Homelands and Empires

Jeffers Lennox begins his narrative of Anglo-French competition for the lands surrounding the Bay of Fundy with the salutary observation that the eighteenth-century French and British Empires “were geographic fictions and the[ir constituent] colonies ... were little more than a collection of pales” scattered across three great indigenous homelands (p. 3). For six decades before the Seven Years' War, European colonists were too few, and their forts and forces too puny, to threaten the natives—Abenakis of the Dawnlands (now Maine), the Wulstukwiuk and Passamaquoddy peoples of modern New Brunswick, and the Mi'kmaq of Acadia (now Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island)—who surrounded them. Lennox's enterprise is to explain how these peoples, who defended their shared interests as the Wabanaki confederacy, shaped imperial outcomes prior to their absorption into the British Empire in 1763. The narrative unfolds in six chronologically arranged chapters, handsomely illustrated by more than forty maps. The story divides into two parts on either side of 1749, when Britain created Halifax, a naval base on the magnificent, generally ice-free Atlantic harbor of Chebucto. Previously, Britain's control of Nova Scotia's lands had been limited to the immediate vicinity of Annapolis Royal on the Bay of Fundy, and the settlement of Canso at the northeastern end of the peninsula. Nova Scotia's government had exercised only minimal control over a provincial population overwhelmingly composed of Mi'kmaqs and Francophone Acadians, both of which were profoundly influenced by ties of trade, language, and religion they shared with the French colonists of Cape Breton Island and their governors, seated in the fortress of Louisbourg

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