The first chapter of A Not-So-New World situates French exploration and settlement in northeastern North America within broader ecological and geological histories. It is these histories—told through archaeological remains of plant materials and the science of plate tectonics—that can help us understand why early explorers such as Champlain seemed so at home in what we know to be a new world for them. Shared genetic relationships between European and American flora meant that many parts of these environments were recognizable, and we can reread narratives of exploration and settlement to see how these familiar spaces were sought out and foregrounded in colonial accounts. These authors drew on contemporary natural science as they identified colonial flora as sauvage (wild) in accounts that both highlighted observable differences between European and American flora and implied that these were remediable defects.
The accounts in which the sauvage nature of New France was examined valorized personal experience and observation and communicated the certainty that French colonialism would redeem American environments in genres such as the travel narrative that celebrated empirical exploration. Chapter 2 examines how the texts through which New France was communicated to French audiences made cultivation a central mode for understanding the colony. The power of cultivation derived, in part, from a broader renaissance in horticultural practice and theory in contemporary France. As they reported their own experiences of colonial environments and took the measure of ecological continuities and differences, authors such as Champlain transformed discussions of colonial environments into opportunities to theorize what French colonialism could do in North America. Claims to know American flora and environments translated into privileged claims to articulate the prospect and purpose of this New France. In focusing on the opportunities to rehabilitate individual plants and whole landscapes, empire itself was recast as a recuperative project.
Chapter 3 follows missionaries who sought to intervene in the ecological lives of indigenous people in order to reform their spiritual lives. Looking to missionary experience in other parts of the Americas, Jesuits and Récollets organized their initial efforts into New France around a plan to sedentarize Algonquian peoples whom they understood to be errant and wild. At sites such as Sillery, missionaries who presumed that indigenous people lacked ecological knowledge instead came to understand its complexity and to appreciate the inability of their own practices to support communities in the boreal forests of the Canadian Shield. As they moved west into Wendat territories, Jesuit missionaries similarly discovered that mission strategies founded on the belief that indigenous peoples lacked a complete ecological knowledge excluded them—as unmarried men hostile to many of the traditional institutions of Iroquoian communities—from the sites of cultivation in these communities. An imperative to cultivate indigenous peoples therefore introduced missionaries to new perspectives on indigenous places and hinted at the limits of French ability to intervene in the lives of American places and peoples.
As cultivation encouraged empirical observation and the conscious assessment of experience, it therefore also created the conditions in which its limitations became evident. Chapter 4 examines how, after the optimistic belief that American plants were sauvage versions of those in France was met with a century of failed experiments, the imagined footprint of French colonialism began to retreat. French colonists relied more thoroughly on French crops and began to identify an essential foreignness in those that they encountered outside of colonial settlements. They also engaged in debates about where French colonialism could best take root that were far more pessimistic about the ability of colonialism to reshape ecosystems and climates. Was the Saint Lawrence Valley simply too cold, or could the region that was increasingly called Canada be scrubbed free of American resistance and made hospitable for French ecological regimes? On both sides of the Atlantic, proponents of colonialism sought to explain harsher-than-expected climates, failed introductions of European crops, and recalcitrant American flora that refused to become identical to its French counterparts. The result was a considerable debate that foregrounded studies of North American environments as a key site for the articulation and contestation of imperial ideologies.
By the eighteenth century, disputes between French colonists and newly confident and organized metropolitan scientists about how to know North American environments mapped closely onto broader currents in the Atlantic world that saw epistemological authority centralized in major European cities. Chapter 5 introduces an institution that had a major influence on how knowledge and plants circulated in the French Atlantic world in the eighteenth century: the Paris-based Académie Royale des Sciences. The Académie was instrumental in the effort by Louis XIV and his influential minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert to centralize cultural production and authority in France, and its history is often examined as a facet of the transition to a bureaucratic state in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The Académie became a global institution because of the ability of its American correspondents to translate the priorities—and the wages—of the Parisian institution to meet the expectations of the colonial and indigenous people who most often actually performed the act of collecting and guiding. The Académie was remarkably successful at mobilizing administrative and military networks to scientific ends, but it also drew on and manipulated a vibrant conversation between diverse colonial and indigenous populations that had begun with the first tentative efforts to establish a French colonial presence. The success of its science—a science of novelty—further marginalized the calls to cultivate a New France that had animated colonists, missionaries, and explorers in the preceding century.
The final chapter of this book examines an episode where colonial, metropolitan, and indigenous ways of studying American flora met and conflicted over the question of whether New France was essentially familiar or an entirely new and foreign continent: the multiple discoveries of American ginseng. When Joseph-François Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), claimed to have discovered ginseng south of Montréal, he also announced his reliance on indigenous peoples. In fact, he used his discovery to claim that the existence of an Asian plant in North America proved larger ecological and cultural continuities between the Old World and the New. His arguments were disputed by French naturalists, who dismissed his ethnographically inclined method and his larger claims of global cultural and ecological continuities; theirs was a science of difference and novelty. Ultimately, when Lafitau’s larger arguments were eventually accepted, it was merchants who acted fastest and who organized large-scale trade with China in the 1730s and 1740s. The trade proved disastrous for indigenous ecologies in North America. Lafitau’s pursuit of physical proof of the Old World origins of indigenous cultures almost drove the plant to extinction and threatened a real botanical relationship between Eurasia and the Americas.
I am ultimately less interested in studying the accuracy of French claims to know New France than in examining the long negotiation between