The Greater Gulf

Essays on the Environmental History of the Gulf of St Lawrence

Claire Elizabeth Campbell, Edward MacDonald, Brian Payne, Claire Elizabeth Campbell, Edward MacDonald, Brian Payne

• Publisher: MQUP
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780773558670
• eBook ISBN:
  9780773559844
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The largest estuary in the world, the Gulf of St Lawrence is defined broadly by an ecology that stretches from the upper reaches of the St Lawrence River to the Gulf Stream, and by a web of influences that reach from the heart of the continent to northern Europe. For more than a millennium, the gulf's strategic location and rich marine resources have made it a destination and a gateway, a cockpit and a crossroads, and a highway and a home.From Vinland the Good to the novels of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the Gulf has haunted the Western imagination. A transborder collaboration between Canadian and American scholars, The Greater Gulf represents the first concerted exploration of the environmental history – marine and terrestrial – of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Contributors tell many histories of a place that has been fished, fought over, explored, and exploited. The essays' defining themes resonate in today's charged atmosphere of quickening climate change as they recount stories of resilience played against ecological fragility, resistance at odds with accommodation, considered versus reckless exploitation, and real, imagined, and imposed identities. Reconsidering perceptions about borders and the spaces between and across land and sea, The Greater Gulf draws attention to a central place and part of North Atlantic and North American history.Contributors include Rainer Baehre (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Jack Bouchard (Folger Institute), Claire Campbell (Bucknell University), Caitlin Charman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Jack Little (Simon Fraser University), Edward MacDonald (University of Prince Edward Island), Matthew McKenzie (University of Connecticut), Suzanne Morton (McGill University), Brian Payne (Bridgewater State University), John G. Reid (St. Mary's University), and Daniel Soucier (University of Maine).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• INTRODUCTION Environmental History in the Greater Gulf
• 1 Reassembling the Greater Gulf
• PART ONE The Gulf as a Contested Geopolitical Space
• 2 “Gens sauvages et estranges”
• 3 Newfoundland’s West Coast and the Gulf of St Lawrence Fishery, ca. 1755–83
• 4 “We have done a great deal of mischief – spread the terror of his Majesty’s Arms thru the whole Gulph”
• 5 Environmental Change, War, and Neutrality in Imperial-Indigenous Relations in the Maritime Colonies, 1793–1815
• PART TWO The Gulf and Its Resources
• 6 “The best fishing station”
• 7 Shell Games
• 8 “Alien concerns”
• PART THREE The Gulf in Imagination and Identity
• 9 Primordial Landscapes, Hardy Folk, and Doomed Aboriginals
• 10 “A window looking seaward”
• 11 “An ugly, piled-up sea”
• CONCLUSION Glimpses of a Greater Gulf
• Contributors
• Index