Frontier Seaport: Detroit's Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt, by Catherine Cangany

Abstract

Frontier Seaport: Detroit's Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepot, by Catherine Cangany. American Beginnings Series. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014. 288 pp. $45.00 US (cloth). ongoing project to more fully incorporate the story of French communities into colonial and early national American history takes another step forward with Catherine Cangany's Frontier Seaport: Detroit's Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepot. As the subtitle indicates, however, Cangany's monograph also places the story of Detroit's early history within the framework of the burgeoning field of Atlantic world history. But lest we categorize this work as principally imperial in its orientation, Cangany reminds the reader early on that, The town's close proximity to Native groups, its physical separation from apathetic imperial powers concerned only with maintaining the settlement's financial viability, and repeated political upheavals made Detroiters resistant to full assimilation into the broader Atlantic World (p. 4). In six chapters that are at once thematic and chronological, we learn that despite the regime changes that occurred during Detroit's first century, the continuities of its culture, economic, and political localisms reveal as much or more about the history of this specific place and its people. Comparatively, the strength of its culture allowed it, by the 1730s, to transcend its location in North America's interior to become connected to the Atlantic world's consumption-based economy. book's first two chapters trace the ways by which Detroit's first settlers used the fur trade to forge connections both to Native Americans in their vicinity and to suppliers of the growing number of consumer goods that were crossing the Atlantic by the 1730s. Cangany uses a wide array of sources that includes merchants' records, probate and criminal court records, French, British, and American military correspondence, travel narratives, and newspapers, to demonstrate the hybridity (p. 5) that developed in Detroit during the eighteenth century. Demonstrating again the usefulness of histories that look at change over time in specific geographic places, we are able to appreciate Detroit's unique development as both a cosmopolitan and provincial community. In chapter three Cangany uses moccasins as a case study to demonstrate even more specifically how something that might be simply categorized as an example of cultural appropriation became something more important both to Detroiters and to the wider Atlantic world. first Europeans to wear moccasins were priests, farmers, and soldiers living in any number of borderlands (p. 75) who simply found them a superior form of footwear for local conditions. …