Mélanie Lamotte , By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2026. pp. xix+369.

Mlanie Lamotte's innovative and dynamic new volume charts several new directions for the study of France's overseas colonies.In straddling the genres of synthesis and research monograph, the author presents much new research on early French settlements in Madagascar, Ile Bourbon (modern-day Runion), and trading ventures in India, and urges scholars to adopt a "transoceanic" and "panimperial" (10) perspective as a corrective to the conventional focus on the betterknown French colonial endeavors in North America and the Caribbean.Over a span of time extending roughly from the 1650s to 1750, through a dialogue between Atlantic and Indian Ocean French colonial sites, it provides compelling evidence for the critical importance of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries for the formulation of a set of critical policies on race, marriage, and assimilation by the French state.In this way, it offers a critique of a historiography that has invested heavily in the idea that the period after the Seven Years' War marked a sharp policy transformation in the management of France's overseas societies.On this score alone, Lamotte's work deserves praise for its questioning of the long-standing scholarly caesura between "first" and "second" French empires, marked by the military defeat and losses of 1763.However, a work of such temporal breadth and geographic scope, encompassing French societies in New France, Lower Louisiana, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Gore and Senegal in West Africa, as well as Anosy (Madagascar), Ile Bourbon, Ile de France (Mauritius), and several outposts in French India, faces a number of serious methodological challenges that are compounded by the author's decision to adopt a "bird's-eye view" (10) blending synthetic and monographic approaches.Is the intention to write a comparative history of French colonialism in these various societies, or to elucidate a series of connections, either between these colonies, and/or with the French metropole?And why choose these particular colonies and not others?Indeed, the decision