If, “To talk about Acadia or Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century is to engage in an act of imagination”, then Jeffers Lennox's investigation into the history of Indigenous homelands and European settlements in north-eastern North America is an act of illumination (3). Lennox argues that the British and French footholds of Nova Scotia and Acadia were little more than “imperial fictions” in the lands of the Wabanaki Confederacy up until the Seven Years War. The Abenakis of the Dawnland (Maine), the Wulstukwiuk and Passamaquoody of Wulstukwik (New Brunswick), and the Mi'kmaw of Mi'kma'ki (Nova Scotia), shaped the process of territorial competition around the Bay of Fundy, resisting, complicating, and in some cases defining the nature of European occupation in the region. In a descending scalar view, Lennox locates his study within the wider frameworks of the Atlantic world and the early American northeast as he picks up Lauren Benton's challenge to move beyond simplistic ideas of conquest by “address[ing] local context and contingencies that shaped both violent conflict and peaceful coexistence” (13).
Across its six chapters, Homelands and Empires reveals the challenges that Indigenous people's territorial strength posed to European claims of sovereignty in order to undermine the “anachronistic” view of mid-eighteenth century north-eastern North America as a land of competing European colonies (16). Though the Wabanaki were absent at nearly every treaty negotiation between France and Britain—from Ryswick to Paris—even the most limited assertions of territorial control emanating from London or Paris depended on Europeans’ successful navigation of the political landscape of the Wabanaki's homeland. The rise of British power in the region was a lengthy and contested process. Nova Scotia's government held little power over the Francophone Acadian and Mi'kmaw populations during the decades-long conquest of Acadia and multiple commercial, cultural, and political webs ran through these Indigenous homelands with little regard for proclamations issued from behind the fortified walls of British outposts. Simply put, Lennox reveals that while claiming colonial territory was much easier to do on paper than on the ground, even the former was an uncertain process, and the latter was characterized by “contested dominium and a complete lack of imperium” until the 1760s (90). By shifting the focus of this diplomatic history from imperial centres to Indigenous homelands, Lennox turns a narrative in which the Wabanaki's dispossession was a foregone conclusion into an account of their power.
The maps and surveys created and used by Europeans (the book includes 41 examples) capture the tension between how imperial administrators imagined colonial possessions and their relationship to realities on the ground. Here, Lennox reveals the myriad of ways which geographic knowledge enabled and limited the spread of empires. He concurs with Mathew Edney to argue that maps and surveys served as the basis for “the discursive construction of empires” in which their use mattered as much as content (186). Lennox's attention to the importance of cadastral surveying is particularly useful here, as the tool which allowed both settlers and imperial officials to turn “fictive empires” into realities on the ground, acre by acre, fence by fence. Key in this process were the surveyors themselves. Charles Morris’ surveying work acted “as the thin edge of an imperial wedge” and by charting the trends within one man's cartographic career, Lennox highlights how representations of British imperial strength gave way to the need for colonization (245).
For all the work Lennox does to reveal the political underpinnings of geographic representations in maps and surveys in the quest for territory, his concluding assertion that, “The enlightened ideal of objectivity and accurate knowledge succumbed to the imperial fervour that swept Europe”, seems to confuse rather than clarify the wider cartographic culture he investigates (214). His critique of the ideal of objectivity shows that it shared a root with imperialism and though British and French officials contested claims of objectivity in imperial negotiations, Europeans’ assertions of accuracy ultimately worked together to invalidate the Indigenous concepts of geographic space. Measuring land and mapping territory were themselves techniques with an “imperial bias” (214). In other words, objectivity was a political position, a pale in the Wabanaki's homelands and a contested claim in metropolitan centres. To understand why Mary Louise Pratt's “imperial eyes” strategically became empirical eyes at particular moments is therefore to ask why competing interest in the contest for north-eastern North America used maps as well as how they used them.Footnote 1
Lennox is alert to this reality and traces the process of map-making back to its origins in the imperial power relationships that produced spatial knowledge. His attention to the erasure of Indigenous people and Indigenous geographies on European maps illustrates well the interplay between those racialized power dynamics that undergird maps’ legitimacy. But he also includes a handful of instances that highlight the absence of a sustained interrogation of gender in the cartographic culture he surveys: Agathe Campbell's case for her property rights under British law (99); charges of “effeminate” states (223); the popular dimensions of public maps and magazines (237). In short, a more holistic approach to the gendered aspects of the cartographic culture in which these contest for sovereignty occurred would have further bolstered Lennox's argument regarding how “maps helped citizens to envision empire and officials to craft policy” (167).
This point aside, Lennox ably fulfils his objectives and has written a remarkable book. Homelands and Empires will be a valuable text for historians interested in the Atlantic world and required reading for scholars on north-eastern North America, both north and south of the 49th parallel. His success issues a rather provocative challenge to historians of empire broadly. “Too often historians analyse one place by its relationship to another”, he writes, “in ways that elide the fact that a region's inner workings were often shaped by immediate spatial concerns rather than larger imperial policy” (12). It will be for future historians to test the validity of this claim in their fields of study, but Lennox clearly shows that histories of empire are served well by critical approaches to geography.
