Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 2 (2019), p. 329

Ecology and environment played a crucial role in the French exploration in North America. As such, Christopher Parsons places the French belief in the agricultural potential of North America and the importance of ‘cultivating’ this environment for colonial success at the centre of A not-so-new-world.

Parsons argues that the concept of ‘cultivation’ was central to French discourses and practices of colonialism. Whilst the French were initially optimistic about their ability to transform the ‘sauvage’ (meaning something akin to ‘wild’ in English) world of America into a well-ordered, cultivated space, these attempts at ‘cultivation’ were increasingly frustrated and undermined as the radical difference of the American environment began to be recognized in the late seventeenth century. The central themes explored by Parsons will of course be familiar to scholars working on English and Spanish colonization in the New World. There is a rich literature that explores European attempts to control and cultivate American lands and thus recreate European societies across the Atlantic. The transformation of wild American lands into cultivated colonial spaces was critical to colonial success, the survival of distinctly ‘European’ bodies, and the improvement of indigenous ones. Cultivating the American environment, then, would not only allow for European settlements to flourish, it was also key to raising indigenous peoples to European standards of civility. Parsons’s work is a welcome intervention into this already flourishing field. Parsons demonstrates how these shared European convictions about the mastery of the environment and its connection to successful colonial policy were enacted (and indeed frustrated) in the French context. Parsons shows in extraordinary detail the origins of this discourse of ‘cultivation’, its limitations, and its importance for understanding the nature of knowledge exchange between indigenous peoples and French colonists and missionaries. In doing so, Parsons argues for a colonial history in which ecology and politics are recognized as being deeply ‘entangled’.

In chapters one and two Parsons explores the meaning of ‘cultivation’ in a colonial context and identifies how this meaning was developed into a systemic theory of colonialism. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries French explorers, settlers, missionaries, and colonial administrators emphasized the similarities between France and North America. Rather than identifying significant differences between the two ecologies, observers instead suggested that New World plants were in fact merely ‘savage’ forms of plants that could be found in the Old World. Through a process of French cultivation, the qualities of these recognisable yet ‘savage’ plants could be improved, and the wider environment of North America made to resemble France more closely.

Chapter three explores the wider significance of the ‘cultivation’ metaphor for French colonialism. As Parsons argues, the notion of cultivation was intimately tied to the process of religious conversion. French missionaries recognized, but did not wholly understand, the spiritual nature of indigenous ecological knowledge. For successful conversion to take place, then, indigenous knowledge about the natural world had to first be understood and then, paradoxically, destroyed. Parsons also demonstrates how indigenous groups actively hid their ecological knowledge from French missionaries as a way of resisting both conversion and the dismantling of their spiritual connection to the natural world. What is perhaps missing from Parsons’ analysis, however, is a discussion of how Christian conceptions of Eden, the Fall of Man, and the connection between agriculture and salvation framed the religious mission in New France.

Chapters four and five analyse the limitations of the French plans for ‘cultivation’. Parsons argues that as the seventeenth century wore on, French understandings of indigenous spaces and ecologies became increasingly fragmented and agricultural plans for the region less coherent. Rather than noting the similarities between American and French flora and fauna, the transplantation of French plants became more important that cultivating ‘savage’ American ones. The boundaries between the ‘cultivated’ and the ‘savage’ continued to shift, as did notions of what constituted French colonial space. Using the example of ‘Canada’, Parsons argues that these shifting boundaries eventually solidified into a distinct region that was embedded in French ecological and social regimes. What increasingly defined French colonial space, then, was Frenchness. At the same time, indigenous ecological knowledge was further marginalized, a theme that Parsons explores through the establishment of botanical science in Paris. As Parsons argues, American plant species were increasingly cleaved from their indigenous contexts, being prized for their botanical novelty and leading to the ‘subtle recognition that New France was in fact a new place and not simply sauvage and in need of cultivation’ (p. 150).

Parsons concludes the book by demonstrating just how contested the nature of New France was well into the eighteenth century. For some, the vision of a French empire remained predicated on the assumption that the Americas and Europe were essentially similar, whilst for others, a French Empire should be extractive, an understanding that was shaped by the idea put forward by France’s scientists that New France was biologically distinctive and its plants uniquely useful. As Parsons also argues, in many ways our understanding of the ecology of North America remains stubbornly incomplete and tied to the physical and cultural violence of European colonialism. To rectify this, Parsons calls for the ‘decolonization’ of traditional ecological knowledge, and the mobilization of indigenous knowledge to confront and help rectify the ‘ecological threats that centuries of aggressive agricultural expansion have wrought’ (p. 188).

Whilst some aspects of Parsons’ work do not break particularly new ground, the book is nonetheless a call to action that makes important interventions, not only into the history of science, environmental history, and the history of global knowledge exchange, but also into contemporary debates surrounding the entanglements of environment and politics. The book is richly researched and will no doubt become standard reading for anyone interested in the exigency of indigenous ecological knowledge or the importance of environment for the justification, implementation, and practice of European colonization in the early modern period.