It is a real-life story reminiscent of “The Man Who Would Be King”(1888), Rudyard Kipling’s tale of two ne’er-do-well soldiers of the Raj, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, who set out to conquer the realm of Kafiristan. In 1656 the French soldier Jacques Le Vacher de la Case arrived in a small French fort at the southern tip of Madagascar. Within a few months he learned the Malagasy language and befriended a local king, Dian Rassisate, who gave him command of an army of 15,000 indigenous troops. He quickly defeated two of the king’s rivals, personally killing both—in one case in single combat, armed only with a shield and a type of spear called an assegai. He married Dian Rassisate’s daughter and at his father-in-law’s death became king of the valley of Ambolo. The local population allegedly treated him “like a god.” He proposed using his army to conquer all of Madagascar for France. But in 1671, before he could start the campaign, he fell ill and died. The French colonial official René de la Blanchère, writing in 1884 (and from whom I’ve taken some of these details), called him “an example of what a daring and intelligent European can accomplish, even alone amidst barbarians, with no resource other than his courage.”

Times change. A novelist rewriting Kipling’s story today would most likely present his characters not as lovable rogues but as homicidal maniacs and rapists. Similarly, historians no longer treat figures like Le Vacher de la Case as brave heroes who served as proof of European superiority and justified the colonization that followed their exploits. In most academic histories of European imperialism written in this century, the Europeans are the barbarians, killing and raping and looting on an unprecedented scale. In By Flesh and Toil, Mélanie Lamotte does not dissent from this view, writing that “the French empire was rooted in extreme physical violence, and in particular sexual violence, which helped subjugate overseas populations.”

But as Lamotte also recognizes in her excellent book, a focus on the imperialists eclipses the histories of the peoples whom they subdued. And these peoples were not only victims. Especially in the early years of imperialism, the small numbers of Europeans arriving in North America and in areas we now call the Global South could have achieved nothing without indigenous alliances and collaborators, even taking into account their superior weaponry. Hernán Cortés and his few hundred Spanish soldiers did not, despite the legend, by themselves conquer the Aztec Empire, whose population numbered in the millions. The Aztecs’ Tlaxcalan enemies conquered it, in alliance with Cortés. Le Vacher de la Case similarly could have done nothing in Madagascar without Dian Rassisate’s army. One of Kipling’s characters sums up the basic approach:

We shall go to those parts and say to any King we find—“D’ you want to vanquish your foes?” and we will show him how to drill men; for that we know better than anything else. Then we will subvert that King and seize his Throne.

In keeping with the turn away from the imperialists, Lamotte’s book examines early European empire building from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated in the process—some willingly, many not. Her particular focus is on the French Empire of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and on the women who served men like Le Vacher de la Case as sexual partners (and often as victims) but also as spouses, guides, translators, business partners, political allies, and much more. The book is packed with fascinating material hard won from the archives. At the same time, it illuminates the considerable obstacles that historians face in trying to learn about indigenous and enslaved people primarily through records left by Europeans who knew and understood very little about them.

Lamotte recognizes this problem. She has consulted an impressive range of documents and uses various creative strategies to squeeze as much out of them as possible. But the challenge is all the greater given her desire to incorporate many different far-flung colonies into her study, including Canada, Louisiana, various Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands, Senegambia, Madagascar, and India. (She downplays Canada because of the volume of previous scholarship on the subject, a strategy more befitting a doctoral dissertation than an ambitious book.) One of her arguments is that “a coherent body of racial policies” gradually emerged throughout France’s overseas possessions. In other words, the record keepers themselves increasingly collapsed women and men from wildly different cultures into the single category of racial other. The documents often tell more than their authors realized, but they still have very real limits. Lamotte’s book is a classic demonstration of what projects of this sort, aimed at reversing “racialized and gendered forgetting,” as the historian Karen Marrero has called it, both can and cannot reveal.

The early modern French Empire offers relatively fertile ground for studies like this, because it depended on local alliances and collaboration more than any of its European competitors. Very few people left seventeenth-century or eighteenth-century France with the intention of settling permanently overseas. They mostly wanted to make money and take it home. The country had no equivalent to the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England. As late as 1763 France’s North American possessions, although theoretically covering almost a quarter of the continent, had a European population of only 70,000, compared with more than 1.5 million in Britain’s thirteen colonies. Beyond a few small zones of dense settlement in the Saint Lawrence River valley, along the Gulf Coast and the lower Mississippi, and in a handful of islands in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, France’s “empire” consisted principally of scattered small towns, forts, and trading posts surrounded by much larger indigenous populations. It needed their help.

These colonial possessions also had a tremendous gender imbalance. France’s seventeenth-century outpost in Madagascar existed for thirty years, during which time some four thousand French men arrived there but only sixteen French women (most of whom, moreover, soon died of infectious disease). In its Canadian colony, the government addressed the issue by recruiting several hundred eligible young French women (the “king’s daughters”) as wives for the male colonists. Their French Canadian descendants today number well over four million. But everywhere in the empire, French men also sought out indigenous or enslaved women to serve their sexual needs. In many cases they relied on violence and coercion. In others, as in that of Le Vacher de la Case, they married, which provided them with useful alliances and, in some cases, considerable wealth. Their mixed-race descendants long made up an important segment of the population in most French colonies, and after generations of intermarriage, some gained official recognition as white. In 1789 perhaps three quarters of the “white” population of Île Bourbon (an island about 550 miles east of Madagascar today known as the French département Réunion) had significant non-European ancestry.

Official French attitudes toward these unions lurched wildly back and forth. At some moments they were encouraged as a means of extending French influence, while at others they were feared as corrupting. In 1633 the founder of Quebec, Samuel de Champlain, told the Innu people that “our young men will marry your daughters and we shall be one people.” As late as 1667 King Louis XIV’s chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, was instructing his Canadian officials to encourage intermarriage between French and Native Americans, “so that after a time, under the same law and master, they shall become only one people and one blood.”

But these statements rested on the assumption that Native Americans would convert to Catholicism and adopt a European lifestyle. By the late seventeenth century, it had become clear that the desired transformation was failing to materialize. Worse, male French settlers were abandoning the colony, gaining adoption into indigenous tribes, and taking on an indigenous way of life. French officials then banned travel by settlers outside the Saint Lawrence River valley and tried to limit contact with Native Americans to those who lived on reservations under the close supervision of Catholic clergy. In Madagascar in 1664, the French Company of the East Indies gave French men permission to marry “women of the country,” in the hope of eventually forming “only one people out of the two nations.” It canceled the ordinance the very next day, citing fears of the indigenous women’s excessive “lustfulness” and the venereal diseases they allegedly carried.

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French Empire also came to depend ever more greatly on African slavery. Even on small Île Bourbon, the proportion of the population in slavery rose from 46 percent in 1713 to 82 percent by 1731. By 1789 France’s three Caribbean possessions of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-Domingue (today Haiti) held almost as many people of African descent in bondage as the entire United States. Conditions were infernal, especially on the Caribbean sugar plantations, where overseers often forced enslaved laborers to spend fifteen hours a day or more engaged in the brutal work of cutting and hauling cane and processing it in dangerous protoindustrial facilities. The owners had calculated that it made economic sense to work the enslaved to death and then replace them, so the average lifespan of new arrivals from Africa was less than a decade. Enslaved women served the French not only as sexual victims but also as providers of future labor, by bearing children who would by law (at least after 1674) inherit their mothers’ enslaved status. In at least some cases, however, French men freed female slaves and married them. In 1669 the governor of Guadeloupe commented laconically that “there [were] many more men and boys than girls of marriageable age, which is why…some masters have married their négresses.”

The French obviously benefited from all the forms of interaction they had with indigenous and enslaved women. But the women could also benefit, and here is where the limits of the source material can pose the greatest challenge. Sometimes Lamotte has been fortunate. In the case of Madagascar, for instance, she can draw on lengthy descriptions of the island, its people, and their customs by French officials, including a 471-page book written by the commander of the French garrison as a guide to future colonization. She has also benefited from the work of the late Pier Larson, a brilliant historian of Madagascar who grew up there as the son of missionaries, spoke the Malagasy language fluently, and skillfully read the seventeenth-century evidence in light of later ethnographic observations. She can therefore note, citing him, that Malagasy women faced a gender imbalance of their own because of the endemic warfare that reduced the adult male population. A Christian marriage with a Frenchman could also mean avoiding polygamous marriages, in which, according to the French commander, wives often referred to one another as “enemies.” And it could bring “security, food, foreign goods and connections.” But even here, Lamotte can speak only of what the women “might have” wanted, because their voices—and even their names—do not appear in the sources.

Sources that do provide names can be frustratingly ambiguous. Lamotte devotes a short passage to a seventeenth-century Senegambian woman known as Senhora (Madame) Belinguere, whom she describes as a “businesswoman” who had grown rich from Atlantic commerce—including, presumably, in slaves. Drawing on accounts written by two officials of a French trading company, she describes Belinguere’s luxurious home and clothing, including a shirt studded with gold buttons and topped with a satin corset. The accounts themselves describe her as an important intermediary between Europeans and African rulers, a canny broker of information, and a guarantor of credit. But they also call her a “courtesan” who owed much of her influence to sexual relationships, both with Europeans and with a local king. One of them called her home a “dangerous place.” How had she gained her position? How much independence did she enjoy? How common was it for women to possess the sort of influence and the European material goods that she did? The sources do not say.

When it comes to enslaved women, the sources can be almost entirely opaque, revealing nothing about where they came from, how they understood their condition, or what opportunities they might have had to improve it. Lamotte tells the story of an enslaved Black woman in Louisiana in the 1740s named Marianne. Her owner, who manufactured pitch and tar, freed both her and her two sons, described in the sources as “mulattoes,” before his death. His neighbor, a French cooper, left all his possessions to the same boys when he died in 1745. “Were these two white men Marianne’s lovers, or was she pressured into living in concubinage with them?” Lamotte asks. Were they the boys’ fathers? “We will never know for sure.” She argues that since the boys presumably helped the owner in his business, the case shows how interracial sex helped supply the fledgling French colonies with much-needed labor. The point is well taken, but the people themselves remain only spectral presences in the archive.

Sexual relations between whites and enslaved women are a particularly difficult subject to investigate. In some cases, the French authorities tried to prevent all interracial sex, either out of a concern for public morality or to protect a slave owner’s “property” from abuse that might hurt its value as labor. In 1729 on Île Bourbon and Île de France (now Mauritius), the authorities issued a declaration that suggested French soldiers frequently raped enslaved women:

We must ensure that no soldier will abduct any négresse, that all the négresses have cabins where they can lock themselves while their husbands are away, and which are kept separate from the soldiers’ cabins.

In some cases, interracial relationships can be inferred only from census documents. The New Orleans census of 1732 listed just six “mulattoes,” but between 1744 and 1759, 184 more appeared, at a time when the city’s entire white population remained about one thousand.

Did some enslaved women willingly sleep with white men? Did Marianne? Many historians argue that the violence and coercion of the slave system made the very concept of slave “agency” in such situations absurd. Lamotte gingerly proposes “the possibility that some of these women who improved their conditions may have done so as a result of their own strategic actions.” But the fact remains that we know almost nothing about the relationships in question. In most cases, only acts of manumission for women and their children hint at relationships that went beyond brute force. But even then, while the men presumably felt some sort of affection, did the women share it? Despite Lamotte’s longing to illuminate their experiences, their attitudes and emotions remain beyond her grasp.

Lamotte has done a remarkable job of historical reconstruction, bringing together the work of other scholars (inevitable, in a project this wide-ranging) with her own impressive archival sleuthing. She cites the influential scholar Saidiya Hartman favorably but resists imitating her controversial practice of “critical fabulation,” which involves countering archival silences with informed but fictional speculation. And her argument about the extent to which the early French Empire depended on indigenous and enslaved people is entirely convincing.

Lamotte does not, however, note the ironic fact that the early French Empire’s dependence on non-European people was also a principal source of its undoing. By the early nineteenth century this empire had almost entirely disappeared, and one major reason was the simple paucity of overseas French population. In Madagascar, for example, the French garrison never numbered more than a few hundred. In 1674, three years after Jacques Le Vacher de la Case’s death, a local ruler attacked it, killing most of its members and bringing the brief colonial experiment to an end. (Full-scale French colonization did not take place until more than two hundred years later.) The British conquered French Canada during the Seven Years’ War of 1756–1763, in part thanks to the huge imbalance of population between the two countries’ North American colonies. In Saint-Domingue (Haiti), where enslaved Blacks outnumbered whites by well over twelve to one, the enormous slave revolt of 1791 set in motion a revolutionary process that led to the expulsion of the French and the creation of an independent Black state. Napoleon signed away the Louisiana Territory and its sparse French population without much regret in 1803. At that point, little was left of colonial France beyond a few small islands, forts, and trading posts. Only in 1830 did the country begin to rebuild an overseas empire, and only in Algeria did a large French settler population develop. (Even today, long after decolonization, France retains a considerable presence overseas, including five populous départements and several other territories.)

Kipling’s heroes failed as well, of course, victims of their own hubris and ignorance. (Kipling was never as simplistic an imperialist as many people think.) The early history of European empires did prove that a relative handful of Europeans, given the right allies and the right conjunction of forces, could conquer vast territories for themselves and their countries. But as the histories of the Americas and Oceania demonstrate all too well, in the long run the only surefire way for European populations to maintain dominance has been to outnumber non-Europeans—by whatever means necessary.