The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History by Christopher Hodson (review)

On the eve of the Seven Years War, in the mid-eighteenth century, the British forcibly expelled thousands of French-speaking inhabitants from the tiny imperial outpost of Acadia, a friction point on the Canadian frontier between the British and French Empires. The story of this expulsion, known as the grand dérangement, has been retold by many historians. Traditionally, such histories lay emphasis on the population's eventual homecoming to North America, where the Acadians' regrouping in Louisiana would lead to the growth of the Cajun community. In contrast, Christopher Hodson's account focuses on the Acadians' experience of displacement and dislocation. Following the destinies of individual Acadians who found themselves scattered across the Atlantic world, from the Caribbean to the Falklands, Hodson pieces together 'disjointed snapshots of confusion, anguish, and weary resolve' (p. 46) in order to examine both the psychological as well as the physical hardships of the diaspora. He pursues this examination against the backdrop of the reshaping of European colonialism in the years after 1763, when Britain's victory in the Seven Years War definitively shifted the balance of imperial power. He thus convincingly fulfils his aim of shedding light on a period too often overshadowed by the subsequent revolutions in the American colonies and in France. Combining narrative history with frequent references to first-hand accounts, in the first chapter of the work Hodson documents the details of the initial expulsion of 1755-56 before moving on to explore the various destinations of the exiled Acadian community. Whereas previous histories have tended to stress the commonality of exiles' experiences, which reinforced their shared cultural heritage, Hodson strives to differentiate between the Acadians' circumstances in the various territories to which they were sent. Chapter 2 focuses on the poverty and ostracization experienced by those dispersed among the Thirteen Colonies in the immediate aftermath of the expulsion. Subsequent chapters reveal how, following France's defeat in the Seven Years War, the Acadians found themselves implicated in French attempts to construct 'a new imperial world' (p. 78), in which 'the notion of using Acadian labor to create an agrarian paradise' (p. 145) was tried repeatedly in different corners of the French Empire. Chapters 3 and 4 explore why such schemes ended disastrously in French Guiana, Saint-Domingue, and the Falklands, while an extraordinary French experiment in internal colonization — the settlement of Acadian refugees on Belle-Île-sur-Mer, off the coast of Brittany — is examined in Chapter 5. The final chapter documents the Acadian exodus to Spanish Louisiana in the 1780s, a move supported by the Spanish authorities. Hodson sets this migration in the context of the chronic lack of white settlers in the New World, which threatened to undermine the European powers' plans for imperial expansion in the late eighteenth century. In tracing the personal stories of Acadian victims of the diaspora, Hodson relies on those who left written records and correspondence; this means that his account inevitably foregrounds the experience of literate white male refugees. It is nevertheless an extremely compelling and valuable contribution to both cultural studies and imperial history, and will be of particular interest to those researching the francophone Atlantic world.