Empire et metissages: Indiens et Francais dans le Pays d'en Haut, 1660-1715 (review)

The book, as the title makes clear, is about the Upper Great Lakes region from the time of first French sustained contact to 1715, a year that marked a turning point in French imperial policy and, thus, in the factors that first shaped the region's history and culture. The focus of the work is on explaining the nature of French and Native contact in the region, and its consequences for each group. In this way Havard attempts to provide a better understanding of the region, its place in the history of the French empire in North America, and the nature of French colonialism.

The book is divided into three unequal sections. Part One sets the context for the study and offers a look at the Native inhabitants of the region, French exploration and settlement in the pays d'en haut, and the basis and nature of the Franco-Indian alliance system that grew up there. French settlement, Havard points out, was sparse among a Native population that, while diminished by war and disease, was still far larger than that of the French. The small number of French, however, posed little difficulty since trade, rather than extending settlement, was the desired outcome of expansion into the region and formed the basis of the French-Native alliance. Part Two explores the alliance system in far more detail, focusing upon the tensions that threatened it. While trade linked the French to such groups as the Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwa, both Natives and French sought to use the other to advance their own political and economic ambitions. The need to pursue some of these occasionally conflicting aims through warfare (for example, against the Iroquois and Fox), and French desires to control the region, put pressure on the French to become ever more involved in mediating among competing interests. This, in turn, drew the French further into the political and cultural life of the region and often into situations that did little to advance French interests. The last section looks at the effects of the intercultural contacts on French and Natives that resulted from cultural and biological intermingling. Here the picture that emerges is of French and Native cultures changing through the selective adaptation of each other's things, beliefs, and practices, and the creation of a Metis people who were culturally and economically connected to, and at the same time distinct from, those of the St Lawrence colony.

Empire et métissages invites comparison with Richard White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), another long book and one that advances a similar argument. Indeed, Havard's major conclusions about the nature of French-Native relations, and about the society that emerged in the pays d'en haut, are not significantly different from White's. Havard even has a catch phrase, like White's 'the middle ground,' to describe the pays d'en haut. Havard calls the 'monde nouveau au coeur du Nouveau Monde' the 'empire du milieu' (18).

Nonetheless, Empire et métissages differs from White's Middle Ground in emphasis and perspective. For example, Havard points out that, unlike White, he does not reject the utility of understanding the pays d'en haut as a frontier, albeit not in the Turnerian sense. Rather, Havard would have readers view the region as both part of a French imperial design, and as a region in its own right. Within the pays d'en haut dominated by Native peoples, the French population disadvantage played a major factor in shaping both the history of the region and the nature of the society that grew up there. The result was a region that was less able to fulfill its intended role as a tool of French imperial designs, one where French culture and intentions...