A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America by Christopher M. Parsons (review)

Christopher M. Parsons's A Not-So-New Worldbrings the connections between French discourses of nature, empire, and dispossession in the early modern North Atlantic into sharp focus. Through meticulous exegeses of early modern French texts concerning horticultural and botanical matters, Parsons traces shifting colonial understandings of the plants, climates, and lands of the Haudenosaunee, Mi'kmaq, Wendat, and other sovereign Native peoples of northeastern North America over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this period, Parsons observes, French administrators, missionaries, and botanists regularly claimed resemblance between North American and French environments in writings that were mostly, if not exclusively, for European audiences. Shaped by ongoing tensions between Indigenous and colonial epistemologies of nature, this ecological discourse of similitude underpinned what Parsons alternately terms an "ideology of cultivation" (153) and a "colonial political ecology" (7) in referring to discursive and material expressions of power made by agents of empire through claims regarding the nature and peoples of early America.

Scholars of early modern empire and environment trained in the history of science or intellectual history have traditionally emphasized the animating force of ideas about difference in European imperial discourses, particularly as they pertained to the tropical ecologies of the Global South. ¹By shifting north and emphasizing the rhetorical and political uses of resemblance rehearsed by colonial actors, A Not-So-New Worldprovides an important corollary to the standard historiography. In accessible and engaging writing, Parsons offers a nuanced account of how elite colonial arguments gradually moved away from drawing attention to inherent resemblances between European and North American plants in attempts to justify Native dispossession and present a vision of nature in the service of empire.

Early seventeenth-century imperial boosters such as Samuel de Champlain, Parsons shows, held as a cornerstone of their discourse the perception of innate similarity between North America's environments and their European counterparts. Underscoring such purported affinities helped support, at least rhetorically, a settler colonial project intending to incorporate Native peoples into European-derived labor regimes and cultural mores, not least through conversion to the Christian faith. In the book's opening chapters, Parsons examines how seventeenth-century French commentators applied the category of the sauvagenot only to people but to various facets of North America's ecosystems. In "propagandistic" (56) writings, French elites cast the perceived otherness of sauvageecology as a surface phenomenon masking an underlying familiarity that was potentially transformable, through cultivation, into an environment approximating France's. Similitude, in these cases, stood in for the possibility of broader integration into the French imperial system. Such latent similarities were proclaimed by Champlain and many of his boosterish contemporaries in the form of sweeping generalizations about North American nature that infrequently derived from meaningful interaction with Indigenous horticultural experts.

Seventeenth-century Francophone missionaries, meanwhile, drew comparisons between European and North American plants that resulted from more direct engagement with Indigenous environmental knowledge traditions. Missionaries were in contact with a diverse range of Native peoples and cultures in North America, and they developed a discourse around conversion that relied extensively on cultivation both as a metaphor for the work of evangelization and as part of attempts to reorder Indigenous agricultural regimes and botanical practices. Parsons is attentive to how historically rich and dynamic forms of horticultural and healing expertise—particularly as held, practiced, and expressed by Native women—were embedded in emergent colonial narratives of conversion. Fleshing out this insight through an examination of texts by evangelizers such as Gabriel Sagard, who lived among the Wendat and other Iroquoian peoples of the Great Lakes, Parsons follows recent scholarship on Jesuits that frames missionary efforts as "sites of encounter between different systems of ecological knowledge" (80). ²Evangelizers claims of a latent and achievable horticultural parity between Europe and France's North American colonial sphere were central to the arguments for conversion...