colonial world. The Colonial Machine is a substantial and mature piece of scholarship, bursting with information and full of avenues for generations of historians to explore.