A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Christopher Parsons’ important new monograph demonstrates that the prominent Enlightenment-era debates regarding global human and biological diversity originated from the colonial experience of European nations during the seventeenth century and the resulting conflict over the means of knowledge production related to the New World. Taking the French experience in what is now the St. Lawrence River valley between modern Québec and Montréal as his test case, Parsons offers a compelling demonstration of how French attitudes towards the Canadian environment changed from the early-seventeenth-century period of exploration and initial settlement to the British conquest of 1760. Undergirded by impressive research in primary sources, Parsons’ interpretation shows how insights from environmental history and the history of science permit a significant reconsideration of French North American settler colonialism. The key change traced by Parsons is the decreasing confidence over time of French colonial projectors in their ability to transform, through a rehabilitative process of cultivation, the North American environment into a replica of France. Extended etymological discussions of French usage of the descriptive term sauvage helps the reader to appreciate the ways in which early colonizers such as Samuel de Champlain represented Canada as an essentially familiar place that could, and would, with deliberate effort, be made to resemble France. In other words, Parsons contends that while French explorers, missionaries and colonists initially understood Canada as a ‘not-so-new’ place, by the middle of the eighteenth-century long experience of the resident French population with its environment (particularly the harsh winters) engendered widespread agreement regarding the ‘novelty’ of its flora and climate on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it