3 - New France, 1661–1744

Summary

This chapter analyzes the efforts of Louis XIV and his successors to create a colonial empire in North America. Through settlement, military might, and Indigenous alliances, France laid claim to territories reaching from Newfoundland and the Gulf of St Lawrence to the Great Plains and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to outlining the causes and consequences of these imperial designs, this chapter focuses on the demographic, economic, political, social, and cultural features of the settler colonies established by France, and the relationships that developed between natives and newcomers, especially in the “middle ground” of the fur trade/military frontier in the interior of the continent. Both the War of the League of Augsburg (1689-97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13) spread to the colonies, creating havoc for settlers and Indigenous allies alike. By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the French ceded Newfoundland, Acadie, and Rupert’s Land to Britain but France remained ascendant elsewhere and founded Louisbourg to serve as a major base for the fisheries, as a flourishing entrepôt for North Atlantic trade, and as a vehicle for contesting British claims to North America.