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>> 49 3 Litigating Empire The Role of French Courts in Establishing Colonial Sovereignties Helen Dewar In seventeenth-century northeastern North America, rival titleholders gradually constructed sovereignty through the assertion of and contest over competing claims. While the struggle among European powers, especially the French and English, to effectively occupy coastal and riverine regions has traditionally received the most attention, rivalries among Frenchmen in the Saint Lawrence Valley and Acadia played at least as important a role in the evolution of French territorial claims. Contending parties fought for ascendancy on the ground through the use of instruments of metropolitan legal authority and personal power, at the court of kings Henri IV and Louis XIII, and also in the kingdom’s courts of justice. The plural legal order in France, rooted as it was in the patchwork of customary laws and privileges of each province and Roman law in part of the kingdom, affected the ability of titleholders to govern and enjoy their trading rights overseas. To a certain extent, all (imperial) politics was local. Competing titleholders projected local legal regimes onto imperial contexts. Litigation among these claimants and between them and outside traders over the first three decades of the century highlights the exercise of power through the distribution of privileges and the incompatibility of exclusive trading privileges in this context. Royal reliance on provincial and local officials to implement overseas commissions underscores the reality of the French empire as a deeply divided, indeed multiple, entity. Legal pluralism connected to the contested 50 > 51 (especially equity), and royal statutes, in descending order of influence. If law is considered one “official form of ordering,” then privileges in France were another.6 Privileges created layers of jurisdiction, status, and law, ranging from a town’s exemption from the legal jurisdiction of its seigneur to a port’s designation as a “port franc” or free port, in which import and export duties were waived, and from a province’s enjoyment of administrative autonomy to a guild’s regulation of its trade. King and province mutually benefited from such arrangements: the king delegated parts of his authority that were better managed locally and increased his revenue; the province and its towns rose in political and economic standing.7 The king was, at the same time, constrained by such privileges in his ability, for example, to implement royal statutes across France. In the context of overseas expansion, we see that privileges permeated even areas of royal law such as navigation and commerce. This essay examines, then, the interplay between a legally and politically plural order in France and the solidification of French claims in North America . What becomes clear is that the instability of trading and colonizing ventures in New France—often portrayed as failures in the historiography—was connected in part to the patchwork of customs, privileges, rights, and laws in France. The essay, based on court documents, petitions, travel accounts, and notarial records, takes in turn six specific legal conflicts among parties active in the colony. The first two occurred primarily on the ground in New France and involved the selective use of law, personal authority, and force. The following four consider the role of New France in interjurisdictional rivalries in France, particularly over the consolidation of maritime authority. Through the lens of metropolitan jurisdictional complexity, we see that the exercise of power overseas was not a matter that concerned only the Crown and private enterprise but also other levels of authority in France for whom the stakes were very high. For some, participation in the privileged enterprise and in the governance of the colony provided an opportunity to enhance authority at home; for others, the Crown’s involvement overseas threatened their own political agency in France. Sovereignty overseas was inextricably tied to questions of royal reach in France itself. A number of scholars of Anglo-America and Britain have begun to explore the connections between state formation and sovereignty overseas, arguing that these were not parallel but interdependent processes.8 Historians of the French Atlantic have been slower to engage with this subject.9 I follow scholars of the state who have moved beyond a narrow institutional framework to include the entire “network of agents exercising political power,” from the lowest officeholder to the king himself.10 This conception, which encompasses both locality and center, avoids the tendency to reify the 52 > 53 a variety of factors on both sides of the Atlantic determined who exercised authority and enjoyed trading privileges in the...

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