| Book Review | The Michigan Historical Review, 34.2

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| Book Review | The Michigan Historical Review, 34.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Edward Watts. In This Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. 288. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $19.95.

In this excellent book, Edward Watts examines representations of eighteenth-century French colonists in the writings of nineteenth-century Anglo-American authors. These representations were ubiquitous, Watts shows, and were a key site for waging what Watts terms an "antebellum culture war" (p. 223) over the identity of the young American nation. For many writers, the retrograde and "failed" French colonial culture provided a foil against which to valorize a heroic, expansionist, and capitalist culture of Anglo Americans. For others, however, the French colonial way of life was a road not taken, an attractive alternative to the aggressiveness of American capitalism, racism, patriarchy, Indian removal, and manifest destiny. Using insights and tools from postcolonial theory, Watts brings to light an important set of critical voices and a lost dissenting discourse from nineteenth-century America and illustrates how images of the French past enabled a fascinating critique of American society.

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