Environment and Technology in Global France, 1763–1914

Despite great political turbulence in the era between the Seven Years’ War and the beginning of World War I (1763–1914), the period possesses a remarkable continuity of France’s global engagement. This chapter studies that engagement by examining how the French interacted with overseas environments and people through technology and infrastructure. As the chapter shows, French technological projects overseas created colonial difference in both material and imagined terms, while informing the development of the French metropole over the course of this era.