Sovereignty across the Atlantic: The Nova Scotia Charter, the Union of the Crowns, and Scottish Independence

Reviewed by: The 'Conquest' of Acadia, 1710: Imperial, Colonial, and Aboriginal Constructions Dale Miquelon The 'Conquest' of Acadia, 1710: Imperial, Colonial, and Aboriginal Constructions. John G. Reid, Maurice Basque, Elizabeth Mancke, Barry Moody, Geoffrey Plank, and William Wicken. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Pp. viii, 297, $60.00 cloth, $32.95 paper In their title, the authors place the word conquest in quotation marks, seemingly implying that this is a courtesy title for the capture of Port Royal in 1710, or an overblown way to describe the cession of Acadia at Utrecht in 1713, or the title of a decades-long process. Certainly they believe that the historian must look at the long history that encompasses the events of 1710 which they argue, is not a single narrative but several interlocking ones. This position drives the organization of the book, in which chapters by different authors elucidate the 'Imperial, Colonial, and Aboriginal Constructions' of the subtitle. The result is an original and welcome addition both to the too-slim shelf of Acadiana and to the bursting library of British imperial studies. John Bartlett Brebner's idea of Acadia or Nova Scotia as 'New England's outpost' is here rejected. Whether one has to do with the short-lived Sterling colony of Nova Scotia, of Nova Scotia as a Cromwellian conquest, or the capture of 1710 and the decades that followed, the [End Page 157] motivations and execution were British. As Geoffrey Plank tells us, New Englanders thought of Acadia not as part of a promised land to claim, but as a Babylon to be avoided and as the retreat of Frenchmen and Indians who were periodically to be subjected to punishing raids. Barry Moody reminds us that Massachusetts even obstructed the settlement of Maine, having projects of frontier settlement still closer to home. His graceful essay emphasizes Anglicanism, English ideas of county government, and the role of British officers in early Nova Scotia. Elizabeth Mancke provides much detail to support this idea of the colony as Great Britain's outpost. Yet for many reasons explored by these authors, Great Britain did little to exert its sovereignty and left those it thought of as its subjects or subjects-to-be in a limbo of uncertainty. In a way, Great Britain was new at empire. Towards the end of the seventeenth century and after 1710 in Nova Scotia, it was called to an unwonted exertion. It fumbled badly in the old Thirteen Colonies as it did in Nova Scotia. Mancke and John Reid recount a transition from private elite colonization to state action. Reid shows that what passed for government in early Nova Scotia was really diplomacy: actual treaties with Micmac and Maliseet, who it was hoped would be first 'good Neighbours' and eventually 'good Subjects' (114); continual negotiation with Acadians, who were claimed as subjects but could not be made true subjects by such an evanescent exercise of sovereignty. William Wicken takes us into the native world of 'M'ikma'ki.' As he writes, Nova Scotia and Acadia were 'legal fictions used by France and Great Britain to justify the exclusion of other European nations [and, he might have added, each other] from the region' (90). In this world, the drying of eels to ensure winter survival was more important than the defence of Port Royal in October 1710. But Native peoples came to see in the years that followed Utrecht that this world had changed. At the Treaty of Boston, 1725, and in subsequent adherences and ratifications, many Indian nations attempted to establish a new, long-term relationship with Great Britain. It was a narrative line characterized by much Native co-operation and independence of action. The story of the Acadians remains, of course, a narrative central to the history of Acadia/Nova Scotia. Two remarkable essays by Maurice Basque break up the supposed monolith of an equal, innocent, and unlettered Acadian society imagined by nineteenth-century historians. Here one glimpses real people: rich and poor Acadians; merchants, sailors, and farmers; Acadians with Micmac relations; temporizing Acadians balancing neutral, pro-French, and pro-English positions; and those who had taken the plunge and joined one or another camp. It...

The development of a cultural life in the Maritime settlements of eighteenth-century Canada was closely tied to events in the American colonies. Throughout the seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth century, both France and England were interested in the Canadian Maritime region, which included the present-day provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland.' Many New Englanders regarded Nova Scotia their northeastern frontier and as a vitally important stepping-stone to the valuable North Atlantic fisheries and to the St. Lawrence region.2 The French, on the other hand, considered Nova Scotia to be the eastern base of military defense and a commercial enterprise.3 Both countries, therefore, wanted this region for their own commercial purposes. As early as 1654 Puritan Massachusetts launched an attack on Port Royal in Nova Scotia and temporarily captured it. After several subsequent battles the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 gave Cape Breton to the French, but the rest of Nova Scotia was controlled by England. New Englanders still wished to drive the French completely out of the Maritime region and wanted it to be New England's outpost. Nevertheless, when the great French fortress of Louisbourg was built on Cape Breton Island, New England merchants eagerly supplied the French with building materials and food, temporarily and conveniently forgetting about their hatred of the French and Catholicism. By 1743, of the 175 vessels arriving at Louisbourg, 78 were from New England and Nova Scotia.4 Two years later, in 1754, the American colonists assisted in capturing

In June 2012, UNESCO named the landscape of Grand Pré, Nova Scotia, a World Heritage Site, as ‘exceptional testimony to a traditional farming settlement created in the seventeenth century by the Acadians in a coastal zone with tides that are among the highest in the world’. Grand Pré is the gateway to the Annapolis Valley, a rare stretch of favourable soils and climate in a largely unarable province. From the early nineteenth century onward, ambitions to make the Valley ‘the Orchard of the Empire’ resulted in some of the most intensive rural development in Atlantic Canada. This transformed the physical, ecological and economic landscape of Nova Scotia profoundly, and became central to its sense of place in the global community. Its fields and orchards also inspired a second industry: tourism, promoting, ironically, a decidedly non-industrial picture of blithe fertility and prosperity. In recent decades, both agriculture and tourism in the region have created a new idyll, one that grafts the language of sustainability onto the pastoral image of apple blossoms, and so successfully draws attention away from the ecological costs and economic health of agriculture in the region. With its focus on pre-industrial Acadian settlement, historical commemoration at Grand Pré has the very real effect of affirming the possibility of local and sustainable agriculture in the area today. But the pré is also part of another history, another set of agricultural practices that followed the Acadians and that still frame most agricultural production in Nova Scotia. This essay offers a second public narrative for Grand Pré, one that treats the site as part of the Annapolis Valley as well as l’ancienne Acadie, part of an industrial landscape as well as an idyllic one. It is only by recognizing both histories that we can really appreciate the realities of modern agriculture and the need for sustainable alternatives.

Reviewed by: Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783-1820 Elizabeth Mancke Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783–1820. Joshua M. Smith. Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006. Pp. 192, $55.00 cloth Island-studded Passamaquoddy Bay on the border between Maine and New Brunswick has been a smuggling zone since the French and English first attempted colonies in northeastern North America in the seventeenth century. In Borderland Smuggling, Joshua Smith analyzes the intense and contentious period of smuggling from the end of the American Revolution through the War of 1812. Smuggling, as Smith notes, is 'a social force within border communities' (xiii) involving local economies, violence, and the reach of governmental authority, from the local to the national and imperial. The years from 1783 to 1820 were also a critical period of identity formation for citizens of the new United States and British subjects in the remaining colonies of British North America, and attitudes toward smuggling refracted multiple elements of that process. Smith's work reconfigures conventional wisdom about smuggling. Current scholarship on piracy, such as that by Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, can leave the impression that smuggling was pursued by the underclasses and disaffected. But, as Smith shows, that was not invariably the case. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British Americans of all social classes engaged in smuggling. Colonial resistance to British attempts to curb it after the Seven Years' War (1756–63) and thereby collect more colonial customs revenues contributed to the coming of the War for Independence. That evidence, however, leads to another bit of erroneous conventional wisdom: US citizens were sympathetic toward, if not supportive of, smuggling, while [End Page 410] British North Americans, loyal subjects of the empire, were anti-smuggling. Smith's evidence shows that smugglers working from Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia came from all social classes, and local elites who allowed smuggling and engaged in it were approved over officials hired to restrict it. Yet by the 1830s elites were beginning to sanitize local memory of the preceding five decades, acknowledging that communities such as Eastport, ME, and Saint Andrews, NB, had benefited from smuggling but suggesting that it had largely been the work of outsiders 'who introduced vicious habits and immorality to the community' (110). For British and American officials, controlling the trade of this border zone became symbolic of the ability of governments to impose order on and elicit loyalty from the governed. For residents of Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, smuggling was an economic strategy more than a reflection of political ideology, as former rebels and loyalists collaborated in the movement of goods across the international boundary. The inability of governments to impose their wills was abundantly manifest with thwarted attempts to enforce Jefferson's Embargo of 1807 and the subsequent Non-Intercourse Act and Macon's Bill No. 2, as well as New Brunswick's Plaster Act (1817). The last was an attempt by Saint John's merchant elites to control the trade of gypsum produced by Nova Scotians, and they persuaded the Nova Scotia assembly to pass supporting legislation. Resistance to that legislation produced strange bedfellows, with royally appointed customs officials in New Brunswick siding with gypsum smugglers, both British and American, because imperial officials did not feel obliged to enforce provincial trade legislation. Borderland Smuggling is a book of modest size, but that briefness combined with the reach of the issues it addresses makes it an excellent book for discussion in an upper-level undergraduate course or a graduate seminar. It is highly readable and covers the reach of state power, the problems that border zones create for the coalescence of state power and identity, the strategies communities devise to subvert state authority in the interest of the local economy, and the willingness of people to accept if not sanction the use of violence in protecting local interests. Smith also shows how international tensions, such as the War of 1812, could intensified smuggling, and how later free trade tempered smuggling across the border between the United States and British North America. Finally, Borderland Smuggling is part of a small but growing...

The present chapter traces the emergence of Scottish Atlantic writing in the seventeenth century by focusing on works from the 1620s that promote the colonization of Nova Scotia. It studies works written by James VI and I, William Alexander, Robert Gordon, Thomas Hariott, and Richard Guthry while also discussing the role the Virginia Company and the indigenous Mi'kmaq and Maliseet populations played in Scotland's attempts to colonize Nova Scotia. It situates these agents and works in the larger contexts of European empire-building. It also considers forms of internal colonialism in the British Isles, including writings about the Highlands and Islands and inner-British power dynamics after the Union of Crowns. The utopian tradition offers ways to understanding the spaces, temporalities, and cultural agents in the emerging Scottish Atlantic, including the tropes of newness and reform as well as the intertextual relationships with earlier travelogues and the longevity of the Scottish colonial imagination.

In the first study to connect the Acadian experience with the heritage of ideas the migrants brought with them from Europe, Naomi Griffiths explores the creation and endurance of the Acadian community and the ways in which the Acadians differed from the people of New England and New France. One result of the war between England and France for the domination of much of North America was the deportation of the Acadians from their homeland in 1755. Griffiths examines the implications of this deportation for the survival of the Acadian community. In 1600 there were no such people as the Acadians; by 1700 the Acadians, who numbered almost 2,000, lived in an area now covered by northern Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and the southern Gaspe region of Quebec. While most of their ancestors had come to live there from France, a number had arrived from Scotland and England. Their relations with the original inhabitants of the region, the Micmac and Malecite peoples, were generally peaceful. In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht recognized the Acadian community and gave their territory -- on the frontier between New England and New France -- to Great Britain. During the next forty years the Acadians continued to prosper and to develop their political life and distinctive culture. The deportation of 1755, however, exiled the majority of Acadians to other British colonies in North America. Some went on from their original destination to England, France, or Santo Domingo; many of those who arrived in France continued on to Louisiana; some Acadians eventually returned to Nova Scotia, but not to the lands they once held. The deportation, however, did not destroy the Acadian community. In spite of a horrific death toll, nine years of proscription, and the forfeiture of property and political rights, the Acadians continued to be part of Nova Scotia. The communal existence they were able to sustain, Griffiths shows, formed the basis for the recovery of Acadian society when, in 1764, they were again permitted to own land in the colony. Instead of destroying the Acadian community, the deportation proved to be a source of power for the formation of Acadian identity in the nineteenth century. By placing Acadian history in the context of North American and European realities, Griffiths removes it from the realms of folklore and partisan political interpretation. She brings into play the current historiographical concerns about the development of the trans-Atlantic world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, considerably sharpening our focus on this period of North American history. (Publisher summary)

Reviewed by: A Fleeting Empire: Early Stuart Britain and the Merchant Adventurers to Canada Germaine Warkentin (bio) Andrew D. Nicholls. A Fleeting Empire: Early Stuart Britain and the Merchant Adventurers to Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press. xxx, 246. $39.95 In this study of English territorial and trade ambitions around the edges of New France in the early seventeenth century, Andrew Nicholls brings together historical actors and episodes he argues have previously been either ignored, downplayed, or misunderstood. When seen as interrelated, however, they cast fresh light on the question of English policy in the Atlantic during the period. Attracted by an unanswered question in George Brown’s influential school textbook, Building the Canadian Nation (1942), Nicholls ‘began to explore the ways in which the appearance of the Kirkes at Quebec in the late 1620s stemmed from the foreign and wartime policies of Charles I, and even more from the aspirations of one of his courtiers, Sir William Alexander, who held the original charter for Nova Scotia.’ Conventionally treated as ‘exotic footnotes’ to the main narrative of Charles I’s reign, events in Quebec and Acadia, he argues, need to be seen in the context of Charles’s management of court patronage, of the king’s conflicting obligations to his three kingdoms, of French claims in the area, and of the lives not only of Alexander but others such as James Stewart, Lord Ochiltree, and a host of minor figures, English, Scottish, and French. Recent work by Bernard Allaire and John Reid has partly erased the record of neglect the author deplores, but Nicholls has made a serious attempt to ask what larger picture is yielded by those events. A Fleeting Empire investigates not only the economic and political issues that faced Charles I and Louis XIII but the patronage relationships that drove events, the family histories determining the actions of individuals, and the economic realities that affected territorial claims. After a (to me) unnecessarily long introduction, Nicholls moves successively to chapters on early English expeditions in the North Atlantic and on James VI/I’s attempts to deal with regional challenges and problems of authority between his new kingdoms, England and Scotland. There follows a thorough and very fresh view of the court career of Sir William Alexander (customarily dismissed as merely an old-fashioned poet), of Alexander’s involvement in English plans for Nova Scotia, and (revealingly) how unimportant such projects were in his expert management of his rise to the earldom of Stirling. The contrasting example of the hapless Ochiltree emphasizes Nicholls’s point that fluctuation in the personal finances of courtly entrepreneurs could play a fatal role in events thousands of miles away. The ‘empire’ of Nicholls’s title was composed of a shifting set of monopolies and other awards established at various times between 1621 and 1632, the subject of chapters 5–10. Besides the Alexanders in [End Page 682] Nova Scotia (father and son), Nicholls examines projects for maritime defence that required the involvement of all three kingdoms, conflicts between Alexander and the Merchant Adventurers syndicate of the Kirke brothers, the tiny Cape Breton colony of the perilously low-funded Lord Ochiltree, the loss of Port Royal, and the control of shipping in the St. Lawrence. He spends little time on financial and courtly parallels in France and New France, but he is very aware of the way men from England and France, Scotland and Ireland, as well as Catholics and Huguenots, all mingled in the Atlantic environment, a point noted by John Bosher but more fully examined here. Alexander’s acquiescence in Charles’s surrender of Nova Scotia proves to be the ‘pragmatic choice of a seasoned courtier,’ not the ignominious retreat of a failed entrepreneur. Unfortunately, Nicholls pursues an almost entirely biographical approach, spending pages on familiar ‘background’ (Jean de Brébeuf, the Elizabethan succession crisis, the career of Sir Walter Ralegh) when an analytical narrative would tie his fascinating material together more effectively. He rightly emphasizes the role of ‘service’ and the system of honours that made courtiership function but says little about the ideals it involved and why they were effective. His archival research is excellent, though even he...

Scottish Colonial Literature is a comprehensive study of Scottish colonial writing before 1707. It brings together previously dispersed sources to argue for a tradition of Scottish colonial literature before the Union of Parliaments. It introduces the term colonial utopian literature to frame the intricate relationship between colonialism and utopianism in the seventeenth century. Offering case studies relating to colonial undertakings at Nova Scotia (1620s), East New Jersey (1680s) and at the Isthmus of Panama, then known as Darien (1690s), Scottish Colonial Literature explores how literature and culture shaped Scotland's colonial ventures in the seventeenth century. In addition, it considers works written in the larger context of the Scottish Atlantic so as to illuminate how the Atlantic shaped seventeenth-century Scottish literature and vice versa. One key question running through the book is the relationship between art and ideology. Textual narratives were powerful instruments of empire-building throughout the early modern period. This book focuses on utopianism as a framework that authors used to claim power over the Atlantic. In the Scottish context, the intersections between utopianism and colonialism shed light on the ambiguous narratives of possession and dispossession as well as internal and external colonialism in Scottish colonial writing of the seventeenth century. Scottish Colonial Literature enters debates about Scotland's position in colonial and postcolonial studies through its focus on pre-1707 Atlantic literature.

WHEN Bernard Bailyn entered graduate school in 1946, studies of New England dominated the field of early American history, many of them produced by Harvard-trained scholars. Two of his teachers, Samuel Eliot Morison and Oscar Handlin, wrote their own—albeit very different—dissertations on Boston.1 Harvard students knew there were practical advantages in choosing a New England topic, since they could find abundant manuscript materials in nearby archives and Widener Library contained nearly any published work they might need.2 Thus Bailyn's decision to focus his own dissertation on New England hardly seems surprising.Yet the long-range consequences of his choice were anything but predictable. Bailyn's later prize-winning scholarship on the Revolution and immigration has overshadowed The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century, the book based on his dissertation.3 This comparative neglect is unfortunate, for New England Merchants was also transformative, both in its influence on Bailyn's career and its impact on a reconceptualization of the early American field. It was Bailyn's entry point into a colonial American past that would engage his imagination for the next seven decades. Here he introduced many of the themes he would continue to develop in his better-known publications, including the significance of social history, connections between ideas and social developments, and New England's place within an Atlantic world. Bailyn insisted that all the seemingly disparate topics he explored—from merchants to Revolutionary ideology to immigration—were connected, although the links might have been clearer in retrospect than at the time. Together they represented “successive expressions of my search for understanding something of the origins of the world we know” across the span of his career.4In addition, with its exploration of transatlantic commercial networks, New England Merchants offered a glimpse at a dynamic colonial world extending far beyond the Bay Colony and its neighbors. Although initially Bailyn could not have foreseen or necessarily intended this outcome, with his first and subsequent books he contributed to the gradual diminution of New England's historiographical dominance. His creative imagination and enthusiastic support of the work of younger scholars helped make possible an ongoing scholarly enterprise that envisions a more expansive early American drama, placing New England in an ensemble cast, not the starring role.Bailyn, who majored in English at Williams College and studied “all things German” as part of his military service, did not arrive in postwar Cambridge intent on becoming an early Americanist. His scholarly agenda was more ambitious. He wanted to explore such grand themes as the transition from the early modern to the modern world, connections between ideas and reality, and historical ties between Europe and America. It was only when he had to fit these expansive goals into a workable academic program that he turned to colonial history “for administrative purposes.” A dissertation on seventeenth-century New England—“the one pure case of the influence of Protestant ideology on capitalist development”—touched on each of his core interests.5 He began by steeping himself in theoretical works, including those by Max Weber and R.H. Tawney. However, as he later explained, a dismissive gesture from Oscar Handlin freed him to turn away from abstract discussions to delve into the actual workings of society and economy.6Perhaps because Bailyn was not drawn to New England history for its own sake and thus not necessarily interested in following scholarly trends in the field, he did not join other scholars who dissected the region's distinctive religious culture. He chose instead to explore different, although related, themes in social history—“the obvious direction” to pursue.7 During the time when he was a graduate student, it likely seemed that little new could be said about puritanism itself. In 1953, the year Bailyn received his doctorate, Perry Miller published the second volume of his magisterial The New England Mind, extending his analysis of the puritan intellectual inheritance he regarded as central to the region's—indeed to America's—history. Bailyn later expressed admiration for Miller's ability “to conceive of a hitherto unglimpsed world” that other scholars had barely imagined. Nevertheless, from the time the book appeared, he believed that Miller's vision failed to capture crucial features of New England's colonial experience.8Bailyn outlined his reservations in a review of this second volume—an audacious move by a young scholar embarking on a career that would not lack for boldness. While he praised Miller's portrayal of a slowly disintegrating puritan hegemony, Bailyn argued that a reliance on theological and literary sources prevented Miller from explaining fully why it happened. To be sure, from these materials, Miller had “extemporized a social history subtler than any yet written,” essential to understanding this transformation, but his improvisation was a poor substitute for “a detailed, sophisticated history of colonial society.” Furthermore, although Miller admitted that “merchants and men of business” contributed to the decline of orthodoxy, such individuals scarcely appeared in his account.9They did, however, figure prominently in the dissertation Bailyn had just written and that would be published two years later. In it, Bailyn explained that almost from the beginning the task of reconciling New England's religious mission with its need for a functioning economy posed critical problems. The colonists’ hopes that they would find easily extracted resources and a pliant Native American population willing to trade on English terms quickly faded. By the 1640s, New England teetered on the brink of disaster. The outbreak of the English Civil War slowed to a trickle the influx of emigrants bringing the capital on which the region's nascent economy depended. Now it was up to merchants to salvage the puritan experiment. They found markets for whatever products colonists had to sell—from fish to barrel staves to livestock—mainly in the Caribbean. Drawing on kinship ties, men of business established commercial relationships with counterparts in various Atlantic ports through which raw materials, imported manufactures, and investment flowed, keeping New England's economy afloat.Prosperity, however, came at a spiritual cost. Commerce required regular interaction with outsiders who did not always approve of the puritan order that ministers and magistrates had painstakingly constructed. Merchants’ economic activities in England often embroiled them in political disputes that, even during Oliver Cromwell's rule over a puritan commonwealth, threatened to interfere with New England leaders’ preference for isolation from worldly distractions. Within the region, merchants wielded considerable influence over their neighbors by determining prices and controlling the supply of credit in an economy chronically short of currency. How to contain these vital yet potentially destabilizing contributions to New England's survival presented leaders with a formidable challenge.Those leaders urged all puritans, of whatever occupation, diligently to pursue their calling, but in the case of merchants, identifying the boundary between industry and avarice proved especially difficult. Ministers and magistrates resorted to exhortation and the courts to curb any signs of acquisitiveness that placed individual profit above the public good. Men of business who were devout puritans struggled to balance the conflicting demands of religious ideals and economic realities, knowing their salvation was at stake. No one wrestled more strenuously with this endless tug-of-war between the interests of self and society than the Boston merchant Robert Keayne.Rising from modest origins as a butcher's son, Keayne prospered as a London tradesman even as he nurtured a profound devotion to puritanism. In 1635, he crossed the Atlantic to join his spiritual mentor, the Reverend John Cotton, in Boston, a town that welcomed Keayne's entrepreneurial talents as much as his religious fervor. But within four years he fell afoul of the leaders in his adopted home, accused of overcharging customers. The court fined him, his church censured him, and Keayne never got over the public embarrassment. Other disputes with his neighbors followed, exacerbated by Keayne's testy personality and his presumed willingness to subordinate the responsibilities of piety to the lure of profit.10Keayne seldom appears in Miller's second volume of The New England Mind (and is not mentioned in the first). The few brief references portray him as his enemies did—as a greedy man whom the clergy rightly “whipped … into line” for his commercial transgressions.11 Bailyn, however, maintained a career-long fascination with the irascible Keayne, featuring him in his very first and last published works, and others in between. He regarded the beleaguered businessman as a far more important figure than Miller's perfunctory treatment suggested precisely because his misfortunes exposed “the actual influence of Calvinist thought in its New England Puritan form upon the life of trade.” Elucidating the connection between religion and capitalism had been Bailyn's goal at the outset of his dissertation research, and he discovered that the sermons and court records Miller consulted were less useful in this endeavor than an extraordinary account written by Keayne himself.12This was the merchant's Last Will and Testament, which went far beyond the usual purpose of allocating bequests. In a document that ultimately ran to 50,000 words and took six months to compose, Keayne sought to justify his actions to his contemporary critics and posterity. He vigorously defended the genuineness of his Christian piety and the righteousness of his business practices. Yet his agonized explanations spoke to the impossible demands placed upon the puritan merchant, whose industry earned praise while its successful generation of profit invited accusations of avarice. If they acceded to the curbs on commercial activity demanded by church and state—such as adhering to the notion of a just price—merchants could not effectively engage in the entrepreneurial activity that brought prosperity to their communities as well as themselves. Although Keayne could never admit it, the merchant's dilemma convinced Bailyn, who published an edited version of this singular document, that capitalism's rise necessarily “involved not the perpetuation but the destruction of this Puritan balance” between faith and commerce—a key turning-point in the transition from the early modern to the modern world.13There was no documented equivalent to Keayne (who died in 1656) as the seventeenth century progressed. Strict orthodoxy gave way to a more tolerant religious environment less censorious of merchants’ economic behavior. A new generation of entrepreneurs, some New England-born and some newcomers—many of whom were Anglicans—took advantage of the region's commercial opportunities without suffering the spiritual angst that plagued at least some of their forebears. After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, merchants who supported the crown and empire grew in influence, turning the few remaining puritan traders into “archaic types” representing the past, not the future. By the eighteenth century, new cleavages opened up within the merchant community, separating those who enjoyed greater access to influential imperial patrons and local government positions from those who did not. At the end of the book, Bailyn hinted that these divisions would eventually contribute to divergent political allegiances on the eve of the Revolution.14The book's initial impact, however, derived from its discussion of seventeenth-century developments. Bailyn provided the detailed social and economic analysis Miller bypassed to explain how and why New England's survival depended upon puritanism's decline. Examining merchants collectively and as individuals, he constructed a narrative propelled not by impersonal historical forces but by human actors with all their virtues and foibles, enlarging the cast of characters crucial to New England's evolution. He demonstrated that colonial merchants did not constitute a unified social class with strict status distinctions; everyone from petty traders to wealthy businessmen with extensive international networks claimed membership in the group. Bailyn's social history, in sum, offered a fresh perspective in a field otherwise dominated by studies of religion and public institutions. He hinted at the significance of his own work in another bold review essay addressing the limitations of his scholarly predecessors. In it, Bailyn pointed out Charles M. Andrews's inability “to conceive of society as an organism, with functionally related parts, with coherent groupings”—in short, his failure to grasp the concept of social structure that lay at the heart of New England Merchants.15The book's contributions to New England history were manifest from the start. Its broader influence within the colonial field—and on Bailyn's scholarship as a whole—emerged only gradually as latent effects of what first seemed a narrowly focused work. In succeeding years, Bailyn returned to key ideas and methodological innovations from his first book, applying them to colonial contexts beyond early New England. The cumulative effect of his lifelong engagement with the implications of New England Merchants helped to extend the compass of early American history beyond what it had been when his career began.The first glimpse of that latent impact came in 1957. Invited to participate in a symposium commemorating the 350th anniversary of Jamestown's founding, Bailyn produced one of the most influential essays of his career. In “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” he adapted the prosopographical analysis developed for New England merchants to study Chesapeake planters and found striking continuities in their experiences. Colonial elites, wherever they lived, struggled to establish their authority. Leaders could not simply assume deference from those below them—if only because some elite figures had themselves once belonged to a lower social rank, and everyone knew it. Chesapeake planters and New England merchants resorted to the same expedients to counter challenges from ambitious newcomers, strengthening their own social and economic status through intermarriage and imperial patronage. From these two regional examples, Bailyn offered general observations about differing European and colonial structures of authority and their political consequences. In Europe's more stable hierarchical order, the same people exerted social and political authority, but this unity of leadership did not carry over to the colonies. There local conditions mainly determined social position while external factors, especially unpredictable imperial demands, shaped political authority. The result was the development nearly everywhere in the colonies of a “new political system” of competing factions, beset by “permanent conflict” at the highest governmental level.16Bailyn continued to explore this “permanent conflict” in a lecture series later published as The Origins of American Politics. Its focus was the endemic factionalism rooted in the peculiar characteristics of the colonial political scene. In most places, royal governors theoretically wielded strong legal authority, but in reality they lacked the local patronage and influence to do their jobs effectively. These conditions encouraged assemblies representing an “overgreat democracy” to thwart the executive at nearly every turn. When Bailyn revised the lectures for publication, he added a lengthy section reviewing the trajectory of “immoderate politics” in various colonies. New York was “almost the ideal type,” a place with “violently rocketing factionalism” beginning with Jacob Leisler's overthrow of the dominant Anglo-Dutch elite in 1689. He described a similarly contentious politics in Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Maryland, and, to a much lesser extent, Virginia.17What about the four New England colonies? Massachusetts alone fit the general pattern of dueling executives and assemblies. Connecticut and Rhode Island, as the only remaining charter colonies, lacked the royal governors whose claims of authority sparked conflict elsewhere. New Hampshire did have a royally appointed executive, but the northern colony turned out to be the exception that proved the rule. Because of “a fortuitous conjunction of economic and political forces” that appeared nowhere else, Benning Wentworth avoided the local resistance afflicting other royal governors. He quashed legislative challenges by strategically placing cronies in the administration of a colony heavily reliant on the export of timber and naval stores. Bailyn's of a of crucial for his work on derived from an of conditions in of New England. This work out the as but not in the way that those who its puritan into the for a between Bailyn's book on seventeenth-century merchants and his on political and ideology a Yet New England Merchants was he initially the distinctive characteristics of colonial society and their connection to both local and Here he first the commercial system” with the by such as the and into the eighteenth These in in a of an of that Robert Keayne, Bailyn's imagination as an figure in a of and he never and could not In The of Bailyn how this wealthy merchant and Massachusetts struggled to how social and political from the early years had by the Revolutionary the of the only world he had but he no more connection between Bailyn's first book and his subsequent work to and social history more New England Merchants appeared, Bailyn with to remaining about the business He had discovered a Massachusetts the years to and, by the of its by sought a more of In with his Bailyn, he resorted to “a that from Bailyn later this as a the it a task much The study the gradual by which colonial commercial economy Bailyn's about its lack of a unified merchant was not the only turning to at that time. Its others to of of the most in England established the Cambridge for the of and Social the of which Bailyn in the these scholars of to from of to be entered into of From analysis of this of a of England's history over the of more than of the one of Bailyn's graduate adopted to explore the of society and economy in colonial and with greater than for the study of New another of Bailyn's graduate was the first to these to in structure and inheritance in a Massachusetts himself returned to in the encouraged by the successful of his first such endeavor and the of other scholars in England and as well as the The of lay in that were not fully or such as of population or These of were central to his new social history ambitious narrative from the beginning of European to the of the one part of that he another document that had little a of emigrants who for between and There were nearly on the with a of about these occupation, place of analysis of such a of required and far more than the he and Bailyn had once When to the presented with and the of some that the this study of colonial immigration of including narrative and as well as Bailyn later explained, one of them the the various into a general New England fit in this It of the two of described in into the region, which less than one of those whose New England's offered few to English for work or from northern England and New were themselves out of their own to such as New and The only part of New England that an influx of and its northern of the of this of was by what was in other colonies from New York to the England even the of this in The of Bailyn's brief of his Here he that the region's were not It was the only place the population grew almost from than in an of and By New England within a broader Bailyn into about its historiographical more than The Puritan to by the of subsequent have been a was in he more people England and for other colonies, the and during the same when at most to New England. the religious was also of people were often of those puritan New were not as a as once There was no stable as Miller and others had At the first generation a program whose a within a society with and The decline of that of could be in part to the activities of years Bailyn published what turned out to be his to this narrative The The of The of in the initial of although only on the and not in the Caribbean. There were no or in this new for it lacked the same detailed in Bailyn did not the that had useful The was that “the do not for an of for the In this Bailyn constructed a narrative that, the of with narrowly focused based on what mentor, Oscar Handlin, once wrote of his that were American In The with and of Bailyn in effect argued that were colonial history not only those who in the He had no to another account of “the of English that would New England or any other He would instead portray “the beginning of a general of the of the and the first time in his own explore often the This was anything but an of English to a New The colonists were not in all but a of with various and religious and for they a were not mainly of but of and the of a from more of New England's puritan Bailyn insisted that this general of there no less than to other To the Bailyn turned to New England's only in the last of in the and often of in the Chesapeake and New The little to the puritan society by Perry Miller or even to the world of New England's merchants that Bailyn had described at the of his themes he first outlined in of Bailyn argued that, important as religious goals were to the of New they did not make the The at for to the of a established by a few later at on the They Anglo-Dutch with a to themselves from worldly and a pure Christian in America. There were to be sure, especially in the way each vision eventually But and were of the and in that account for population the Atlantic and had a effect on New England. unity of purpose on some by of emigrants to themselves from their English Yet once they in the New disputes over of faith opened up a of puritanism was instead “a of trends within a transatlantic this New England were determined to a religious for their They to from in or Robert and the in with at that did not over religious in New but its leaders a of only New England regarded as the to of a of religious would only in New England the all New England colonists came from but this did not they from regional

BOOK REVIEWS BUILDING THE BritishAtlantic WORLD Buildingthe BritishAtlantic World:Spaces,Places,and Material Culture, 1600-1850, edited by Daniel Maudlin and Bernard L. Herman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. ISBN: 978-1-4696-2682-6 Paperback: 352 pages Since I started teaching a survey of early American art five years ago, I have been on the prowl for a book that narrates the architectural history of the Atlantic world in a compelling way,that challenges standard tales of top-down cultural transmission , and that explores the diversity of experiences and geographic centers of the long eighteenth century. My wait is over. Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places,and Material Culture, 1600-1850, edited by Daniel Maudlin and Bernard L. Herman, tackles the creation of transatlantic cultural identities through the built environment. The breadth of the book's scope and the depth of its individual essays ensured its immediate relocation from my bedside table to my students' reading list. Despite its humble claims to incompleteness, the book's thirteen highly readable essays offer a remarkably inclusive re-evaluation of the British worlds built on both sides of the Atlantic from the seventeenth century through the early nineteenth . Representing anthropology, literature, and the histories of architecture, material culture, art, and the early modern period, its authors unite around a methodological approach that treats the material world as a primary document. Rooted in the now generation-old field ofvernacular architecture studies, the essays employ deep and original research. The book also engages postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity and transatlantic models of exchange developed in other disciplines. Organized into thematic categories-government, religion, commerce, and domestic-the chapters operate as case studies of specific built environments, building types, or demographic groups. Some essays are tightly focused, while others cast a wide geographic or temporal net. Anna 0. Marley targets Thomas Jefferson's dining room picture hang, for example, while Peter 48 Benes aggregates data for more than two thousand meetinghouses over 150 years. Many take a comparative approach to understand how ideas and ways of making migrated or persisted across various networks. Stephen Hague and Carl Lounsbury compare buildings in England and the colonies. Daniel Maudlin looks to the homes people made in Nova Scotia, New England, and the Scottish Highlands. Building the British Atlantic World untangles the web of identities formed in the British Atlantic at the same time it respects the interdependence of the threads. The book is as much about the formation and dissemination of a coherent transatlantic identity as about its subversion or dissolution-conscious or not. It trades long-repeated apocryphal tales ofrude coloniststranslating English pattern books for the simultaneous cultural exchanges betweenhigh-styleand vernacularforms. PeterGuillecyinterrogates the methods by which English artisans transported ways of making from dock to dock, while Bernard L. Herman repositions London itself as a "borderland" after the Great Fire of 1666. Styleremains a concern for many ofthe authors-and rightly so. It was a way to proclaim one's belonging and taste and to manufacture a sense offamiliarity far from one's homeland. But the essays acknowledge that the exterior sameness of classical design often smoothed over differences in structure and meaning determined by the persistence of local traditions or the particulars of site. Lee Morrissey, for example, repositions the idealized classicism of Drayton Hall (the ultimate pre-Jefferson example of Palladian architecture in America for every survey student) in its context as a slave-built structure. The essays wrestle with problems of meaning and attack head on the intention of the producer and perception of the consumer of a place-and sometimes the tension between the two. Emily Mann argues that the early fortifications ofVirginia, Bermuda, and Barbados served both the practical considerations of protecting colonists and the psychological need to reassure them of a settlement's safety and permanence. Alison Stanley chronicles "Praying Towns" as a means for Native Americans to convince Puritan missionaries of their fitness and willingness to accept Christianity and as a public relations ploy by the New England Company for investors back home. Whether personal or imperial, politics lurk in the background behind every choice. Building theBritishAtlantic World introduces new subjects as well as...

Reports of shifts in rates of aggradation in a salt marsh deposit at Amherst Point, Nova Scotia have been linked with fluctuations in eustatic sea level, crustal subsidence and, possibly, changes in tidal amplitude. However, evidence for the most recent fluctuation is an artifact of early Acadian land reclamation that occurred in the seventeenth century at Amherst Point. Acadian settlers had constructed dikes to prevent regular tidal flooding, but probably allowed occasional flooding of the surface by tidal waters, thus maintaining the salt marsh signature of the deposit. Statistical analysis of the pollen assemblage from the uppermost deposit interpreted as a regressive sequence aligns critical depths with pollen assemblages retrieved from modern soils of diked and drained marshes. Inspection of historical aerial photographs confirms that the dikes persisted on the site until at least 1939. Interpretations of earlier fluctuations recorded in deposits below this regressive sequence remain valid. It is possible that the Bay of Fundy experienced a regressive period just prior to Acadian diking, but future research on unexamined salt marsh deposits here or elsewhere must include an exhaustive search of historical documents to avoid misinterpretation of anthropogenic modifications.

The half century that followed the coronation of James II brought an escalation in English interest in the possibility of empire outside Europe. Through the seventeenth century, 300,000 Englishmen had advanced across the Atlantic, seating themselves within uncharted American spaces and among unfamiliar native peoples. The creation of trading depots, forts, and encampments in parts of India and the Guinea Coast offered further glimmerings of global ambition. Repeatedly, strategic and commercial interests ushered the Crown into the occupation of Mediterranean cities, islands, and peninsulas. Throughout most of the century, hopes of global empire had appeared chimerical: the congeries of scattered settlements, commercial outposts, and private fiefdoms offered unpromising materials for international hegemony. The period between 1685 and 1730 can be identified, therefore, as a formative phase in the trajectory of English imperial expansion. Frontiers were stretched northward into Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the Hudson’s Bay basin and extended through the southern plantation world. Simultaneously, the Crown intensified its measures to control and exploit the established settlements. Proceeding in the background was the cultural and demographic transformation of great tracts of the dominions through unfree African labor. Stuart and, latterly, Hanoverian monarchs ruled a political community expanding in its terrain and its subject population, with far-reaching implications for the religion, culture, society, and economy of the domestic realm. Modern scholarship has sought increasingly to recover connections between the pressures of a nascent empire and the politics of the domestic realm, in a time of warfare and revolution. Fresh insights into early modern overseas expansion have been embedded in new accounts of Stuart and Hanoverian politics, examinations of overseas trade, and studies of the Protestant religion. The subject has given rise to an especially fertile field of intellectual history. The repositioning of Scotland and Ireland as “Atlantic nations” has uncovered linkages between the growth of dominion in America and the problems of managing a “multiple kingdom” monarchy within the British Isles. This article concentrates on works that have examined the influence of overseas expansion over the domestic kingdoms governed by Stuart and Hanoverian monarchs.

Modern seismologists perhaps too easily become enamored of their modern seismographs and instrumental arrays that can do wonders for the analysis of recent events. In the instrumental era, we tend to forget that such recordings are barely 110 years old and that we are trying to understand seismic‐source zones with an activity return period in the order of 300–600 years. Documenting and understanding preinstrumental historic events is still a necessary endeavor and requires the input of our allies in the field of history. I welcomed John E. Ebel’s re‐examination of the 5 February 1663 earthquake (Ebel, 2011). As someone who has worked on the historical seismicity of parts of Atlantic Canada, I appreciate the great difficulty the author had in digging out data from the seventeenth century. Early European settlement in eastern Canada was very sparse at the time, many settlers were not literate, and even fewer could afford the cost of a pen and ink and the paper to keep a journal or diary—or the time that a journal takes away from the task of subsisting in the harsh environment of their New World. The author kindly credited me (p. 1027, col. 1) with information with respect to the 5 February 1663 event being felt and to having rattled cooking utensils and tableware in the village of St. Peters in southeastern Cape Breton Island in Acadia (now the Province of Nova Scotia). The credit for these data rightly should go to Ronnie‐Gilles LeBlanc, a historian at Parcs Canada, Centre de services de l’Atlantique in Halifax, Nova Scotia; I was only a conduit. In fact it is not quite certain where Nicolas Denys was living on 5 February 1663. M. LeBlanc’s exact words of 9 September 2009 to me on this location were, “It is not clear whether Denys was …

Introduction This paper originally was in the form of an address to the Mining Society of Nova Scotia, 19th Annual Fall Meeting, Sydney, Nova Scotia, November 20, 1982. In this presentation, the paper was entitled " Some North Sea Experiences With Offshore Hydrocarbon Developments ". History The experience of North Sea countries with oil and gas is, of course, very recent. Since at least the period of the Roman invasion of Britain, the North Sea has been a centre of trade and its principal natural resource has been fish. To the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, the North Sea brought the feared Norse hordes who were less than welcome guests in their country (actually kingdoms). During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the North Sea was the centre of trade in Northern Europe under the Hanseatic League. Cities such as Hamburg and Lubeck in Germany. Bruges (present day Brussels) in what was then France, London, and Bergen in Norway became important centres of trade. After the decline of the Hanseatic League, London continued to thrive but was rivaled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Amsterdam, which became a major trading and commercial centre. Much of this history is irrelevant to the present day experience of North Sea countries with offshore development but it is included to give some perspective to the very short experience North Sea countries have had with oil and gas compared to their long experience with trade, commerce and fishing. Turning to the recent North Sea experience, it has been slated that as late as 1958, a staff geologist with the Norwegian Geological Survey said he would drink all the oil that would be found on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (Stenstadvold, 1981, p.l). Such was the attitude to the prospects of finding offshore hydrocarbons until the mid-1960s. The first significant discovery of hydrocarbons by a North Sea country was not made offshore, but rather onshore, in the Netherlands, in 1959. In that year, the massive Slochteren gas field in Groningen Province, with estimated recoverable reserves of 63 trillion cubic feet, was discovered. Apparently, this discovery was not taken as an indication of the potential for oil and gas discoveries offshore as offshore drilling did not begin until several years later. In 1963 and 1964, Norway and the United Kingdom, respectively, declared sovereignty over their continental shelves. Offshore drilling licenses were issued very soon after sovereignty was declared but it was not until 1965 that the boundary between the United Kingdom and Norway was agreed to. The 1958 Geneva Continental Shelf Convention provided for the sovereign right of states to explore and exploit natural resources of the sea bed on the continental shelf to a depth of 200 metres, to the limits which exploitation of natural resources was feasible or, failing agreement between two littoral countries, to a line equidistant between them.

Reviewed by: Writing a New France, 1604-1632: Empire and Early Modern French Identity Gordon M. Sayre (bio) Writing a New France, 1604-1632: Empire and Early Modern French Identity. Brian Brazeau. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. 132 pp. Many early Americanists have read excerpts from the Jesuit Relations, the series of reports from missionaries in New France published in Paris from 1632 to 1673. The product of the herculean effort of Reuben Gold Thwaites and colleagues to translate the Relations, along with "Allied Documents" from missionaries in Illinois and other colonies and from after 1673, is now available online, and anthologies such as Allan Greer's make the texts even more accessible for classroom use. But few anglophone scholars are aware of the intellectual and religious issues in New France prior to the Jesuit Relations, or of the writings of the first Jesuit to come to Canada, Pierre Biard, who voyaged to Acadia in 1611-13. Biard promoted in his writings "New France, this new land, first discovered in the last century by our countryman, a twin land to ours, subject to the same influences, lying in the same latitude, and having the same climate" (Brazeau 4-5, qtng. from Thwaites). Brian Brazeau's book analyzes the idea of New France as a reflection of European France, of the colony as a twin, a mirror, or a reexamination of the metropole. In the early seventeenth century the wars of religion in France had subsided, and colonial writers such as Biard and Marc Lescarbot sought to promote the colony in Canada as a chance to remake France or to return to its glorious origins. In 1606-07 Lescarbot sailed to Port Royal in what is now Nova Scotia with the Sieur de Poutrincourt, an ally of Henri IV and like him a former Protestant. Lescarbot was a lawyer, a humanist historian, and a poet, and though he lived in America for less than a year, when he returned to Old France he wrote a six-volume Histoire de la Nouvelle France, which included redactions of previous exploration texts by Verazzano, Cartier, Laudonnière, Champlain, and others. In a chapter titled "Nos Ancêtres les Américains" Brazeau shows how the sixth volume, an ethnography of the local native people, the Armichiquiou, presents Lescarbot's theory that the indigenous Americans were descended not from Ham nor from a lost tribe of Isreal, but directly from Noah: "Noah, patriarch of the Amerindian, is revealed as not only the biblical father of humanity but also specifically as [End Page 191] the progenitor of the Gauls. The French and the Amerindians share a common ancestor" (89). Drawing on a 2001 book about European theories of the origins of the American Indians by Giuliano Gliozzi, Brazeau explains the ideology behind Lescarbot's theory. The Amerindians preserved some of the primitive virtues of the Gauls, and the French should be inspired to recapture the valor of the medieval Crusades, and to "Christianise the peoples of the West, who of their own will give us their lands" (qtd. 73). Brazeau argues that in spite of a resistance among the French landed aristocracy (the noblesse d'épée) to engaging in commercial activity, and in spite of tensions between Protestants and Catholics, the ideologists of French colonization formulated a coherent appeal to the crown. Brazeau emphasizes the work of Antoine de Montchrétien, who appealed to the king: "vous pouvez planter et provigner de nouvelles Frances" ("you can plant and spread [or 'layer'] New Frances") (112). The root "vigne" in that line becomes significant as well, for Brazeau shows how Lescarbot and Champlain (and one could add Cartier, although his writings are not analyzed in the book) emphasized that Canada, as Biard had noted, was at the same latitude as France and that grapes were found growing there. For Champlain "the presence of grapevines is a condition for the habitability of any area" (31), but the significance of grapes goes beyond the role of wine in French identity, which "was nebulous at the time" (29): "Without the work of man, vines are simply a common plant. Wine is thus a victory over nature. The place of the wine producer is...