Lawless Empire

Abstract This chapter explores the social, economic, and political relations that both constituted and circumscribed the emerging French empire of the early eighteenth century. Beginning in the era of John Law’s Mississippi Company (1716–1720), which sought to reorganize French finances and reorient the political loyalties of French subjects around paper currency backed by Louis XV’s monarchy, it examines French attempts to transform Indigenous and colonizer economies from the kingdoms of Galam