ABSTRACT
This section of the Handbook presents a number of regional analyses of settler colonialism in the Americas, which was the first ‘New World’. John G. Reid and Thomas Peace begin this story in the northeast. By disaggregating this region from the rest of North America (a move that prompts Reid and Peace to integrate the northern parts of New England within their analysis, but not southern New England), this chapter argues that settler colonialism as a mode of domination was initially sidelined as other economic concerns were prioritised. Cod, first of all, attracted Europeans to Ktaqmkuk in the fifteenth century, which was henceforth known as the ‘Newfoundland’; furs drew Europeans down the St. Lawrence River over the next two centuries, leading to the creation of ‘New France’. Settler colonialism was relatively benign, the authors argue, until the mid-eighteenth century, as the English began to take control of New France, and the balance of power tilted against the indigenous communities. Settler colonialism, ‘manifested through settler sovereignty and territorial control’, in the words of the authors, irreversibly got underway at this moment in the northeast.
