Dechêne's work, when first published, constituted a major milestone in the development of methodology and use of sources. Her systematic examination of difficult and massive documentary collections blazed a number of new trails for other researchers. Her judicious blending of numerical data and "qualitative" findings makes this book one of the rare examples of "new history" that avoids the extremes of statistical abstraction and anecdotal antiquarianism. Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal won the Governor-General's Award and the Garneau Medal from the Canadian Historical Association when it first appeared in French.
Covering a period that runs from the founding of the colony in the early seventeenth century to the conquest of 1760, People, State, and War under the French Regime in Canada is a study of colonial warriors and warfare that examines the exercise of state military power and its effects on ordinary people. Overturning the tendency to glorify the military feats of New France and exploding the rosy myth of a tax-free colonial population, Louise Dechêne challenges the stereotype of the fighting prowess and military enthusiasm of the colony’s inhabitants. She reveals the profound incidence of social divides, the hardship war created for those expected to serve, and the state’s demands on the civilian population in the form of forced labour, requisitions, and billeting of soldiers. Originally published posthumously in French, People, State, and War under the French Regime in Canada is the culmination of a lifetime of research and unparalleled knowledge of the archival record, including official correspondence, memoirs, military campaign journals, taxation records, and local parish records. Dechêne reconstructs the variegated composition and conditions of military forces in New France, which included militia, colonial volunteers, and regular troops, as well as Indigenous allies. The study offers an informed and ambitious comparison between France and other French colonies and shows that the mobilization of an unpaid, compulsory militia in New France greatly exceeded requirements in other parts of the French domain. With empathy, sensitivity to the social dimensions of life, and a piercing insight into the operations of power, Dechêne portrays the colonial condition with its rightful dose of danger and ambiguity. Her work underlines the severe toll that warfare takes on the individual and on society and the persistent deprivation, disorder, fear, and death that come with conflict.
Nancy Christie innovatively and significantly transforms the writing of Quebec history between 1763 and 1837 by locating Quebec within new British practices of imperial governance asserted in the wake of the Seven Years War. Breaking with the conventional master-narrative of the era as one of gradual integration between French- and English-speaking communities, accompanied by incremental political and social liberalization, Nancy Christie presents the six decades following the Conquest as a period of assertive British strategies for assimilating Quebec's French and Catholic majority, and refurbished authoritarianism deployed to arrest the spread of revolution in the Atlantic world. Brilliantly advanced, this new narrative of post-Conquest Quebec builds upon entirely new research meticulously gleaned from over 20,000 cases from the criminal and civil judicial archives and a sustained examination of both official and unofficial political and social discourses. This study charts both the British practices of colonial rule, which sought the assimilation of non-British 'others' through both formal modes of law and governance, and the consumption of British manufactured goods, and the contestation of these through the daily resistance of ordinary men and women. In so doing, Christie identifies Quebec as a case study with which to open a new trajectory in the wider study of the British Empire. Her striking conclusion urges a shift in historical focus from the interaction between European colonizers and racialized others, to the centrality of practices of rule designed to govern European subaltern peoples.
Combining innovative archaeological analysis with historical research, Peter E. Pope examines the way of life that developed in seventeenth-century Newfoundland, where settlement was sustained by seasonal migration to North America's oldest industry, the cod fishery. The unregulated English settlements that grew up around the exchange of fish for wine served the fishery by catering to nascent consumer demand. The English Shore became a hub of transatlantic trade, linking Newfoundland with the Chesapeake, New and old England, southern Europe, and the Atlantic islands. Pope gives special attention to Ferryland, the proprietary colony founded by Sir George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, in 1621, but later taken over by the London merchant Sir David Kirke and his remarkable family. The saga of the Kirkes provides a narrative line connecting social and economic developments on the English Shore with metropolitan merchants, proprietary rivalries, and international competition. Employing a rich variety of evidence to place the fisheries in the context of transatlantic commerce, Pope makes Newfoundland a fresh point of view for understanding the demographic, economic, and cultural history of the expanding North Atlantic world.
Après avoir cofondé la première revue homosexuelle canadienne, la poète Elsa Gidlow, 21 ans, décide de quitter Montréal en 1920, déçue par le manque de possibilités amoureuses que lui offre alors la ville. Le réseau d'amis masculins homosexuels qu'elle a intégré au cours des années précédentes ne manque toutefois pas d'occasions de trouver des partenaires. En effet, même si l'homosexualité est considérée comme un crime depuis l'époque coloniale, une culture gaie masculine, qui était pratiquement inexistante avant 1880, s'est largement épanouie depuis le début du siècle. Grossières indécences retrace les origines de cette culture clandestine complexe et fascinante. Dominic Dagenais a consulté à rebours des archives produites en grande partie par la surveillance et la persécution, soit des dossiers judiciaires, des articles de journaux, de la correspondance, des archives personnelles, des publications médicales et des dossiers d'enquêtes publiques pour mettre au jour le contexte répressif dans lequel les identités homosexuelles contemporaines se sont construites et pour découvrir les espaces publics investis par le monde homosexuel montréalais au tournant du XXe siècle. Dans une ville marquée par le fleurissement des loisirs commerciaux et les trépidations de son quartier chaud, des hommes, mais aussi quelques femmes, ont déployé diverses stratégies pour se rencontrer et pour nouer des relations. Des rencontres risquées surviennent ainsi dans les rues, ruelles, magasins, parcs, théâtres et toilettes publiques de la ville. Un monde homosexuel riche et diversifié prend forme à Montréal au tournant du XXe siècle, en dépit d'une surveillance policière de plus en plus élaborée et des lourdes sanctions pénales auxquelles s'exposent les individus se livrant à des rapports homosexuels, considérés alors comme une grossière indécence et comme le pire des vices. Ce livre documente son histoire inédite.
Cet ouvrage revisite l'histoire intellectuelle et politique canadienne entre la révolution américaine et les rébellions de 1837-1838 au Haut et au Bas-Canada en la réintégrant dans le cadre des Révolutions atlantiques qui ont secoué l'Europe et l'Amérique entre 1776 et 1838. Reposant sur un cadre théorique inspiré des travaux des historiens intellectuels du monde atlantique, il traite plus particulièrement de l'importance du concept de liberté dans le développement de l'État dans les deux colonies. Il démontre que ces dernières se sont développés dès 1791 en suivant un idéal de liberté qui, tout en étant différent de la liberté à l'oeuvre au sein des mouvements révolutionnaires de la fin du XVIIIe siècle, n'en était pas moins issu des Lumières. Il présente également les rébellions de 1837-1838 comme étant en partie le résultat d'un affrontement entre deux concepts très différents de liberté.
The only multivolume encyclopedia covering all aspects of North American colonial warfare, with special attention paid to the social, political, cultural, and economic affairs that were affected by the conflicts. Encyclopedia of North American Colonial Conflicts to 1775: A Political, Social, and Military History is the first multivolume resource on the full range of combat and confrontation in the New World prior to the American Revolution—not just rivalries between European empires but Indian conflicts, slave rebellions, and popular uprisings as well. Organized A–Z, the encyclopedia covers all major wars and conflicts in North America from the late-15th to mid-18th centuries, with discussions of key battles, diplomatic efforts, military technologies, and strategies and tactics. Encyclopedia of North American Colonial Conflicts to 1775 explores the context for conflict, with essays on competing colonial powers, every major Native American tribe, all important political and military leaders, and a range of social and cultural issues. The insights and information contained here will help anyone understand the genesis of North American culture, the plight of Native Americans after European contact, and the beginnings of the United States of America.
Becoming British Columbia is the first comprehensive, demographic history of British Columbia. Investigating critical moments in the demographic record and linking demographic patterns to larger social and political questions, it shows how biology, politics, and history conspired with sex, death, and migration to create a particular kind of society. John Belshaw overturns the widespread tendency to associate population growth with progress. He reveals that the province has a long tradition of thinking and acting vigorously in ways meant to control and shape biological communities of humans, and suggests that imperialism, race, class, and gender have historically situated population issues at the centre of public consciousness in British Columbia.
The Seven Years' War (1754–1763) was a pivotal event in the history of the Atlantic world. Perspectives on the significance of the war and its aftermath varied considerably from different cultural vantage points. Northern and western Indians, European imperial authorities, and their colonial counterparts understood and experienced the war (known in the United States as the French and Indian War) in various ways. In many instances the progress of the conflict was charted by cultural differences and the implications participants drew from cultural encounters. It is these cultural encounters, their meaning in the context of the Seven Years' War, and their impact on the war and its diplomatic settlement that are the subjects of this volume. Cultures in Conflict: The Seven Years' War in North America addresses the broad pattern of events that framed this conflict's causes, the intercultural dynamics of its conduct, and its profound impact on subsequent events—most notably the American Revolution and a protracted Anglo-Indian struggle for continental control. Warren R. Hofstra has gathered the best of contemporary scholarship on the war and its social and cultural history. The authors examine the viewpoints of British and French imperial authorities, the issues motivating Indian nations in the Ohio Valley, the matter of why and how French colonists fought, the diplomatic and social world of Iroquois Indians, and the responses of British colonists to the conflict. The result of these efforts is a dynamic historical approach in which cultural context provides a rationale for the well-established military and political narrative of the Seven Years' War. These synthetic and interpretive essays mark out new territory in our understanding of the Seven Years' War as we recognize its 250th anniversary.
