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Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026)
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Melody Labotte
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Lewis Waid
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Melody Labotte
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Lewis Waid
Hello and welcome to another episode of the New Books Network. I'm Lewis Waid, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg and the author of Privilege Economy in States in Aldridging, Marine Insurance, War and the Atlantic Empire Under Louis xiv. It is my pleasure to be speaking today with Melody Labotte, who is Assistant professor of History at Duke University, will be talking about her wonderful new book By Flesh and How Sex, Race and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire, published by Harvard University Press. In this book, she provides a pioneering analysis of the French empire from the start of the 17th century to the middle of the 18th century, drawing on a wide array of sources to argue for the crucial role that people of African and Malagasy, South Asian and Native American descent played in the formation of the empire. Mel, thank you so much for joining us today.
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Melody Labotte
Hi Lewis, thank you for inviting me.
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Lewis Waid
I learned so much from reading your book and I'm very excited for our discussion. Before we dive in, just a heads up to our listeners that we are likely to speak about non consensual sex in this conversation so to start us off, let's discuss the title. Could you explain why you chose by flesh and toil? And why do these words matter so much for the argument you make in the book?
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Melody Labotte
So I have chosen to conceptualize the early modern French colonies and outposts as an empire of flesh of toil for several reasons. First, because sexual relations between women of non European ancestry and white men played a critical role in populating the early French colonies and outposts with both insulate and free people. Second, because extreme physical violence and especially sexual violence lay at the foundation of the French empire and enabled the subjugation of many populations. And third, because by the 18th century, French policymakers really tried to create hierarchies based on race by controlling interracial sex and marriage in order to consolidate and maintain oppressive labor regimes. And then finally, this was an empire of flesh and toil because the French empire was largely built on the labor of both enslaved and free people of non European ancestry. So, of course, substantial work has already been produced on slave labor across many European European colonies in the United States. But in the context of the French empire, relatively little attention have been paid to slave labor and even more to the labor of free people of non European ancestry.
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Lewis Waid
A significant contribution of your book is to bring the Atlantic and Indian oceans together in your analysis of the French empire, something that so few works have done up to this point. What do we gain, would you say, from bringing these oceans together in the same analysis?
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Melody Labotte
So that's a question I get a lot, actually. And I would say that bringing the Atlantic and Indian oceans together has allowed me to make several contributions to the fields of French colonial history and black history as well. So first, it has allowed me to highlight a set of shared transoceanic repertoires of empire. So basically, what Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper define as the different strategies empires use to build themselves while incorporating diverse people. And in the book, these transoceanic repertoires range from assimilation and racial policies to alliances with very powerful indigenous leaders, to cultural adaptation and widespread metissage, by which I mean mixed sexual relationships that helped populate the colonies. And then second, this transoceanic approach helped me show how development in the Atlantic shaped policies are in the Indian Ocean and vice versa, ultimately driving the unification of imperial policies across oceans. So just to give you one example, in chapter one, I demonstrate how the famous we shall be one people kinship rhetoric, which was employed by Samuel de Champlain to promote intermarriage in Quebec in 1633 and which was central to the political Culture of Native American people in the region influenced policies issued for the French colony of Annecy in south eastern Madagascar. And then this transoceanic approach also helped me show that by the early 18th century, a French empire was really beginning to take shape, growing more united through a coherent set of racial policies and also through the circular circulation of vessels, people and ideas. Because the book comes with a digital project mapping the circulation of vessels across oceans. Now, in the past, there were a lot of claims that the early French colonies and outposts were way too disconnected from each other and from the motherland to even form an empire capable of formulating a coherent imperial policy. And so what I'm trying to do in the book is to show that through this transoceanic approach, we can really challenge this claim. And then finally, this transoceanic approach helped me show how people of non European ancestry became connected through shared struggles to protect their dignity, to advance their interests, to seek justice and safety for themselves and for their loved ones, very often under extreme conditions. So just to be give you one example here, chapter six shows how in the early 18th century, an elite of men of Malagasy ancestry on Al Bourbon integrated the political sphere after waging a remarkable struggle for equal rights. So obviously this struggle echoes the movement led by men of color from Saint Domingue many decades later during the age of revolutions. Right.
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Lewis Waid
I really gladly bring up Odyssey d' Al Bourbon in your answer, because in taking this bird's eye approach to the French empire, you shed so much light on Madagascar, Isle Bourbon in the Indian Ocean. These are islands that have received very little attention from historians up to this point. Yet as you show, they were especially significant sites of early French colonialism because of the distinctive demographic structures that emerged there. Could you tell us a little bit about these?
- [09:24]
Melody Labotte
Yes, you're completely right. So my book is really intended to highlight the critical role played by Al Bourbon and Madagascar in the history of the French empire. So just to give you a bit of Context, in the 1640s, the French established a settlement called Fort Dauphin in Annecy in southeastern Madagascar. And there they formed alliances with several worldria, which was basically a class of high ranking nobles who controlled several small kingdoms and chiefdoms on the island and were constantly at war with each other. Now, many of these alliances were actually sealed through intermarriage between Frenchmen of different ranks and between women from leading Rondrier or noble Malagasy families. So just to give you maybe what is the most famous example, Jacques Pronis, who was the French governor of Fort Dauphin, married a woman named Diane Ravlon Manor. She was a Rwandria princess, and she was also the niece of the king of Annecy, a man named Diane Ramar. Now, other Frenchmen also married local women, but most of these women were actually sexually coerced, enslaved women. And together these couples established many farming settlements around Fort Dauphin and throughout the annalsy region. And what's interesting is that the tradition of intermarriage was transferred from Madagascar to Al Bourbon when the French established a settlement there in the 1660s. So just to give you a bit of context, on Isle Bourbon. Isle Bourbon was uninhabited before the French arrived, and it only attracted very few European immigrants in the 17th and early 18th century because of its very remote location, it was located months away from metropolitan France and from the more profitable Caribbean colonies. And so the population of Isle Bourbon, it largely grew through the arrival of free and enslaved people from Madagascar and India, as well as through metissage, mixed sexual relations. And many of Al Bourbon's earliest residents were actually European refugees and their Malagasy wines, who had fled Madagascar during what appears to be the very first anti colonial revolt in French colonial history, which took place in Annecy in 1674, over 100 years before the Haitian revolution. And then other early inhabitants on Al Bourbon included bonded Malagasy people and also several Luso Indian women whom French authorities had transported from India specifically to marry European colonists because they were Europeanized and they were Christians because they had interacted with the Portuguese for a very long time back in India. And by the early 18th century, children born to French Malagasy and French Lusso Indian couples who had gotten married in the Catholic church made up the majority of the free population of Ibon. And what's very interesting is that local officials eventually assimilated these mixed children into the island's so called white population by classifying them as whites in official documents. And as plantation slavery expanded, some French officials began to view these mixed relationships as a threat to the stability of the slave system. And in response to that, they created a series of bans aiming at prohibiting intermarriage on Al bourbon beginning in 1674. And one of these measures was later reproduced in French colonial Louisiana as part of a broader effort to standardize imperial policy. And so, in the end, Al Bourbon ended up exercising an outsized influence on the history of the French empire.
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Melody Labotte
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Lewis Waid
So while you take a bird's eye approach to the French Empire, at the same time you're very clear that you're writing history from below or even way below. Could you tell us a bit about what you mean by this and how you overcame the challenges you encountered in writing history in this way?
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Melody Labotte
That's a good question. So just to give you a little bit of context on the historiography, many studies of early French empire building embraced top down perspectives centering on the aspirations and actions of French officials. And so one of the central claims in the book is that to truly understand how the French Empire was built, we have to look at history from below or even way below. And here I'm using the expression coined by Marlene Du, who is a Black studies scholar at Yale. And so this means that we have to look at how ordinary people on the ground, and especially women and men of non European ancestry, contributed to the making and unmaking of empire through their sexuality, through their labor, and also through their political actions. Now, reconstituting the lives of these people, and especially those who lived in slavery, is obviously a challenging task because the vast majority of them were illiterate and they left us no firsthand narratives. And so we have to obviously rely on documents produced by biased elite white men, including missionaries, officials, colonists and merchants, many of whom were actual slave owners. And so in order to kind of address this challenge, I read archival evidence against the bias grain of white colonizers, to borrow an expression coined by Marissa Frances. And I also stitched Together a vast patchwork of historical fragments from a very broad range of archival and printed sources, including censuses, marriage and baptism records, official correspondence, a lot of legislation, several travel narratives, and most importantly, a lot of court testimonies given by enslaved people and notarial documents, including animation acts, wills, act of property sales and donations, and estate inventories.
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Lewis Waid
I was struck when reading the acknowledgments for your book by the generosity with which you credit the institutions and the people that have supported you throughout the journey of this book. Every history book has its own history. Could you perhaps tell us a little bit about the story behind your book and how it came to be?
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Melody Labotte
You're right. I'm grateful to so many people for their support throughout this long adventure. So my interest in French colonial history actually goes way back, and it is deeply personal because it begins with my own family history. And so, through my black mother, I'm actually a seventh generation descendant of an enslaved Afro Caribbean man named Alruz, who worked on a sugarcane plantation on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe in the late 18th century. But I also inherited another kind of colonial legacy from my white father, because he was a young conscript, an apple du contangent in the French army during the Algerian war of independence. And in Algeria, he witnessed a lot of things, including several killings. And he told me about his experience many times with a very unsettling detail. And so for years, those histories have left me with, let's say, a lot of questions. You know, how did the French become so deeply involved in the slave trade? How did they build an empire that would eventually shape the lives of more than 100 million people across the world? And so when I got to Cambridge, England, I knew that I wanted to study history. But an interesting twist was that I actually began with Tudor England. And so my MA dissertation was about Queen Elizabeth the First and the Armada. So not exactly French colonialism. But in 2009, I spent a year at King's College, London, and this is where I met David Todd and Richard Drayton, and they both converted me to French colonial history. It happened one evening at an Indian restaurant in London. I always remember that day. And so when I went back to Cambridge in 2010 to begin my PhD, I was looking for different places to work on. It was pretty obvious that I was going to work on Guadeloupe. Because of my own origins. I have always been fascinated by the history of Louisiana. I read Tom Sawyer as a child, and I just really loved those stories. And then Reunion Island Al Bourbon back In the days was also an interesting place to work on because of the diversity of the population that I just talked about. And then so I got the chance to work with truly extraordinary archivists and scholars in the French overseas archives in Aix en Provence, but also at the Library of Congress in Washington, on Reunion island, at Stanford and Harvard, and across the entire state of Louisiana. I ended up living two years in Louisiana. It was an amazing experience. I even spent time in Canberra as a fellow at the Australian National University. And those communities, they really supported me in so many ways while I was writing this book. You know, I'm very much a historian. I think you can tell from the book that I'm an archive rat. But you'll probably see the influence of a lot of different disciplines and fields in the book, especially Black studies, Black feminist studies and French studies. And that's because I got the chance to interact with many scholars in these fields, many of whom read the manuscript and offered very generous feedback along the way.
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Lewis Waid
So it sounds to me like the story of your book is as global as the history you are telling. Absolutely, yeah. So in the book you range from Louisiana to Senegambia, New France, Al Bourbon, Madagascar, India. I was struck in your conclusion by the way in which you try to draw. To try to draw inspiration from your actors, the actors you are studying. Yeah. As sources of inspiration. Could you maybe say a little bit about that?
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Melody Labotte
Yeah, so that's a very good question. I. So because I grew up in France and it was not always easy, I experienced racism in a way that was deeply damaging to my self esteem. When I was in France, and I mean, it was many years ago, I Left France almost 20 years ago now, and I felt it very difficult to find role models in France. And so I wanted to write a history that would be inspiring to people out there who might feel like I did 20 years ago before I moved to England. And so that's why the book is not just about officials and the racist policies and the discrimination. It's also an amazing story of resilience, of political action, of attempts to set limits to the expansion of French imperial power and coercion across those different places.
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Lewis Waid
So to round off our discussion, let's look briefly to the future. How do you plan to build on this book in your research going forwards?
- [24:31]
Melody Labotte
So while conducting my research on how sex, race and labor in the black diaspora, I became particularly interested in the social, cultural and economic experiences of unsafe people across the French colonies. And obviously my interest for slavery also goes back to my family history. And so this is really where I want to take my research in the future. So my second book will feature the first pan imperial study of the daily lives of the enslaved in the French Empire in the Anglo American historiography. So I will use interdisciplinary methodologies to write another history from below, but this time of the domestic, social and economic lives of enslaved people. That second book will feature a chapter about my own family history. And, you know, actually been working on this second book for quite some time now, so hopefully we'll probably come together faster than the first. So stay tuned.
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Lewis Waid
We look forward to a great deal. Before we end, is there anything else you would like our listeners to know about the book?
- [25:50]
Melody Labotte
I mean, this book was a labor of love and it took a decade for me to write this book. And it's the result of many years of research in the archives. And so I really hope that they will enjoy the granular aspect of the good of the book, that they will remember those stories, that they will remember those names. And I'm really glad that it's out there now. And yeah, I hope they enjoy it.
- [26:24]
Lewis Waid
Mel, it has been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
- [26:28]
Melody Labotte
Thank you so much for inviting me. It's my pleasure.
- [26:31]
Lewis Waid
I have been your host, Lewis Wade, and we have been discussing By Flesh and Toil how Sex, race and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire. Published by Harvard University Press. Until next time.