The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History, by Christopher Hodson

Abstract

In this vivacious and wide-ranging first book, Christopher Hodson offers a welcome new perspective on the experiences of the French Catholic communities nestled around the Bay of Fundy who were ruthlessly expelled from their homes by British American forces in late 1755, and catapulted into unanticipated New Worlds around and beyond the Atlantic. As with the historical decision to ethnically cleanse Nova Scotia, Hodson’s study both stands by itself and owes much to (and makes more sense when read against) historiographical developments in recent years. For, though deplorably ill-treated by their contemporaries, the Acadians have done quite well in the past decade or so, as their victimisation, plight and survival have been the subject of at least three important Anglophone monographs: Geoff Plank, An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia (2003; rev. ante, cxviii [2003], 228–9); John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland (2005); and Naomi Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian: A North American Border People, 1604–1755 (2005).