Andrew D. Nicholls’s A Fleeting Empire: Early Stuart Britain and the Merchant Adventurers to Canada takes off from a small incident—the capture of Quebec in 1629 by the English merchant adventurers the Kirke brothers during the French-English war of that year—and follows with a much larger attempt to unravel the many strands of seventeenth-century politics and diplomacy that led there. The title is of course a pun—the conquest was part of an imperial project established by English merchant fleets that proved fleeting indeed, virtually expiring with the 1632 treaty that ended the war. Along the way, it drew in quite a few well-known and barely known figures who form the principal subjects of the work.

The book is far better than it set out to be. The vision laid out in the introduction is in fact quite limited. Nicholls sets out to explore the rarely noticed English conquest of 1629 and the interruption it represented to the principal story of early Canadian historiography, the growth of New France. That it has been largely ignored is not really so surprising; within three years, the war had ended and the territories had been returned to their previous owners, with few obvious consequences for their future development. This is followed by a first chapter on the French and the Hurons that is as interesting and informative to read as it is seemingly irrelevant to the rest of the story, which focuses almost entirely on British merchants and colonizers.

Fortunately, it gets much better from there, and A Fleeting Empire reveals a good bit more than its seemingly limited agenda suggests. That is partly the result of the depth of the research, which constantly uncovers illuminating information about the various figures and events in the story that goes well beyond what we thought we knew. Moreover, by following the research trails across the conventional bounds that separate early American and Canadian history from British and imperial history, and court politics and diplomacy from commerce and imperial aspiration, Nicholls substantially revises our knowledge of the place of colonies in the early Stuart political world and the relationship of the English and Scottish imperial crowns.

The central figure in the story is Sir William Alexander, later Earl of Stirling, principal promoter of the short-lived and often derided Nova Scotia scheme. Nicholls takes a broad view of Alexander’s career, pointing out just how active an advisor he was to both James and Charles. By placing that venture within the context of his overall career, as courtier as well as colonizer, one who was involved with many of the most important royal concerns during the same period as he was attempting a colonial project, Nicholls effectively demonstrates the inadequacy of viewing that venture as a hopeless failure. For one thing, through the creation of the Order of Knights Baronet of Nova Scotia, the colony received far more direct royal support than did contemporary English colonizing ventures, even as the settlement itself was abandoned in the treaty negotiations. Moreover, it was only the settlement itself that was surrendered in 1632 and not Alexander’s charter, which would in fact be invoked several times in later years. And most important, the sacrifice of the Nova Scotia settlement was accompanied by several significant compensatory grants to Alexander, which maintained both his personal finances and his place in the diplomatic world and the world of imperial ambition.

Not everyone made out as well as Alexander. The Kirke brothers received a public show of support for their accomplishments at Quebec but little personal benefit. They remained active royal supporters nonetheless. Nicholls traces as well the career of James Stewart, Lord Ochiltree, who lost not only his Cape Breton settlement but ultimately his personal fortune, his honor, and his liberty. He was imprisoned for nearly two decades at Blackness Castle for a serious error in judgment in the game of court politics.

The most striking aspect of Nicholls’s portrayal is his depiction of the interconnections of court politics and the imperial crowns with North Atlantic pursuits in early Stuart Britain. Even with all of the attention to the Atlantic world and the “new” British and imperial histories, that level of connection has rarely been so well displayed and in so much detail. Moreover, Scottish ventures in the North Atlantic have nearly always been represented as minor efforts peripheral to the main story not only of the development of the three kingdoms but even of early imperial expansion. Yet one comes away from the book with a clear portrayal of William Alexander as, simultaneously, an essential advisor to the Scottish crown and Scotland’s leading colonial promoter and better connected at court than most of his English counterparts.

And what of the merchant adventurers who loomed large in the actual conquest of Quebec and its surroundings? They were a disparate lot, working on behalf of their king, their country, and themselves, in no particular order. They were men of shifting allegiances, especially where nation and confession came into conflict, as they did among Huguenot colonizers, for example, as well as numerous others. They constantly straddled the borders of law and of policy—the Kirke brothers’ seizure of Quebec, after the war had already ended, was but one example. It took years to put things to rights. In the end, the greatest task of treaty negotiators was not so much to sort out the legacies of their conquests as to undo their actions and make reparations.