This chapter focuses on the French military engineer and architect François Blondel, known for the construction of several monumental structures in metropolitan France. Blondel devised several plans and accounts on the feasibility of developing existing strongholds in modern fortresses or choosing completely new sites for a rayon of fortified towns, forts, and batteries. Blondel’s maps represented the islands as seemingly homogenous entities, where local differences between French and Carib settlements were blurred. This spatial construction of the islands of French territory on representations such as maps or plans was preceded by the so-called seigneurial period on the islands, including next to Guadeloupe and Martinique also Saint-Christophe (Saint-Kitts and Nevis) and Tortuga Island. It was then that French feudal proprietors tried to enclose land with a combination of manorial economy with a kind of baroque representation practice resulting in the creation of several more or less magnificent ‘castles’ on the islands. It is important to consider this ‘feudal’ period in order to understand how it prefigured the effort in the later seventeenth and in the eighteenth century to form a territory from only a few individual and scattered settlements and strongholds that could be regarded as a coherent empire.
This study explores the shared history of the French empire from a perspective of material culture in order to re-evaluate the participation of colonial, Creole, and indigenous agency in the construction of imperial spaces. The decentred approach to a global history of the French colonial realm allows a new understanding of power relations in different locales. Traditional binary models that assume the centralization of imperial power and control in an imperial centre often overlook the variegated nature of agency in the empire. In a selection of case studies in the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, and India, several building projects show the mixed group of planners, experts, and workers, the composite nature of building materials, and elements of different ‘glocal’ styles that give the empire its concrete manifestation. Thus the study proposes to view the French overseas empire in the early modern period not as a consequence or an outgrowth of Eurocentric state building, but rather as the result of a globally interconnected process of empire building.