Bertie Mandelblatt  (University of London)
What French Atlantic? : the challenge to Francophone postcolonial scholarship presented by the study of the ancien régime French Atlantic

This paper addresses the contentiousness within French scholarship over the use of the term 'French Atlantic' in the historical study of the connections between France, its West African trade in slaves and its colonies in the Americas in the pre-Revolutionary era. Recently, Bill Marshall has attended to the conceptual capacities of this term, arguing that they are rooted in the specificities of French colonial history. However, more typically French historians suggest that the popularity of Atlantic history is specific to Anglo-American research and applying the notion in the study of French colonial relations is simply a question of faddish political correctness. Taking Marshall's arguments as a point of departure, this paper begins by exploring the 20th-century historiography of the 'French Atlantic', examining the legacy of the Annalistes, and of Godechot in particular, and then moving to its treatment within French scholarship from the moment of the explosion in interest in Atlantic History more generally in the 1990s (Gilroy, Rediker, Linebaugh). Specifically, I will interrogate its usage (or absence) within the work of Sylvia Marzagalli, Anne Pérotin-Dumont, Paul Butel, Liliane Hilaire-Perez and in various recent issues of French history journals devoted to l'Atlantique. Equally, I will consider how it is used in Anglophone scholarship of the French Americas, looking, for example, at the recent work of Laurent Dubois, Doris Garraway, Kenneth Banks and James Pritchard.

My Phd research traces the historical geographies of food cultures in the Franco-Caribbean of the ancien régime through a double optic: in the first instance, through the mercantilist metropolitan and inter-colonial networks that provisioned the islands and French slaving ships with salt beef from Ireland, flour from both France and la Nouvelle France, and salt fish from la Plaisance (among other commodities); secondly, it investigates the local creolized food practices that developed in such sites as slaves' provision grounds and plantation kitchens. The concept of the French Atlantic is central to the project - this conference paper concludes by highlighting the value of the Atlantic lens to this kind of research which, in order to answer Marshall's question, "What might happen, what might be enabled, by thinking of Frenchness as diasporic and mobile,?" confronts the multiple transatlantic connections created by the first French empire. In summary, this paper proposes that a contemporary historicized amplification of the term 'French Atlantic,' one that accounts for its links with other, overlapping 'Atlantics,' has the potential to add both dimensionality and nuance to French postcolonial scholarship.