Just as a note: this is my understanding of Foucault's impact on history as an MA student, and my exposure to Foucault has been relatively recent and not all that great so others can feel free to correct me. You don't have to read it, you can skip to the end for the couple books that I will recommend.

According to Jacques Revel in writing his introduction Histories: French Constructions of the Past (detailing the development of the Annales school) writes how Foucault was utilized by historians as a way to bring themselves more into the theoretical debates going on among in the social sciences at the time with the ultimate goal of unifying social sciences with history at the head. In the early 70's or so, I believe most social scientists in sociology, anthropology, etc. adopted structuralism as a way of detaching themselves from the kind of "historical imperialism" that was occurring in France since the end of WW2. Foucault similarity to Annales historians made him especially attractive and thus his ideas were incorporated into their methodology (though Revel, Joyce, and others say it was really haphazardly incorporated without really understanding what Foucault was really about). When the Annales school spread to mainstream popularity in Britain and the US in the 90's (?), Foucault's ideas were taken along with it and underwent further evolution especially in Britain where they especially focused on governmentality, which sounds like what you're looking for. The notion of governmentality was especially impacted by the materiality turn in Britain. Where Foucault was interested in how individuals and states govern themselves, the British governmentality was also including how materials (pens, paper, office space) and culture (literacy as a both culture and a rudimentary "technology": influenced by Latour's ideas, bureaucracy, and by extension institutional culture) impacts how society is governed. Critique of governmentality say it is too top-down and too focused on how power only develops from the center and spreads out to the periphery (especially in colonial contexts).

All my point really is the books that utilize Foucaldian governmentality are not gonna be history books that traditional historical method; it's more a comparison of different social theories and how they can be used to interpret certain historical events in context. Anyways here's the list:

Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Garden of Versailles and Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Mudi

Richard Biernacki, Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914

Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East Indian Company

Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity

James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

If you're interested in a book that examines HOW Foucault's ideas work and their relationships to the writing of history, I'd suggest Mark Poster's [*Foucault, Marxism and History*](https://www.amazon.com/Foucault-Marxism-History-Production-Information/dp/0745600182). He argues that Foucault marked a fundamental shift in the writing of history and the construction of historical analysis and narrative because Foucault reoriented the focus away from the (Marxian) laboring subject, and toward the discourse, the ways of knowing and communicating that shape human experience and through which power flows. I don't recall his precise language, but the phrase that stuck with me was something like "The forces that govern us are not visible at the level of the subject." In other words, for Marx, and for so many historians before and since, if you wanted to understand change over time, you look at people: their experience as an "objective" thing, and their responses to those experiences.

So, in a Marxian account of historical change, you'd look at the material conditions of people in a society and then attach their actions to those material experiences. Say, for example, you study the condition of the working classes in Britain in the mid-19th century, and you find that they're terrible because their wages are low. When those same people develop class consciousness, organize into trade unions, have strikes, organize a Labour party, and so on, then you have an essentially Marxian, laboring-subject focused history. Foucault would argue, however, that because of the mutually constitutive nature of power and knowledge, we have to look not to the apparently objective experience of certain historical subjects, but rather to the discursive field that serves as the medium for communicating and effecting power. Power for Foucault is therefore diffuse, spread throughout society, and not visible in the actions of any single person or even necessarily in a single group.

Now, if you want to see this idea applied more broadly, let me suggest a couple, in different areas. A really important, well-known example of Foucauldian analysis is Ann Stoler's Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, in which the author examines colonial power and sex in Southeast Asia. The idea is to understand how the discussion of sexuality, race, and gender, by and through the colonial state, shape the way that power relationships are constituted.

Edward Said's Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism both deal with imperialism as a discursive construction.

A final example, right in line with Stoler and Said, would be Ann McClintock's Imperial Leather.