[This is the third essay of the Borealia series on Cartography and Empire–on the many ways maps were employed in the contested imperial spaces of early modern North America.] Lauren Beck The Geographic Names Board of Canada (GNBC) provides scholars with a database of place names that allows users to look up the location of a place name,… Continue Reading
Latest in: New France
-
-
Benoît Grenier and Alain Laberge Following the release of Allan Greer’s latest book,[1] a colossal work of comparative history that we would like to salute from the outset, our distinguished colleague from McGill University has declared the inexistence of the seigneurial “system” (a declaration more pronounced in the original English version of his text[2]). Over… Continue Reading
-
Çà et là, l’historiographie a rappelé le rôle singulier de la cartographie pratiquée dans un contexte colonial : offrir des connaissances géographiques aux dirigeants qui souhaitent asseoir leur emprise sur un territoire étranger. Les cartographes deviennent ainsi des agents bâtisseurs d’empire, déployant leur savoir-faire technique au profit d’un pouvoir impérial et d’un souverain lui-même très limité dans ses déplacements.
-
Julia Lewandoski [This essay kicks off a Borealia series on Cartography and Empire-on the many ways maps were employed in the contested imperial spaces of early modern North America.] After the 1763 Peace of Paris, British officials embarked on an ambitious project to probe and depict the territories—many in reality still under indigenous sovereignty—that they now considered… Continue Reading
-
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
-
Peter H. Russell’s Canada’s Odyssey is a sweeping reconsideration of the foundations of Canada’s constitutional order that has garnered considerable attention and praise. This essay is the second in a three-part series assessing the book’s significance. Donald Fyson My comments focus on the pre-Confederation chapters of Peter Russell’s Canada’s Odyssey. I’ll concentrate on Quebec and… Continue Reading
-
Ann Little’s The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (Yale University Press, 2016; paper, 2018) traces the remarkable story of a woman from her New England childhood to Wabanaki captivity and adoption to adulthood as an Ursuline nun in eighteenth-century Quebec. The book’s innovative use of sources and narrative provokes conversation about what a biography could be.… Continue Reading
-
Gregory Kennedy Note: This is the fourth in a series on environmental history and early modern history cross-posted with NiCHE, the Network in Canadian History & Environment. Life as an academic often feels like constant movement between hope and despair. Hope that our research will have an impact, and be accepted our peers … despair at the latest… Continue Reading
-
Michael J. Davis “We are at present working on the establishment of New Orleans, thirty leagues above the entry of the Mississippi,” wrote the newly-commissioned commandant-général of Louisiana, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on June 12, 1718 to the Council of the Marine at Versailles.[1] Work on New Orleans, however, had been underway since the… Continue Reading
-
Scott Berthelette Throughout the 1730s and 1740s, the French established a series of forts northwest of Lake Superior in present-day Northwestern Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Minnesota, and North Dakota. French colonial officials hoped that these postes de l’Ouest, or Western Posts, would secure New France’s pick of prime northern furs, which would undermine the English dominance… Continue Reading
