The "Conquest" of Acadia, 1710: Imperial, Colonial, and Aboriginal Constructions (review)

Less an interdisciplinary work than a multiperspectival one, The "Conquest" of Acadia adopts a Braudelian approach to the relatively little-known, little-studied event at its center. Most immediately, the book recounts the event itself; second, it explores the conquest as a conjunctural phenomenon that revealed a larger transition in Acadian experience; and third, it seeks to place the conquest of Acadia within the framework of the longue durée of imperial enterprise and intercultural contact in the Americas. Thus, the authors argue that "there is no single valid narrative" of the events of 1710, and the volume is made up of a series of linked essays exploring them from a variety of perspectives (xi).

This is an ambitious undertaking that succeeds in its aims, though it suffers from some of the difficulties characteristic of both multiple-author works and multilayered analysis. Most importantly, Reid and his co-authors offer rich explorations of Acadian social and political history that place the conquest of 1710 in illuminating contexts. Mancke and Reid use the episode as a point of departure for a wide-ranging comparison of French and British approaches to empire and argue that the French hold on Acadia was tenuous because of the relative weakness of the French creole elite. Basque contends that Acadian residents responded to English conquest in complex ways, conditioned in part by the close ties that many local elites had to New England's maritime economy. Plank illuminates this relationship from the opposite direction by showing the strong interest that many New Englanders had in Acadia. Wicken argues that although the Mi'kmaq initially did not show much concern about the conquest of 1710, they gradually learned that British sovereignty brought greater pressures to bear on their independence. Moody traces the largely failed attempt to create British settlements that might have dominated, or at least blended with, the region's French population. The authors conclude that the conquest of Acadia created a "fragile equilibrium" among the local populations that is characteristic of much North American history, and indeed of many early modern empires (207).

This bare summary hardly does justice to the book's many rich insights: The nature of early modern empires, the comparison between French and British approaches to colonization, and the particular challenges of administering Acadia/Nova Scotia are all treated insightfully. Yet it also illustrates the principal shortcoming of the volume. Despite the authors' extensive collaboration ("no mere collection of essays" but "a coordinated effort to portray a multilayered reality"), the book has a tendency toward fragmentation that is inevitable in any work with six authors (xi). Moreover, the authors' approach produces another kind of fragmentation, a product of their debt to the Annales school. Although each level of analysis offered makes sense on its own terms, the levels remain discrete; for the most part, the insights achieved on one level do not substantially shape the approaches or findings of the other levels. Nonetheless, the book is obviously the definitive work on the conquest of 1710; more generally, anyone interested in the history of early modern empires will benefit enormously from its analysis and insight.