Bitter Feast

Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-64

By Denys Delâge
Translated by Jane Brierley
Categories: Regional & Cultural Studies, Canadian Studies, History, World History, Canadian History, Indigenous Studies
Publisher: UBC Press, Boréal
Paperback : 9780774804516, 410 pages, January 1993
Ebook (PDF) : 9780774853781, 410 pages, October 2007

Table of contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Maps

1. Europe in Transition at the Heart of an Economic World-System

2. North America Before European Settlement

3. The Question of Unequal Exchange

4. Huronia and Iroquoia

5. Conquer America and Conquer the Atlantic

6. The Rebirth of European Societies in North America

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Description

This innovative interdisciplinary study offers a comprehensive analysis of the French, Dutch and English colonization of northeastern North America during the early and middle decades of the seventeenth century. It is the first book to pay serious attention to the European economic and political factors which promoted colonization, and it argues that the prime determinant was the uneven development of agricultural systems in western Europe.

Reviews

Bitter Feast is a welcome and important contribution to 17th-century studies. All serious students of Canadian history should regard it as essential.

- J.R. Miller

Delage's arguments are diverse, elegantly constructed, and based on a wide range of respectable interpretative concepts ... The originality of his work lies in the diversity of material that he synthesizes and the structure that he gives to his subject matter.

- Bruce G. Trigger

It is engrossing, enlightening and even lively reading. It is easy to see why the book was a prize winner when it first appeared in 1985. It will be a long time before a more comprehensive and readable work on the fur trade appears.

- Virginia P. Miller