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The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime. By james e. mcclellan iii and françois regourd. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2011. 696 pp. $102.00 (cloth).
In the same years that world history emerged as a field, the history of science took what Londa Schiebinger has termed a "colonial turn," exploring the relationship between science and the growth of European empires.1 The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime, by James E. McClelland III and François Regourd, makes a major contribution to this literature by detailing the exact mechanisms through which science and European colonial expansion worked together, reinforcing and aiding one another, in the eighteenth-century French Empire. McClelland and Regourd argue that France "represents the perfect case" (p. 481) for examining the interactions between science and colonialism in this period because it was a leading, if not the leading, European colonial power in the eighteenth century and because of its "institutionalized and statesubsidized" science (p. 14). More than other contemporary European powers, France represented the "marriage" of political power and state authority with the "intellectual and moral authority of science and natural philosophy" (p. 13).
The authors have dubbed the individuals and institutions that created this partnership "the Colonial Machine," which they define as "a coordinated whole of organized and institutionalized French science and medicine [. . .] turned toward colonial ends" (p. 15). They caution, however, that the Colonial Machine was never an "abstract entity," but a "collective unity" that "existed only in action" (p. 21 ). Not only were science and colonial efforts "deeply intertwined," as has long...