ALLAN GREER

National, Transnational, and Hypernational Historiographies: New France Meets Early American History

Abstract: Have transnational currents (Atlantic, borderlands, continentalist) in the history of colonial North America overcome the distortions long associated with a national framing of research on the early modern period? Have we left behind the tendency to read the political geography of the nineteenth century back into the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Taking the example of writings on New France, a colonial formation that sprawled across large parts of what was to become Canada and the United States, this article argues that national historiographic traditions continue to exert a powerful inuence. Even as they pursue their subject across modern borders, Canadian, Quebec and United States historians frequently view New France through the lens of their own respective national traditions. The recent upsurge of interest in New France on the part of Early Americanists is a welcome development, but its impact is somewhat vitiated by a tendency to retain a United States-centric intellectual agenda while annexing new territories and cultures to what remains a national intellectual enterprise. The article concludes with the suggestion that New France specialists situate their work more in a wider hemispheric context, one that includes comparative perspectives on Latin America and the Caribbean. Keywords: historiography, New France, Canada, Quebec, United States
Resume : Les courants transnationaux ( latlantique, le frontalier, le continental) ont-ils su corriger les distorsions qui ont longtemps accompagne la recherche sur la periode ` modern menee dans un cadre national? Avons-nous de laisse la tendance a interpreter ` ` ` lhistoire des dix-septieme et dix-huitieme siecles en fonction de la geographie politique ` ` ` du dix-neuvieme siecle? A partir de lexemple de la Nouvelle-France, une entite coloniale recouvrant de larges pans de ce qui deviendrait le Canada et les Etats-Unis, cet article afrme que les traditions historiographiques nationales exercent toujours une ` ` inuence considerable. Dans la poursuite de leurs travaux par dela les frontieres modernes, les historiens du Canada, du Que bec et des Etats-Unis observent frequemment la Nouvelle-France par la lentille de leurs traditions nationales respectives. Sil est ` heureux que les specialistes des Etats-Unis des premiers temps sinteressent aujourdhui a ` la Nouvelle-France, leur tendance a suivre un programme intellectuel centre sur les
The Canadian Historical Review 91, 4, December 2010 6 University of Toronto Press Incorporated doi: 10.3138/chr.91.4.695

696 The Canadian Historical Review

` Etats-Unis en annexant de nouveaux territoires et de nouvelles cultures a ce qui reste un projet intellectuel national gache quelque peu la portee de cet interet. Larticle se termine sur la suggestion que les specialistes de la Nouvelle-France inscrivent leurs travaux au sein dun contexte hemispherique plus vaste, comprenant des perspectives comparatives sur lAmerique latine et les Antilles.

Mots cles : historiographie, Nouvelle-France, Canada, Quebec, Etats-Unis

Has the history of the Americas in the early modern period nally entered the post-national phase? According to the folk wisdom of the profession, history as we know it was born in the nineteenth century, the ideological handmaid of the nation state. Nationalist ideologies and a national framing for historical inquiry were characteristic of the discipline, with pernicious results, particularly when they structured studies of earlier centuries. But now, we are frequently told, a global age is upon us and colonial history is being reconsidered from a variety of expansive perspectives ying banners labelled Atlantic, continental, hemispheric or, more generally, transnational all of them promising to free us from the blinders imposed by national history. While subscribing in a general way to this schematic narrative of historiographical emancipation, and while sharing the general excitement over the development of new transnational perspectives, I would like to take this opportunity to register some qualications. The bad old historiography may not have been so conningly national in scope and the new approaches may not be as fully liberated from national preoccupations as they seem. Much depends on whether we monitor the interplay of national and transnational at the level of the object of historical study or at the level of the stance and universe of discussion occupied by the historian. Before moving to elaborate upon these qualications through a selective examination of the historiography of New France, let me rst acknowledge the force of the now-conventional critique of the nationalizing traditions that for so long gripped the discipline and the eld. Objections have been raised on both intellectual and moral/ political grounds. Europeanists, for example, complain of the confusion that results from projecting into the medieval past modern entities such as Germany or Italy or France. Patrick Geary considers such anachronisms anything but harmless: Modern history was born in the nineteenth century, conceived and developed as an instrument of European nationalism [sic nationalisms]. As a tool of nationalist ideology, the history of Europes nations was a great success, but it has turned our understanding of the past into a toxic waste dump, lled with the poison of ethnic nationalism, and the

New France Meets Early American History 697 poison has seeped deep into popular consciousness. Cleaning up this waste is the most daunting challenge facing historians today.1 In the wake of the vicious conicts that, in the late twentieth century, tore through what had been Yugoslavia, violence occasioned by the overlapping territorial claims of Serbs, Croats, Albanians, and others, as well as by associated efforts to enforce ethno-religious homogeneity within the various successor states, Gearys strong language seems fully justied. However, the toxic real-world effects of nationalist history are not quite the same in zones of European colonization such as the Americas as they are in the heart of Europe itself. Whereas in Europe the drama of nationalist history comes mainly from the clash with rival nations for recognition, territory, and glory, in the Americas plots (while far from immune to nation-on-nation rivalries) revolve more consistently around struggles against nature and natural, non-civic, humanity (i.e., Indians). The tendency, in writings about the New World in the early modern period, is to naturalize colonization, so that the conquest, subjugation, and marginalizing of Indigenous peoples appears as a normal and necessary prelude to the full emergence of the already latent settler nation state. Obfuscating the colonization and dispossession of Native peoples is central to the ideological work performed by national history in a settler state,2 hence the moral impulse to right this wrong by challenging entrenched national narratives. In the United States, many colonial historians have voiced objections to the seemingly irrational tradition of treating an arbitrarily delineated portion of the North American continent in the period before 1776 as, in Joyce Chaplins words, a prelude to the creation of the United States.3 To pretend that there were only thirteen colonies
1 2 Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2002), 15. Beyond the Americas, settler-national historiographies became entrenched in other sites of European colonization around the globe. This was quite visibly the case in Australia and New Zealand, where a new generation of scholars is leading the way in challenging these colonialist narratives. See, for example, Bain Attwood, Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (Crows Nest, nsw: Allen and Unwin, 2005), 1135; Anna Haebich, The Battleelds of Aboriginal History, in Australias History: Themes and Debates, ed. Martyn Lyons and Penny Russell (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005), 121; Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999). Joyce Chaplin, Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early American History, Journal of American History 89 (Mar. 2003): 1433.

698 The Canadian Historical Review and to assume that the white, English-speaking population was the only signicant actor, and that themes linking forward to the history of an independent republic were the most interesting ones, is to indulge in anachronistic thinking that is by no means innocent. Chaplin assigns the tunnel vision of early American history to that persistent myth, American exceptionalism, an ideology that has been justly accused of giving comfort to national complacency and arrogance. It is important to note, however, that the United States has no monopoly over exceptionalism. The notion that a given country has a special destiny, rooted in a unique and meaningful story of the past, is characteristic of nationalist history generally, and the practice of reading national boundaries back into a pre-national period is so widespread as to represent a virtually universal historiographic phenomenon. When we recall the nation-building traditions of their profession, it is hardly shocking to discover that historians of Argentina, Mexico, and, I daresay, Sri Lanka, Croatia, Nigeria, and Syria share a tendency to focus on an imagined conjunction of ethnicity and territory stretching back into the misty past.4 us historians deserve our admiration for their concerted efforts to banish exceptionalism and other parochial tendencies from their historiography historians of the smaller, less secure nations of the western hemisphere have been, on the whole, much more hesitant in confronting similar problems but at the same time, the paradox of exceptionalist anti-exceptionalism suggests complexities that may be worth further exploration. Traditions of Canadian historiography, no less blinkered than those of the us, present an additional wrinkle: the presence of divergent senses of the nation has produced two versions of colonial history, one mainly English, the other predominantly French. Out of the vast domain claimed by France in North America, Canadian historians have long tended to focus on those portions currently under the Canadian ag.5 Francophone Quebec historians frequently limit their studies to an even narrower terrain, that is, to the St Lawrence Valley between Montreal and the Gaspe Peninsula. Thus have Canadian and American historians often seemed locked in a tacit conspiracy to divide the history of colonial North America into separate zones of inquiry, zones corresponding more to the political geography of the
4 Etienne Balibar, The Nation Form: History and Ideology, in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 13249. For an example of Canada-centric New France history, see Allan Greer, The People of New France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).

New France Meets Early American History 699 nineteenth and twentieth centuries than to the realities of the seventeenth and eighteenth.6 Reacting against this entrenched partition of their terrain, historians struggle to develop a broader vision of the past, some adopting an Atlantic orientation, others starting with Native Americans and following a facing east strategy, still others inserting early American history into a hemispheric context or envisioning a new continentalism with aspirations to reintegrate the history of North America.7 Alan Taylor puts it well: The escalating integration of North America by treaty, investment, trade, migration, travel, mass-media, and environmental pollution renders our national boundaries increasingly porous. As a result, we may now be prepared to broaden our historical imagination beyond the national limits of the United States, to see more clearly a colonial past in which those boundaries did not yet exist.8 These words, addressed to a us audience by a distinguished American scholar, were no doubt intended to be read as an appeal to a more cosmopolitan view of the past, one in harmony with an international consciousness of the contemporary world, but they might also be read as a manifesto for a national historical enterprise with expansionist ambitions. Im sure the author had no such imperialistic intentions in mind; however, like many historians trained as us colonialists but critically engaged with the traditions of their eld,
6 One could list a multitude of exceptions to any of the generalizations contained in this paragraph. Quebec historians conning their attention to the St Lawrence Valley? What about Guy Fregault on Louisiana or more recent work on Detroit and the Illinois country? See Guy Fregault, Le grand marquis, Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil et la Louisiane (Montreal: Fides, 1952); Renald Lessard, Jacques Mathieu, and Lina Gouger, Peuplement colonisateur au pays des Illinois, in Proceedings of the Twelfth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society (Lanham, md: University Press of America, 1988), 5768). However, the aim of this essay is to present a series of arguments rather than to undertake a detailed catalogue of all work in the eld. Rather than try to capture every historical current, counter-current, and nuance, I focus on a series of important and representative works. Work in the eld known as early American history receives disproportionate attention because this is the area where the promise of post-national history has been loudly proclaimed and where the results have been, for that reason, all the more disappointing. The New Continental History was the topic of a stimulating roundtable discussion at the ninth annual conference of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture held in New Orleans in June 2003. Participants hailed from New Mexico, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and California. Alan Taylor, Colonial North America, History Compass (2003), doi:10.1111/14780542.010.

700 The Canadian Historical Review Alan Taylor does not seem to have made up his mind whether his subject is a country or a continent. The language used to designate the eld of study encourages a basic ambiguity on this score: just as American can refer either to a specic nation state or to a pair of continents, so the phrase Early American History could refer to the history of the Americas, or the prehistory of the United States, or perhaps the study of North America from a United States perspective. The intellectual headquarters of Early American History might be Williamsburg or it might be Cambridge, ma, or it might be Baltimore or Philadelphia, but it could not conceivably be located in Guadalajara or Montreal or Havana. Where national perspectives shape and inect the study of colonial history, not all nations are equal. It might be useful to recognize this fact: in the historiography of the Americas, as in the political life of the Americas, there is one Great Nation, a multiplicity of small nations, and a certain number of dependent (for example, Puerto Rico) and aspiring nations (for example, Quebec). The intellectual force of the Great Nation, backed by a superpowers prestige and cultural inuence and represented in the specic area of colonial history by an elaborate institutional infrastructure and battalions of well-trained professionals, can seem overwhelming. Of course, considerations of power may not be on the minds of Great Nation historians as they struggle to escape the connes of anachronistic boundaries and cast their eyes to the farthest horizon that is how hegemony feels to those who enjoy it but these very considerations may explain a certain ambivalence on the part of scholars based in or oriented towards small and aspirational nations. When the call goes up for transnational approaches to colonial history, the latter are likely to welcome the opportunity to transcend their own parochial traditions and collaborate with and learn from others. At the same time, how can they help wondering whose agenda will drive this enterprise? In the brave new borderless world of colonial history, will there still be centres and peripheries, norms and the deviations, important issues and secondary matters, and if so, how will these be negotiated and adjudicated? Where will scholarship be published and what language will predominate at conferences? (United States historians often cite the prevalent monolingualism of their eld as if it were a neutral fact, or the aggregate effect of purely personal limitations, rather than one of the structural privileges of power.) Needless to say, such questions are apt to arise at the periphery rather than at the centre because, at the centre, the answers seem self-evident. Great nationsmall nation tensions run through much of the literature on the colonial

New France Meets Early American History 701 period in the Americas, with small-nation resistance sometimes taking overtly nationalist forms, sometimes appearing in the guise of a kind of pan-Latin-Americanist challenge to dominant narratives of Atlantic history.9

new france As we contemplate histories and historiographies of the colonial Americas, writing on New France seems particularly interesting material for an examination of the interplay of national and transnational perspectives. Unlike New England or the Chesapeake, its geography cannot be contained within the boundaries of any one nation state of the present day; in that respect, it has more in common with the colonial complex once called Peru. Its history has been written in two languages and it has been sliced and packaged for consumption in more than one national and transnational market. Over the years New France has been dened quite differently for different historiographical circles, and so I should perhaps begin by stating what I mean by that term. New France is best viewed, not as a clearly bounded territory, nor as a political entity subject to uniform sovereignty, but rather as a dynamic zone of contact and colonization; it was an expansive colonial system, constructed jointly by French and Native peoples, and it spread across the northeastern quadrant of the continent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Centred on the St Lawrence Valley between Quebec and Montreal, it ramied outward through commercial networks and military-diplomatic alliances; French explorers, traders, missionaries, and soldiers travelled the waterways leading rst to the Great Lakes and then north to Hudson Bay, west across the Great Plains and southward along the Mississippi and its tributaries. Just as important were the Native expeditions that made their way from these distant regions to the St Lawrence settlements, seeking access to European goods and to a variety of political and cultural benets associated with the French connection. New France consisted of the narrow area of intense European occupation and the networks of alliances and more tenuous links that connected the St Lawrence
9 See, for example, Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Ian K. Steele, Bernard Bailyns American Atlantic, History and Theory 46 (2007): 4858.

702 The Canadian Historical Review settlements with a vast hinterland occupied and controlled by dozens of Indigenous nations. The uncertain product of constant negotiation, this hinterland was not an imperial space with denite boundaries, but rather a eld of uncertain, but nonetheless consequential, interaction. Understood in this way, New France is only partially French, and the small areas where French colonists were numerically preponderant and where one can speak of the sovereignty of the French colonial state cannot be separated from the far larger and predominantly Native zones that also constituted New France. As a colonial complex encompassing intense European settlement and a Native frontier of connection and mutual inuence, New France bore a basic resemblance to all imperial ventures,10 but it also displayed some unique qualities, if only in degree. The very small number of settlers involved, the disparity between the tiny area of concentrated European presence and the immense hinterland of imperial outreach, and the subtleties and complexities that characterized Native colonizer relations in this colonial zone combined to present a striking contrast with most Spanish, English, and Dutch colonies. My brief denition of New France, shaped as it no doubt is by early twenty-rst-century approaches to colonial history, puts the accent on process rather than place, it foregrounds relationships between Natives and newcomers rather than focusing exclusively on the intentions, outlooks, and deeds of explorers, conquerors, settlers, and other white founders.11 Its object is not French North America, a phrase sometimes used to evoke all the territories claimed by the king of France, the great blue patch stretching across half a continent in maps that illustrate colonial history textbooks; the greatest part of these territories were French only in the most tenuous and tendentious ways. Nor am I talking about the French in America. By the early eighteenth century, there were people of French origin in many parts of the continent more still in the West Indies but they hardly formed a singular collective entity that could comprise the subject of a coherent history. Louisiana, Acadia, Ile Royale, Canada, as well as Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St-Domingue were home to many French people, but should these Europeans and Creoles be abstracted from the various colonial societies they shared with, in different proportions, African and Afro-American slaves and Native peoples and then, bundled together with compatriots from across the colonial
10 See Lauren Benton, Spatial Histories of Empire, Itinerario 30 (2006): 1934; Ann Laura Stoler, On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty, Public Culture 18 (2006): 12546. ` See Allan Greer, 1608 as Foundation, Themes canadiens / Canadian Issues (Fall 2008): 203.

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New France Meets Early American History 703 world, be constituted as an object of historical study? Of course, for some specialized purposes French North America or the French in America make sense as subjects of investigation, but I remain convinced that New France, understood in the terms outlined above (sometimes called Canada in the colonial period) is a better vehicle for capturing the basic dynamics of colonial history. Early historians, writing while New France still lived, were inclined to place its history within an expansive, albeit Eurocentric, frame, sometimes as a chapter in the story of the expansion of Christendom, sometimes as part of the history of the overseas dominions of the French monarchy.12 Such broad, civilizational perspectives seem perfectly in keeping with historiographical fashions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What is surprising is the discovery that, even in the nineteenth century, when we imagine nation-state history to be at its zenith, the most inuential historian of New France actually presented that history within a continental, and to some degree an Atlantic setting.

francis parkman Francis Parkman, a writer whose intellectual ambition still has the power to inspire awe, might well be considered the granddaddy of transnational colonial history. A romantic historian in the Carlyle, Michelet, Prescott mould, Parkman painted upon a truly continental canvas and he could hardly be accused of neglecting French America. Indeed his six-volume series, France and England in North America, devotes more attention to New France than to the British colonies; witness some representative volume titles: The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, The Old Regime in Canada, Count Frontenac and New France under Louis xiv.13 Parkmans successes in integrating
12 Francois Du Creux, The History of Canada or New France, trans. Percy J. Robinson, ed. James B. Conacher, 2 vols. (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1951); Pierre-Francois-Xavier Charlevoix, Histoire et description generale de la Nouvelle France avec le journal historique dun voyage fait par ordre du roi dans LAmerique septentrionale, 6 vols. (Paris, 1744); trans., ed. J.G. Shea, History and General Description of New France, 6 vols. (New York: J.G. Shea, 186672). Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, 7 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 186592). The modern standard edition will be cited here: Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, ed. David Levin, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 1983). On Parkman, see W.J. Eccles, The History of New France According to Francis Parkman, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 18 (Apr. 1961): 16375; Francis Jennings, Francis Parkman, a Brahmin among Untouchables, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. (July 1985): 30628.

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704 The Canadian Historical Review New France into a story of colonial North America can provide some lessons for contemporaries and so can his failures and limitations. Parkman approached his vast subject, the century-long duel of France and Britain, with a self-consciously American outlook, but he quickly came to realize that the northern and French dimension of his story was the part that most challenged his understanding and that most needed to be explicated and interpreted for the benet of his fellow countrymen. Accordingly, he set out to master the French language and (with the help of French-Canadian historians) to collect French source materials. He also travelled to Quebec and to Italy in order to imbibe the atmosphere and penetrate the mysteries of the Roman Catholic religion. His research efforts were prodigious, his desire to comprehend sincere, but his agenda was coloured by assumptions about civilizational essences and hierarchies of culture. Though he looked north rather than east, Parkman was a scholar in the Orientalist mould. Parkmans books were dramatic partly because of the authors majestic style, his vivid character sketches, and his evocation of a vast and mysterious landscape, but they arrested readers attention also because they were saturated in meaning. The decisive contest on the Plains of Abraham that sealed the fate of a continent, a battle in which two great generals confronted one another and then promptly died of battleeld wounds, provides a spectacular climax for France and England in North America. However, what vastly intensies the signicance of the WolfeMontcalm duel in Parkmans account is the way the author succeeds in using the two colonial antagonists to personify fundamentally opposed principles. By this means, a short, sharp clash of arms stands for a much larger, deeper conict, Hegelian in its import, of rival civilizations. And so the Wolfe and Montcalm volume connects with and provides a conclusion to the other volumes of Parkmans series stretching back over a century and a half of colonial development. Here is how Parkman sums up the opposing forces on the eve of the Seven Years War. First Canada:
I have shown elsewhere the aspects of Canada, where a rigid scion of the old European tree was set to grow in the wilderness. The military Governor, holding his miniature Court on the rock of Quebec; the feudal proprietors, whose domains lined the shores of the St Lawrence; the peasant, the roving bushranger; the half-tamed savage, with crucix and scalping-knife; priests; friars; nuns; and soldiers, mingled to form a society the most picturesque on the continent. What distinguished it from the France that produced it was

New France Meets Early American History 705

a total absence of revolt against the laws of its being, an absolute conservatism, an unquestioning acceptance of Church and King. The Canadian, ignorant of everything but what the priest saw t to teach him, had never heard of Voltaire . . . He had, it is true, a spirit of insubordination born of the freedom of the forest; but if his instincts rebelled, his mind and soul were passively submissive. The unchecked control of a hierarchy robbed him of the independence of intellect and character, without which, under the conditions of modern life, a people must resign itself to a position of inferiority. Yet Canada had a vigor of her own. . . . Whatever she had caught of its [Frances] corruptions, she had caught nothing of its effeminacy. The mass of her people lived in a rude poverty . . . while those of the higher ranks all more or less engaged in pursuits of war or adventure, and used to rough journeyings and forest exposures were rugged as their climate. Even the French regular troops, sent out to defend the colony, caught its hardy spirit, and set an example of stubborn ghting which their comrades at home did not always emulate.14

Please note the gendered language; more of the same is in evidence in Parkmans characterization of the English colonies. After taking due note of the fragmentation and diversity of British North America, the historian goes on to focus on New England, where Puritanism still prevailed in the middle of the eighteenth century: a harsh and exacting creed, with its stiff formalism and its prohibition of wholesome recreation.
Nevertheless, while New England Puritanism bore its peculiar crop of faults, it produced also many good and sound fruits. An uncommon vigor, joined to the hardy virtues of a masculine race, marked the New England type. The sinews, it is true, were hardened at the expense of blood and esh, and this literally as well as guratively; but the staple of character was a sturdy conscientiousness, an undespairing courage, patriotism, public spirit, sagacity, and a strong good sense . . . The New England colonies abounded in high examples of public and private virtue, though not always under the most prepossessing forms.15

New England is to New France, Parkman repeatedly implies, as male is to female. Even if the colony avoided the overt effeminacy he associated with France, and even though his volumes are populated with stirring accounts of bold adventurers, heroic missionaries, and
14 15 Parkman, France and England, 2:8601. Ibid., 2:863.

706 The Canadian Historical Review brave soldiers, all of them French men, New France does not seem to have been populated by a masculine race. The Canadian was an effective ghter partly because of his passive submission to command, he implies, partly because of his tendency to seek escape from stultifying authority in the wild expanses of the forest. Vacillating between blind obedience and unconstrained freedom, the French Canadians displayed qualities that Victorian gentlemen of Parkmans day considered fundamentally feminine. The attributes of true manliness were reason, steadiness, self-control, and, above all, independence. A man, to be a man, he wrote, after pronouncing New France a colony under subjection and dependence to the monarchical despotism of the Bourbons, must feel that he holds his fate, in some good measure, in his own hands.16 And so the swashbuckling coureurs de bois and tough militia ghters of New France nd themselves on the female end of Francis Parkmans scale of national cultures. Alongside the gender polarity and the confrontation between French and English, Parkmans works hinged on the opposition of European civilization and Indian savagery. More frankly racist than other historians of the day, such as Bancroft, Parkman consistently portrayed Native Americans in repellent, animalistic terms: endish, cruel, ugly, man, wolf, and devil, all in one: the slanders come unleavened with any sentimentality about natural virtues.17 The problem with the French in Canada was that, though not really savage themselves, they were far too inclined to consort with Indians. Jesuits learned their languages and lived in their villages, fur traders and explorers trucked with them even slept with them! and military commanders relied heavily on their inhuman cruelty to spread terror through the British colonies. Thus it was that New France, in spite of its picturesque outward appearance and its history of gallant deeds, was ripe for the fall. The femininity bred by absolutist government and Catholic faith, along with the contaminations of savagery born of excessive contact with Indians, had infected Canadian manhood and corrupted the bre of Canadian life. New France, in Parkmans telling, represents the negation of New England and of the civilized, masculine qualities that ensured the triumph of Anglo-American forces in the Seven Years War and that provided a moral foundation for the independent American republic.
16 17 Ibid., 1:1377. David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 13541.

New France Meets Early American History 707 The conclusion to his nal volume points ahead to a future in which the disunited colonies became the United States . . . Those who in the weakness of their dissensions needed help from England against the savage on their borders have become a nation that may defy every foe but that most dangerous of all foes, herself.18 Now the reader begins to wonder whether this is what France and England in North America had been about all along. A work dedicated to international conict and the clash of civilizations, a continental history of unbounded horizons, one that lavishes far more attention on New France than on any of the British colonies might just conceal a purely national subtext, a set of reections on the origins and identity of the United States of America. For Parkman, French Canada functioned as an antagonistic Other, an opponent in war and an alter ego in peace, highlighting through its defects and absences Americas characteristic strengths. New France even stood as a warning to America about the dangers of surrendering to internal weakness. We might consider France and England in North America as a different kind of warning, for it seems to illustrate a major pitfall awaiting historians who aspire to transcend national boundaries in the study of colonial North America. It is one thing to extend ones vision across the continent, incorporating New France and the English colonies into a single, wide-angle eld of study. It is another thing to leave behind the intellectual preoccupations and historiographic traditions of a single nation. Parkmans goal was American history writ large, and to that end he annexed vast territories into a single national narrative. His perspective was neither narrowly national nor truly cosmopolitan: we might label it hypernational.

after parkman: new france nationalized Little need be said about the post-Parkman phase of colonial historiography. It was a time, as has been noted by Chaplin, Taylor, and other commentators, when us historiography tended to retreat, as far as the spatial scope of the colonial eld was concerned, into a narrowed eld of vision; historians rarely looked out beyond the Thirteen Colonies, and when they did their gaze was usually directed towards Britain and the British Caribbean. New France was seldom the object of serious study. In American history textbooks, the French tended to descend out of the north in times of war; where they came
18 Parkman, France and England, 2:1478.

708 The Canadian Historical Review from, New France, was a rather mysterious zone populated mainly by stereotypes and cliches ultimately traceable to Parkmans unsympathetic portrait. In the story of the settlement of the western frontier, pioneers entered the Michigan and Illinois territories as into a virgin wilderness; there was little sense in these accounts that the region had experienced a century of prior colonization as part of New France (and Louisiana). The fashion in the 1960s and 1970s for social history and community studies only reinforced the inward orientation of the eld, notwithstanding the fact that similar studies of St Lawrence Valley settlements seemed to invite comparative reections.19 While us historiography largely wrote New France out of its story of colonial origins, Canadian historiography wrote it in, though selectively and in the service of more than one national story. Until the middle of the twentieth century, and beyond, New France was seen as not only the beginning of French Canada, but as by far the most important chapter in the history of that identity. In French-language scholarship, as well as in the popular memory of French Quebec, the pre-1759 colonial period loomed large, more so than the analogous prerevolutionary period in the United States national narrative, because this was the time when French Canada was most fully itself: French in language, Catholic in religion, rural, obedient, and brave. Scholarly works and school textbooks revelled in the military exploits and the bold explorations of the great men of New France. As with all nationalist historiography, this one was heavily freighted with ideological baggage, in this case mostly of a very conservative variety.20 Although there was great pride in the colonys continental dimensions, attention focused on the French settlements of the St Lawrence Valley. In a fashion that parallels us colonial historiography of the time, the English are portrayed as a constant threat, yet FrenchCanadian historians displayed little curiosity about the history of the
19 It is surprising how seldom Louise Dechenes classic study of the island of Montreal (rural and urban portions) is cited in the Early American literature. Louise Dechene, Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal, trans. L. Vardi (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1992). ` Originally published as Habitants et marchands de Montreal au xvii e siecle (Paris: Plon, 1974). See, for example, Lionel Groulx, Histoire du Canada francais depuis la decouverte, 2 vols. (Montreal: LAction nationale, 19502). Historiographic surveys include Serge Gagnon, Quebec and Its Historians 1840 to 1920 (Montreal: Harvest House, 1982); and Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 48128.

20

New France Meets Early American History 709 British colonies. And while the Revolution formed the main hinge of United States historical narratives, the Conquest of 175960 was, if anything, a more momentous turning point for French-Canadian historiography.21 The rise of Quebec nationalism and the secularization of discourses of identity since the 1960s has somewhat dampened enthusiasm for New France, yet the colony continues to be viewed as fully and unambiguously ancestral; the pronouns us and we are routinely attached to the settlers of the seventeenth century. However, now the central link with the colonial period is through language, not religion or political authoritarianism; moreover the heir to francophone New France is not so much an ethnic group, French Canada, as an aspiring nation-state, la nation quebecoise. As much as in earlier generations, Quebec historiography tends to focus on the strictly French element of New Frances diverse population and on the narrow band of settlements along the shores of the St Lawrence where an overseas extension of ancien regime European society took root. At the same time, scholars grouped around the journal Recherches amerindiennes au Quebec have contributed greatly to knowledge of the Indigenous peoples of the period, but their work is yet to be fully integrated into the mainstream of New France studies. Natives still tend to be treated as an external factor in what remains basically a settler-national narrative.22 Meanwhile, other historians most of them English-Canadian, though one would not want to equate language and historiographical perspective too closely have attempted to integrate the history of New France into a Canadian national story. This could be a complicated operation, particularly so a century ago when Canada was often viewed as a British nation within the British Empire.23 New France then made its appearance as antecedent, but not exactly ancestral, to the Canadian state. Although its history was recounted in epic terms
21 Catherine Desbarats and Allan Greer, The Seven Years War in Canadian History and Memory, in Cultures in Conict: The Seven Years War in North America, ed. Warren Hofstra (Lanham, md: Rowman and Littleeld, 2007), 14578. A striking recent instance is Louise Dechenes study of war in New France; while acknowledging that Natives were deeply and crucially involved, the author nevertheless focuses exclusively on the French. Louise Dechene, Le peuple, letat et la guerre au Canada sous le regime francais (Montreal: Boreal, 2008). Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism: 18671914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970).

22

23

710 The Canadian Historical Review as a story of great exploits, New France was basically a decient colonial entity, destined for defeat; its settlers standing in need of British tutelage in order to ourish.24 Much in the writings of this Canadian school was reminiscent of Parkmans interpretation, but toned down in deference to the sensibilities of fellow citizens of French origin. In this condescending historical discourse, New France, that is to say in its white settler aspect, represented both the Other and the beginnings of the nation. With the fading of the British connection over the course of the twentieth century, and with the growth of a sense of Canada as binational rather than British, Canadian historians developed a more positive view of New France, inserting it into textbook accounts as the rst chapter of an additive national narrative. The French part of the Canadian identity took root between 1608 and 1759; subsequently, settlers of British origin laid the foundations of English Canada. This two-stage binational narrative made little impression on French-language historians who tended to maintain their focus on the francophone thread leading straight from New France to modern Quebec, leaving it to their anglophone colleagues to integrate the history of New France into an Atlantic-to-Pacic national narrative. However, the Canadian and the Quebec accounts had much in common, including a settler-national tendency to focus on white people and a national tunnel vision that neglected the dimensions of New France that extended beyond the borders of modern Canada/Quebec. At a time when scholarship on New France generally came crammed into the political geography of the post-Confederation age, one Canadian historian did follow French imperial networks across North America and beyond. In the 1960s and 1970s, W.J. Eccles was writing with passionate conviction about New France, both as ancien regime settlement on the St Lawrence and as continent-wide empire; he even included Louisiana and the French West Indies in some of his works. Unconned by current national boundaries, Eccles was nevertheless strongly shaped by nationalist impulses. His very rosy portrait of New France and its sturdy pioneers can be read as a gesture of peace and reconciliation at a time when Quebec separatism threatened Canadian unity and when many English Canadians felt a need to learn more about their francophone neighbours. Facing inward, Eccless nationalist history stood for concord, but outwardly it breathed anti-American re. With imperial wars as a major theme of
24 See, for example, George M. Wrong, The Rise and Fall of New France, 2 vols. (Toronto: Macmillan, 1928).

New France Meets Early American History 711 much of his writing, Eccles rarely missed an opportunity to heap scorn upon the English colonists and to revel in Canadian victories such as the bloody raids on Schenectady and Deereld.25 Here then, is a Canadian example of hypernational history.

the new continentalism Emerging from a long twentieth century dominated by national history, colonialists seem now to aspire to emulate Parkmans broadly continental eld of vision, even as they strive to steer clear of the racial, gender, and national polarities that structure his interpretations. It is tempting then to hold up the nineteenth-century historian, in both his appealing and his repellent aspects, as a yardstick by which to measure his twenty-rst-century successors in the American science of New France. An examination of some recent studies, all of them inuential works by excellent scholars, suggests that the transnational impulse has yet to overcome ingrained nationalizing tendencies in the eld. Sometimes New France appears as the absent presence, an incomplete or shadowy gure in works where it ought logically to be a central part of the story. In other cases, New France ` is incorporated, a la Parkman, into a hypernational narrative. The Middle Ground exemplies the former tendency.26 In this wideranging and brilliantly original work, Richard White keeps getting stopped at the border, shying at anachronistic boundaries where Francis Parkman plunged forward. This otherwise intrepid historian seems to frame his topic, temporally and geographically, so as to keep within the United States as currently congured, even though the patterns of colonial relations he delineates appear to have extended much more broadly across time and space. His spotlight focuses on Algonquians and Europeans residing south of the Great Lakes, while largely ignoring the emergence of alliances north of the Great Lakes. Moreover, his story begins in the 1660s, just when French and Indians came into sustained contact on the shores of Lake Michigan. Absent from his account is the history of AlgonquianFrench relations
25 A representative sample of this historians work would include W.J. Eccles, The French in North America 15001783, rev. ed. (Markham, on: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1998; original edition France in America, 1972); and W.J. Eccles, Essays on New France (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987). See also Desbarats and Greer, Seven Years War, 1578. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 16501815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991).

26

712 The Canadian Historical Review during the previous sixty years, a time when trade and alliance protocols took shape and developed into forms that would eventually extend into the southerly Great Lakes region.27 This, surely, was a crucial chapter in the history of the Middle Ground, but it was a chapter set in what is now Quebec and Ontario and so it nds no place in what remains very much a work of American history. Other works, bolder about border crossing, display a willingness to incorporate substantial New France material into a more inclusive version of colonial history. Daniel Richters synthetic essay Facing East from Indian Country seems designed as an antidote to the white supremacist vision of colonial history exemplied by Francis Parkmans work; yet, following the more attractive side of Parkman, Richter paints on a broad canvas of North American dimensions. His Indian-centric take on the eld seems to demand transnational treatment, since the cultural and political geography of Native North America has never conformed to the boundary lines of empires and nations. Yet, from the opening pages of his book, Richter evinces uncertainty as to whether he is writing the history of a continent or that of a nation. At this point in our fractious nations history, he writes in the prologue, it seems more than necessary and desirable to nd frames of reference capable of embracing the common, if often excruciating, origins of the continents diverse peoples.28 Is Facing East continental history or national history? Initially, the reader gets the impression that this is the story of an Indian country stretching across North America, or at least across the eastern half of the continent. Coverage is, of necessity, sketchy and impressionistic, but the chapters on European contact, trade, and empire formation include a more than ample share of New France sources and topics: vignettes from Jesuit Relations and Jacques Cartiers voyages, a sketch of the life of Catherine Tekakwitha. But gradually, as the narrative moves forward to the period of the American Revolution, this diverse array of evidentiary material enters a funnel, only to emerge at the narrow end as a contribution to the history of the United States of
27 See Bruce Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canadas Heroic Age Reconsidered (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1985); Denys Delage, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeast North America, 160064 `res: NativeFrench (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1993); Peter Cook, Vivre comme fre Alliances in the St Lawrence Valley, (PhD diss., McGill University, 2008). Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2001), 910. This passage follows a quote from Charles Beard: Any written history involves the selection of a topic and an arbitrary delimitation of its borders.

28

New France Meets Early American History 713 America. The closing pages of Facing East are explicit and emphatic; national allusions jump from the page: Thomas Paine . . . 1776 . . . republic . . . the United States grew up in Indian country . . . citizens of the new nation . . . their nation was born in a revolution . . . as White Americans wrote their nations past.29 In his search for an Indigenouscentred version of colonial history, it is as if Daniel Richter suddenly lost his footing and fell into a settler-national conceptual booby trap. Another important work in colonial American history displays a similar tendency to begin with large, transnational ambitions, only to retreat at the end into a us national interpretive framework. Fred Andersons massive study of the Seven Years War, Crucible of War, is anything but a narrowly conceived work.30 A worthy successor to Parkman in his appreciation of dramatic events that spill across continents and traverse oceans, Anderson takes care to situate what used to be called the French and Indian War in a global context. His gaze extends from the frontiers of Pennsylvania to the corridors of imperial power in London. At once imperial and colonial in orientation, Crucible of War gives due attention to policy-makers, generals, ordinary settlers, and Native Americans. One of the books strengths derives from the way the author draws on ethnohistorical research and integrates the critical Indian dimension into his account of the war. Moreover, he recounts the land campaigns in Germany, the BritishFrench struggle in India, the siege of Havana, and other far-ung events that ordinarily receive summary treatment as background to the North American theatre. However, when it comes time to sum up, the focus of The Crucible of War narrows, giving the (false) impression that this is a book about the United States before there was a United States. The war, concludes Anderson, became the necessary precondition for the development of an American nation-state that for most of its existence has been neither empire nor republic, but both.31 The body of the text demonstrates, forcefully and convincingly, that this rst world war was fought out, as far as North America is concerned, in a prenational continent of tribes and empires, but when it comes to extracting meaning from this complex story of raids, sieges, and naval encounters, Anderson falls back on a national narrative frame. Once again, comparisons with Parkman come to mind, even as we
29 30 31 Ibid., 2512. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 17511766 (New York: Knopf, 2000). Ibid., 746.

714 The Canadian Historical Review recognize the world of difference separating the nineteenth-century historians bigotry from Fred Andersons inclusive and enlightened approach to the topic. Where New France is concerned, Parkman certainly portrayed the colony in harsh terms as the antithesis of Yankee virtue, but he did at least x his attention upon Canada, according it a starring role in his saga of imperial struggle. Andersons view of New France, by contrast, is benign and fair-minded, but not very deeply researched. To say that Canada (and indeed all things French) is the hole at the centre of the Crucible of War would be to overstate the case: as one of the principal combatants and as the most important battleground of the war, New France is hardly ignored. But all the social and political depth that so enriches Andersons treatment of the Anglo-American side goes missing when it comes to the enemy. Hardly any French-language primary materials are cited and even the Canadian secondary literature is used only selectively.32 Similarly, whereas the author recounts the metropolitan political intrigues and reversals that conditioned British policies towards the war, he treats France as a black box out of which decisions to pursue war or sue for peace emerge for no discernible reason.33 Other recent works like those mentioned so far, admirable in other respects are equally disappointing to anyone who thinks that colonial North America ought to include New France. When Eric Hinderaker examines the effects of empire in the Ohio Valley, one of the empires involved is, of course, the French.34 Since the head32 A chapter devoted to the weakened condition of the St Lawrence settlements in 1758 when famine had added its effects to the economic crisis provoked by the British naval blockade is based primarily on English-language studies and translated works, all of them thirty to fty years old. Missing is any reference to Guy Fregaults La guerre de la conquete or his biography of Bigot both of these admittedly older works, but both of them fundamental to the topic; missing also is any reference to Louise Dechenes study of logistics and food supplies, as well as a raft of relevant articles and theses, most of them in French. Anderson, Crucible of War, 23639. See Guy Fregault, La guerre de la conquete (Montreal: Fides, 1955), trans. M. Cameron, Canada: The War of the Conquest (Toronto: Oxford University Press 1969); Guy Fregault, Francois Bigot, administrateur francais (Montreal: Institut dhistoire de lAmerique francaise, 1948); Louise Dechene, Le partage des subsistances au Canada sous le regime francais (Montreal: Boreal, 1994), esp. chap. 8; Jay Cassel, The troupes de la marine 16831760: Men and Material (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1987). A point made by Alan Taylor in his review of Crucible of War. Alan Taylor, Writing Early American History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 13749. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 16731800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

33

34

New France Meets Early American History 715 quarters of French North America was Canada, the point from which Christian missions, commercial operations, and military expeditions were projected, one might expect that the New France background would receive the same serious attention that Hinderaker accords to the English colonies. Instead, the author relies on a narrow range of Canadian scholarship and simplies their ndings almost beyond recognition.35 As with so many other American studies of the pays den haut, the French pop up out of nowhere or, worse yet, they emerge from a cardboard background of essentialized deciencies. When they try to go continental, American historians have the greatest difculty integrating New France into their narrative as anything but a periphery or an anomaly. The Blackwell Companion to Colonial America, a recently published guide to work in the eld, does a far better job than other such reference works to break with nationalizing traditions. The editor, Daniel Vickers, made a point of including chapters on New France as well as Atlantic Canada, New Spain, and the Caribbean. And yet, in spite of its admirable aims, and notwithstanding the enthusiastic back-cover endorsement of Gary Nash (The continent-wide approach is breathtaking a testimony to the expanding horizons of American historians), the vision is not really transnational. Nashs American historians are, in all but four cases, historians of a nation, not of the North American continent, and Blackwells Colonial America is essentially the prerevolutionary United States. Thus we have chapters on ecology, migration and settlement, economy, women and gender, etc., all dedicated overwhelmingly to the Thirteen Colonies. A chapter entitled Empire is all about the British Empire. Tacked on at the end are four chapters called, Comparisons: The Caribbean, Comparisons: New France, etc. Thus New France makes an appearance, but as a deviation from a norm, rather than as an integral part of colonial
35 The feudal system in Canada was a failure, Hinderaker announces condently, adding further, Chronic underpopulation in the French colony kept land values low indeed, most of the land in Canada was essentially worthless in the French period. Ibid., 80. These statements, debatable in the historiographical context of 1960s, when scholars thought that seigneurial tenure had been instituted with a clear metropolitan policy objective, are largely meaningless in light of works published in recent decades: Louise Dechene, Levolution du `cles, regime seigneurial au Canada: le cas de Montreal aux xviie et xviiie sie Recherches sociographiques 12 (1971): 14383; Dechene, Habitants and Merchants, 13443; Sylvie Depatie, Mario Lalancette, and Christian Dessureault, Contribu` tions a letude du regime seigneurial canadien (Montreal: Hurtubise hmh, 1987); Allan Greer, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes, 17401840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 89139.

716 The Canadian Historical Review America. The Blackwell Companion nicely illustrates both the expanding horizons of colonial history and the resilience of a tendency to view the object of study as the ascendant lineage of the United States of America.36 It would be ungenerous, after this bill of indictment, if I were to fail to take notice of works that more fully realize the potential of transnational colonial history. One such case is Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deereld, by Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney.37 Haefeli and Sweeney do a good job of integrating Canadian and American material to enhance understanding of a specic event, the bloody raid on Deereld, Massachusetts, its background and aftermath. The authors give equal attention to the New England and the New France contexts of this borderland tale, foregrounding Native as well as Euro-American actors. Inevitably, the Massachusetts frontier forms the spatial centre of this tale, but Canada, the point of origin of the raid and the destination of the captives, is by no means marginalized. Haefeli and Sweeney are up to date on New France scholarship and they make good use of Canadian primary and secondary materials. This is important, not to achieve some sort of journalistic balance, but because it allows them to gain a fuller understanding than earlier writers on the topic of a quintessentially transnational event.

ways forward The purpose of this essay is not to identify genuine and false versions of some ideal transnational history. History can be fruitfully studied from a wide range of perspectives from the micro to the macro. Yet there is a hunger throughout the discipline to escape the constraints of parochialisms of all sorts, including national parochialisms, that have structured and channelled our inquiries, privileging some aspects of the past while obscuring others. Where New France is concerned, my hope is that scholars will continue to look for ways to listen to the evidence of the primary sources and construct meaning without falling back on anachronistic national narratives. Let me just briey review a few of the approaches currently on offer.
36 37 Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deereld (Amherst, ma: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).

New France Meets Early American History 717 The borderlands paradigm, commonly deployed in studies of the Southwest, but sometimes applied to the North, holds limited promise, in my view. Here, frontier history meets post-colonial theory with the result that hybridity, uidity, and uncertain identities, Native and European, are recognized, embraced, celebrated. However, as Joyce Chaplin points out, historians of early America have tended to align their borderland studies with the geography of the post-1848 nation-state.38 Where New France does enter the picture, as in Jeremy Adelmans and Stephen Arons inuential American Historical Review article, the results are awed by a refusal to take Canadian scholarship seriously. Taking as one site of their analysis the Great Lakes region during the rst half of the eighteenth century, the authors insist on the centrality of the fur trade in conditioning relations between the French and Native nations. This commercial determinism ies in the face of a generation of New France scholarship on the subject, but the authors hew to a Innisian interpretation, going so far as to cite in their support writings by W.J. Eccles that directly contradict their own thesis.39 The Atlantic World approach represents another thrust outward from the connes of traditional American history. A wealth of ne studies on trade, migration, and the circulation of political and religious ideas have linked the history of the Thirteen Colonies to broader international developments. Historiographically, the Atlantic paradigm has had the useful effect of effecting a junction between British and American scholarship, especially on the early modern period. And yet, as Bernard Bailyn frankly acknowledges, Atlantic history originated in the same political moment that gave rise to nato; a Churchillian vision of the English-speaking powers as a partnership for global leadership animated much scholarship in this area.40 Consequently, the phrase Atlantic history frequently serves as shorthand for the history of the British Atlantic in the early modern
38 39 Chaplin, Expansion and Exceptionalism, 1444. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-State, and the Peoples in between in North American History, American Historical Review 104 (1999): 81441. Compare W.J. Eccles, A Belated Review of Harold Adams Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, Canadian Historical Review 60 (1979): 41941; W.J. Eccles, The Fur Trade and Eighteenth Century Imperialism, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 15 (1983): 34262. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2005); Bailyn, The Idea of Atlantic History, Itinerario 20 (1996): 1944. It is worth noting that Bernard Bailyn has done much in recent years to encourage research on Atlantic history beyond the Anglo-American axis.

40

718 The Canadian Historical Review period a situation that has drawn critical comment from historians of the Hispanic world.41 Notwithstanding the fact that France was a leading arguably the leading seafaring power through what North Americanists call the colonial period, New France tends to be overlooked in the Atlantic history eld. If blame were to be assigned for this state of affairs, one would have to mention the reluctance of historians of the French-speaking world to embrace Atlantic approaches along with the entrenched Anglo-American bias in Atlantic history. Until recently, New France specialists interested in an Atlantic approach received little aid or encouragement from scholars of ancien regime France, xated as the latter have tended to be on France itself and displaying much less interest than their British counterparts in the kingdoms overseas extensions.42 And yet there are hopeful signs of change: a resurgence of interest in overseas and colonial history in France, as well as a growing international literature that integrates New France into a broad perspective sometimes known as the French Atlantic.43 Valuable as the Atlantic approach may be, I would like to recommend a comparatively neglected frame of analysis, the one that considers particular colonial histories as aspects of a broader history
41 42 Jorge Canizares-Esguerra. Some Caveats about the Atlantic Paradigm, History Compass (2003), DOI:10.1111/1478-0542.004. Cecile Vidal, The Reluctance of French Historians to Address Atlantic History, Southern Quarterly 43, no. 4 (2006): 15389. At the same time, it should be noted that French scholarship provided some of the most important pioneering works in Atlantic history, including a massive study of Spanish overseas shipping: Huguette Chaunu and Pierre Chaunu, Seville et lAtlantique, 1504 1650, 8 vols. (Paris: A. Colin, 1955). Laurent Dubois, The French Atlantic, in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, 13761 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Gilles Havard, Lhistorigraphie de la Nouvelle-France en France ` `cle: nostalgie, oubli et renouveau, in De Que bec a lAmerique au cours du xxe sie francaise: Histoire et memoire, ed. Thomas Wien, Cecile Vidal, and Yves Frenette, 95124 (Quebec: les Presses de lUniversite Laval, 2006); Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth, Absolutely Atlantic: Colonialism and the Early Modern French State in Recent Historiography, History Compass 8, no. 1 (2010): 10117; Silvia Marzagalli, The French Atlantic, Itinerario 23 (1999): 7083. For notable examples of the Atlantic approach applied to the history of New France, see Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 17131763 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002); Dominique Deslandres, Croire et faire croire: les missions ` francaises au xvii e siecle (Paris: Fayard, 2003); James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 16701730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

43

New France Meets Early American History 719 of the Americas. Historians of New France seeking wider horizons would be well advised to cultivate hemispheric approaches, and that means, in practical terms, paying greater attention to Latin America and the Caribbean.44 Since continental perspectives dominated by Great Nation historiography are unavoidable, some effort is required to extend views farther to the south, but the rewards would be great. Linking the historiographies of New France with those of Spanish America, Brazil and the West Indies might look like an end-run strategy to offset the dominance of Great Nation historiography through a small-nation alliance, but such a move has ample intellectual justication. Methodologically, New France specialists have much to learn from Latin American and Caribbean scholarship. The colonial histories of those southerly regions also invite comparative studies, though my aim here is not particularly to promote comparative research. When deployed with some suppleness, comparisons can open up new questions and clarify interpretations, but a rigid and overly systematic comparative history breaks continuities, cuts entanglements, and interrupts the ow of narration.45 In addition to exploring points of comparison, historians of New France would be well advised to consider their subject as connected and entangled with other colonial entities within the history of the Americas. The idea of situating the history of New France within the same eld of vision as Latin America and the Caribbean may seem strange, considering how minimal was the interaction between the colonizers of these distant sections of the hemisphere. At different times, French and Spaniards came into contact and into conict in the waters and on the islands of the Caribbean, in Florida, and on the borders of Louisiana; French attempts at colonization also collided with the Portuguese on the coast of Brazil. But New France was far removed from these encounters. Moreover, the Native peoples of the Americas hardly formed a single unit; there was virtually no contact in the precolonial centuries between North America and South America. And yet, heterogeneous though it was, the hemisphere had, over the millennia, developed its own biological and cultural systems, united
44 The hemispheric approach has been proposed on several occasions in the past, often as a device for effecting a junction between United States and Latin American history. My point here is to recommend it for the specic purpose of gaining an enhanced understanding of New France. See Herbert E. Bolton, The Epic of Greater America, American Historical Review 38 (1933): 44874; Jack P. Greene, Hemispheric History and Atlantic History, in Greene and Morgan, ed., Atlantic History, 299315. Jurgen Kocka, Comparison and Beyond, History and Theory 42 (2003): 41.

45

720 The Canadian Historical Review in their isolation from the interconnected continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The well-known cataclysmic epidemics that followed in the wake of European explorers all across the Americas testies to their self-contained quality prior to colonization. There was also a fundamental unity, observable only at the level of the hemisphere, to the process of colonization itself. In the two centuries following Columbuss voyages, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Britain, and France laid claim to and to some extent, occupied or at least made their presence felt over the greater part of this vast domain. This was scarcely a concerted, co-operative effort by these ruthlessly competitive colonizing powers, but it was an interactive phenomenon, one that was played out across the length of the New World. The fabulous wealth Spain drew from the Indies focused French attention on America in the sixteenth century, and the rebuffs suffered in Brazil and Florida helped direct colonial enterprises towards the St Lawrence in the seventeenth. In this way, the French settlement of Canada was very much the product of the wider history of imperial competition in the Americas. Venturers from Europe established a presence in Africa and Asia, as well as in the Americas, between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, and they drew prots from these Old World outposts too. However, apart from a few small enclaves, they did not establish real colonies there as they did in the New World; in this additional respect, the Americas had their own unique experience of European penetration. For all its diversity, colonization in the Renaissance and Baroque periods had some basic characteristics in common. Everywhere, Indigenous peoples tended to be dispossessed and subjected to European hegemony. Whatever position one may take on the contested term capitalism, it is clear that New World economies were reorganized in ways that channelled wealth eastward across the Atlantic to the prot of a European economy poised for burgeoning growth in later centuries. These very general observations lieux communs for the most part are meant simply to establish the fact that there was an entity the Americas of which New France formed one section, and a process colonization of which New France constituted one version. But is there any reason that historians of New France should bear this larger context in mind? One major advantage, particularly as compared with the Atlantic approach, is that it helps to ensure that Natives are at the starting point of any analysis of colonization, for Native peoples and their interactions with Europeans are the basic common

New France Meets Early American History 721 factor in this hemispheric history. Beyond that, a history-of-theAmericas frame holds the promise of enhanced understanding of a variety of specic themes; let me list a few of these. Environmental History This is a comparatively under-researched aspect in the history of New France. Clearly, that colonial formation participated in the Columbian exchange of microbes, plant crops, animals, and weeds, but how exactly did the northern climate and topography shape and modulate ecological colonization? In the absence, through much of the territory affected, of grasslands or even open forest, there were few openings for the herds of feral cattle that transformed the pampas of the Rio de la Plata or for the plague of sheep that wrought such destruction over Mexican landscapes. On the other hand, it is well known that the Canadian fur trade led to over-hunting of certain species, especially the beaver, and to the depletion of stocks over wide territories. Even so, it seems that the ecological consequences of colonization tended to be much less drastic in the North American domains claimed by France than in those occupied further to the south by the British, Spanish, and Portuguese. These points need to be veried, modied, and eshed out in an environmental history attuned to broader patterns within the hemisphere. War War, colonial and imperial, is a prominent feature in the history of New France and it was war that sealed the colonys fate. Historians have examined the ways in which the military presence helped shape New Frances state and society,46 though much more could be said on this score from a vantage point that included Latin America and the Caribbean. One big question that occurs when one thinks in hemispheric terms is why the imperial struggle pitting New France against the English colonies culminated in a ght to the nish, whereas imperial conict in the Caribbean and in South America
46 Dechene, Le peuple, letat et la guerre; W.J. Eccles, The Social, Economic, and Political Signicance of the Military Establishment in New France, Canadian Historical Review 52 (1971): 122.

722 The Canadian Historical Review (e.g., along the borders of Brazil and Rio de la Plata) were settled with comparatively minor territorial adjustments. Colonial State Formation While the historical literature is well stocked with broad-gauge works on political theory and European empire, studies of political authority and the construction of colonial sovereignties tend to be more specialized in their focus. We can read about theories of empire, ceremonies of possession, and views of cultural difference at the level of the Atlantic world, but if our interest is in practices of power, we face a fragmented and regionally specialized literature. Opportunities abound for broadly conceived and truly colonial examinations of the construction and institutionalization of political power, ones that capture the dynamics of the colonizercolonized relationship. The political history of New France, quite naturally oriented towards the historiography of ancien regime France, is now beginning to integrate Natives into the story of colonial state formation.47 Attention to the hemispheric context and particularly to Spanish American cases, could only assist that enterprise. At the same time, it might be instructive to Latin Americanists, when they examine the famous Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century, to note that Bourbon monarchs had been dedicated to bureaucratic rationalizing in New France a century earlier. Missions and Religious Conversion The spiritual invasion of Christianity was a phenomenon of global dimensions in the early modern centuries, an event that can be usefully apprehended within an Atlantic frame, as part of the extension of European cultures across the ocean.48 However, an Americas approach also has much to recommend it; one thinks particularly of
47 See Catherine Desbarats, La question de lEtat en Nouvelle-France, in Memoires de la Nouvelle-France: De France en Nouvelle-France, ed. Philippe Joutard and Thomas Wien, 18798 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005); `mes Desbarats, Deux pas vers une histoire du politique decolonisee: les proble de souverainete et de lesclavage amerindien en Nouvelle-France, Bulletin dhistoire politique 18 (forthcoming) See Allan Greer and Kenneth Mills, A Catholic Atlantic, in The Atlantic in Global History, 15002000, ed. Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman, 319 (Upper Saddle River, nj: Prentice Hall, 2006).

48

New France Meets Early American History 723 the utility of a Catholic America view that considers the religious colonization of New France and Latin America within a single frame. Alongside the comparative studies of Catholic and Protestant missionizing styles, it would be stimulating to take fuller advantage of the rich Jesuit archives to explore Indigenous Christianity in widely separated settings. Preliminary probes on the seventeenth-century missions of Paraguay and New France indicate that Jesuit missionaries, beginning with almost identical training and mindsets, and working with Natives with broadly similar social organizations, ended up with very different results. The contrast between the highly regulated Guaran reducciones of South America and the rather loosely organized convert communities of the St Lawrence may be attributable to differences in the ambient colonial context.49 Property Formation The dispossession of Native peoples and the creation of new colonial forms of land tenure was a fundamental aspect of the colonization of the Americas and New France with its seigneurial property forms representing one important variant in that larger process. This is one area where the normalization of the Anglo-American pattern has thrown up particularly serious obstacles to understanding. If Indian treaties and purchases, settler freehold, title registration, and modied primogeniture constitute the self-evidently right and proper vehicles for organizing personal claims to land and resources, then the feudal practices that developed in New France could be viewed only as defective, anomalous, or atavistic. Bringing other regions of the colonial Americas into the picture reveals a more complex picture with multiple trajectories for the larger process of property formation. We nd that both the Spanish and the French, though in very different ways, developed colonial tenures in which European forms of owning overlapped and merged with Indigenous forms. The English (along with the Dutch) might just as well be considered the anomalous case in the Americas by virtue of their insistence on completely eliminating Native tenures often through the ritual of purchase before establishing colonial tenures on a legal tabula rasa.
49 Allan Greer, Towards a Comparative Study of Jesuit Missions and Indigenous Peoples in Seventeenth-Century Canada and Paraguay, in Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, ed. Robin Wright and Aparecida Vilaca, 2132 (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 2009).

724 The Canadian Historical Review conclusion In examining historical practices that sometimes go under the transnational label, this essay has argued that, regardless of the spatial scope of our research, colonial historians have great difculty setting aside the nationalizing traditions of their discipline when constructing meaning. The case of New France seems to bear out this observation: ignored or treated summarily in some studies where it ought logically to feature centrally, dismembered and assimilated into more than one national narrative, presented to modern readers as an identity or an anti-identity. All these still-entrenched historiographical habits act to inhibit understanding of an expansive colonial formation that grew, took shape, and died in an era before the appearance of nation-states in the Americas. There is nothing intrinsically superior about big history, scholarship that zooms out to encompass large parts of the globe within its eld of vision. Some of the nest historical monographs have indeed been microhistorical studies of small communities or obscure individuals. If our aim is to emancipate colonial history from the anachronistic habits of thought established by national historiography, it is important to do more than simply expand our spatial range. It is also a matter of examining familiar subjects from unfamiliar vantage points. How does seventeenth-century North America look from the perspective of a French, Spanish or Dutch Atlantic? How does it appear when New France or Mexico is considered central, rather than foreign or peripheral? Can we establish a viewpoint that faces east from the lands of the Cree or the Pawnees and maintains that perspective even through the era of settler state-building? Earlier I noted the advantages, especially for historians of New France, of the hitherto neglected Americas approach, but there is no single best escape route from the strictures of national historiography. Rather than revising, reforming, or inating existing national schools of history, we would be well advised to promote a fuller, richer dialogue among historians representing a variety of national, linguistic and ethnic backgrounds.

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Toronto Early Canada Group, the Universite de Montreal, and the Territorial Crossings: Histories and Historiographies of the Early Americas workshop at the Huntington Library, San Marino, ca. The author wishes to thank Juliana Barr, Joyce Chaplin, Francois Furstenberg, Steve Penfold and, especially, Kate Desbarats for their insightful comments and suggestions.