The French Empire since 1600

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

From the 1600s to the 1950s, France – as both a monarchy and a republic – governed many colonial and European empires, embracing (at different times) territories as diverse as Haiti, Algeria, Vietnam, India, and Canada. This course will trace the French Empire’s extraordinary rises and falls from its seventeenth-century origins to the era of decolonization in the mid twentieth-century. How did the French Empire come into being? Who ran it and how? How did French rule affect its colonial subjects overseas? And how did the French at home respond to imperial challenges and opportunities? Although the Age of Empires has gone, we will trace its political and cultural legacies as they are stamped across our world today.