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their lands traded to England under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 in return for trading concessions in India. They were subsequently scattered along the coast, especially in Maine and the mouths of the Mississippi (where they became known as ‘Cajuns’), some in the Antilles and many back to the maritime provinces. Wherever they went, French-speaking communities sprang up, at least for a time.

* This can hardly have been a fundamental cause, since two decades later it was French naval power which crucially denied the British access to America when they were trying to hold on to their own colonies.

† The French had the satisfaction of providing Versailles as the site for the 1783 conference that divested Britain of its American colonies, just twenty years after the Paris conference when the British had taken Nouvelle-France from them.

§ These figures are drawn from a French source, Leclerc (2001,

* Cayenne was founded in 1643 and with Caribbean sugar aplenty had been part of Colbert’s plans for systematic colonisation. It was briefly used after the French Revolution as a place of exile for political prisoners (1794-1805). It never recovered economically from France’s abolition of slavery in 1848, and thereafter was famous mainly for its prison camp, Devil’s Island, in operation from 1852 to 1946.

† By a happy coincidence, during the reign of Napoleon III, 1852-70, the regime was even known as le second Empire.

* The Belgians, relying much more on foreign expertise to run their empire, also made less use of French as a pervasive language of administration. As in the British colonies, there was widespread use of any pre-existing lingua franca, notably Swahili and Lingala.

* Article 2 of the constitution: ’la langue de la République est le français’. This is then given effect by the law of 4 August 1994, ’la langue de l’ enseignement est le français’ (implemented in article L. 121-3 of the Code de l’Éducation).

† In our Romanisation of Russian, y has the value of English y in yet (often attached as a superscript to a consonant, showing that it is palatalised); ï represents a vowel not known in standard English: it is like the vowel i with the body of the tongue drawn back, which can be heard for instance in the Scottish pronunciation of the word dirk; ë, as in Cyrillic spelling, is pronounced yo as in ‘yob’. The acute accent, ’, marks a heavy stress, and o when it is not stressed sounds more like a. In older Russian, the letter is transcribed ė, since it seems to have represented a more closed e sound, like E in the local pronunciation of ‘Edinburgh’, or é in French été.

* The name is a Latinisation of Rusy, first heard of in the ninth century. Its origins are obscure (and discussed in Franklin and Shepard 1996: 27-32). But the Finnish name for Swedes is Ruotsi (perhaps originally meaning ‘oarsmen’); and the first recorded use of the term (as Rhōs, through Greek) is the Bertinian Annals’ account of a visit to a Frankish court in 839, of ‘certain men who said they were called Rhos, and that their king, known as chacanus [i.e. khagan - a Turkic title!] had despatched them… The Emperor [Louis—he of the Strasburg Oaths; see Chapter 8]… discovered that they were Swedes by origin.’ But a contemporary source, the Arabic Book of Routes and Kingdoms (c.846), tells us: ‘The Rūs are a tribe of Slavs. They bring furs of beavers and black foxes…’ (Milner-Gulland 1997: 53-5). There is also a small river called the Rosy, which flows into the Dnieper just south of Kiev.

* The Russian for Orthodox, pravoslavnïi, is a loan translation from the Greek. But tellingly, this word could as well be analysed to mean ‘truly Slav’ or indeed ‘rightly glorious’.

† Barraclough (1978: 209, 230). In the early twentieth century there were substantial flows into Turkestan too, sometimes provoking large-scale departures