| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

John Mack Faragher. A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland. New York: W. W. Norton. 2005. Pp. xx, 562. $28.95.
In July 1755, the colonial government of Nova Scotia ordered the forcible removal of the colony's entire French-speaking, Catholic, Acadian population. Over several months approximately 7,000 men, women, and children were carried away by ship to nine of the thirteen mainland English-speaking colonies to the south. During the next four years, thousands of others were evicted from what now is eastern Canada, with most of the later deportees transported to France. As John Mack Faragher reminds us in this poignant and detailed history of the event, in addition to those who were relocated perhaps as many as 10,000 died. In the climactic, public confrontation prior to the removal, the colonial authorities had demanded that the Acadians swear unconditional allegiance to the British crown. The Acadians refused, with their leaders insisting that as a people they were neutral in the contest between Britain and France. The British labeled the Acadians' stance rebellion.	1
In order to understand what this confrontation meant, Faragher starts more than 150 years earlier, with the founding of the original French colony of Acadia, and he gains much by looking back so far. Acadia passed between the French and English empires several times in the seventeenth century. Faragher argues that the Acadian colonists learned self-government in moments when their status was unclear and they were all but abandoned by imperial authorities, particularly during a period of nominal (i.e. ineffectual) English rule between 1654 and 1671. In those years, Acadia fended for itself and maintained a commercial network that linked it to a wide array of trading partners, English-speaking, French, and Algonkian. Faragher's analysis of the regional economy is lucid and detailed. He emphasizes the Acadians' economic power as livestock keepers and merchants in cattle and meat.	. . .

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