From the early sixteenth century, thousands of fishermen-traders from Basque, Breton, and Norman ports crossed the Atlantic each year to engage in fishing, whaling, and fur trading, which they regarded as their customary right. In the seventeenth century these rights were challenged as France sought to establish an imperial presence in North America, granting trading privileges to certain individuals and companies to enforce its territorial and maritime claims. Bitter conflicts ensued, precipitating more than two dozen lawsuits in French courts over powers and privileges in New France.

In Disputing New France Helen Dewar demonstrates that empire formation in New France and state formation in France were mutually constitutive. Through its exploration of legal suits among privileged trading companies, independent traders, viceroys, and missionaries, this book foregrounds the integral role of French courts in the historical construction of authority in New France and the fluid nature of legal, political, and commercial authority in France itself. State and empire formation converged in the struggle over sea power: control over New France was a means to consolidate maritime authority at home and supervise major Atlantic trade routes. The colony also became part of international experimentations with the chartered company, an innovative Dutch and English instrument adapted by the French to realize particular strategic, political, and maritime objectives.

Tracing the developing tools of governance, privilege granting, and capital formation in New France, Disputing New France offers a novel conception of empire – one that is messy and contingent, responding to pressures from within and without, and deeply rooted in metropolitan affairs.

Helen Dewar is assistant professor of history at the Université de Montréal and research associate of the Wilson Institute for Canadian History.

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“This is a masterful book, demonstrating extensive knowledge of the historiography of early modern France as well as that of early Canada. Dewar studies poorly understood archival sources – civil suits and legal documents in France – alongside established work on the CNF, concepts of sovereignty and authority, and traditional discussions of elite rivalry and state formation. We see well-known figures like Richelieu, but understand their actions with regard to New France in more nuanced and convincing ways.” Gregory Michael William Kennedy, Université de Moncton

“Dewar’s book is a compelling and incisive study of early New France and a tremendous contribution to the flourishing field of French colonial scholarship.[…] Disputing New France succeeds wonderfully as a challenge to the odd historiographical wall of disapproval that inevitably faces those who study the history of France’s overseas colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” H-France