Catherine Desbarats

North America from the Top Down: Visions from New France

This paper re-examines the spatial foundations of North American historiography concerning the early modern period. By focusing on the history of New France in its broader context, it argues that the hegemony of a United States-centric approach to pre-national America has distorted our understanding of the basic spatial dynamics of the period. More visibly than in other zones of empire formation, but not uniquely, New France displays a variety of spaces. We discuss three of these: imperial space, indigenous space and colonial space. We call into question the entrenched tendency, derived we think, from near-exclusive attention to the history of the Thirteen Colonies, to characterize this as “colonial history” and to assume that “colonies” were the only significant vessel of this history.

Commerce by a frozen sea. Native Americans and the European fur trade

details to identify inconsistencies and gaps indicative of the scope and scale of illicit trade passing through Bristol’s ports and has uncovered new information. The detailed footnotes provide lots of additional detail and direct the reader to nine annotated document transcriptions available online through ROSE (the University of Bristol’s ‘Repository of Scholarly Eprints’) which serves as a free to download ‘outsourced’ appendix to this book. A useful contribution of the study is its implications for methodology, i.e. demonstrating that records of illicitly traded goods are not too difficult to find so long as you know the sort of thing that you might be looking for and have access to other records or contextual information with which to compare. As such, the conclusions critique some of the previously published works, which base their conclusions mainly upon data from ‘official’ customs accounts/port books, on the basis that they may have understated, if not omitted, the extent of illicit trade. As such, Jones’ study provides a strong case for studying illicit trade in other localities and perhaps revisiting previously published studies where they have been based predominantly upon customs accounts data.