Building the Devils Empire by Shannon Lee Dawdy - Literature review Example

Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans by Shannon Dawdy Building the Devil’s Empire by Shannon Lee Dawdy is an important work whichoffers the first comprehensive history of New Orleans’s early years, and the author deals with the town’s development from its origins in 1718 to its revolt against Spanish rule in 1768. In her book, Dawdy develops and uses a major concept called ‘rogue colonialism’ to explain the evolution and development of French Colonial Louisiana. This paper makes a reflective exploration of the concept to comprehend what Dawdy means by rogue colonialism and how she thinks it characterizes French Colonial Louisiana. Further, it also undertakes an exploration of the various dramatic personae with which the author begins each chapter in order to make out how each person’s experiences provide evidence of rogue colonialism in French Colonial Louisiana. Significantly, a profound understanding of the notion of rogue colonialism helps one in assessing whether French colonial Louisiana was a success or a failure and for whom. Therefore, this paper makes a profound analysis of the book Building the Devil’s Empire to realize how Dawdy develops and uses the concept of rogue colonialism to explain the evolution and development of French Colonial Louisiana. In her book Building the Devil’s Empire, Shannon Lee Dawdy offers a luminous and spirited reinterpretation of the emergence and development of French New Orleans and this book is important for the comprehensive history of New Orleans’s early years, which includes the town’s development from its origins in 1718 and its revolt against Spanish rule in 1768. Through this important work, Dawdy makes an essential contribution to the understanding of the history of the Americas and of the French Atlantic and she takes the readers into the daily life of the city to offer a convincing illustration of the history of French New Orleans. In her picaresque account of New Orleans’s wild youth, Dawdy offers compelling illustration of various characters which include strong-willed captives, thin-skinned nobles, sharp-tongued women, and carousing travelers. In the course of her book, Shannon Dawdy also attempts to reveal the global significance of the port city, by examining its role in the French Empire and the Caribbean. In support her arguments, Dawdy makes use of the example of rogue colonialism, where governments, outlaws, and capitalism become entangled. Significantly, the descriptions of New Orleans prompt the readers to re-evaluate the notions of how colonialism works and the concept of rogue colonialism is an important contribution to the understanding of colonialism. The author has been effective in presenting the French colonial New Orleans as what anthropologists call a ‘face to face’ community, meaning that permanent residents probably recognized each other on the street and could quickly place one another within family trees and social geographies. “It is a place where one can become reasonably intimate with the community through archives and artifacts. Its small scale makes historical ethnography feasible, giving us the means to imagine scenes of everyday life, peopled with a cast of familiar characters.” (Dawdy, 23) Therefore, it is important to realize that the book Building the Devil’s Empire by Shannon Lee Dawdy makes an essential contribution to the general understanding of colonialism and it has two fundamental aims. First, it offers a historical ethnography that makes out the characters, smells, struggles, and banter of the eighteenth century New Orleans community. Second, and more importantly, it is concerned with the nature of colonialism sand the theories concerning its strategies, technologies, and ideologies. According to the author, New Orleans is important for the general understanding of colonialism and development of Creole societies, because various undercurrents of colonialism became typical in New Orleans. In short, the author is concerned with a profound exploration of ‘tension of empires’ which operated in the French period and makes a series of claims about the nature of colonialism itself. One of the most important aspects of the various discussions in the book Building the Devil’s Empire is that Shannon Dawdy develops and uses the concept of rogue colonialism to explain the evolution and development of French Colonial Louisiana. According to the author, New Orleans contributes the understanding of colonialism in a particularly historical manner, and in a more global way. She maintains that New Orleans can be considered as Enlightenment experiment in which modern tools of colonialism, including urban planning, census-taking, natural histories, ethnographies, mapping, new criminalities, and the control of subordinates through sentiment, were under development. Louisiana’s very existence as an imperial project, the author suggests, is obligated to self interested entrepreneurs and it was founded by people of a culture of military privateers and coureurs de bois, whose livelihood depended upon the violation of imperial law. Here, the author suggests the idea of ‘rogue colonialism’ which was not unique to Louisiana and this concept can be comprehended in comparison with the concept of colony. Whereas colony is the territorial unit politically subsumed by an outside nation-state or imperial center, the political leaders of a rogue colony do not recognize this hierarchical relationship. Rogue originally meant ‘vagrant’ or an ‘independent beggar’, which was criminalized to mean ‘scoundrel’ or a deliberately dishonest person. “One finds rogue colonialism where rogues of either kind exert significant influence upon the moral, political, and economic life of the colony. Their influence is significant in the degree to which their identities and activities are viewed as licit, meaning socially acceptable. Rogues can be found both at the top of the colony’s order and at the bottom. Given the great social mobility possible in colonial situations such as French New Orleans, we must also watch for their movement through the ranks.” (Dawdy, 237) The concept of rogue colonialism has a significant scope in the understanding of the evolution and development of French Colonial Louisiana. Dawdy’s global argument is that colonialism frequently creates conditions that foster cultures of resistance as well as circuits of seditious power and contraband flow, which may be realized as rogue colonialism. These rogue forces bear a resemblance to organized crime syndicates in their organizational strength, political savvy, internal conflicts, far-flung networks, use of exemplary violence, and oligarchic tendencies. Rogue colonialism also refers to the influence of those individuals on the ground that pushed colonial frontiers in their own self-interest. An understanding of the role of rogue colonialism suggests how colonies were created as much by military entrepreneurs and piratical vagrants as by monarchs and ministers. “The idea of rogue colonialism provides a way of thinking about forms of agency beyond and beside those that follow the transcript of ‘domination and resistance’ between colonizers and the colonized. Improvised and ‘masterless’ forms of agency were crucial to the founding, making, and undoing of colonies.” (Dawdy, 20) Another important aspect of the book Building the Devil’s Empire by Shannon Lee Dawdy is that the author introduces various dramatic personae in the beginning of each chapter in order to reveal how each person’s experiences which provide evidence of rogue colonialism in French Colonial Louisiana. Thus, in the first chapter, the author introduces the experiences of Father Le Maire, who was one of Louisiana’s earliest intellectuals who spent fourteen years there. The author offers the example of Le Maire to indicate the concept of enlightenment and disorder which is very important in an understanding of rogue colonialism in French Colonial Louisiana. Similarly, Dawdy introduces a French military engineer named Adrien de Pauger, who is freshly disembarked at Mobile from his transatlantic journey and transferred his instruments, papers, and personal goods into a small, shallow draft boat. Here, the author is concerned with the concept of nature and planning as evidence of rogue colonialism in French Colonial Louisiana. In conclusion, Dawdy develops a very useful concept called rogue colonialism to explain the evolution and development of French Colonial Louisiana and it is a valuable concept in the understanding of colonialism in general. Work Cited Dawdy, Shannon Lee. Building the Devil’s Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2008. Read More