Response by David Todd (King’s College London)

 

Thank you very much to Alexia Yates for her kind and thoughtful introduction. Thank you also to all those (virtually) present, it’s a great pleasure to see you. And thanks a lot to the Joint Center for History and Economics for organizing this launch. It would take me too long to mention all the debts I accumulated while working on this project. But I want to mention one, to the regretted Christopher Bayly, an extraordinarily inspiring scholar and generous individual, because it was a conversation with him that gave me the idea – and the confidence – to undertake this project.

I can’t possibly respond to all of Alexia’s insightful questions. Let me select those I feel able to answer – and conveniently forget about the others. I understand why she isn’t completely comfortable with the formal vs informal dichotomy. Imperial reality was often murkier than either one or the other. But ideal types can still be useful. I only use the dichotomy to identify the informal aspects of French imperial power, because I think they have been neglected. The book is (deliberately) not a comprehensive account of French imperialism in the nineteenth century.

As for the book’s abruptness on the shift from informal to formal in the early decades of the Third Republic, the problem, in my view, is rather that I give too many disparate explanations: domestic, with the impact of the Commune on the Parisian luxury complex, and the assertion of a more virtuous republican politico-economic culture; and global, with the intensification of foreign economic competition, and the accentuation of territorial expansionism by all imperial powers. My sense is that the change had multiple causes. But if I were forced to choose, I would probably point to global changing conditions – especially a worldwide reappraisal of the benefits of territoriality – as the main factor, and view republican colonialism as the French version of this broader trend.

However, in my response, I would rather double down on the very generous comments that Alexia just made. So, to further reassure myself that this is a useful book, let me try and highlight what I think are its main contributions: to the history of France; to the history of empires; and to the history of economic life.

 

Velvet Imperialism and the History of France

First, then, the book is much more about the history of France than I anticipated when I started researching it. But what it says about nineteenth-century France is the product of a detour through French engagement with the world, and of my own detour – as a native Frenchman, who emigrated to Britain twenty years ago – via Anglophone imperial historiography. This double detour has helped me consider nineteenth-century France from the outside and the result is different from the Whiggish – or rather, in a French context, Republican – narrative of nineteenth-century France as the country of 1789 and of the Third Republic as the natural, inevitable end point of that history.

What I try to suggest in the book is that if France was influential in the making of new imperial ideologies and the unfolding of nineteenth-century globalization, it was mostly for opposite reasons. What many foreign contemporaries admired about France was precisely the ingenuity it deployed in taming the revolutionary threat, at least for most of the period 1800 to 1880. And it was this “counter-revolutionary modernity” which made French commodities, French capital, French culture – including new French ideas about a global racial or civilizational division of labour – and collaboration with France appealing to conservatives in Europe, the Americas or the Middle East, and which facilitated French informal expansion.

 

Velvet imperialism and the history of empires

Second, I hope the book brings something new to the history of modern European empires. That empire does not exclusively consist in territorial annexations is something most historians recognise. But they often leave it at that, and go on to focus on the formal dimension – perhaps because it is more visible on maps, and easier to study thanks to more abundant archival records. Instead, the book pursues several leads – using the instruments of intellectual history, economic history and legal history – to suggest that historians can do more than posit the existence of the informal and can even study in some detail the part of the imperial iceberg that was under the water line – to echo the original image invoked by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher in their article “The imperialism of free trade”.
 
I would be thrilled if this could contribute to a re-evaluation of the informal dimension of empire in general, beyond the French case and in a comparative perspective. To give but one example, in the wake of the 2003 Iraq war, a flurry of books drew parallels between the British and American empires, and cast the latter as the successor of the former. Regardless of their ideological flavour, these comparisons often relied on a dubious culturalist assumption of “Anglo” filiation, as if the United States was the novel incarnation of what the French would decry as un empire anglo-saxon.

Due to the importance of the informal dimension of American imperialism, I would argue that a comparison with the French informal empire of the nineteenth century – with how France used culture, commodities, capital and legal norms to deploy imperial power and thwart revolutionary threats against liberal capitalism – is likely to be more instructive. The Velvet Empire, in an age of limited bourgeois consumption, prefigures Victoria de Grazia’s American “Irresistible Empire” of mass consumption better than, say, the Indian Raj of the Victorians. But perhaps I am merely being envious of how well Anglo-American imperial comparisons have been selling.

 

Velvet imperialism and the history of economic life

Third, and finally, I hope the book brings something to the new, emerging history of economic life. It takes seriously several old and new attempts to rethink industrial modernity, which have in common a rejection of the “big factory” fetishism of a certain strand of economic history, and it attempts to put these ideas into practice. The book has therefore little to say about cotton spindles and coal output. Instead, it highlights other important contributions of the French and French imperial experience to the emergence of what we think of as modern capitalism.

For instance, the book reappraises the significance of luxury as a French specialization that enhanced consumer desire, but on a more global scale than in the early modern period. It revisits the old controversy on nineteenth-century French economic growth to suggest that it was complementary with, and not only alternative to, the British model of development. And it underlines the importance of immaterial aspects of economic life, to which (apart from high finance) traditional economic history has devoted little attention. In this period and especially in post-revolutionary France, a wide range of services also experienced tremendous economic change: legal services, advertising, prostitution, restauration, tourism, etc. Alexia is right that the book could have said more about assetization, or the commoditization of investment itself, as a culmination of that process. But I’m glad I didn’t try, because I know her own ongoing work will dissect this aspect of nineteenth-century French economic life much more compellingly than I could have done.

I mostly discuss these features of the French imperial economy in my favourite chapter, “Champagne capitalism”. The title is not only a pun, because the extraordinary growth of the champagne industry is an outstanding example of the dynamics (and limits) of mid-nineteenth-century French economics: a mediocre wine was reinvented as an indispensable marker of social success, thanks to a combination of new technologies and savvy marketing; and it was passed off as quintessentially French, despite the crucial role of German entrepreneurs and British, American and Russian consumers in this transformation. Despite its French label, champagne is better construed as a global imperial drink, favoured not only by French courtiers, but also City Bankers, Anglo-Indian colonial masters, and American slave plantation owners.

Of course, I’m also mentioning this example as a pretext to open a bottle of (mediocre) champagne in front of my screen and [after laborious opening of the bottle] raise a toast to thank all my friends and colleagues, present and absent, for their support over the years.

Before the wine makes me tipsy, let me conclude by stressing what I think the book’s various contributions have in common. For understandable reasons, historians of modern France, of modern empires, and of industrialization have tended to focus on the most visible aspects of their subject: republicanism, formal colonies, and large factories. By contrast, the book is an attempt to uncover the significance of aspects that are harder to see, and sometimes unpleasant to look at: the informal, the immaterial, and the counter-revolutionary. The results aren’t always neat or spectacular, because the evidence is widely dispersed and often I could only work with clues. But I hope they’ll persuade you that these neglected aspects were an important part of French, imperial and economic historical reality, and worthy of further study.