New France and the Hudson Bay Watershed: Transatlantic Networks, Backcountry Specialists, and French Imperial Projects in Post-Utrecht North America, 1713–29

• Published in: Canadian Historical Review
• Main Author: Berthelette, Scott
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2020
• Subjects: Religious studies; History; Hudson Bay
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.2018-0094; https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/chr.2018-0094

Examining communication and information networks during the period of the Régence (1715–23), this article argues that French metropolitan ministers, imperial planners, colonial administrators, and royal cartographers relied heavily upon backcountry specialists – coureurs de bois, runaway soldiers, and veteran voyageurs – to provide ethnographic, geographic, and strategic knowledge, which informed and shaped the policies of post-Utrecht French North America. Subsequently, colonial officials believed that these French frontier diplomats and negotiators were the key to consolidating imperial control over the geographic, political, and cultural landscapes of the Hudson Bay watershed. These backcountry specialists were embedded within Indigenous information networks that criss-crossed North America and were thus important intermediaries between the French state and Indigenous peoples at the edge of empire. Although coureurs de bois and voyageurs became pivotal informants, explorers, fur traders, and military leaders, they not only were unwavering agents of imperial power but also pursued their own agendas and exercised agency in the Hudson Bay watershed. Backcountry specialists initially made it possible for French colonialism to extend into the watershed, but their own ambivalent relationships with the French colonial government and its representatives also fragmented the imperial authority of the French Empire in North America.