The Slow Rush of Colonization: Spaces of Power in the Maritime Peninsula, 1680–1790

Thomas Peace’s The Slow Rush of Colonization: Spaces of Power in the Maritime Peninsula, 1680–1790 is a crucial contribution to the historiographies of early Canada and North America. Peace grounds his study in the geography of “the Maritime Peninsula,” a region “bound by the St. Lawrence River, Gulf of Maine, and the Atlantic Ocean,” crisscrossed by waterways connecting Mi’kma’ki and Wabanaki Homelands, and stretching to Nova Scotia, Acadia, and New England. Rather than considering distinct Indigenous nations or European colonies as discrete entities, Peace reconstructs overlapping “spaces of power” in the region, created by the Mi’kmaq, Wabanaki, Wendat, French, and British, to present a “more contiguous whole” (1). The book’s chronology challenges narratives of conquest by foregrounding Indigenous responses to imperial encroachments, sovereignty over land, diplomatic pluralisms, and autonomy.The book’s ten chapters mobilize extensive archival research, drawing on French, English, and Indigenous-language materials from libraries and archives across the globe. The first four chapters explore the localized responses of Mi’kmaq, Wendat, and Wabanaki peoples to imperial encroachments upon their homelands at the turn of the eighteenth century. Peace inverts the absence of Mi’kmaq voices at the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701 to argue for Mi’kmaq autonomy and the limitations of imperial control within Mi’kma’ki Homelands. Emphasizing continuity over rupture, Peace illustrates how Indigenous agents autonomously decided to participate or remain neutral in the “imperial stakes” of Anglo-French wars, which continued to exert less sway “against those of more local Indigenous, colonial, and imperial actors” (125).Peace shifts his focus in chapters 5 through 7, showing that in the aftermath of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, British and French imperial actors redrew jurisdictional boundaries across the Maritime Peninsula. Peace addresses changes to Mi’kmaq, Wendat, and Wabanaki strategies in a more “nationally and imperially focused” context, which posed new challenges to Indigenous autonomy (135–6).In the final chapters, Peace evaluates Indigenous responses to British claims on Mi’kma’ki land into the 1760s and beyond, showing that the British justified these claims by appropriating a fictive French “conquest” to nullify Native sovereignty. The Mi’kmaq hotly contested British claims to “innocence in the process of Indigenous dispossession,” according to Peace (227). Notably, in 1746, the Mi’kmaq articulated their outrage at the British placement of a naval base within Mi’kma’ki Homelands. The Mi’kmaq reported this incursion to the governor of Halifax in their own language, employing a French intermediary to deliver the message. As imperial pressures mounted in the 1760s, Peace also examines minutes produced by the 1760 and 1761 treaties, which emphasized Mi’kmaq demands for nonterritorial terms that protected land and autonomy and codified Mi’kmaq-British relations within older diplomatic obligations.Peace reimagines contested spaces and jurisdictions by thinking through the functionalities of those spaces. However, his reconstruction of power dynamics and land might be enriched by considering how gender fits into the book’s framework of settler colonialism (which, as Native scholars have theorized, was and is a fundamentally gendered mechanism). Attention to gender might expand Peace’s definitions of spatial power, autonomy, and land. In chapter 3, for example, this might have allowed Peace to use the 1708 census not to evaluate gendered imbalances within Wabanaki and Mi’kmaq communities but to consider the ways that Native women inhabited and crossed space as laborers, elders, kin, diplomats, and geographers.Thomas Peace’s The Slow Rush of Colonization offers a rich regional history of the Maritime Peninsula and a layered spatial framework valuable to Early Americanists, broadly defined. Drawing upon settler colonial theory, Native American and Indigenous studies, and spatial production, Thomas Peace contributes a complex and important study, generating new approaches to make sense of complexity, geography, and contest.