The Slow Rush of Colonization
350 pages, 6 x 9
2 b&w photos, 9 maps, 1 diagram, 3 tables
Hardcover
Release Date:01 May 2023
ISBN:9780774868341
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The Slow Rush of Colonization

Spaces of Power in the Maritime Peninsula, 1680-1790

UBC Press

In The Slow Rush of Colonization, historian Thomas Peace traces the 100-year context that underpins the widespread Euro-American/Euro-Canadian settlement of the Maritime Peninsula.

Broad in chronological and geographic scope, The Slow Rush of Colonization uses the concept of spaces of power to provide a history of settler colonialism in eastern North America that demonstrates the continuity of Indigenous sovereignties while also calling attention to the diverse – and often unaligned – strategies both the French and English Empires used in their attempt to dispossess First Peoples.

By analyzing deeds, censuses, treaties, and imperial correspondence, Peace demonstrates how Mi’kmaw, Wabanaki, Peskotomuhkati, Wolastoqiyik, and Wendat nations persistently resisted these incursions. At the same time, with each renewed conflict and treaty that followed, a British culture of settler conquest developed, allowing them to ignore this history of resistance once imperial warfare came to an end.

The Slow Rush of Colonization is essential reading for those who want to understand the roots of settler colonialism in Canada and the US and the tools France and England used to occupy and settle Indigenous Homelands during the eighteenth century.

A trenchant and comprehensive history of how warfare, settlement, trade, and treaties laid the groundwork for the normalization of European colonization and settler occupation of the Maritime Peninsula – and hence to the legal and judicial systems still in use in Canada and the US today – this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of settler colonialism in North America.

Thomas Peace is an associate professor of history and co-director of the Community History Centre at Huron University College. He has authored numerous articles on the history of schooling and settler colonialism, historical relationships between the Mi’kmaw and Acadians, and the influence of digital technologies on the historian’s craft. He has edited two Open Educational primary source readers: The Open History Seminar (with Sean Kheraj) and A Few Words that Changed the World. Since 2009 he has edited ActiveHistory.ca, one of Canada’s leading history blogs, and in 2016, with Kathryn Labelle, he edited From Huronia to Wendakes: Adversity, Migrations, and Resilience, 1650–1900.
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