Development and Diplomacy: The Lobster Controversy on Newfoundland's French Shore, 1890–1904
The matter of French claims in Newfoundland probably caused more acrimony and outcry among the professionals and businessmen who dominated the Newfoundland legislature in the later nineteenth century than any other single issue. Most historians of the ‘French Shore problem’ have followed Fred Thompson's lead in analysing the history of the French shore by focusing on high-ranking diplomats and the colonial elite. They have also tended to view the conflict as involving primarily three groups: the French and British diplomatic corps and the Newfoundland mercantile and political elite. Using a well-known late nineteenth-century dispute over the lobster fishery as a case study, this paper reconsiders the history of the French Shore by drawing on reports about conditions on the Treaty Shore and on methodological and theoretical insights that have emerged since Thompson published his pioneering work in 1961. It argues that a wider array of groups exerted significant influence in how the controversy over lobster on Newfoundland's west coast in the late nineteenth century played out. Viewing the controversy from the perspective of these groups reveals the extent to which those outside of formal policy circles influenced the shape and viability of official agreements.
Planters, Eskimos, and Indians: Race and the Organization of Trade under the Hudson’s Bay Company in Labrador, 1830–50
Abstract: Focusing on the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) 1830–50, this paper examines the unsettling and reconstitution of racial categories in Labrador. It argues that in Labrador these categories reflected the particular class-based logic that emerged as the company sought to assert itself in this region in the face of resistance to encroachment. In particular, in this setting, social categories were tied to access to the distribution of credit in the prevailing system of merchant capitalism (“truck”) in the region. And, while understanding the foundations of colonial categories in Labrador is obviously important for grasping the history of this locale, the centrality of the credit system to racial distinctions in the region also has wider implications for our understanding of nineteenth century colonialism. After all, relations of exchange figured prominently as mechanisms through which Europeans asserted authority over colonial spaces in a wide variety of “contact zones,” especially in the middling years of the nineteenth century. It is likely that the pattern of relations and mode of categorization under the HBC in Labrador had parallels elsewhere.
Gender and History in Medieval English Romance and Chronicle
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt/M., Oxford, Wien. This reading of canonical texts of medieval English literature - Sir Gawain and the Green Night and Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale - alongside Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae and other Anglo-Norman and English chronicles offers a broader context for reading the romance narratives and re-evaluates romance conventions in light of the genealogical priorities of these chronicles. By arguing that maternity is featured as a position of power, Gender and History in Medieval English Romance and Chronicle adds to our understanding of women and sovereignty, and the ways gender and authority were rhetorically linked to medieval texts.