Old Newfoundland: A History to 1843

Olaf Uwe Janzen is an associate professor of history at Memorial
University, reviews editor of The Northern Mariner, and the editor of
Northern Seas.

With this book, Patrick O’Flaherty endeavors to present a narrative
history of Newfoundland’s early history, from its prehistoric
beginnings until that moment when a sectarian political deadlock
compelled Great Britain to suspend the colony’s first system of
bicameral representative government and replace it with an amalgamated
unicameral system. Though O’Flaherty touches frequently on
Newfoundland’s social, economic, and cultural history, this is
primarily an administrative, political, and constitutional analysis. Its
conclusions have a curiously dated character—a kind of reincarnation
of D.W. Prowse’s A History of Newfoundland, first published in 1895.
Prowse used many of the same Colonial Office records on which
O’Flaherty relies, and attached the same exaggerated importance to
17th-century “charters” and subsequent parliamentary legislation,
often reducing complex issues to misleadingly simple dichotomies, such
as the relation between inhabitants and West Country merchants. This is
not to say that O’Flaherty does not make use of modern secondary
sources; the fairly extensive bibliography suggests otherwise.

Yet it is a very selective bibliography. Key works on the French
experience in Newfoundland during the 17th and 18th centuries by Laurier
Turgeon, Jean-Franзois Briиre, and others are missing, giving
O’Flaherty’s treatment both an intensely anglocentric and a Whiggish
quality that Prowse would have relished. Even when O’Flaherty turns to
the political process that led eventually to representative
government—a theme where he has published important original research
of his own—the absence of recent literature by Christopher English,
David Alexander, and others is conspicuous.

O’Flaherty’s discussion is laced with questionable judgments both
explicit (as when he concludes that the military stationed at St.
John’s during the 19th century made Newfoundland an “occupied
territory”) and implicit (as when he alludes to 18th-century merchant
markups of 100 or even 200 percent without also offering comment as to
what might constitute fair profit at the time). We need a modern survey
of Newfoundland history, one that reflects the tremendous breadth and
vitality of the scholarship produced over the past 25 years, but I would
be hesitant to assign this book to impressionable students.