Exchange, Empire, and Indigeneity in French America

Abstract

Exchange, Empire, and Indigeneity in French America Eugene R. H. Tesdahl Inconquis: Deux retraites françaises vers la Louisiane après 1760. By Joseph Gagné. Quebec: Septentrion, 2016. 264 pages. Paper, ebook. Histoire des coureurs de bois: Amérique du Nord, 1600 – 1840. By Gilles Havard. Rivages des Xantons. Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2016. 885 pages. Paper. Despite the growing internationalization of early American history, scholars of early America all too often confine themselves to reading only English-language works. Many scholars rely on documents from the Spanish, Dutch, and French regimes while neglecting current research published in those languages. In two engaging monographs, Joseph Gagné and Gilles Havard remind us that French-language research remains essential to understanding early modern North America. Many will be familiar with Havard's previous scholarship, especially the monumental Empire et métissages: Indiens et Français dans le pays d'en haut, 1660–1715 and Histoire de l'Amérique française (coauthored with Cécile Vidal). Havard's Histoire des coureurs de bois is similarly ambitious and effective. Havard challenges readers to reconsider the significance of the French presence in North America by reimagining "the emblematic figures of the 'coureur de bois' [unlicensed trader] and of the 'voyageur' [canoe paddler] from a 'transnational' or 'trans-imperial' perspective that will take into account, over a period of two and a half centuries (circa 1600–1840), the entirety of the North American continent" (8).1 This book is the most thorough investigation ever attempted of the coureurs de bois, but it is also much more. Rather than focusing narrowly on the unlicensed fur traders themselves, Havard uses the coureurs de bois to open a window into the histories of trade, empire, race, and masculinity in the French Atlantic world. This approach is an important model for Francophone scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Although it weighs in at nearly nine hundred pages, Havard's study is surprisingly accessible [End Page 548] to those with only the most basic knowledge of Indigenous and French North America. Even scholars with minimal French-language skills will find themselves richly rewarded. Anchored by copious archival materials from collections in the United States, Canada, Spain, and France, the book also expertly synthesizes the dense French- and English-language literature on the coureurs de bois, the North American fur trade, and Indigenous societies. Havard spans great stretches of time and space, retracing 250 years of history across a vast territory, from the Atlantic coast of Canada, down the Saint Lawrence River Valley, past the pays d'en haut of the French Great Lakes region, into the Illinois Country, French Louisiana, and even the Intermountain West. Dutch boslopers (wandering traders) in New Netherland, British deerskin traders in South Carolina, and French Missouri River boatmen join Havard's cast. Sovereign Indigenous nations occupy the center of this narrative, not its periphery. The work is divided into two thematic sections, the first focused on colonial societies and the second on Indian societies. In part 1, Havard demonstrates that French colonial administrators often vacillated between viewing coureurs de bois as assets or as liabilities in bolstering a tenuous American empire. In search of greater imperial control within what Havard describes as the "fragile military and economic context" (43) of the mid-seventeenth century, French officials created a restrictive permit system, authorizing only a limited number of colonists to participate in the fur trade.2 Those who flouted these requirements, traveling into Indian country to conduct unlicensed trade, came to be known as coureurs de bois. Havard thoughtfully details what some have long known: that the very existence of coureurs de bois at once infuriated French officials and economically bolstered the French Empire. Simultaneously decried and depended upon, the coureur de bois became a figure of mobility, freedom, criminality, and masculine virility. A similar dynamic played out in other empires. Although Havard's focus remains on the French, he also analyzes both illicit and legitimate fur trades in different regions and within different European and Indigenous zones of influence. Part 2 examines dynamic Indigenous nations, their involvement in and manipulation of the fur trade, and the métis (mixed) cultures...