Book Review

This book is a magnificent synthesis that exposes the evolution of British policies with regard to the Acadians between 1690 and 1760 and the context related to empire struggles that eventually led to deportation. Applying himself to grasp the collective stakes, Geoffrey Plank occasionally illustrates them through the life of a leader or a village history. Up to 1710, the British conquests in Acadia were characterized by dreadful looting. Thereafter, the occupation was definitive, and the British strove to shape Acadia on the systematic mode of social management. It became a matter of ensuring political loyalty, of securing conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism, and of modifying the integration model between colonists and Indians to one of apartheid. Early in the process, deportation of Acadians to France was considered, along with an assimilation strategy for the Micmacs. However, deportation costs and the warlike resistance of the Micmacs led to an in situ assimilation program for the Acadians and a genocide policy for the Indians. If the policies with regard to the conquered had evolved, they had always postulated a fundamental difference between Acadians and Indians, while in reality these two peoples were tightly interrelated. During the following decades there came to light, through the inconceivable Métis figure, the basic difference between the ancien régime French colonial model and the more modern English model.

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