World.48 Yet while plants and animals both marvelous and monstrous may have posed a significant intellectual problem for Christopher Columbus and later explorers of Spanish territories in Central and South America, French colonists and missionaries had a fundamentally different experience of North American environments that appeared strangely familiar at first encounter. French settlers, traders, and missionaries discovered new places in the early seventeenth century that they considered novel in the way of the Terre neuve or Newfoundland located just to the northeast of New France. Yet novelty in the way that it would be later articulated by Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon—as a chronologically new continent, manifestly different from a more familiar, knowable, and reliable Old World—was a conceptual impossibility within a worldview that insisted on the mutability of American difference.49 It was only gradually that both colonial and metropolitan authors struggled with how to adequately capture (and contain) this American difference, opening up spaces where new forms of knowledge could be articulated and initiating a broader discussion of natural difference in French North America.
Moments of shock or marvel are rare in the accounts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New France. Instead, we are presented with historical actors who seem to know exactly where they are and who, because of its obviousness, can remain frustratingly reticent in their descriptions of colonial environments or in reflections on their own ecological knowledge. A Not-So-New World follows the rise and subsequent fall of cultivation as an organizing ideology of French colonialism in northeastern North America as a means to bring an otherwise obscured political ecology to light. Cultivation as a discourse translated French colonialism into a recognizable horticultural act and shaped indigenous and colonial environments as a set of ecological and material practices. From seventeenth-century prominence to eighteenth-century obsolescence, the story of cultivation therefore weaves together a dizzying cast of historical actors and an equally diverse set of ecological and cultural contexts. If it is a story of local encounters between colonists and indigenous plants and peoples, cultivation’s history nonetheless also remains entangled with global and local ecological and climatological oscillations, intellectual revolutions transforming the relationship with the natural and material world in Europe, and shifting political and cultural landscapes in colonial North America and the Atlantic world. A Not-So-New World therefore charts a course that blends insights from environmental history and the history of science to reconsider the history of European colonialism in North America, but it follows the path laid by historical actors who self-consciously considered their own place in its long history.
The first chapter of A Not-So-New World situates French exploration and settlement in northeastern North America within broader ecological and geological histories. It is these histories—told through archaeological remains of plant materials and the science of plate tectonics—that can help us understand why early explorers such as Champlain seemed so at home in what we know to be a new world for them. Shared genetic relationships between European and American flora meant that many parts of these environments were recognizable, and we can reread narratives of exploration and settlement to see how these familiar spaces were sought out and foregrounded in colonial accounts. These authors drew on contemporary natural science as they identified colonial flora as sauvage (wild) in accounts that both highlighted observable differences between European and American flora and implied that these were remediable defects.
The accounts in which the sauvage nature of New France was examined valorized personal experience and observation and communicated the certainty that French colonialism would redeem American environments in genres such as the travel narrative that celebrated empirical exploration. Chapter 2 examines how the texts through which New France was communicated to French audiences made cultivation a central mode for understanding the colony. The power of cultivation derived, in part, from a broader renaissance in horticultural practice and theory in contemporary France. As they reported their own experiences of colonial environments and took the measure of ecological continuities and differences, authors such as Champlain transformed discussions of colonial environments into opportunities to theorize what French colonialism could do in North America. Claims to know American flora and environments translated into privileged claims to articulate the prospect and purpose of this New France. In focusing on the opportunities to rehabilitate individual plants and whole landscapes, empire itself was recast as a recuperative project.
Chapter 3 follows missionaries who sought to intervene in the ecological lives of indigenous people in order to reform their spiritual lives. Looking to missionary experience in other parts of the Americas, Jesuits and Récollets organized their initial efforts into New France around a plan to sedentarize Algonquian peoples whom they understood to be errant and wild. At sites such as Sillery, missionaries who presumed that indigenous people lacked ecological knowledge instead came to understand its complexity and to appreciate the inability of their own practices to support communities in the boreal forests of the Canadian Shield. As they moved west into Wendat territories, Jesuit missionaries similarly discovered that mission strategies founded on the belief that indigenous peoples lacked a complete ecological knowledge excluded them—as unmarried men hostile to many of the traditional institutions of Iroquoian communities—from the sites of cultivation in these communities. An imperative to cultivate indigenous peoples therefore introduced missionaries to new perspectives on indigenous places and hinted at the limits of French ability to intervene in the lives of American places and peoples.
As cultivation encouraged empirical observation and the conscious assessment of experience, it therefore also created the conditions in which its limitations became evident. Chapter 4 examines how, after the optimistic belief that American plants were sauvage versions of those in France was met with a century of failed experiments, the imagined footprint of French colonialism began to retreat. French colonists relied more thoroughly on French crops and began to identify an essential foreignness in those that they encountered outside of colonial settlements. They also engaged in debates about where French colonialism could best take root that were far more pessimistic about the ability of colonialism to reshape ecosystems and climates. Was the Saint Lawrence Valley simply too cold, or could the region that was increasingly called Canada be scrubbed free of American resistance and made hospitable for French ecological regimes? On both sides of the Atlantic, proponents of colonialism sought to explain harsher-than-expected climates, failed introductions of European crops, and recalcitrant American flora that refused to become identical to its French counterparts. The result was a considerable debate that foregrounded studies of North American environments as a key site for the articulation and contestation of imperial ideologies.
By the eighteenth century, disputes between French colonists and newly confident and organized metropolitan scientists about how to know North American environments mapped closely onto broader currents in the Atlantic world that saw epistemological authority centralized in major European cities. Chapter 5 introduces an institution that had a major influence on how knowledge and plants circulated in the French Atlantic world in the eighteenth century: the Paris-based Académie Royale des Sciences. The Académie was instrumental in the effort by Louis XIV and his influential minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert to centralize cultural production and authority in France, and its history is often examined as a facet of the transition to a bureaucratic state in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The Académie became a global institution because of the ability of its American correspondents to translate the priorities—and the wages—of the Parisian institution to meet the expectations of the colonial and indigenous people who most often actually performed the act of collecting and guiding. The Académie was remarkably successful at mobilizing administrative and military networks to scientific ends, but it also drew on and manipulated a vibrant conversation between diverse colonial and indigenous populations that had begun with the first tentative efforts to establish a French colonial presence. The success of its science—a science of novelty—further marginalized the calls to cultivate a New France that had animated colonists, missionaries, and explorers
