• Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America–A Review

    Gregory Kennedy Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (Cambridge University Press, 2018). This ambitious book considers “the ways in which Europeans and their Euro-American descendants remade New World space as they laid claim to the continent’s resources, extended the reach of empire and established polities and jurisdictions… Continue Reading

  • Reply to Benoît Grenier and Alain Laberge

    Allan Greer I am grateful to Benoît Grenier and Alain Laberge for having taken the trouble to read my book and comment on my short polemic, “There was no Seigneurial System.” Indeed, I’m doubly grateful since I relied heavily on the extensive and rigorous research of these two historians in preparing Property and Dispossession. Why… Continue Reading

  • There was no Seigneurial System

    Allan Greer From elementary school books to encyclopedia entries to scholarly treatises, no work on New France is complete without a section on the “seigneurial system,” a phenomenon that supposedly shaped the agrarian society of this colony and set it apart from other colonial settlements.[1] Imposed upon Canada by absolutist France, so the story goes,… Continue Reading