By Flesh and Toil: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Mélanie Lamotte

On this episode of the In Theory podcast, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Mélanie Lamotte about her recent book "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (2026). Lamotte's work presents a globe-spanning account of how a shared set of racially based policies wedded together various French colonies and outposts in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In turn, Lamotte responds to questions about composing a history at such a transoceanic scale, reading against the archival grain to uncover the voices of the enslaved and free people of color who struggled against this emergent legal order, and reckoning with what these struggles mean for our understanding of the history of rights and revolution in this period.