The Nova Scotia Planters in the Atlantic World, 1759-1830 ed. by T. Stephen Henderson and Wendy G. Robicheau (review)

Thanks largely to the efforts of the Planters Studies Committee at Acadia University, the 8000 or so New Englanders who migrated to Nova Scotia in 1759-62 have come to be collectively defined as the Nova Scotia Planters and 'no longer dwell in historical obscurity' (p. 13). This volume consists of the papers given at the Fifth Planters Conference in 2010 and attempts to examine Planter studies within the context of the broader Atlantic world. In a stimulating historiographical overview Jerry Bannister calls for a new history of eighteenth-century Nova Scotia, one which sees it as being neither marginal nor of only regional significance, but 'as occupying the centre of a larger struggle for supremacy in the Atlantic world' (p. 21). Bannister takes particular aim at John Bartlett Brebner, whose study, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony during the Revolutionary Years, has dominated our understanding of this period since its publication in 1937. 'In 2012', Bannister claims, 'it is difficult to imagine an academic historian seriously repeating Brebner's claims about the colonial insignificance of Nova Scotia' (p. 29). Nova Scotia's isolation in this period is also challenged by Keith Mercer. In the first critical study of press gangs in this period Mercer points out that immunity from impressment was one of the factors that led some New Englanders to migrate to Nova Scotia and that the Planters 'were not moving to a strange land' (p. 256). Alexandra Montgomery, in a fascinating study of Planter mobility 1761-83, also dismisses Brebner's portrayal of Nova Scotia as a 'marginal outpost' composed of 'disparate, isolated communities' (p. 126). The attempt to integrate the Planters into the wider Atlantic world, downplaying their ongoing and close connection with what used to be called a Greater New England, is not entirely convincing. Montgomery admits that the Planters were 'still vitally connected to problematic New England traditions' (p. 149) and even the arrival of the Loyalists, Patricia Rogers notes, 'ultimately sustained and advanced existing relationships' between Nova Scotia and New England (p. 153). And I am not convinced that different attitudes towards tea-drinking, as Richard Connors suggests, can really explain why the Planters did not embrace the American Revolution. Inevitably not all of the essays deal directly with the general theme of the volume. Jonathan Fowler laments that Planter studies and Acadian studies have developed largely in isolation from each other and that most of the time our subjects saw themselves 'more as members of families than as members of the groups we now call Planters and Acadians' (p. 61). Allan Robertson and Julian Gwyn give us detailed studies of the internal development of Falmouth and Chester Townships, while Kenneth Paulsen, David Bell and Daniel Goodwin are interested primarily in the religious history of Nova Scotia. Gwen Davies draws some interesting comparisons between the experience of Planter children and of Loyalist children. Overall this is a valuable collection of essays that deserves a wide audience among historians of both Canada and the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.