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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Bradley G. Bond, editor. French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2005. Pp. xxi, 322. $59.95.
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| Louisiana stands as something of a historiographic orphan, an abandoned stepchild of the various nationalist narratives that long reigned supreme in historical scholarship. National historiographies (in stark contrast to seventeenth and eighteenth-century European empires) never laid claim to colonial Louisiana, this vast territory transferred from Native American to French to Spanish to French and finally to U.S. control, its society a mix of Native American, African, and European origin. French historiography—focused almost exclusively sur L'Hexagone—traditionally lacked interest in its first overseas empire. Louisiana became a Spanish possession too late, and too briefly, to figure prominently in a historiography that, for much of the twentieth century, was in any event largely unconcerned with its colonial past. As for the United States, the history of colonial Louisiana has mostly figured as a sideshow of exoticism and "regional otherness," as Daniel Usner puts it in this book, "a shadowy but romantic prologue on a stage that inevitably belonged to the English colonists in the East" (p. 8). |
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Matters may be set to change. With the rise of a newly self-confident Atlantic history, Louisiana may finally have found a perspective amenable to its complex colonial past—or so it is suggested in this collection of essays, which originated in a 1999 conference commemorating the founding of French Louisiana. Opening and closing with essays by the most prominent Anglophone historians of Louisiana, Usner and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, the ten intervening chapters—of which only three emerge from the pens of U.S.-based scholars—range widely from Euro-American contact to economic history, demography, migration, and beyond. |
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Usner's essay sets out the historiographical stakes, tracing the various ways Louisiana has been represented and misrepresented across nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. scholarship. Casting Louisiana as "peculiar and exotic" (p. 2), writings by early nationalist historians served largely to "justify physical acts of conquest and displacement" (p. 3) by exalting a Protestant, Anglo future of liberty and free enterprise. As time went on, however, Louisiana's "romantic otherness" (p. 10) would be reinterpreted by modernist writers, laying the groundwork for an image aimed at attracting tourists to an increasingly Disneyfied New Orleans whose exotic past could be commercialized and sold. Within this shifting matrix, the ambiguous status of racial mixing always lay at the core of representations of Louisiana's past. |
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It may only be logical, then, to find the next three essays addressing Euro-American relations: one in the context of environmental history and land use, the next through gift exchange and diplomacy, and the last through Native American belief systems. These essays, thematically integrated and very much up to date in the relevant historiography and sources, remain more suggestive than demonstrative—mostly due to their brevity. Next come two chapters bearing a less obvious relationship: one by Bertrand van Ruymbeke dismantling the hardy myth that Louis XIV's Huguenot policy lies at the root of France's failure in Louisiana, and North America more broadly; the other, an imaginative though perhaps overstated essay tracing the evolution of the Ursuline community in New Orleans from a state of "dependent passivity" (p. 104) into "a community of women with a powerful sense of their own authority" (p. 96). |
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