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THE END OF NEW FRANCE: FALLING WITH GRAVITY
William R. Nester. The French and Indian War and the Conquest of New France. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. xix + 492 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).
Christian Ayne Crouch. Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians, and the End of New France. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014. xiv + 250 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.
Daniel P. Barr. A Colony Sprung from Hell: Pittsburgh and the Struggle for Authority on the Western Pennsylvania Frontier, 1744-1794. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2014. 334 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00.
Now that all the 250th anniversaries related to the Seven Years' War in America are behind us and the scholarship they helped promote is before us, it is a good time to revisit our understanding of the subject. Much has been learned recently about the French and British administrations, their finances, and their military, and about the colonial and Indian armies that fought what were poorly labeled as the French and Indian War and Pontiac's Rebellion.
William Nester and Christian Crouch have written books that expressly focus on what caused the fall of New France. This is an old chestnut that has been used to harass Canadian undergraduates for generations. Was it the inevitable cultural failure of aristocratic, backward-looking France and its colonial clone that were no match for the new capitalistic British and American civilization, as Francis Parkman argued amid his appreciation for individual French heroes? Did France abandon New France as the final crisis approached, as Guy Frégault claimed in his classic Québeçois nationalist study? Did Montcalm ruin a close-run finale by attacking too soon on the Plains of Abraham and by surrendering more than he should have, as Bill Eccles has argued? Might a French fleet still have saved New France after Lévis' victory over Murray and the revolution of 1760 in Britain's government?
William Nester, author of more than thirty books on a wide range of historical subjects that now include five books related to this war, effectively uses much recent work on the French navy, finances, and personalities to reinforce his earlier arguments about why France lost New France....