ABSTRACT
The mid-eighteenth-century sweep of Yankees into downeast Maine and Nova Scotia ushered in a new era in the 300-year history of European involvement in northeastern North America. When New Englanders relocated to Liverpool and Machias, the region had only scattered pockets of Euroamerican inhabitants, but settlement was a deceptive foil for a long and varied European presence in the area. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political instability along the North Atlantic littoral precluded Europeans from making a discerning assessment of the region’s economic assets. Liverpool and Queens County also had weak agricultural and strong resource extractive sectors, especially fishing. British policy in Nova Scotia, determined by the Board of Trade and the colonial government, sometimes together, sometimes in opposition, shaped the province’s demographic character. The weak agricultural and strong export-oriented resource economies of Liverpool and Machias were the most manifest signs that these towns were closely tied to the Atlantic economy and its networks.
