My dissertation explores the global dimensions of France’s engagement with the natural world during its transition to modernity. By integrating archival research and computational network and textual analyses, I highlight the critical role of diverse historical actors in constructing how modern people engage with nature.My dissertation examines why and how in the second half of the eighteenth century birds moved to the forefront of natural history and the broader cultural imaginary, as manifested in scientific journals, poems, newspapers, paintings, porcelain dishes, and collections exhibiting hundreds of specimens. It argues that this phenomenon emerged at the apogee of the high Enlightenment, after the Seven Years War, and waned with the collapse of the Empire in 1815. In this period of global transformation, a firm apprehension of nature in both its totality and minutiae seemed within reach. That birds traveled between localities and had relatives in remote parts of the globe resonated with contemporaries, who were trying to grapple with a globe that was becoming more tightly connected and a social world that was becoming increasingly mobile. Moreover, birds’ moderate size and variety promised what other organisms could not offer: the possibility of enabling comprehensive collection, preservation and classification on the one hand, and detailed description, on the other. This ambitious engagement with the expansive natural world ended with the disintegration of the Empire. Confronted with regional and colonial resistance, and overwhelmed by an influx of specimens, naturalists began to produce ornithological projects that were more modest in thematic and geographical scope. Moreover, as a new discipline within zoology, Ornithology became more rigidly defined and methodologically homogeneous. While nature has occupied a prominent place in scholarship on the Enlightenment and the nexus of science and empire, historians have paid scant attention to naturalist communities outside a few urban centers and to actors beyond renowned naturalists. This oversight has circumscribed our perception of how Europeans experienced nature in a moment of transition into modernity. My dissertation complicates the elite- and metropole-centered perspectives of historical change by utilizing archival materials and artifacts from 16 localities, along with computational textual and network analyses, to explore the connections among approximately 1,200 people and hundreds of specimens involved in the production of knowledge about birds.

Using the French philosopher Ernest Renan's dictum that the "nation's existence is ... a daily plebiscite" as an ironic point of departure, this dissertation examines the contours of oppositional political culture to the French annexation of the County of Nice and the Duchy of Savoy in 1860. Ceded by treaty to France by the northern Italian kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, these two mountainous border territories had long been culturally and geo-strategically in the French orbit. Unlike their counterparts in any other province of France, the inhabitants of the two territories were asked to approve or reject the annexation treaty, and thus their incorporation into France, in a plebiscite employing universal male suffrage. The 1860 annexation has traditionally been viewed as a rare example of an uncontroversial nineteenth-century territorial realignment, an instance where French strategic and diplomatic interests aligned perfectly with the national aspirations of the inhabitants.

In fact, the annexation was always more controversial than the virtually unanimous plebiscite results indicate. The archival record shows surprisingly strong and long-lived resistance to the settlement of 1860 in both territories. Cultural tensions between French administrators and the annexed populations exacerbated separatist sentiment as the gulf between the expectations of an easy transition and the far more complex reality of the enormous administrative transformation became increasingly manifest. Unsettled and antagonistic diplomatic relationships with Switzerland (which felt entitled to territorial compensations in Savoy) and Italy (where many nationalists resented having to give up Nice) contributed to French fears that these neighboring countries would try to subvert the annexation. French administrators consistently turned to the quasi-mythical notion of "Swiss agents" or "Italian subverters" to explain the resistance that they encountered to French rule. These tensions resulted in the emergence of anti-French movements, oriented in Savoy toward nearby Switzerland and in Nice toward the newly-unified Italy. The opposition in Savoy was predominantly political and republican in character. Attracted to Switzerland's decentralized government and political liberties, it grew stronger in the 1860's as opposition to the Second Empire increased. Niçois opposition, by contrast, maintained an essentially ethno-national-territorial agenda oriented towards Italy, and had great affinities to the irredentism of Italian nationalists after 1861.

The catastrophic Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 brought these movements to a head. Fears that Savoy and Nice might voluntarily detach themselves from the French state appeared very quickly after the Sedan disaster, culminating in street riots in Nice and the election of three separatist deputies to the National Assembly, and a movement in the northern Savoy in favor of inviting Switzerland to occupy and annex territory in the Haute-Savoie. In both provinces, separatism drew strength from the unresolved tensions of the annexation as well as from the uncertain political climate of France's Third Republic. As monarchists and republicans battled for control of the state, separatism became linked to the national political struggle. Initially this was most evident in Savoy, where the pro-Swiss separatist current in Savoy remained grounded in the area's precocious republicanism. In Nice separatism maintained its Italian dimension, but gradually became marginalized and discredited when separatist leaders became involved with the conservatives. The firm establishment of the Republic by 1880 thus, paradoxically, helped to neutralize both separatist currents and finally cemented the annexation that had occurred two decades earlier.

The rapid development of commercial capitalism in the eighteenth century transformed political, social and cultural structures of life in early modern France and its colonies. It wove together an increasingly global world by speeding goods and people across oceans. This dissertation examines the social consequences of capitalist deterritorialization in the first French Empire. The ship stands as a key technology that propelled the emergence of France as a commercial power in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the ocean is most often represented as the gap between points on sweeping maps that trace the travel of sugar, indigo, calicos and captive people. For historians of the slave trade, the Middle Passage has often held a paradoxical status, an origin point for diasporic communities amid an abyss of human loss. In contrast, maritime historians have illuminated the ship as a site of traditional workshop relations, or as a nursery anti-capitalist and anti-state radicalism. This dissertation brings new archival material to historiographic debates about commerce, labor, and slavery to reassess these visions of oceanic social worlds. It exposes the ship as a central site of capitalist spatial and social formation in the eighteenth century, while challenging conceptualizations of capitalist space as an untextured web of connection. By placing Africans at the forefront of the study, it reveals deep continuities in the commodification of all social bonds at sea. African captives, forced into the Middle Passage, composed the majority of people on these long-distance voyages, and their encounter with capitalism exposes in the barest terms the aspirations of early modern capitalists and the gravitational pull of the market, as it subsumed and redefined social bonds. This close look at capitalist social formation at sea reveals a world formed through the fusion of human and economic bonds and propelled by the threat of social and physical annihilation.

The first chapters illuminate the processes by which women, men and children ordered their social worlds at sea. Addressing the captives held aboard ship in chapter one, and crewmen and officers in chapter two, this section discusses rites, labor and trade as practices of social ordering aboard ship. These chapters reveal the social meanings that adhered to claims of economic possession and the processes by which people at sea forged bonds of belonging. Childbirth and the accompanying rites, as well as breastfeeding and childcare, surface as significant social engines among women aboard slaving ships, whereas the unusual isolation of men, captive and free, forced alternative strategies to secure care and life-giving necessities. The final two chapters turn to points of contact between social groups. In chapter three, I trace the rise of the market as a force of social ordering and the falling away of religion and other institutions and practices as avenues of solidarity at sea. My final chapter takes as its starting point the predominance of death at sea and the problem of ordering the dead in oceanic graves. It demonstrates that death grounded this seaborne social world, even as it ravaged communities aboard ship.

This dissertation seeks to contribute to the history of internationalism through an examination of the early nineteenth century French peace movement. It argues that the French movement contributed to the international peace movement both in theory and practice, by drawing on the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment to make peace the subject of organized activism.

The early nineteenth century international peace movement is seen as the work of Dissenting sects in Britain and America, with the assistance of Free Traders like Richard Cobden. The French peace advocates' ideological roots, in contrast, can be found in the Enlightenment - in the peace thinking of the philosophes, but also in debates on economy, culture, religion, politics, etc. They drew upon the work of particular authors like Jean-Baptiste Say, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, but above all continued general Enlightenment notions like historical progress and human perfectability. This intellectual heritage helped French peace advocates to imagine a distinct model of international cooperation, one in which political, cultural and economic borders remained in flux. It also gave them the tools to denounce colonialism - all while attempting to maintain forms of soft power for French `civilization'.

French peace advocates were more restricted than American and British pacifists in their forms of activism, but they also published a wide range of materials on peace, developed arguments for peace within associations, and participated in and promoted the international congresses. Through these practices, French peace advocates contributed to the development of civil society, nationally and internationally. A study of their movement shows how and why this transition from philosophy to organized action became possible.

Often dismissed as utopian, the history of the early peace movement can help us to better understand the development of French, European and international history. Like many groups in the early nineteenth century, French peace advocates were deeply optimistic about their program and their potential agency. However, this seemingly utopian program continues to have considerable resonance today, in contemporary international institutions as well as in ongoing debates about democracy and political change.