Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion.
New York: St. Martin's Press (Palgrave Macmillan), 1996.
Book Information: Google Books; Amazon.com.
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Author Information:
- Robert Aldrich (b. 1954), Wikipedia.
- Professor Robert Aldrich, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, The University of Sydney, Australia.
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Wikipedia Articles:
- French colonial empire, 1534–1980.
(After reading Aldrich's Greater France I feel obliged to warn the reader that this Wikipedia article treats many topics in a very abbreviated manner.) - Overseas France, France d'outre-mer, l'Outre-mer, les DOM-TOM.
- Copra, "dried coconut kernels from which coconut oil is expelled", noted by Aldrich as an export commodity from some French colonies.
- groundnut, Bambara groundnut, a legume from West Africa.
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Aldrich's Greater France is a very good introduction to the French overseas empire since 1830; however, it appears that it is currently out-of-print. Aldrich's Notes and Bibliography contain extensive references to the French literature so I am sure his book remains a useful guide for more serious students and readers of French. Some more recently published books (in English) on this topic include:
- Frederick Quinn. The French Overseas Empire. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers (Greenwood Publishing Group), 2000.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.] - Todd Shepard. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2006.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.] - Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery. Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858-1954. Translated by Ly Lan Dill-Klein. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.] - David Todd. A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
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