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Reviews
In This Remote Country
French Colonial Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780–1860
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By Edward Watts
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(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. ix, 275. Notes, bibliography, index. Clothbound, $59.95; paperbound, $19.95.)
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| In this intriguing book, Edward Watts explores how Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century constructed and used the history of French colonialism in North America. That history, Watts persuasively argues, became a tool in debates about "what type of nation the United States would become," with one model— the destructive and racist British empire—set against its kinder, gentler French counterpart. Thus, "even as the French themselves were erased" from the North American continent, "their memory retained a powerful presence in conversations the nation had about itself" (pp. 11, 13). |
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Watts has uncovered a remarkable array of nineteenth-century sources treating the history of French colonialism in just this way. The French show up in discussions of Indian policy, interracial marriage, middle-class masculinity, and the politics of westward expansion, and Watts treats these topics in some detail. Watts also pays attention to the differences between the interpretations advanced by western and eastern intellectuals and politicians. Western models, he argues, tended to include the French as part of the story, embracing their adaptation to the wilderness and their ability to build relationships with the region's Indians. Less locally-driven histories, however, tended to treat the French as backward, if sympathetic, failures. |
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