To Spawn a Competent Empire: French Architectural Imagery in Early Colonial Senegambia and New Orleans

This article engages the architectural imagery that French emissaries produced in Senegambia and New Orleans in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I reveal how French colonizers represented themselves and their country as skillfully able to exploit non-European landscapes. In Senegambia, colonizers depicted their purportedly efficient usage of African house types. In New Orleans, images showcased how French functionaries could employ native woods to craft necessary buildings. This paper explores the origins of modern imperialism. Imagery registered how colonial travelers competently spawned a multicultural France that came to define the nation’s global identity long before the French Revolution.