Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Feb 18, 2026

Mélanie Lamotte, Assistant Professor of History at Duke and author of By Flesh and Toil, explores how sex, race, and labor shaped the early French imperial world. She traces transoceanic links between Atlantic and Indian Ocean colonies. Stories from censuses, notarial records, and testimonies highlight how non-European people’s relationships and work helped build and contest imperial power.

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INSIGHT

Flesh And Toil Built The Empire

Sexual relations and extreme physical violence were foundational to populating and subjugating early French colonies.
By the 18th century, French policy sought to control interracial sex and marriage to enforce racial hierarchies and labor regimes.

INSIGHT

Trans-Oceanic Repertoires United Policy

A trans-oceanic approach reveals shared repertoires that connected French Atlantic and Indian Ocean territories.
Policies and practices circulated across oceans, helping unify an early French imperial project.

ANECDOTE

Madagascar Alliances Through Marriage

Mélanie Lamotte recounts Fort Dauphin alliances sealed through intermarriage with Malagasy nobles.
These unions and coerced relations produced settlements that shaped Madagascar and later Isle Bourbon demographics.

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From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India.

The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways.

Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Harvard UP, 2026) illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building.

This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.

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