This history of the struggles to regenerate France's colonial empire in the eighteenth century reveals how political economists, colonial administrators and planters shaped the recalibration of empire in the Americas and Africa, unearthing connections between Ancien Regime colonial innovation and the French Revolution's republican imperial agenda.

Vichy's Double Bind advances a significant new interpretation of French collaboration during the Second World War. Arguing that the path to collaboration involved not merely Nazi Germany but Fascist Italy, it suggests that the Vichy French government was caught in a double bind, between the irreconcilable positions of the two Axis governments.

Casino gambling is central to understanding the cultural, social, and intellectual history of nineteenth-century Europe. Tracing the development of casino gambling across this period, this book connects that story to ideas about chance, luck, emotions, and psychology, and reveals how Europeans used gambling to understand their changing world.