2015/09/10 by Catherine Desbarats, Allan Greer · 2 citations
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Canadian Identity and History #American Constitutional Law and Politics #American History and Culture #Hegemony #Colonialism #Historiography #Empire #Indigenous #Context (archaeology) #Space (punctuation) #Variety (cybernetics) #History #Period (music) #Early modern period #Genealogy #Colonial period #World history #Geography #Ancient history #Political science #Law #Archaeology #Aesthetics #Art #Philosophy #Computer science #Linguistics
paper · doi:10.1163/18770703-00502008
published in Journal of Early American History 5(2), 109-136 (Brill)
openalex publication_date 2015/09/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/26
This paper re-examines the spatial foundations of North American historiography concerning the early modern period. By focusing on the history of New France in its broader context, it argues that the hegemony of a United States-centric approach to pre-national America has distorted our understanding of the basic spatial dynamics of the period. More visibly than in other zones of empire formation, but not uniquely, New France displays a variety of spaces. We discuss three of these: imperial space, indigenous space and colonial space. We call into question the entrenched tendency, derived we think, from near-exclusive attention to the history of the Thirteen Colonies, to characterize this as “colonial history” and to assume that “colonies” were the only significant vessel of this history.