The 'Conquest' of Acadia, 1710: Imperial, Colonial, and Aboriginal Constructions (review)

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...

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