By 1731, France had attempted a number of different types of administration of its relatively new colony of Louisiana. The territory had been under direct royal management until 1712, when the monopoly on the colony was sold to a private French businessman. The monopoly was later taken on by a state-sponsored company called the French Company of the Indies and was ultimately retroceded to the French Crown. Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana offers to zoom in on these specific moments of colonial experimentation, of the trials and errors that were part of the historical process of French colonization.

Through the study of a remarkable source, the author takes on the challenge of making accessible to the general reader the worlds of the French Company of the Indies without compromising the complexity of the contexts in which it existed. Through the individual trajectory of Marc-Antoine Caillot, clerk of the French India Company appointed to the French colony of Louisiana, Erin M. Greenwald brings the reader across three continents, demonstrating the mobility of individuals during the early modern period. Her thoroughly researched narrative aims to unravel the commercial networks of the French Company of the Indies while making use of Caillot's Relation du Voyage en Louisianne ou Nouvelle France (1730) as a backbone for broader research and questions. The different themes of each chapter follow the voyage through every stage, including the overland route in France. Starting with a well-documented analysis of the French India Company in France, the book then leads us to Britanny, the West African coast, and Louisiana as well as to the French comptoirs in India, in the epilogue. Including the journey in France enables the author to draw a subtle parallel between Caillot's experience in decentralized regions of France and that in Louisiana. Aside from the diary of Caillot, Greenwald draws on many regional sources and contemporary literature to complement her narrative, which testifies to the thorough archival research that went into this work.

As stated by the author, the book is in the same vein as Robert Harms's 2001 book The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade. Indeed, the masterful historical contextualization and the readability of Greenwald's book attest to it. In many ways, Caillot, through his own account, can be considered a protagonist of the global microhistory put forth by Francesca Trivellato (“Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?,” California Italian Studies [2011]). If we follow Trivellato's argument, the experience of a single individual can be reconstructed in order to understand the connections and contexts “from the perspective of the actor involved in them, rather than from the point of view of the institutions that created the structures,” as is done in the book under review. Striking a balance between the micro perspective and the macro is a goal Greenwald sets in her introduction: “In this study, the institutional history of the French Company of the Indies and the macro view of the French Atlantic world are brought to ground level through the lived experience of Marc-Antoine Caillot” (p. 3). In combining the macro view of global connections with the in-detail observations of Caillot, the book's aim is an interesting response to the prevalence of the focus on structure rather than on individual agency in economic and social history. The main contribution of this book is probably the author's decision to study the French India Company from the inside, focusing on the career of a specific individual, rather than taking the institutional perspective. Furthermore, Greenwald confirms that historians can illuminate broader trends by focusing on unique documents—which is what Caillot's Relation du Voyage en Louisianne ou Nouvelle France is.

Additionally, this study of an individual carrier inside the French India Company demonstrates the important and too often neglected link between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. It thereby invites the reader and future researchers to cross the artificial boundary between the two spaces of historical analysis. The aim, set out in the introduction, of placing a small-scale individual history inside a bigger picture has been achieved. However, we miss an argumentation that would have given more depth to the elegant narrative. For instance, the necessity for an individual inside the French India Company to navigate multiple networks of connections at home and abroad in order to develop and maintain his career could have been highlighted throughout the analysis. Could the title of the last chapter—“A Colony Fit Only for a King?”—be considered an argument against the profitability of the colonizing operation of the French Company of the Indies? As is mentioned in the epilogue, the company seemed to have been fit only for trading operations, not colonizing ones. A contribution to historical debates on the role and viability of colonizing companies as compared with trading companies would have been welcome in order to put the French Company of the Indies in a broader context of the history of the corporate form. Nevertheless, the book remains an impressive accomplishment: a far-flung and enlightening account of the French Atlantic and beyond.