ABSTRACT
France was the most universal of empires, in the long age of reform with which this book is concerned. But the French Atlantic Empire has been oddly invisible, for more than two centuries, in histories of the enlightenment, of Atlantic reform, and of the origins of the French revolution. But these different futures are a part of how it really was, in the long age of reform and revolution. John Shovlin provides a fascinating account of the multiplicity of reforms undertaken by the French monarchy in the generation before the French Revolution, and of the incorporation, within the royal administration, of the political culture of the enlightenment. Economic reform, including the reform of colonial and commercial policies, was at the heart of the enlightened administration, as Shovlin shows. Pernille Rge, in her original and illuminating chapter, examines the relationship between enlightenment and reform, in the micro-history of the French administration of the Antilles.
