Thirteen essays test the assumption that French law travelled outward from Versailles as a finished thing and simply applied itself overseas. Nancy Christie, Michael Gauvreau and Matthew Gerber open by setting recent revisionist work on Bourbon absolutism, which found kings bargaining constantly with powerful local elites, against a colonial historiography still working mostly from ministerial correspondence. Their contributors go to judicial records instead: interdiction proceedings against the supposedly mad in Saint-Domingue, servants' suits in New France, disputes over the seigneurial corvee, the documentary traps facing people trying to prove they were free, and the archive Moreau de Saint-Mery assembled and shaped. What emerges is a legal order that was plural, unstable and usable by litigants of very unequal standing. The volume spans Canada, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean colonies from the late seventeenth century into the 1830s, and treats law as one social institution among many.