The Canadian Studies Program
International & Area Studies
University of California at Berkeley

SYMPOSIUM

Québec and the seventeenth-century Atlantic World: 
Quatercentennial perspectives

Co-sponsored by the Department of History
and the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities

with the support of
the Consulate General of Canada, San Francisco/Silicon  Valley,
and the Quebec Government Office in California

Friday, November 07, 2008
Department of History Conference Room
3335 Dwinelle Hall

9-5

The Canadian Studies Program, of International and Area Studies at Berkeley , is convening a symposium on the founding of Quebec

in the historical context of the Atlantic world of the 17th century. 

   All conference sessions free and open to the campus community, public, and press with advance registration.

Background

This year, 2008, marks the quatercentenary of the foundation of Québec -  a historic event, but one that did not take place in a vacuum.  While it is often considered in the context of Canadian history,  it also had a European and Atlantic context, for within 30 years  before and after Champlain established the Québec colony, other  European settlements were being planted on the western Atlantic  littoral, by England, Scotland, the Dutch Republic and Sweden,  and by France. To this period date Acadia, Nova Scotia,  Newfoundland, New England, Nieuw Nederland, Nya Sverige, Virginia  and Maryland. By the mid-seventeenth century, they were joined by  new French, Dutch, Danish, English and Scottish colonies in the  Caribbean and central America. Thus was created what historians  have come to call the Atlantic World - a pan-oceanic community,  bound together by maritime trade and strategic concerns. It  reflected long-standing interests by the nations with coasts on  the northern seas, but these interests were in the Old World as  well as the new—plantation in the Americas and the trade which  resulted was partly intended to gain strategic positions, and to  raise money, for these powers’ wars against the Spanish empire,  and against each other.

This symposium will mark the quatercentenary of the  foundation of Québec colony by placing it a context too  infrequently considered - that of early-modern Atlantic  colonizing and commercial enterprises of several European  maritime powers, including France

Agenda

9.00-9.30         Registration and coffee

9.30-11.00       Chair:  Michael Wintroub ( University of California , Berkeley )

Thomas G. Barnes ( University of California , Berkeley ): “From Fort Caroline to Port Royal: Another Way to Create a New France ”

Malcolm Smuts ( University of Massachusetts , Boston ): “Sea Dogs, Huguenots and the Protestant Atlantic ”

11.00-11.15     Coffee

11.15-12.00     Chair:  Thomas G. Barnes ( University of California , Berkeley )

Jean-Philippe Warren ( Concordia University ): “ Quebec : The Frontier Town and the French Empire”

12.00-1.00       Lunch

1.00-2.30         Chair:  Ethan Shagan ( University of California,  Berkeley)

Arthur Williamson ( California State University Sacramento ): “Empire and Anti-Empire in the Scoto-Britannic Vision: From Constantinople to Nova Scotia ”

D. J. B. Trim ( Pacific Union College ): “The Dutch Republic and the ‘Atlantic World’, c. 1590–1674”

2.30-2.45         Coffee

2.45-4.15         Chair:  Alan Taylor ( University of California,  Davis)

Carolyn Podruchny ( York University ): "Dreaming of Pale Skin, Hairy Faces and Sharp Knives: Anishinaabe Narratives of Discovering the French and English"

Mark Peterson ( University of California , Berkeley ): “Rumors of War and a "Free Mercate" in Boston :  Imperial Competition and Co-operation among New France, New England, and New Netherlands in the 1640s”

4.15-4.30         Break

4.30-5.00         Chair: D. J. B. Trim ( Pacific Union College ; Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley):

                        Plenary discussion

5.00-6:00          RECEPTION

Rapporteur's Summary (PDF file)

Canadian Studies would like to recognize the ongoing support of

International and Area Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

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Last updated 04/21/09:rr