This cohesive collection investigates many of the most hotly contested questions surrounding the Conquest: Was the battle itself a crucial turning point, or just one element in the global struggle between France and Great Britain? Did the battle's outcome reflect the superior strategy of General James Wolfe or rather errors on both sides? Did the Conquest alter the long-term trajectories of the French and British empires or simply confirm patterns well underway? How formative was the Conquest in defining the new British America and those now living under its rule?"--Pub. desc.
This companion volume to Revisiting 1759 examines how the Conquest of Canada has been remembered, commemorated, interpreted, and reinterpreted by groups in Canada, France, Great Britain, the United States, and most of all, in Quebec. It focuses particularly on how the public memory of the Conquest has been used for a variety of cultural, political, and intellectual purposes. The essays contained in this volume investigate topics such as the legacy of 1759 in twentieth-century Quebec; the memorialization of General James Wolfe in a variety of national contexts; and the re-imagination of the Plains of Abraham as a tourist destination. Combined with Revisiting 1759, this collection provides readers with the most comprehensive, wide-ranging assessment to date of the lasting effects of the Conquest of Canada.
Combined with Revisiting 1759, this collection provides readers with the most comprehensive, wide-ranging assessment to date of the lasting effects of the Conquest of Canada.
French North America in the Shadows of Conquest is an interdisciplinary, postcolonial, and continental history of Francophone North America across the long twentieth century, revealing hidden histories that so deeply shaped the course of North America. Modern French North America was born from the process of coming to terms with the idea of conquest after the fall of New France. The memory of conquest still haunts those 20 million Francophones who call North America home. The book re-examines the contours of North American history by emphasizing alliances between Acadians, Cajuns, and Québécois and French Canadians in their attempt to present a unified challenge against the threat of assimilation, linguistic extinction, and Anglophone hegemony. It explores cultural trauma narratives and the social networks Francophones constructed and shows how North American history looks radically different from their perspective. This book presents a missing chapter in the annals of linguistic and ethnic differences on a continent defined, in part, by its histories of dispossession. It will be of interest to scholars and students of American and Canadian history, particularly those interested in French North America, as well as ethnic and cultural studies, comparative history, the American South, and migration.
Revisiting 1759 provides a fresh historical reappraisal of the Conquest and its aftermath using new approaches drawn from military, imperial, social, and Aboriginal history.
Beyond redrawing North American borders and establishing a permanent system of governance, the Quebec Act of 1774 fundamentally changed British notions of empire and authority. Although it is understood as a formative moment - indeed part of the "textbook narrative" - in several different national histories, the Quebec Act remains underexamined in all of them. The first sustained examination of the act in nearly thirty years, Entangling the Quebec Act brings together essays by historians from North America and Europe to explore this seminal event using a variety of historical approaches. Focusing on a singular occurrence that had major social, legal, revolutionary, and imperial repercussions, the book weaves together perspectives from spatially and conceptually distinct historical fields - legal and cultural, political and religious, and beyond. Collectively, the contributors resituate the Quebec Act in light of Atlantic, American, Canadian, Indigenous, and British Imperial historiographies. A transnational collaboration, Entangling the Quebec Act shows how the interconnectedness of national histories is visible at a single crossing point, illustrating the importance of intertwining methodologies to bring these connections into focus.
A History of Law in Canada is an important three-volume project. Volume One begins at a time just prior to European contact and continues to the 1860s, Volume Two covers the half century after Confederation, and Volume Three covers the period from the beginning of the First World War to 1982, with a postscript taking the account to approximately 2000. The history of law includes substantive law, legal institutions, legal actors, and legal culture. The authors assume that since 1500 there have been three legal systems in Canada – the Indigenous, the French, and the English. At all times, these systems have co-existed and interacted, with the relative power and influence of each being more or less dominant in different periods. The history of law cannot be treated in isolation, and this book examines law as a dynamic process, shaped by and affecting other histories over the long term. The law guided and was guided by economic developments, was influenced and moulded by the nature and trajectory of political ideas and institutions, and variously exacerbated or mediated intercultural exchange and conflict. These themes are apparent in this examination, and through most areas of law including land settlement and tenure, and family, commercial, constitutional, and criminal law.
For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain was the dominant world power, its strength based in large part on its command of an Empire that, in the years immediately after World War I, encompassed almost one-quarter of the earth’s land surface and one-fifth of its population. Writers boasted that the sun never set on British possessions, which provided raw materials that, processed in British factories, could be re-exported as manufactured products to expanding colonial markets. The commercial and political might was not based on any grand strategic plan of territorial acquisition, however. The Empire grew piecemeal, shaped by the diplomatic, economic, and military circumstances of the times, and its speedy dismemberment in the mid-twentieth century was, similarly, a reaction to the realities of geopolitics in post-World War II conditions. Today the Empire has gone but it has left a legacy that remains of great significance in the modern world. The Historical Dictionary of the British Empire covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Britain.
The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism examines the global history of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination from ancient times to the present day. It explores the ways in which new polities were established in freshly discovered ‘New Worlds’, and covers the history of many countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, South Africa, Liberia, Algeria, Canada, and the USA. Chronologically as well as geographically wide-reaching, this volume focuses on an extensive array of topics and regions ranging from settler colonialism in the Neo-Assyrian and Roman empires, to relationships between indigenes and newcomers in New Spain and the early Mexican republic, to the settler-dominated polities of Africa during the twentieth century. Its twenty-nine inter-disciplinary chapters focus on single colonies or on regional developments that straddle the borders of present-day states, on successful settlements that would go on to become powerful settler nations, on failed settler colonies, and on the historiographies of these experiences. Taking a fundamentally international approach to the topic, this book analyses the varied experiences of settler colonialism in countries around the world. With a synthesizing yet original introduction, this is a landmark contribution to the emerging field of settler colonial studies and will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the global history of imperialism and colonialism.
The largest estuary in the world, the Gulf of St Lawrence is defined broadly by an ecology that stretches from the upper reaches of the St Lawrence River to the Gulf Stream, and by a web of influences that reach from the heart of the continent to northern Europe. For more than a millennium, the gulf's strategic location and rich marine resources have made it a destination and a gateway, a cockpit and a crossroads, and a highway and a home. From Vinland the Good to the novels of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the Gulf has haunted the Western imagination. A transborder collaboration between Canadian and American scholars, The Greater Gulf represents the first concerted exploration of the environmental history – marine and terrestrial – of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Contributors tell many histories of a place that has been fished, fought over, explored, and exploited. The essays' defining themes resonate in today's charged atmosphere of quickening climate change as they recount stories of resilience played against ecological fragility, resistance at odds with accommodation, considered versus reckless exploitation, and real, imagined, and imposed identities. Reconsidering perceptions about borders and the spaces between and across land and sea, The Greater Gulf draws attention to a central place and part of North Atlantic and North American history. Contributors include Rainer Baehre (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Jack Bouchard (Folger Institute), Claire Campbell (Bucknell University), Caitlin Charman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Jack Little (Simon Fraser University), Edward MacDonald (University of Prince Edward Island), Matthew McKenzie (University of Connecticut), Suzanne Morton (McGill University), Brian Payne (Bridgewater State University), John G. Reid (St. Mary's University), and Daniel Soucier (University of Maine).
