Late in 1755, an army of British regulars and Massachusetts
volunteers completed one of the cruelest, most successful military
campaigns in North American history, capturing and deporting seven
thousand French-speaking Catholic Acadians from the province of
Nova Scotia, and chasing an equal number into the wilderness of
eastern Canada. Thousands of Acadians endured three decades of
forced migrations and failed settlements that shuttled them to the
coasts of South America, the plantations of the Caribbean, the
frigid islands of the South Atlantic, the swamps of Louisiana, and
the countryside of central France. The Acadian Diaspora tells their
extraordinary story in full for the first time, illuminating a
long-forgotten world of imperial desperation, experimental
colonies, and naked brutality. Using documents culled from archives
in France, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States,
Christopher Hodson reconstructs the lives of Acadian exiles as they
traversed oceans and continents, pushed along by empires eager to
populate new frontiers with inexpensive, pliable white farmers.
Hodson's compelling narrative situates the Acadian diaspora within
the dramatic geopolitical changes triggered by the Seven Years'
War. Faced with redrawn boundaries and staggering national debts,
imperial architects across Europe used the Acadians to realize
radical plans: tropical settlements without slaves, expeditions to
the unknown southern continent, and, perhaps strangest of all,
agricultural colonies within old regime France itself. In response,
Acadians embraced their status as human commodities, using
intimidation and even violence to tailor their communities to the
superheated Atlantic market for cheap, mobile labor. Through vivid,
intimate stories of Acadian exiles and the diverse, transnational
cast of characters that surrounded them, The Acadian Diaspora
presents the eighteenth-century Atlantic world from a new angle,
challenging old assumptions about uprooted peoples and the very
nature of early modern empire.
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