New Books In European Studies

In Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard University Press, 2012), historian Miranda Spieler tells of the transformation of a slave plantation colony into a destination for metropolitan convicts in the eight decades following the French Revolution. Unlike the better-known case of British Australia, French Guiana failed to turn from penal colony to economically viable territory and today remains a sparsely populated overseas department of France. The cover photograph of a forested riverbank shrouded in mist evokes the continual disappearance of  human settlement in Guiana. Spieler approaches this erasure not as a failure of French colonial policy, but rather as an expression and product of its design. Her book is a marvelous legal history that shows how the laws of empire shaped a colonial topography, relocated its inhabitants and played a decisive part in their ongoing destruction. In understanding laws and penal colonies as sites of experimentation, where new methods of subjugation and ne