The Acadian Diaspora tells the extraordinary story of thousands of Acadians expelled from Nova Scotia and scattered throughout the Atlantic world beginning in 1755. Following them to the Caribbean, the South Atlantic, and western Europe, historian Christopher Hodson illuminates a long-forgotten world of imperial experimentation and human brutality.
Late in 1755, an army of British regulars and Massachusetts volunteers completed one of the cruelest, most successful military campaigns in North American history, capturing and deporting seven thousand French-speaking Catholic Acadians from the province of Nova Scotia, and chasing an equal number into the wilderness of eastern Canada. Thousands of Acadians endured three decades of forced migrations and failed settlements that shuttled them to the coasts of South America, the plantations of the Caribbean, the frigid islands of the South Atlantic, the swamps of Louisiana, and the countryside of central France.
This engagingly written and excellently researched study is the first to explore fully the Acadians' role in the reconstruction of French imperialism after the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763... The Acadian Diaspora ensures that the Acadians can no longer be seen in essence as mere victims of imperial cruelty.... Hodson shows instead they were energetic and canny actors who survived against tremendous odds on the cutting edge of French Enlightenment agricultural experimentation. It is this emphasis on Enlightenment experimentation that marks this return to the best tradition of grand and erudite imperial history as a quintessentially 'Eighteenth Century History.'
