Christopher M. Parsons is a historian of science, medicine, and the environment in the early modern Atlantic world with a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. His current research explores the spread of European illnesses in New France, New England, and New Netherland in the 1630s “in order to understand how epidemic disease shaped colonial encounters and imperial rivalries,” (https://cssh.northeastern.edu/faculty/christopher-parsons/). In addition, he teaches courses at Northwestern University as an Associate Professor of History. His 2018 book, A Not-So-New-World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America won the Prix Lionel-Groulx award from the Institut d’Historie de l’Amerique Francaise and an honorable mention for the Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society. This book traces his “longstanding interest in highlighting the contribution of indigenous peoples to the evolution of European and Euro-American environmental sciences,” (https://cssh.northeastern.edu/faculty/christopher-parsons/).
A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America, is an in-depth exploration of France’s colonial aspirations that used ecological cultivation to assert dominance in the “new world.” Parsons places his book among the historiography of French colonial naturalism but asserts that unlike other scholars, this book demonstrates that the flora of the new world was not so unfamiliar to colonists as has been studied before. He says that instead of the novelty of North America posing “a significant challenge to European intellectual traditions,” the “strangely familiar” similarities between the flora and fauna of the old world and the new sparked a different kind of novelty. A novelty which spurred colonials to understand the differences between them and claim the land as a “New France,” which they were divinely authorized to cultivate and civilize in the shape of the old world. American flora, while familiar, was just distinct enough from their European counterparts that they were deemed “sauvage,” and in need of European cultivation. The drive to understand American flora intertwined indigenous knowledge into French settlements, with colonists attempting to “civilize” and “cultivate” native plants, and subsequently the native peoples, to make them more distinctly “French.”
I appreciated that the first chapter of this book was dedicated to understanding the broader ecological and geological histories of the earth. By describing plate tectonics and the genetic links between plants on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the author ties a science lesson about plant genetics into an explanation of why French explorers and colonists would find the plants of the new world so familiar to the ones they left behind in France. This sets the stage for subsequent chapters to explore why the colonists felt the new world plants were “sauvage,” and their desire to intervene in the social, political, and spiritual lives of the indigenous people who lived there through the cultivation of native flora. Chapter two defines the terms “sauvage,” and “cultivation,” in the context of communicating the observable world to contemporaries in Europe. As Parsons explains, it was how information about “New France was communicated to French audiences [that] made cultivation a central mode for understanding the colony,” (11). One of the strengths of A Not-So-New-World is that each chapter builds upon the concepts of the last. From the definitions of savagery and cultivation of chapter two comes chapter three, which dedicates time to following the missionaries “who sought to intervene in the ecological lives of indigenous people in order to reform their spiritual lives,” (12). The ideas of American flora being savage, and the French duty to cultivate the natural world, are central themes throughout the book which bring focus to the argument that French colonists used the natural world to cement French colonial presence in North America.
Chapters four, five and six focus on the empirical side of natural history, as well as the intellectual exchanges of knowledge that occurred across the Atlantic. Chapter four discusses the results of French experiments cultivating American flora that ultimately failed to achieve the reshaping of the natural world in northeastern North America. It was at this point in these experiments that French colonists began to doubt that colonialism could “reshape ecosystems and climates,” which in turn meant that they had failed in their goal of establishing a New France that mimicked the old (12). In chapter five, Parsons enters the court of Louis XIV as the Royal Academy of Sciences is established. The author argues that the Royal Academy not only facilitated the exchange of knowledge between the colonists and their counterparts in France but enhanced the exchanges of knowledge between colonists and indigenous groups in America that had attempted to take place at the beginning of France’s attempt at colonial settlement and initially failed. This new outlet for scientific conversation shifted attitudes away from the idea of “cultivating” New France as a means of colonization. Parsons concludes his book with a case study in chapter six about the discovery of American ginseng, a plant initially “discovered” in Asia. This case study is significant for a few reasons. First, it is an example of how the question of “whether New France was essentially familiar or an entirely new and foreign continent,” was debated among the intellectuals of the time. Second, it highlights indigenous knowledge in assisting Jesuit missionaries find and identify new types of ginseng. Thirdly, it discusses contemporary debates about ethnographic and cultural “continuities between the old world and the new,” since ginseng had then appeared on different continents. This case study is a culmination of the author’s arguments throughout the book by highlighting different aspects of French colonialism that were used, debated and experimented in North America.
The focused nature of the book suggests it was written for scholars of colonial North America, but it is written in a way that would be familiar to a broader audience. The concepts present in the book are explained thoroughly and concisely so that readers who are unfamiliar with French colonialism would find it easy to understand and analyze. In addition, Parsons includes a few visual aids in the form of maps and botanical illustrations to emphasize points. Considering that this book focuses on natural history in colonial North America, I would have thought that there would have been more scientific illustrations present, but that all depends on the availability of surviving sources. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and honestly cannot find much that I disliked about it. Overall, A Not-So-New World was an interesting new perspective on French colonialism in North America with its focus on ecological cultivation that spurred colonial ideologies, new scientific experiments, and exchanges of knowledge in an attempt to reshape a seemingly familiar landscape into one distinctly French.
