New England and the Maritime Provinces: Connections and Comparisons

Olaf Uwe Janzen is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland. He is the reviews editor of The Northern Mariner and the
editor of Northern Seas.

The focus of this important collection of 18 essays by historians and
geographers, originally presented at a conference held in 2000, is a
trifle misleading. True, most concentrate on New England and the
Maritime Provinces as a coherent region, yet both the conference and the
essays are really explorations in Canadian–American relations. All are
guided by the notion of “borderlands”—regions where political
boundaries seem increasingly made irrelevant by social, economic,
cultural, intellectual, and other networks. Thus, among the essays
included here are studies of migration patterns, economic development,
folklore, resource depletion, war and conflict, smuggling, sports
culture, even patterns of discrimination. One essay on pre-Contact
archaeology suggests that “cross-border regional study” has a
timeless validity. Perhaps, but then the political limits defined in the
title are ignored more than once by contributors whose analyses of the
region as “borderland” transcends New England and the Maritime
Provinces. Indeed, Elizabeth Mancke openly challenges the tendency for
historians to impose too coherent and unified a framework on a region
that had many “spaces of power,” which often functioned at variance
with each other. She fits her analysis of settlement during the 16th and
17th centuries into the larger framework of “Atlantic history” and,
like others, feels compelled to extend the geographical limits of that
analysis as far as Newfoundland and Labrador. Others concede that their
analyses work only when the “borderland” in question is stretched to
include parts of Quebec. In his concluding essay, Graeme Wynn uses the
notion of “unstable space” to affirm that scholars must avoid
treating the region as one of static or linear development, and that
regional connections were constantly changing and shifting.

And that, perhaps, is why this is such an important collection for
students of Canadian–American relations. Where specialists like J.B.
Brebner and George Rawlyk once analysed regional history within the
rigid framework of modern political boundaries, today’s specialists
recognize that the “borderlands” paradigm works only within a fluid
set of cultural and intellectual boundaries, and that understanding what
occurred within the region more often than not requires awareness of
what was also happening outside the region.