Making Geographical Connections – via Nova Scotia, Canada

Geographers explore geographical connections in their imagination and through research as well as citizens across time, space, with an interest in flows in particular, at different scales -here through the lenses of economic, political and historical geography.I try and offer an example of weaving together different geographical connections not ordinarily done so prominently in regional geography approaches.In August 2015, I spend a few weeks in one of eastern Canada's Maritime Provinces on the Atlantic [1][2], not quite geared up to do a re-take of Billy Connolly's: Journey to the Edge of the World from Halifax, Nova Scotia on the Canadian Atlantic through the notorious Northwest Passage to Vancouver Island on the Canadian Pacific coast, screened by ITV in 2008), so staying put in Nova Scotia itself.On the plane approaching Halifax, a Canadian businessman informed us that this time we should make it since the wind was not against usunlike at times when the plane approaching from the west cannot make it there, having to return to Ottawa or Montreal.Nova Scotia is one of the Maritime provinces, stretching 500 kilometres from northeast to southwest, with a shoreline of over 6,000 kilometres, with no point further from the sea than 70 kilometres [3].Fittingly, I had heard of the world-famous Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, NS -but not much else, other than its capital Halifax and some of the universities there.It has been stated that, for centuries, Nova Scotia's interests and contacts lay across the sea with Europe, not with the rest of Canada [3] [4].I knew that Halifax was a major portgateway to the Atlanticfor the British Empire [5], was a citadel town for the British colonial administration of the part of Canada the British (colonists) controlled in competition with the French.The colonial wars in north eastern America from 1688 until 1760 set France, her colonists in New France and Acadia, and her aboriginal First Nations allies against the British Empire, her colonists, militias, and aboriginal allies.One of the most frequently contested areas during these conflicts was the French colony of Acadia and, after its capture by Great Britain in 1710, the new British colony of Nova Scotia [6].Acadia was the launch pad for frequent French and First Nations raids into Maine and New England.The British tried to stop these attacks by capturing Port-Royal, the capital of French Acadia, and subduing or winning the favour of the First Nations tribes.With the support of their New England militia, the British captured and held Port-Royal beginning in 1710, renaming the place Annapolis Royal, though British control over the remainder of old Acadia proved elusive for a time as the French and First Nations struck repeatedly at Annapolis and the British fishing settlement at Canso, NS.Beginning in 1755, however, Great Britain mustered a significant force that not only drove the French military from Nova Scotia but was used to expel the remaining 8,000 majority French Acadian population from the British colony as suspected unreliable, in a scheme of ethnic cleansing with significant losses of life [7].Referred to as the -Far Reaches of Empire‖, the war in Nova Scotia (1710-1760) serves Grenier [8] as a case study, though he also documents how a new form of irregular warfare took shape in the New World, on the fringe of Empire.Acquired by Britain after Queen Anne's War, the province was occupied both by French-speaking Acadians and several Native American tribes or Nova Scotian Indian or Aboriginal peoples, with the Mi'kmaq (or Micmac, called Souriquois by the French) being the founding people of Nova Scotia and remaining the predominant Aboriginal group within the province, in some reserves as well as outside.When the Mi'kmaq first encountered Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries, their territory stretched from the southern portions of the Gaspé Peninsula

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