History 8220

History 8220: Atlantic Canada in the Atlantic World

Department of History, Dalhousie University

Instructor: Jerry Bannister, Associate Professor

From the late 1960s to the early 1990s, the field of Atlantic Canada was dominated by regional issues such as economic underdevelopment and the notion of "limited identities." The rise of the Acadiensis generation of historians — led by Phillip Buckner, Ernest Forbes, T.W. Acheson, among others — built on the traditional perspective established by earlier scholars such as W.S. MacNutt. This scholarship embraced a broad historical approach that considered a range of social variables (i.e., class, gender, and ethnicity), and employed quantitative analysis and other techniques to explore the region's economic patterns. Yet despite the variety and vigor of this research, most historians continued to view Atlantic Canada through the lens of regionalism. In framing their analyses, scholars invariably looked westward, fixated on the question of why the Atlantic region lagged behind Central Canada.

Since the early 1990s, the field of Atlantic Canada has fractured, as historians have searched for alternative ways to conceptualize the histories of its four component provinces. Innovative research in areas such as native, labour, and women's history replaced the regional meta-narrative of underdevelopment with an array of divergent histories. In response, historians such as Margaret Conrad and James Hiller have emphasized the need to broaden our perspective further to include the "regions of the mind" — i.e., the imagining and re-imagining of the Atlantic region over time — while Ian McKay questioned the very existence of the field. "Why even have a field of Atlantic Canadian history," McKay asked, "if Atlantic Canada is an empty space upon which we multiply our incompatible and incommensurate stories?"

While the history of Atlantic Canada was undergoing an identity crisis of sorts, the "Atlantic world" was emerging as one of the most dynamic fields in North American history. As scholars of Atlantic Canada worried over the future of the field, their counterparts working on the Atlantic world steadily expanded the depth and scope of their research. A quick search of the extensive resources amassed by H-Atlantic or Harvard's Atlantic Seminar will turn up scores of ambitious monographs on a wide range of topics. As David Armitage and others have pointed out, the salient feature of this new research has been its emphasis on constructing an inclusive account of the links between the diverse peoples and cultures of the Atlantic Rim. This research has produced an intellectual rainbow encompassing (at last count) a Black, Red, White, and Green Atlantic, as well as an English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and even a criminal Atlantic. Despite this remarkable diversity, most of these books share two common traits: they are oriented outwards towards the ocean, rather than inwards towards the continent; and they view the Atlantic as a type of highway, linking peoples together, rather than a barrier separating them apart.

This course will explore the historiography of the Atlantic world and its relationship to the study of Atlantic Canada. Historians of Atlantic Canada have recently published a number of innovative studies that employ transatlantic and circumatlantic perspectives. Rather than concentrating on the older canon of regional history, we will focus on these recent studies and discuss their implication for the history of Atlantic Canada. Our approach will be deliberately transnational: we will read a variety of books and articles in fields outside of the traditional purview of regional historiography. The first law of history is the law of selection: to keep the course material manageable, we will have to be choosy. I have tried where possible to make choices that match the interests of the seminar members and to select the best of the recent work in Atlantic history. I have also tried to include a range of methodological perspectives from fields such as archaeology, historical geography, and biography.

The weekly seminars are designed to progress thematically and chronologically from the growth of European trade and settlement in the seventeenth century to the effects of industrialization in the twentieth century. Our readings will explore key developments in the formation of the region that eventually became "Atlantic Canada": early transatlantic trade in staple commodities; negotiation between Europeans and Native peoples; state formation and capitalist expansion in the eighteenth century; imperial conflict and the casualties of war; the breakup of the first British Empire; forced migration of slaves and convicts; maritime labour from the age of sail to steam; the role of gender in Atlantic societies; and the response to industrialization in the Maritimes. Although a number of important themes have been omitted, the readings still cover principal issues in the history of Atlantic Canada, such as the expulsion of the Acadians and the arrival of the Loyalists.

We will meet once a week to discuss a set of thematic readings from our main list. Seminar members will select two of the sets of weekly readings and prepare an oral presentation (approximately 10 minutes) and written summary of their chosen readings. They will act as the seminar leader for their two selected weeks, and a short written assignment (5-10 pages) is due one week after each presentation. The major paper will be an historiographic essay (20-30 pages) examining a particular theme based on a selection of articles and books chosen in consultation with me. The major paper is due two weeks after the final class. The historiographic essay should be based on a topic related to each student's thesis project.

There is no required textbook. If you feel the need to read background material, there are a number of useful textbooks and collections of essays available in the Killam Library: Margaret Conrad and James Hiller, Atlantic Canada: A Region in the Making; Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid, eds., The Atlantic Region to Confederation; E.R. Forbes and D.A. Muise, eds., The Atlantic Provinces in Confederation; Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture; John McCusker and Russell Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (2nd ed), as well as the various volumes of the recent Oxford History of the British Empire. For interesting methodological perspectives, you may want to consult David Hackett Fischer's Historians' Fallacies and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, which formed the basis for the fascinating www.dohistory.org web site. Listed below are some other helpful on-line resources, which include reviews of many of the books on our list:

COURSE SCHEDULE

Week One: Historiography (1): The Canadian Atlantic

  • John Reid, "Writing About Regions," in John Schultz, ed. Writing About Canada: A Handbook for Modern Canadian History (1990).
  • Ian McKay, "A Note on 'Region' in the Writing of the History of Atlantic Canada," Acadiensis 29, 1 (Spring 2000).
  • Special Issue: "Back to the Future: The New History of Atlantic Canada," Acadiensis 30, 1 (Autumn 2000).
  • Margaret Conrad and James Hiller, Atlantic Canada: A Region in the Making (2001), pp. 1-12.
  • Peter Pope, "Comparisons: Atlantic Canada," in Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America (2003).

Week Two: Historiography (2): The Atlantic World

  • Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (2005).
  • David Armitage, "Three Concepts of Atlantic History," in David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (2002).
  • Marcus Rediker and Michael F. Jiménez, "What is Atlantic History?" CPAS Newsletter: The University of Tokyo Center for Pacific and Asian Studies (October 2001).

Week Three: The Commercial Atlantic (1): Fish into Wine

  • Peter Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (2004).
  • Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, "The English Mercantile Community in 17th century Porto: A Case Study of the Early Newfoundland Trade," Newfoundland Studies 19, 1 (2003)

Week Four: The Aboriginal Atlantic: Negotiation and Imperialism

Week Five: The Commercial Atlantic (2): Geography and Power

  • Stephen Hornsby, British Atlantic, American Frontier: Spaces of Power in Early Modern British America (2005).
  • David Hancock, "'A World of Business to Do': William Freeman and the Foundation of England's Commercial Empire, 1645-1707," William and Mary Quarterly LVII, no. 1 (January 2000).
  • Jerry Bannister, "Citizen of the Atlantic: Benjamin Lester's Social World in England, 1768-69," Newfoundland Quarterly 96, 3 (Fall 2003).

Week Six: The Acadian Atlantic: Casualties of Empire

  • John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland (2005).
  • P. D. Clarke, "L'Acadie perdue; Or, Maritime History's Other," Acadiensis 30, 1 (Autumn 2000).

Week Seven: Revolutionaries and Loyalists: The Fault Lines of Empire

  • Elizabeth Mancke, The Fault Lines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, 1760-1830 (2004).
  • Forum: Barry Cahill, "The Black Loyalist Myth in Atlantic Canada," and James Walker, "Myth, History and Revisionism: The Black Loyalists Revisited," Acadiensis 29, 1 (Autumn 1999).

Week Eight: Coercion, Migration, and Freedom (1): The Black Atlantic

  • David S. Cecelski. The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (2001).
  • Harvey Amani Whitfield, "We Can Do as We Like Here": An Analysis of Self Assertion and Agency Among Black Refugees in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1813-1821," Acadiensis 32, 1 (Autumn 2002).

Week Nine: Coercion, Migration, and Freedom (2): The Criminal Atlantic

  • Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation: The Formation of the Criminal Atlantic (2004).
  • Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (1987), ch 6.

Week Ten: The Red Atlantic (1): The Many-Headed Hydra

  • Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000).
  • Marcel van der Linden, "Labour History as the History of Multitudes," Labour/Le Travail 52 (Fall 2003).
  • Bryan Palmer, "Hydra's Materialist History," Historical Materialism, 11 (Fall 2003).

Week Eleven: Jack's Atlantic: Maritime Labour Afloat and Ashore

  • Daniel Vickers and Vince Walsh, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (2005).
  • Judith Fingard, Jack in Port: Sailortowns of Eastern Canada (1982).

Week Twelve: The Gendered Atlantic: Social Organization of Power

  • Valerie Burton, "The Myth of Bachelor Jack: Masculinity, Patriarchy, and Seafaring Labour," in Colin Howell and Richard J. Twomey, eds., Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour (1991).
  • Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996).

Week Thirteen: The Red Atlantic (2): Maritime Socialism

  • David Frank, J. B. McLachlan: A Biography (1999).
  • Ian Mckay, "Of Karl Marx and the Bluenose: Colin Campbell McKay and the Legacy of Maritime Socialism," Acadiensis 27, 1 (Spring 1998).