"A Great Want of Loyalty to Themselves": The Franco-Newfoundland Trade, Informal Empire, and Settler Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century

Historians of settler colonialism have posited that the interplay of four interlinked types of relations are central to settler societies. In particular, they emphasize shifting interactions between indigenous peoples and a settler collective; between the settler group and exogenous subaltern groups (for example, migrants of Asian and African descent in North America); between indigenous and exogenous subaltern groups; and the overlap between settler states and the imperial metropoles that spawned them. This case study of the Franco-Newfoundland trade suggests that analyzing and theorizing settler contexts also requires close attention to the informal, mainly commercial, linkages between settler states and the multiplicity of rival metropoles vying for access to spaces and resources in the "Age of Empire."