ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the extra-European campaigns and endeavour at the same time to establish what, if anything, was the concrete impact of the French Revolution on the wider world. It deals with an area that might at first sight seem ripe for a positive response to the ideas emanating from France. The chapter is concerned with the French colonies. If the French Revolution was a world event, it was more a world event in retrospect than it was at the time of its occurrence. From the sixteenth century onwards, a number of European powers had competed with one another to control the Caribbean, and by the middle of the eighteenth century all the territories of the West Indies had been divided up among the powers and transformed into colonies. For Britain and France, especially, the imperial edifice which emerged in this fashion played a role which simply cannot be underestimated.
