Bitter Feast
Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-64
By Denys Delâge; Translated by Jane Brierley
UBC Press
This innovative interdisciplinary study offers a comprehensive analysis of the French, Dutch and English colonization of northeastern North America during the early and middle decades of the seventeenth century. It is the first book to pay serious attention to the European economic and political factors which promoted colonization, and it argues that the prime determinant was the uneven development of agricultural systems in western Europe.
Awards
- 1986, Winner - Prix Lionel-Groulx
RELATED TOPICS:
Canadian History, European History, History, Indigenous Studies, Quebec Studies, Regional Studies
Delage's arguments are diverse, elegantly constructed, and based on a wide range of respectable interpretative concepts ... The originality of his work lies in the diversity of material that he synthesizes and the structure that he gives to his subject matter.
Bitter Feast is a welcome and important contribution to 17th-century studies. All serious students of Canadian history should regard it as essential.
It is engrossing, enlightening and even lively reading. It is easy to see why the book was a prize winner when it first appeared in 1985. It will be a long time before a more comprehensive and readable work on the fur trade appears.
Denys Delage is a professor in the departments of Sociology and History at Laval University in Quebec City. In 1986, he was awarded the Prix Lionel-Groulx for the French edition of this book. Jane Brierley (translator) is a Montreal literary translator who won the 1990 Governor General's award for her translation of Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspe's Yellow-Wolf and Other Tales of the Saint Lawrence.
Preface and Acknowledgments
Maps
1. Europe in Transition at the Heart of an Economic World-System
2. North America Before European Settlement
3. The Question of Unequal Exchange
4. Huronia and Iroquoia
5. Conquer America and Conquer the Atlantic
6. The Rebirth of European Societies in North America
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
