This book proposes the first expansive investigation of the emergence of racial idioms and hierarchies in the French Atlantic world from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Drawing upon a wide variety of colonial and metropolitan sources, the author traces the ways in which early modern French metropolitan conceptualizations of social and religious order were deployed, challenged, and transformed to create new and racialized identities in the varied and evolving contexts of the French colonization of North America, the Antilles, Guiana, and West Africa. Ultimately, this study shows how these colonial developments contributed to the formulation of new understandings of the connection between race and national identity in both colonial and metropolitan settings during the decades leading up to the French and Haitian Revolutions.