The Quebec Connection

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the idea of independence inspired radical changes across the French-speaking world. In The Quebec Connection, Julie-Françoise Tolliver examines the links and parallels that writers from Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa imagined to unite that world, illuminating the tropes they used to articulate solidarities across the race and class differences that marked their experience. Tolliver argues that the French tongue both enabled and delimited connections between these writers, restricting their potential with the language’s own imperial history. The literary map that emerges demonstrates the plurality of French-language literatures, going beyond the concept of a single, unitary francophone literature to appreciate the profuse range of imaginaries connected by solidary texts that hoped for transformative independence. Importantly, the book expands the "francophone" framework by connecting African and Caribbean literatures to Québécois literature, attending to their interactions while recognizing their particularities. The Quebec Connection’s analysis of transnational francophone solidarities radically alters the field of francophone studies by redressing the racial logic that isolates the northern province from what has come to be called the postcolonial world.

To achieve this Richard Vaudry traces the migration of both English and Irish Protestants and examines the careers of various prominent Quebec Anglicans, including Jacob, Eliza, and George Mountain, Jasper Hume Nicolls, Henry Roe, Jonathan and Edmund Willoughby Sewell, and finally Jeffrey Hale - families with impeccable imperial credentials. By stressing the importance of an imperial, transatlantic culture, Vaudry offers a fresh and innovative look at the history of the Anglican church in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Quebec.

Beyond redrawing North American borders and establishing a permanent system of governance, the Quebec Act of 1774 fundamentally changed British notions of empire and authority. Although it is understood as a formative moment - indeed part of the "textbook narrative" - in several different national histories, the Quebec Act remains underexamined in all of them. The first sustained examination of the act in nearly thirty years, Entangling the Quebec Act brings together essays by historians from North America and Europe to explore this seminal event using a variety of historical approaches. Focusing on a singular occurrence that had major social, legal, revolutionary, and imperial repercussions, the book weaves together perspectives from spatially and conceptually distinct historical fields - legal and cultural, political and religious, and beyond. Collectively, the contributors resituate the Quebec Act in light of Atlantic, American, Canadian, Indigenous, and British Imperial historiographies. A transnational collaboration, Entangling the Quebec Act shows how the interconnectedness of national histories is visible at a single crossing point, illustrating the importance of intertwining methodologies to bring these connections into focus.

In Steamboat Connections Frank Mackey gives us a narrative account of the first twenty-five years of steam navigation along the St Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers. Relying on a wealth of primary archival sources, Mackey focuses on the development of steamer traffic from 1816 – when the foundations were laid for the first stage-and-steamboat line between Montreal and Upper Canada – to the early 1840s - when locks, canals, innovations, and human daring conquered the rapids on those rivers and allowed for navigation between Montreal and the Great Lakes. He shows how, starting in 1841, small steamers ran "the circuit" – down the rapids of the St Lawrence to Montreal and then back up to Kingston and other Great Lakes ports via the Ottawa River and the Rideau Canal. Mackey introduces the entrepreneurs who forged this important link between Montreal and the nation's interior and chronicles the course of their industry, correcting previous misinterpretations. He sheds light not only on steamboats but also on the social, commercial, and geographical development that they made possible. He shows that the history of this country, a land with vast expanses and a harsh climate, cannot be fully appreciated without looking at the different modes of transportation that made it possible.