This study interrogates how the French empire was imagined in three literary representations of French colonialism the conquest of Tahiti and the established colonial systems in Martinique and in India. The study is the first in either English or French to demonstrate that representations of power relations as well as the broader discourses with which they were linked were as closely concerned with probing the similarities and differences of rival European colonial systems as they were with reinforcing their imagined superiority over the colonized and that such power relations should not be conceptualized as a dualistic categorization of colonizer versus colonized. In doing so it aims to go beyond examining the interaction between colonized and colonizer or between colonial centre and periphery and to interrogate instead the circulation of ideas and practices across different sites of European colonialism drawing attention to a historical complexity which has been neglected in the necessary race to recover voices previously occluded from academic analysis.