Heirs Of An Ambivalent Empire

The fur trade was the heart of the French empire in early North America. The French-Canadian (Canadien) men who traversed the vast hinterlands of the Hudson Bay watershed, trading for furs from Indigenous trappers and hunters, were its cornerstone. Though the Canadiens worked for French colonial authorities, they were not unwavering agents of imperial power. Increasingly they found themselves between two worlds as they built relationships with Indigenous communities, sometimes joining them through adoption or marriage, raising families of their own. The result was an ambivalent empire that grew in fits and starts. It was guided by imperfect information, built upon a contested Indigenous borderland, fragmented by local interests, and periodically neglected by government administrators. Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire explores the lives of the Canadiens who used family and kinship ties to navigate between sovereign Indigenous nations and the French colonial government from the early 1660s to the 1780s. Acting as cultural intermediaries, the Canadiens made it possible for France to extend its presence into northwest North America. Over time, however, their uncertain relationships with the French colonial state splintered imperial authority, leading to an outcome that few could have foreseen – the emergence of a new Indigenous culture, language, people, and nation: the Métis.

When strange signs appeared in the sky over Québec during the autumn of 1660, people began to worry about evil forces in their midst. They feared that witches and magicians had arrived in the colony, and a teenaged servant named Barbe Hallay started to act as if she were possessed. The community tried to make sense of what was happening, and why. Priests and nuns performed rituals to drive the demons away, while the bishop and the governor argued about how to investigate their suspicions of witchcraft. A local miller named Daniel Vuil, accused of using his knowledge of the dark arts to torment Hallay, was imprisoned and then executed. Stories of the demonic infestation circulated through the small settlement on the St Lawrence River for several years. In The Possession of Barbe Hallay Mairi Cowan revisits these stories to understand the everyday experiences and deep anxieties of people in New France. Her findings offer insight into beliefs about demonology and witchcraft, the limits of acceptable adolescent behaviour, the dissonance between a Catholic colony in theory and the church’s wavering influence in practice, the contested authority accorded to women as healers, and the insecurities of the colonial project. As the people living through the events knew at the time, and as this study reveals, New France was in a precarious position. The Possession of Barbe Hallay is both a fascinating account of a case of demonic possession and an accessible introduction to social and religious history in early modern North America.

What people wore in the distant past is often challenging to determine, owing to the disintegration of natural textiles and materials over time. Yet when new findings from archaeological excavations are compared with documentation about early Acadia, a fascinating picture of the society’s early fashions is revealed. Fashioning Acadians is a history of clothesmaking and dress in Acadia from 1650 to 1750. Through the analysis of four Acadian settlements in what is now Nova Scotia, Hilary Doda uncovers the regional fashions and trends that had begun to emerge prior to the violence of the deportations of 1755. Men’s and women’s wardrobes are described from head to toe, from headdresses and hairstyles down to stockings and shoes, along with accessories such as buttons, buckles, and jewellery. While Acadians retained many aspects of the fashion systems of France, New France, and New England, a distinctive Acadian identity can be seen to take shape as their dress evolved and was influenced by other regional styles. Exploring the possibilities of a new methodology for identifying lost or decayed garments, Doda argues that surviving notions, sewing tools, and accessories – the small finds of archaeological sites – are important sources of information not only about domestic life, but about manufacturing processes, dress and textile cultures, and the influence of intersecting fashion systems in colonial spaces. Fashioning Acadians expands our understanding of Acadian lives and their connections to both the Atlantic world of goods and the landscapes of Nova Scotia.

The Enlightenment Atlantic was awash in deep feelings. People expressed the ardour of patriots, the homesickness of migrants, the fear of slave revolts, the ecstasy of revivals, the anger of mobs, the grief of wartime, the disorientation of refugees, and the joys of victory. Yet passions and affections were not merely private responses to the events of the period – emotions were also central to the era’s most consequential public events, and even defined them. In Enthusiasms and Loyalties Keith Grant shows that British North Americans participated in a transatlantic swirl of debates over emotions as they attempted to cultivate and make sense of their own feelings in turbulent times. Examining the emotional communities that overlapped in Cornwallis Township, Nova Scotia, between 1770 and 1850, Grant explores the diversity of public feelings, from disaffected loyalists to passionate patriots and ecstatic revivalists. He shows how certain emotions – especially enthusiasm and loyalty – could be embraced or weaponized by political and religious factions, and how their use and meaning changed over time. Feelings could be the glue that made loyalties stick, or a solvent that weakened community bonds. Taking a history of emotions approach, Enthusiasms and Loyalties aims to recover and understand the wide range of political and religious emotions that were possible – feelable – in the Enlightenment Atlantic.

Long before Confederation created a nation-state in northern North America, Indigenous people were establishing vast networks and trade routes. Volcanic eruptions pushed the ancestors of the Dene to undertake a trek from the present-day Northwest Territories to Arizona. Inuit migrated across the Arctic from Siberia, reaching Southern Labrador, where they met Basque fishers from northern Spain. As early as the fifteenth century, fishing ships from western Europe were coming to Newfoundland for cod, creating the greatest transatlantic maritime link in the early modern world. Later, fur traders would take capitalism across the continent, using cheap rum to lubricate their transactions. The contributors to Before Canada reveal the latest findings of archaeological and historical research on this fascinating period. Along the way, they reframe the story of the Canadian past, extending its limits across time and space and challenging us to reconsider our assumptions about this supposedly young country. Innovative and multidisciplinary, Before Canada inspires interest in the deep history of northern North America.

ISSN 2769-4100

The histories of Europe and Africa are closely intertwined. At times, this closeness has been emphasized, at other times, suppressed and denied. Since the nineteenth century, European imperial powers have carved up the continent of Africa among themselves, drawing borders and charting shorelines; in the process, inventing Africa. This was a project anchored in ancient Greek and Roman representations of Africa. For Italy, colonialism in Africa was a matter of consolidating its project of national unification, nominally completed in 1870 with the capture of Rome. By asserting its position as an imperial power, the young nation of Italy hoped to join the club of European nation-states and, in so doing, be rid of the perception that it was a country somewhere in between Europe and Africa. Yet, Italy's colonial endeavour in Africa was also a project with deep historical meaning. Italy posed its imperial project in Africa as a national return to territory which was rightfully Italian. Italian ideologues of imperialism based this claim on the history of Roman history on the continent. When Italian soldiers disembarked on the beaches of Libya during Italy's invasion of 1911-1912, and came across the ruins of Roman imperialism, they were, according to prominent cultural and political figures in Italy, rediscovering the traces of their ancestors. Yet, when Italian imperial ambitions set their sights on East Africa, regions that had not been conquered by Rome, how could Italy nevertheless shape its imperial project in the image of ancient Rome? This book charts this story. Beginning with Italy's first imperial endeavours on the African continent in the last decades of the nineteenth century and continuing right through to Italy's current attitudes towards Africa, this book argues that empire in Africa was a central aspect of Italian nation-building, and that this was a project which anchored itself in memories of ancient Rome in Africa. Although Fascism's invasion of Ethiopia (1935-1936) is the best-known moment of Italian imperialism in Africa, this book shows that Italian imperialism, modelled on ancient Rome, has a history which long predates Mussolini's movement, and has a legacy which continues to be acutely felt.

As fur traders were driven across northern North America by economic motivations, the landscape over which they plied their trade was punctuated by sound: shouting, singing, dancing, gunpowder, rattles, jingles, drums, fiddles, and – very occasionally – bagpipes. Fur trade interactions were, in a word, noisy. Daniel Laxer unearths traces of music, performance, and other intangible cultural phenomena long since silenced, allowing us to hear the fur trade for the first time. Listening to the Fur Trade uses the written record, oral history, and material culture to reveal histories of sound and music in an era before sound recording. The trading post was a noisy nexus, populated by a polyglot crowd of highly mobile people from different national, linguistic, religious, cultural, and class backgrounds. They found ways to interact every time they met, and facilitating material interests and survival went beyond the simple exchange of goods. Trust and good relations often entailed gift-giving: reciprocity was performed with dances, songs, and firearm salutes. Indigenous protocols of ceremony and treaty-making were widely adopted by fur traders, who supplied materials and technologies that sometimes changed how these ceremonies sounded. Within trading companies, masters and servants were on opposite ends of the social ladder but shared songs in the canoes and lively dances during the long winters at the trading posts. While the fur trade was propelled by economic and political interests, Listening to the Fur Trade uncovers the songs and ceremonies of First Nations people, the paddling songs of the voyageurs, and the fiddle music and step-dancing at the trading posts that provided its pulse.