Week 4 – Lecture 2
History 202 – Canada to 1867
English and French Borderlands 30/09/2013
Midterm – meet on Friday at Leacock 26 = one or two essay questions won’t need laptops = bring pens!
Studying for mid-term = reading, themes for reading, other themes e.g. what is the contact zone? Why did
peoples come to NF? Why isAcadia? What do we learn from it?
Less focus on Brett Rushforth and the term papers
Gender = Backhouse
English and French competition in NorthAmerica has the effect of:
Divvying up the territories – French vs. English Newfoundland, Hudson’s Bay vs. St Lawrence Colony
Becomes a race to the Pacific also competition for trade w. Hudson Bay and Montréal Companys
Raids, massacres, seizures of trading posts by rival powers or merely privateers… 17thC Canada is one of the
more violent places in the world.
Acadian with a trading post multiple charters issued within nations which cause rival networks, claims of
church authority, differing councils – 100 associates, seigneurial lines of arguments = differing French interests
already competing and then added to this is the competing lines of other interest
Privateers/pirates e.g. Elizabeth I adept at commanding an unofficial navy as privateers whom become part of
the navy if war breaks out
EXAMPLES:
Montréal
Planted in 1642 – missionary city – cut off Iroquois raiding parties, protect French-allied traders; attacked from
day 1 of building
Danger of going outside the walls… Iroquois brags that habitants were ‘unable to go over a door to pisse’
Hard for furs to be transported along the St Lawrence River so Montréal originally had to be built but by day 1
the French were under attack here = perilous place
How to feed yourself? – stuck in the barricades… game and greenery
growing but really the population is besieged
‘it is almost impossible to make either peace or war with these
barbarians… war is their life, their amusement and their source of profit
all in one… the beauty of the country is only to be looked at from afar’
Father d’Endemare 1644 Can NF be sustained? Seems unlikely in the early years – esp. because the King
has still not sent out any soldiers
The Queen Regent subscribes privately to send soldiers
Newfoundland
English settlers from e17thC = subject to attacks by English rivals by French and basque pirates and French
military/navy after Plaisance is founded as French fortress in 1662
1690s – Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville burns St. Johns and doezens of others
many die
English merchants ask for British state aid British state send their navy as the British and French states become
increasingly involved in imperial games
When the French send a d’Iberville, the British learn to reply in kind
N.B = fiercest areas of the borderland = where the English and French are closest to each other = wars are
definitve of this period
Acadia
French settlement at Port Royal 1605 – destroyed 1613 by Samuel Argall, English Privateer on instruction from
Virginia
1620 – a charter for Virginia grants it all land to 48 Parallel – all the way to newfoundland
1621 – James I grants all land between newfoundland and new England to William alexander, Scot = calls it
New Scotland
1627-1632 =Alexanders and Kirkes attack, claim Port Royal
1640s – Acadian civil war. French rivals with English claimants and new England embroilments
1654 – Robert Sedgwick – English privateer with warrant to attack French privateers, captures Port Royal and
other forts which France only get back in 1670 = hard to ascertain whom theAcadians are now loyal to
1674 – Dutch privateer Jurriaen Aernoutsz inflicts serious raids, damage, claims Acadia for Dutch West India
Company = throughout this,Acadia’s governor has no troops = governed by NF whom have no more resources
to send
1690 – King William’s War – England captures Acadia; returns it in 1697
N.B.s = Governor ofAcadia = little benefit = someone to take shots at not a relationship with the
state = irrelevant to the lives of people elsewhere which makes then neither French nor English Lessons?
State has minimal presence
Competition for fur, land, posts etc = cannot create economic security which is sustainable trade (lots of
smuggling) which is an officially monopoly granted one since the state either lets this happen or decides to ramp
up it’s appeals
Makes for some obscure loyalties esp. inAcadia = neither the English nor French trust the local population as a
consequence of the transfers
No way to figure out what the Natives are thinking and why they are thinking this – hard to know if they are
genuinely French or not
ALSO – indigenous loyalties further complicate matters
Much of the land lived on byAcadians is shared with casual trade with the Mi’kmaq (?! Check spelling!!)
Much more complicated relations between the Mi’kmaq and different communities that stretch down the
Canadian coast
Much more settlement – farming and spreading from the coast unlike theAcadians
Leads to warfare
What role do the French have in this warfare?
French and Mi’kmaq largely congenial relations
Wabenaki and New Englanders much more hostile relations, beginning around 1670s and escalating as settlers
push westwards
During open warfare, New Englanders, French, Mi’kmaq, inflict terrible raids on one another e.g. Deerfield
1704 – 56 dead
Conquest ofAcadia
New England says enough is enough and can’t bear to have the French
Frontier is a place of confused identities and loyalties Is a zone of metissage (mixed Native and French people – formal citizenship status that reflects the mingling of
races mingling and mixing of identities is really creating something distinct)
People make their own world, amidst fluid and fluctuating ethnic identities and loyalties
Pierre-Esprit Radisson
Born in France
Adopted by Iroquois
Leads French trading expeditions in the PDH
Leads English trading expeditions through Hudson’s Bay the foundation of the organisation
Is Radisson a traitor (as he was described by the French)?? Does this word having meaning?
‘betraying’the French prior to going to London but also
New identities and new masculinity??
Masculinity forged in the encounters between west and Natives many Native rituals are designed to show off
masculine qualities e.g. making slaves, scalping did people like Radisson find this more appealing than the
French styles
French Canadians – can disappear into the backwoods OR stay within society
If one doesn’t get on with the ‘boss’or ‘imprisons you for being too entrepreneurial’= goes to another company
Radisson – dies in London
Better at finding allies in the English court rather than in the French court
Reflects a certain cosmopolitan at the courts just as much as at the frontier
At a time when people at the court often had a very French education – duelling, arts etc. = would be wrong to
say that there is an English England and a French France – It is NOT that simple at all…
Unclear what the French state’s relationship is with French Canadians
- French officials for example can signa peace treaty with the Wendat in the 1640s or with Iroquois in 1701 =
this is ‘France’at work in New France its not clear how French the inhabitants are, what they have common with French at home
frontier shapes identities more than cultural baggage?
Priests, seigneurs, officials continually complain that French Canadians are different from the people of France,
far more independent = perhaps the frontier is more important to constructing their idneties than French
traditions and institutions
Pehr Kalm – Swedish tourist 1749 – Canadians are ‘creoles of canada’– mixed race?
Richard White/Brett Rushforth redux
To what extent do the conditions of modernity in NAmerica – mass movements of people around and across
frontiers, widespread missionary propagandising, commodification of everyday life – break down older
restraints upon individuals and communities…
Are ‘culture’and’trade’in serious tension with one another or do they dovetail?
English – trade is culture
French = less so
Hard to understand how they could have a ‘community’(forceful, centralised state)
Some of the old bond that held people in their social identities = loosening?
Widespread missionary propagandising = new also…
Sense that a priest persuades rather than forcing people to feel guilty outreach by the Church is actually quite
new
Competition for souls, commodification of everyday life = fur trade is at the vanguard of a modern consumer
revolution?
NewAtlantic trade – turns Natives into consumers and producers at the same time as Europeans also
Did the fur trade destroy old traditional values? = happened to everyone
Arguments that the IR caused modern consumption…
But more recent historiography turns this around because there was so much demand for new products
industry followed slavery
Into 18thC Canada is becoming of increasing strategic importance around the world – need Newfoundland! Fish, navy’s training ground
BUT the perplexities of governing these vast, violent, poorly known territories are also intensifying
Frontier perplexities = ‘how can we know what they are thinking about God and King? Will become
enlightenment theories – maybe we don’t need to know what they are thinking about King and God in order to
govern them…
Put them through the rites is good enough? – very material understanding of knowledge (Biard) Week 5 – Lecture 1
History 202 – Canada to 1867
State and Society in New France 30/09/2013
What’s the difference between state and society?
Next week’s reading an essay by Benjamin Franklin = look for date and then find the one in the syllabus
- British imperial reasoning gets driven by colonial reasoning also = statement re. why theAmerican colonists
think France should be OUT of North America/Canada
film also = fate of the continent (?) link on the syllabus
State = an international political unit
Difference between state and government?
The government can change but the state remains somewhat static = the state refers to the apparatus of
government the mechanisms of power used to impose rule upon the people (refers to government but not the
transitory meaning of government)
Where does the state end and society begin? State vs. private action.
When is someone acting as an agent of the state? Very few state claims that are uncontested.
= Originally, there was not much formal state presence in Early Canada = people come with warrant
(government gives them a piece of paper asserting that they represent royal authority BUT to some degree it
really is just a piece of paper = only application of power will prove the power of the paper!)
early on people go to NF as traders, settlers and even convicts
‘state official’is a hat that they sometimes put on most of the time they are busy trying to pursue a living,
convert people etc.
= to be a state official is not to eschew private profit people invest in official positions in order to earn profits
from fees, bribes, side-line industries and perhaps to avoid debts
stronger distinction exists now if people are seen to be profiting from public service but this is NEW (almost an
Enlightenment ideal – there is a bound and limited state and that a good strong community distinguishes
between
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