France in the Early Modern World 1300-1790

Exploring the impact French history has had on world history, this book unpacks the events and their significance from the Black Death to the beginning of the French Revolution, as well as how climate change, global trade, and epidemic disease have impacted France.

During the colonial period, the French came to define themselves as a nation by contrasting themselves with outsiders, including European rivals, the people they colonized, and the Africans they enslaved. They also defined themselves as a nation against insiders, people who were not accepted as French, such as people of Jewish and Protestant faith, as well as longtime residents of foreign origin. Classic topics of French history, the growth of the state, the Wars of Religion, Louis XIV’s monarchy, the Enlightenment, and the origins of the French Revolution, appear in a new light when understood in the context of world historical developments and the way in which the French defined themselves through inclusion and exclusion.

France in the Early Modern World 1300–1790 is essential reading for students of early modern French and European history and for historians for whom it offers a model for examining the history of one country within a world history context.