<i>A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America</i> . By <scp>Christopher</scp> M. <scp>Parsons</scp> <i>A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America</i> . By ParsonsChristopher M.. (Early American Studies.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 264 pp., ill.

Christopher Parsons’s erudite engagement with environmental history shapes his account of New France. This is field-leading scholarship for those thinking through the environmental early modern and through histories of imperial knowledge. (Let me suggest that, minimally, all scholars of the French sixteenth century should read Parsons’s thoughtful account of the term ‘sauvage’ (p. 6).) From Samuel de Champlain’s 1608 sowing of wheat in Quebec through to Paris’s appraisal of ginseng in the early eighteenth century, Parsons shows how environmental encounters serve as a prism through which we can explore the French ambition to know and claim the Americas. Chapter 1 shows that, initially, the French did not find American botany a challenge to their Aristotelian categorizations, but instead read the new terrain via its similarity to European plants; Parsons argues that in minimizing botanic difference, the new world was thus ‘cognitively domesticated’ (p. 32). A crucial part of this process was the generalization of indigenous names for plants, separated from their connection to specific communities. Chapter 2 explores the figure of cultivation in the colonial work of Champlain, Marc Lescarbot, and the Jesuit missions; Parsons argues that the literal and metaphorical practice of cultivation was central to the ‘recuperative project’ of empire (p. 12), allowing the French to set themselves apart from the Spanish, and to imagine their project instead as ‘a consensual and mutually beneficial exchange’ (p. 48). (This chapter is also wonderful on the strangely capacious genres of colonial authors: Parsons has a real eye for literary form.) Chapter 3 describes the Jesuit efforts to ‘sedentarize’ indigenous peoples as a convergence of spiritual and ecological interventions. In a powerful reading that should be taken up widely as a methodological example, Parsons describes the epistemological legacy of the missionaries’ partial appropriation of indigenous knowledge; since Jesuits did not have access to women’s oral traditions, they accounted only for men’s stories of indigenous cultures. Chapter 4 describes a growing French pessimism about American climates and crops in the context of the late-seventeenth-century calculation and management of colonial space, a topic much explored in recent work; Parsons’s eye for the environmental stakes of this delineation of space makes his contribution to this debate compelling. Chapter 5 shows how the new Académie royale des sciences created a new ‘political ecology of empire’ (p. 126) in which Parisian naturalists came to displace grassroots knowledge of New France; here, Parsons’s care for the prose of his sources shapes a nuanced reading of the Parisian scientists’ effacement of indigenous and colonial labour. Chapter 6 explores Joseph-François Lafitau’s work on American ginseng, showing how this surprising discovery sustained ‘a global Jesuit communication network that stretched from Asia to Kahnawake’ (p. 155). In his Conclusion, Parsons describes the ecological legacy of the settler colonialism that emerges out of this history, reminding us of our own entanglements ‘in environments that are political and polities that are also ecological’ (p. 188). A Not-So-New World makes a wonderful contribution to scholarship.

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