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Book Review
Canada and the United States
A. J. B. Johnston. Control and Order in French Colonial Louisbourg, 17131758. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 2001. Pp. xlv, 346. $54.95.
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Historians of the British colonies in North America have recently placed more emphasis on differences between the colonies than on a common, distinctive Anglo-American experience. A similar trend has affected scholarship on the French colonies. On the basis of recent historical writing, it is easier to find contrasts than commonalities among the divergent French settlements in Newfoundland, Acadia, Cape Breton Island, Quebec, the Illinois country, and Louisiana. Louisbourg (the principal French town on Cape Breton Island) was built quickly following the removal of the French from their year-round settlements on Newfoundland in 1713, and from the outset it received an enormous subsidy from the government of France. Fishing and overseas trade were the dominant private economic activities, but the colony also had a powerful military presence, with soldiers making up a higher proportion of the population than anywhere else on the continent. As a result of these circumstances, Louisbourg did not evolve the way most other colonies did. Virtually none of the colonists left town to establish farmsteads, and only a minority established families. In 1752, nearly forty years after its founding, Louisbourg had a population approaching 4,000, and males outnumbered females by approximately six to one. |
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