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Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-64
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.
410 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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May 24, 2022
This English edition was translated from the French by Jane Brierly. Bitter Feast is a comparative history of how North Eastern North America was subordinated to the European economy. It focuses on English, Dutch and French colonization, and the impact this had upon indigenous peoples, particularly the Hurons and Iroquois. It is sort of a blend of Brebner’s “The North Atlantic Triangle” and “Trigger’s Natives and Newcomers.” The book discusses the relative successes and failures of the colonizers, and the reasons for them, and goes into great detail about the splintering and disintegration of particularly the Hurons, looking at economics, politics, religion and society. Although I think some of Delage’s argument is debatable and other parts can be put into more context, it is an important study and worthwhile read.
The overall thesis of the book is taken from world-system theory, a version of Marxist thought that originated in opposition to Adam Smith and the classical economics idea that, because of relative advantages held by different regions, the whole world is made better when different places specialize in different products and trade between them. In Delage’s argument, the world system in 1600 was characterized by a core country, Holland, with a semi-periphery made up of England, France and Sweden, and further out were countries like Spain and further out still a far periphery made up of places like North and South America and India. The core “monopolizes finance, commerce and manufacturing, and a more rural, primitive periphery…supplies raw materials.” The result was “unequal exchange” between “a stone age continent and a manufacturing age continent” in which value inevitably flowed from the periphery to the core in “the underlying process of the accumulation of capital.”
I am no economist and can say that Delage provides some very persuasive evidence for his case. Just for a starter, though, the theory states that exchange is unequal because the labour time put into manufacturing the products of trade, in this case North American furs for European manufactured products, is unequal. He with the lowest productivity loses. I know that classical economists, however, say that much more than labour goes into the value of a product, for example, ingenuity and capital. It would be interesting to hear a debate between two economic historians representing these opposing views.
The first chapter describes the rise of capitalism in North Eastern Europe, or, how the Dutch and the English became the most powerful countries in Europe. There are some very interesting points here. One of the reasons for a lack of Dutch colonists in North America was their incredibly strong economy – there just weren’t very many poor people in Holland. The particular development of capitalism in England, on the other hand, led 80,000 people to leave for a better life in North America. France, the country with the largest population, was actually the weakest, largely because it was still traditional and feudal. Marxist theory tells us that capitalism makes states rich and powerful, not poor and weak.
Delage describes Huron society and economy, and how the fur trade fit into it and began to transform it. For the Hurons, trade was related to alliance, and was ritualistic in nature, while for the French it was a commercial transaction. Further, in general, because of unequal exchange, it meant that Huron society became more unequal, as those with access to the trade routes became richer and as the Hurons began to dominate their neighbours more because of their trade with the French. Wars intensified. It also meant that everybody had to work harder to, for example, hunt for beavers or other furs, trade with other nations for furs, or produce corn to trade for furs.
The idea of unequal exchange is actually quite at odds with modern social justice theory and the idea of “other ways of knowing.” The claim that North American indigenous society was “stone age” and “primitive” is quite controversial now. Delage acknowledges that not all knowledge went one way. The Hurons had knowledge that the Europeans did not, for example the knowledge of medicinal plants in North America, or how to adapt to the environment, such as snowshoes or canoes, or even political and social forms that were much more egalitarian and democratic than their contemporary European counterparts. However, Europeans on the whole had many more things that the Hurons wanted than the reverse, and that is how the Europeans reduced them to poverty and dependency. Europeans society would not have crumbled if they had stopped receiving beaver skins. By 1660, the same thing could not be said of North Eastern North American indigenous societies need for European trade goods. European “ways of knowing”, how to make steel and lead, how to build ships, how to organize large groups of people, were far more powerful than indigenous Huron ways.
The Hurons lost their war with the Iroquois, ending in their dispersion and the transformation of their identity as an identifiable group. The first reason for this was geography. The Hurons were far from the French while the Iroquois were close to the Dutch, with the result that it was easy for the Iroquois to ambush the Hurons on their way to trade with the Dutch, while the Iroquois trade route was secure. The second was economic. The capitalist Dutch traded better products at better prices to the Iroquois than the French to the Hurons. The last two reasons were because of the mistake that the French made in allowing the Jesuits to control trade with the Hurons. Firstly, the Dutch traded guns for beavers so that the Iroquois by 1650 had 1,000 warriors armed with muskets, which they used to sweep the surrounding nations before them, not just the Hurons, but also the Eries, Petuns, and Neutrals. On the other hand, because the French were afraid that armed Hurons would turn their guns on the Jesuits in their midst in the Huron villages, only Christian Hurons were allowed to possess guns, and there just were not enough of them to defend against the Iroquois. Why would traditionalist Hurons want to kill the Jesuits in their midst? Well, along with the Jesuits and the Europeans in general came huge epidemics that swept through the indigenous villages, killing perhaps 50% of them. Traditionalist Hurons looked at the Jesuits as sorcerers who had come to kill them and their way of life, and there were great disagreements at the Huron councils about whether to kill the Jesuits. Which brings us to our final point. The Iroquois were not fighting a unified Huron confederacy, but rather a people who had been divided among themselves on the issue of adopting Christianity and submitting to the Jesuits or not. It was so bad that some Hurons voluntarily went to join their Iroquois rivals because then at least they could keep their traditional religion. The role of disease in the Huron defeat is uncertain. Certainly, their numbers had been reduced by perhaps half between 1635 and 1650, but the Iroquois had suffered as well. On the other hand, the Iroquois made up their numbers by adopting war captives into their society, while the Hurons lacked the opportunity to do so. This makes for very interesting reading.
Delage also looks at how the English, Dutch and French subordinated or removed the indigenous peoples from their areas. There was a tension between the fur trade, which meant alliance with the indigenous people, and settlement, which meant clearing land for European settlement and subsequent wars with the people occupying it. Further, French efforts to control indigenous peoples were not notably successful at this time. They tried residential schools, but the students ran away. Most indigenous peoples could not be induced to settle on reserves, but some 300 Christian Huron survivors ended up near Quebec City under the control of the Jesuits. Notions of private property replaced the idea of collective ownership. His vision of how forests were destroyed and the tree nuts and game, which had been collective property, were replaced by farms filled with crops and domestic animals, which were private property, is true, but it ignores the fact that indigenous farmers were not about to let foreigners come onto their fields and just harvest the crop for themselves either.
This book suffers from the stereotype of the ecological Indian, natural stewards of their land. Evidence for the stereotype is the great abundance of fauna and flora in North America that the Europeans found when they arrived. This abundance, however, was produced for several reasons. First, indigenous people consciously limited their numbers by, for example, women breast feeding their children for an extended period to increase the time between births. On the other hand, large areas of game-rich lands were that way because they were essentially no-man’s lands between antagonistic groups. To go there was to risk death. When indigenous population pressure existed, game was scarce. For example, deer were scarce in Huronia. Further, when indigenous people in the distant past themselves arrived in North America, they were greeted by species such as the giant ground sloth, giant bears, mammoths, camels, horses, and the sabretooth tiger. They hunted them all to extinction. For the fur trade, they exterminated the beaver as well. We know that Europeans engaged in mass, wasteful and needless slaughter of animals in North America. There are recorded instances of indigenous peoples doing the same thing.
Delage writes with great impact about the upheavals in Amerindian culture forced by the European presence, especially with the Jesuits in New France, and the reservation system. The French generally subjected them to a totalitarian regime of control on the reserves, which was similar but even worse than the systems of control that French themselves experienced under an absolute monarchy allied with the Catholic Church. This contrasts very poorly with our modern ideas of democracy, to which egalitarian indigenous societies seem much more attractive. This is all true and important. It is also true that the Europeans did not encounter static cultures but people living in fluid, living systems that were undergoing constant change because of changes in their environment and because of contradictions within their own societies. Indigenous peoples moved around, they consciously shaped their cultures, and sometimes disasters occurred because of outside forces beyond their control, all before Europeans arrived. We can’t know the details because they weren’t recorded, but some outlines are available. Graeber and Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything” contends that these egalitarian societies were actually conscious creations, being brought into being through the overthrow or fall of the more hierarchical Missippian mound building cultures, as exemplified by the great works at Cahokia or in Ontario at the Serpent Mounds in Peterborough. Also, indigenous cultures varied greatly from more matriarchal to more patriarchal, from more egalitarian to more hierarchical and from more free to coercive empires. Thus, the European subordination of indigenous cultures is a true and important fact of history; however, the issued raised are not only found between European and indigenous cultures, but also among indigenous cultures themselves. What are the sufficient and necessary conditions for human beings to start forcibly subordinating each other and how can we prevent this in the future?
Advocates of equity forget that freedom includes the freedom to not give. Indigenous societies such as the Huron have been hailed as non-coercive, egalitarian and free. They certainly were free in comparison to European societies at the time with regard to, for example, sexual freedom and religious dissent, and they had a much more inclusive political culture. Further, when we look at the methods they used to make the society more egalitarian, people with more gave to those who had less in many ways, and received status and praise for those contributions. However, a failure to give, for example, in response to a dream or to make good on reparations to another clan or tribe for a murder committed by one of ours, could bring about suspicions of witchcraft and that was punishable by death.
Overall, Delage says that the British and Dutch, but not the French, were driven to imperialism by a quest for capital, and that is what made them more successful imperialists. That is an important point. Capitalism made more powerful imperialists, but not imperialists generally. Think about Julius Caesar or any of the Chinese generals who conquered what is now Western China in the 17th and 18th Centuries. They were quite effective imperialists as well.
This book powerfully confirms a thesis put forth by McNeill in "Plagues and Peoples". McNeil says that societies destabilized by disease become far more vulnerable to ideological takeover by civilizations that are not so affected. What happened to the Hurons is one of the better examples I know of this.
Hindsight is 20/20. New France would have been much better off if imperial policy had not been subservient to the Church. They could have had better trade relations with the indigenous peoples, more settlement, and more investment. The Hurons would have been much better off if they had barred the Jesuits from ever coming to their villages and allied themselves with the Iroquois against the French. The English won the prize of the North Atlantic economy because they combined mass emigration with capitalism, while the Dutch didn’t have the numbers and the French had a disadvantageous position and an antiquated economy. However it happened in detail, colonial history in general can be “understood in the light of an economic world system,… where the ebb and flow of prices, wages, and populations affect all these parties, despite discrepancies between them.” Influences went more than one way, but one way of life was enriched and the other was completely subordinated and upended.
The overall thesis of the book is taken from world-system theory, a version of Marxist thought that originated in opposition to Adam Smith and the classical economics idea that, because of relative advantages held by different regions, the whole world is made better when different places specialize in different products and trade between them. In Delage’s argument, the world system in 1600 was characterized by a core country, Holland, with a semi-periphery made up of England, France and Sweden, and further out were countries like Spain and further out still a far periphery made up of places like North and South America and India. The core “monopolizes finance, commerce and manufacturing, and a more rural, primitive periphery…supplies raw materials.” The result was “unequal exchange” between “a stone age continent and a manufacturing age continent” in which value inevitably flowed from the periphery to the core in “the underlying process of the accumulation of capital.”
I am no economist and can say that Delage provides some very persuasive evidence for his case. Just for a starter, though, the theory states that exchange is unequal because the labour time put into manufacturing the products of trade, in this case North American furs for European manufactured products, is unequal. He with the lowest productivity loses. I know that classical economists, however, say that much more than labour goes into the value of a product, for example, ingenuity and capital. It would be interesting to hear a debate between two economic historians representing these opposing views.
The first chapter describes the rise of capitalism in North Eastern Europe, or, how the Dutch and the English became the most powerful countries in Europe. There are some very interesting points here. One of the reasons for a lack of Dutch colonists in North America was their incredibly strong economy – there just weren’t very many poor people in Holland. The particular development of capitalism in England, on the other hand, led 80,000 people to leave for a better life in North America. France, the country with the largest population, was actually the weakest, largely because it was still traditional and feudal. Marxist theory tells us that capitalism makes states rich and powerful, not poor and weak.
Delage describes Huron society and economy, and how the fur trade fit into it and began to transform it. For the Hurons, trade was related to alliance, and was ritualistic in nature, while for the French it was a commercial transaction. Further, in general, because of unequal exchange, it meant that Huron society became more unequal, as those with access to the trade routes became richer and as the Hurons began to dominate their neighbours more because of their trade with the French. Wars intensified. It also meant that everybody had to work harder to, for example, hunt for beavers or other furs, trade with other nations for furs, or produce corn to trade for furs.
The idea of unequal exchange is actually quite at odds with modern social justice theory and the idea of “other ways of knowing.” The claim that North American indigenous society was “stone age” and “primitive” is quite controversial now. Delage acknowledges that not all knowledge went one way. The Hurons had knowledge that the Europeans did not, for example the knowledge of medicinal plants in North America, or how to adapt to the environment, such as snowshoes or canoes, or even political and social forms that were much more egalitarian and democratic than their contemporary European counterparts. However, Europeans on the whole had many more things that the Hurons wanted than the reverse, and that is how the Europeans reduced them to poverty and dependency. Europeans society would not have crumbled if they had stopped receiving beaver skins. By 1660, the same thing could not be said of North Eastern North American indigenous societies need for European trade goods. European “ways of knowing”, how to make steel and lead, how to build ships, how to organize large groups of people, were far more powerful than indigenous Huron ways.
The Hurons lost their war with the Iroquois, ending in their dispersion and the transformation of their identity as an identifiable group. The first reason for this was geography. The Hurons were far from the French while the Iroquois were close to the Dutch, with the result that it was easy for the Iroquois to ambush the Hurons on their way to trade with the Dutch, while the Iroquois trade route was secure. The second was economic. The capitalist Dutch traded better products at better prices to the Iroquois than the French to the Hurons. The last two reasons were because of the mistake that the French made in allowing the Jesuits to control trade with the Hurons. Firstly, the Dutch traded guns for beavers so that the Iroquois by 1650 had 1,000 warriors armed with muskets, which they used to sweep the surrounding nations before them, not just the Hurons, but also the Eries, Petuns, and Neutrals. On the other hand, because the French were afraid that armed Hurons would turn their guns on the Jesuits in their midst in the Huron villages, only Christian Hurons were allowed to possess guns, and there just were not enough of them to defend against the Iroquois. Why would traditionalist Hurons want to kill the Jesuits in their midst? Well, along with the Jesuits and the Europeans in general came huge epidemics that swept through the indigenous villages, killing perhaps 50% of them. Traditionalist Hurons looked at the Jesuits as sorcerers who had come to kill them and their way of life, and there were great disagreements at the Huron councils about whether to kill the Jesuits. Which brings us to our final point. The Iroquois were not fighting a unified Huron confederacy, but rather a people who had been divided among themselves on the issue of adopting Christianity and submitting to the Jesuits or not. It was so bad that some Hurons voluntarily went to join their Iroquois rivals because then at least they could keep their traditional religion. The role of disease in the Huron defeat is uncertain. Certainly, their numbers had been reduced by perhaps half between 1635 and 1650, but the Iroquois had suffered as well. On the other hand, the Iroquois made up their numbers by adopting war captives into their society, while the Hurons lacked the opportunity to do so. This makes for very interesting reading.
Delage also looks at how the English, Dutch and French subordinated or removed the indigenous peoples from their areas. There was a tension between the fur trade, which meant alliance with the indigenous people, and settlement, which meant clearing land for European settlement and subsequent wars with the people occupying it. Further, French efforts to control indigenous peoples were not notably successful at this time. They tried residential schools, but the students ran away. Most indigenous peoples could not be induced to settle on reserves, but some 300 Christian Huron survivors ended up near Quebec City under the control of the Jesuits. Notions of private property replaced the idea of collective ownership. His vision of how forests were destroyed and the tree nuts and game, which had been collective property, were replaced by farms filled with crops and domestic animals, which were private property, is true, but it ignores the fact that indigenous farmers were not about to let foreigners come onto their fields and just harvest the crop for themselves either.
This book suffers from the stereotype of the ecological Indian, natural stewards of their land. Evidence for the stereotype is the great abundance of fauna and flora in North America that the Europeans found when they arrived. This abundance, however, was produced for several reasons. First, indigenous people consciously limited their numbers by, for example, women breast feeding their children for an extended period to increase the time between births. On the other hand, large areas of game-rich lands were that way because they were essentially no-man’s lands between antagonistic groups. To go there was to risk death. When indigenous population pressure existed, game was scarce. For example, deer were scarce in Huronia. Further, when indigenous people in the distant past themselves arrived in North America, they were greeted by species such as the giant ground sloth, giant bears, mammoths, camels, horses, and the sabretooth tiger. They hunted them all to extinction. For the fur trade, they exterminated the beaver as well. We know that Europeans engaged in mass, wasteful and needless slaughter of animals in North America. There are recorded instances of indigenous peoples doing the same thing.
Delage writes with great impact about the upheavals in Amerindian culture forced by the European presence, especially with the Jesuits in New France, and the reservation system. The French generally subjected them to a totalitarian regime of control on the reserves, which was similar but even worse than the systems of control that French themselves experienced under an absolute monarchy allied with the Catholic Church. This contrasts very poorly with our modern ideas of democracy, to which egalitarian indigenous societies seem much more attractive. This is all true and important. It is also true that the Europeans did not encounter static cultures but people living in fluid, living systems that were undergoing constant change because of changes in their environment and because of contradictions within their own societies. Indigenous peoples moved around, they consciously shaped their cultures, and sometimes disasters occurred because of outside forces beyond their control, all before Europeans arrived. We can’t know the details because they weren’t recorded, but some outlines are available. Graeber and Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything” contends that these egalitarian societies were actually conscious creations, being brought into being through the overthrow or fall of the more hierarchical Missippian mound building cultures, as exemplified by the great works at Cahokia or in Ontario at the Serpent Mounds in Peterborough. Also, indigenous cultures varied greatly from more matriarchal to more patriarchal, from more egalitarian to more hierarchical and from more free to coercive empires. Thus, the European subordination of indigenous cultures is a true and important fact of history; however, the issued raised are not only found between European and indigenous cultures, but also among indigenous cultures themselves. What are the sufficient and necessary conditions for human beings to start forcibly subordinating each other and how can we prevent this in the future?
Advocates of equity forget that freedom includes the freedom to not give. Indigenous societies such as the Huron have been hailed as non-coercive, egalitarian and free. They certainly were free in comparison to European societies at the time with regard to, for example, sexual freedom and religious dissent, and they had a much more inclusive political culture. Further, when we look at the methods they used to make the society more egalitarian, people with more gave to those who had less in many ways, and received status and praise for those contributions. However, a failure to give, for example, in response to a dream or to make good on reparations to another clan or tribe for a murder committed by one of ours, could bring about suspicions of witchcraft and that was punishable by death.
Overall, Delage says that the British and Dutch, but not the French, were driven to imperialism by a quest for capital, and that is what made them more successful imperialists. That is an important point. Capitalism made more powerful imperialists, but not imperialists generally. Think about Julius Caesar or any of the Chinese generals who conquered what is now Western China in the 17th and 18th Centuries. They were quite effective imperialists as well.
This book powerfully confirms a thesis put forth by McNeill in "Plagues and Peoples". McNeil says that societies destabilized by disease become far more vulnerable to ideological takeover by civilizations that are not so affected. What happened to the Hurons is one of the better examples I know of this.
Hindsight is 20/20. New France would have been much better off if imperial policy had not been subservient to the Church. They could have had better trade relations with the indigenous peoples, more settlement, and more investment. The Hurons would have been much better off if they had barred the Jesuits from ever coming to their villages and allied themselves with the Iroquois against the French. The English won the prize of the North Atlantic economy because they combined mass emigration with capitalism, while the Dutch didn’t have the numbers and the French had a disadvantageous position and an antiquated economy. However it happened in detail, colonial history in general can be “understood in the light of an economic world system,… where the ebb and flow of prices, wages, and populations affect all these parties, despite discrepancies between them.” Influences went more than one way, but one way of life was enriched and the other was completely subordinated and upended.
December 3, 2023
Denys Delage is a Canadian professor of sociology at Laval University in Quebec. Other notable works include Le Piège de la liberté (The Freedom Trap), Au croisement de nos destins: Quand Uepishtikueiau devint Québec (At the crossroads of our destinies: When Uepishtikueiau became Quebec). Delage has written other works about the Canadian history of Amerindian encounters with Europeans. As a professor of sociology I would deem him qualified to write about these issues.
In Bitter Feast, Delage takes the reader on a journey of the birth of capitalism in Europe and its destructive transatlantic spread to the New World in the 1600s. Delage details the relationships that the three dominant European powers had with the Amerindians, geography and wildlife in Northeast North America. The European powers competed with one another to exploit the Amerindians and North America for its resources in order to become the leader in the New World Market. Through the introduction of capitalism and christianity, the Amerindians will lose their traditions, culture and lives. Bitter Feast shows the lengths to which humanity will go to make a profit and the costs of such ambition.
After reading Bitter Feast, Delage’s central argument is that capitalism was the motivation behind the atrocities that occurred in the colonization of the Northeast portion of North America. This argument is evident in the relationships the French, English and Dutch had with the Amerindians. It is apparent in the efforts the European powers exhausted to dominate the World Market. It is conspicuous in the christianization of the Amerindian to tame them into becoming European like. It is obvious in the rise of the African slave trade by European corporations. It is visible in the exploitation of wildlife and land in the New World.
France moved into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in the New World, where they began profiting from the Fur trade. The fur trade eventually changed the power dynamic of the Huron and men would spend more time working, leaving the women to take care of community matters in their absence. From the first contacts, the French used Amerindian trade routes to make a profit. The French gained strength in the fur trade, seeking more trade opportunities and risking death for capital.
The Dutch and French profited from the ignorance of international trade rules of the Algonkians and Hurons and continued exchanges in an almost ritual fashion. They pitted tribes against each other by way of competition in commerce and exploiting their knowledge of reciprocity in gift giving. Disease was rampant, and the land was stripped of its resources causing the Amerindians to become dependent on European products. All of this led to irrecoverable damage to Amerindian life, culture and values.
There was competition amongst the Huron tribes to welcome Jesuit missionaries because it secured their place as middlemen in the fur trade. Further attempts by the Jesuits to convert the Huron infiltrated the developing capitalist system as the Huron weren’t allowed to trade unless they allowed missionaries into Huronia and they couldn’t own guns unless they were baptized. At first the Huron didn’t understand the pandemics but soon caught on that the Europeans were making them sick. Nonetheless, they maintained their relationship with the missionaries in order to secure exclusivity in trading.
The Christianization of the Huron saw shifts in social relationships, a halt to traditions, and the repression of their culture. Christianity completely crippled the Huron way of life and instilled a division amongst the people that led to the Iroquois emerging as dominant over the Huron and victors of the Fur Trade when they finally attacked. The Iroquois had the advantage in part because the Dutch had a much more secular approach, leaving the Iroquois culture largely intact. The French Jesuits were fed up with the Amerindians as they couldn’t tame them and make them into farmers. This led to the reservation system with the construction of the Sillery.
The Amerindians increased their warring with each other which affected the bottom line of the West India Company. Genocide, slavery and war amongst the Amerindians contributed to the gradual shift in the balance of power in favor of the Europeans. Europeans found it more difficult to make slaves of the Amerindians because they knew the land, they were necessary for the Fur Trade, they died at a higher rate than African slaves from diseases and because the institution of slavery was already a way of life for the slaves from Africa.
Delage used many primary and secondary sources. Some of the primary sources include letters, official documents and first hand accounts. There is an exhaustive list of books written by other historians as secondary sources. There were sources from several different countries including Holland, France, Canada among others. I was unable to understand a lot of them as many were written in French.
Bitter Feast is written in a way that the general public can understand it. It will be an easy read for anyone that is interested in the topic. Delage never spends too much time discussing the boring details but tells the story in a captivating way. Personally, this is my favorite book that we’ve read for French Empire class so far. There were many sections that evoked strong emotional responses, especially those dealing with the christianization of the Huron. I recommend this book for all because it is a wealth of information but reads more like a story rather than history.
In Bitter Feast, Delage takes the reader on a journey of the birth of capitalism in Europe and its destructive transatlantic spread to the New World in the 1600s. Delage details the relationships that the three dominant European powers had with the Amerindians, geography and wildlife in Northeast North America. The European powers competed with one another to exploit the Amerindians and North America for its resources in order to become the leader in the New World Market. Through the introduction of capitalism and christianity, the Amerindians will lose their traditions, culture and lives. Bitter Feast shows the lengths to which humanity will go to make a profit and the costs of such ambition.
After reading Bitter Feast, Delage’s central argument is that capitalism was the motivation behind the atrocities that occurred in the colonization of the Northeast portion of North America. This argument is evident in the relationships the French, English and Dutch had with the Amerindians. It is apparent in the efforts the European powers exhausted to dominate the World Market. It is conspicuous in the christianization of the Amerindian to tame them into becoming European like. It is obvious in the rise of the African slave trade by European corporations. It is visible in the exploitation of wildlife and land in the New World.
France moved into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in the New World, where they began profiting from the Fur trade. The fur trade eventually changed the power dynamic of the Huron and men would spend more time working, leaving the women to take care of community matters in their absence. From the first contacts, the French used Amerindian trade routes to make a profit. The French gained strength in the fur trade, seeking more trade opportunities and risking death for capital.
The Dutch and French profited from the ignorance of international trade rules of the Algonkians and Hurons and continued exchanges in an almost ritual fashion. They pitted tribes against each other by way of competition in commerce and exploiting their knowledge of reciprocity in gift giving. Disease was rampant, and the land was stripped of its resources causing the Amerindians to become dependent on European products. All of this led to irrecoverable damage to Amerindian life, culture and values.
There was competition amongst the Huron tribes to welcome Jesuit missionaries because it secured their place as middlemen in the fur trade. Further attempts by the Jesuits to convert the Huron infiltrated the developing capitalist system as the Huron weren’t allowed to trade unless they allowed missionaries into Huronia and they couldn’t own guns unless they were baptized. At first the Huron didn’t understand the pandemics but soon caught on that the Europeans were making them sick. Nonetheless, they maintained their relationship with the missionaries in order to secure exclusivity in trading.
The Christianization of the Huron saw shifts in social relationships, a halt to traditions, and the repression of their culture. Christianity completely crippled the Huron way of life and instilled a division amongst the people that led to the Iroquois emerging as dominant over the Huron and victors of the Fur Trade when they finally attacked. The Iroquois had the advantage in part because the Dutch had a much more secular approach, leaving the Iroquois culture largely intact. The French Jesuits were fed up with the Amerindians as they couldn’t tame them and make them into farmers. This led to the reservation system with the construction of the Sillery.
The Amerindians increased their warring with each other which affected the bottom line of the West India Company. Genocide, slavery and war amongst the Amerindians contributed to the gradual shift in the balance of power in favor of the Europeans. Europeans found it more difficult to make slaves of the Amerindians because they knew the land, they were necessary for the Fur Trade, they died at a higher rate than African slaves from diseases and because the institution of slavery was already a way of life for the slaves from Africa.
Delage used many primary and secondary sources. Some of the primary sources include letters, official documents and first hand accounts. There is an exhaustive list of books written by other historians as secondary sources. There were sources from several different countries including Holland, France, Canada among others. I was unable to understand a lot of them as many were written in French.
Bitter Feast is written in a way that the general public can understand it. It will be an easy read for anyone that is interested in the topic. Delage never spends too much time discussing the boring details but tells the story in a captivating way. Personally, this is my favorite book that we’ve read for French Empire class so far. There were many sections that evoked strong emotional responses, especially those dealing with the christianization of the Huron. I recommend this book for all because it is a wealth of information but reads more like a story rather than history.
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November 27, 2014Excellent et troublant! J'adore ce livre... J'aime particulièrement toutes ces citations d'écrits de cette époque, témoignages tant européens qu'amérindiens, humanisant les événements, les faits.
Je le lis en français.
Je le lis en français.
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