Conference: “Spaces of Power and Contestation in Early America, 1607-1865”
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1The first biannual conference of the European Network for the Study of Early America (RéDEHJA) was held on June 18-20, 2025 in Nantes. Centered around the theme “Spaces of Power and Contestation in Early America, 1607-1865," it was co-organized by Virginie Adane (Nantes Université), Claire Bouhris-Mariotti (Université Paris 8), Agnès Delahaye (Université Lumière Lyon 2), Augustin Habran (Université d’Orléans) and Carine Lounissi (Université de Rouen-Normandie). The panelists explored the ways in which power was and still is embodied and exerted in various spaces of North America by giving a voice to the people who inhabited these areas. Their presentations provided historical insight into Indigenous, African, African-American, British, Creole, French and Acadian perspectives by mobilizing archives from the diplomatic, missionary, penal, military and intellectual fields.
2A roundtable discussion was organized to honor the memory of historian Trevor Burnard, a close friend of RéDHEJA founders and French early americanists in general, who passed last year. Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol and Eric Schnackenbourg praised the academic excellence and generosity of this impactful researcher who made central contributions to the history of the Atlantic slave trade and of the British Empire in the Americas.
3The following summary offers a panorama of the presentations, grouping them according to three leading perspectives. A first group put forward the negotiation of sovereignty in various spaces; another raised the question of daily practices and resistance to power; and a third elaborated on the geographic boundaries of the spaces at issue.
Space-based negotiation of sovereignty
Asserting and recognizing sovereignty
4Kristofer Ray (College of the Holy Cross) debunked the myth of the American Revolution as an unstoppable empire of liberty with uncontested sovereignty over its territory as described by Frederick Jackson Turner. He stressed the apparent fragility of the newly-founded republic, especially in the face of threatening alliances between Indigenous tribes or between them and the British. It thus seemed impossible for the new nation to bend all the people it claimed to govern to its rule, especially in Trans-Appalachia. Landownership was intricately associated to federal power, as shown by Manon Boullen (Université Paris Cité) and her study of the 1820 Land Act. Poorer settlers could then buy land grants from the federal government through cash transactions just as it was extinguishing more and more Indian titles in the West. This act thereby used land as a tool for social engineering. The federal government thus sold land in order to produce its own sovereignty. Commenting on the texts and correspondence produced by Tocqueville and Beaumont after their trip in 1831-32, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (Université Paris Cité) pointed their paradoxical understanding of the strength of the federal government. Caught in their enthusiastic survey of the progress of “civilization,” the two men commented on the effects of land rationalization and Native American deportation while failing to identify and recognize the power of the federal government. Conflicting sovereignty was further discussed as Patrice Dallaire (Universités Laval et Paris Cité) delved into the diplomatic knot of Mexican President Santa Anna’s trip to Washington DC (1836-37) in the hands of Texan rebels. By going through the lacunary documentation of the events, the talk focused on questioning Santa Anna’s status as a prisoner, an envoy or a guest, and accounted for his seemingly unsuccessful meeting with the US government.
Navigating autonomy and allegiance
5Individuals and communities were able to retain and even increase their autonomy after switching from one sovereign to another, as Andrew Wegmann (Texas Tech University) showed for Creoles in New Orleans. Following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the existence of a large mixed-raced group who had fought alongside American revolutionaries in the first of the Republic’s territorial conquests forced a compromise on the legal status of a community of free people of color who had never known slavery, ultimately giving way to full citizenship. Also dealing with changing sovereignty over a group of people, Robert Englebert (University of Saskatchewan) explored the issue of securing the loyalty of the French population of Illinois Country to the British who were attempting to make the land into a truly British colony in the 1760s and 1770s. French settlers resisted integration into British territory up until and even after it officially passed into British hands. The context of the war of 1812, William Kelly (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) argued, offered freedom-seekers the power to renegotiate their loyalty. The British offered them a way to escape slavery in high numbers by joining their side in the war. The skills and knowledge they brought to the British had direct consequences on the end of the war. For plantation owners, however, these escapes justified legal and diplomatic battles for indemnity claims after the war as recognition of their failed sovereignty. Sovereignty could also be claimed and reclaimed through skin, which Craig Koslofsky (University of Illinois/ IEA de Nantes) presented as a space of contested sovereignty in 18th-century British America. While white enslavers branded the people they kept as slaves as a sign of property, poorer whites also marked their own skins to symbolize self-ownership. By contrast between the ink and the skin, initials and doodles also served the purpose of underlining one’s whiteness in a racialized society.
Daily practices and resistance
Subsistance and resistance
6Augustin Habran (Université d’Orléans) put forward the ambiguous role which the Indigenous nations that had been removed to Indian Territory had played in the process of Westward expansion. Faced with the violent resistance of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains, they turned to raising cattle as a means to physically appropriate the land recently attributed to them by the US government, thus creating a vertical frontier economy with nearby Texas along the Shawnee trail (1840s). Foodways were also at the heart of Nicholas Crawford’s talk (Sam Houston University) on the strategies developed by maroon populations in Dominica (c. 1764-1786). Relying complementarily on cultivating crops, raiding nearby plantations and trading both with French settlers and enslaved people, these societies developed a relational economy of subsistence.
Domestic lives and resistance
7Caylin Carbonell (Bowdoin College) showed that households were spaces of resistance in the everyday lives of servants. Barns were ideal places for illegal activities such as storing stolen goods or sheltering runaways. The very inside of a colonial home was vulnerable to intrusions from outside servants as soon as the masters left, which made it easy to start fires from less supervised rooms such as cellars. Michaela Kleber (Northwestern University/EHESS) stressed the varying power relationships in households where Native women married white men in French Colonial Illinois. These women brought their own Indigenous understanding of slavery, according to which slaves were part of a kinship network and were eventually freed. However, by the early 18th century, such slaves could no longer be integrated into society. Benjamin Balloy (CNRS) demonstrated that Native American household practices could have large-scale political implications by exploring the Mourning Wars in the Mississippi Valley in the 1750s. He explained that among the Illinois, a funerary ritual required the mourners to offer scalps and captives to the deceased. This funerary practice meant that the people of the Mississippi valley were frequently at war together, which undermined French strategies for alliances in the area. Focusing on everyday spoken language, Tiéphaine Thomason (University of Cambridge) painted an urban “speechscape” (Galagher) through archival work and recovered the orality of punishment in Martinique (c. 1709-1767). While standard French is omnipresent in written sources, it was spoken through many voices and bodies in a multilingual society. Where voices appeared, in what language, and around whom thus complements written records that speech fundamentally escapes.
Embodying resistance
8Ronald Angelo Johnson’s (Baylor University) keynote speech was a call to explore the lives of black and Indigenous people. He insisted that the lives of figures like Phillis Wheatley, who he says should be called an American revolutionary writer, or Crispus Attucks, who died during the Boston Massacre, but also those of the chasseurs volontaires from Haiti, who fought and died for the independence of the United States, need to be known and taught in classrooms to show their contribution to the revolution and to history in general. Also focusing on the life of a black man, Mairin Odle (University of Alabama) offered insight into the slave narrative of Benjamin Benson, who underwent several cycles of enslavement and liberation as he traveled the Atlantic space. His trajectory outlines the porosity of international boundaries, the instability of a free black man’s status that remained contingent with the possibility of being taken back into slavery, and the extended network of kinship that developed in the Caribbean and the Southern United States.
Demarcating and controlling space
Controlling land and water in the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence
9Four presentations focused on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and its valley. Drawing from cases where soldiers committed desertion or counterfeiting, Donia Menghini (Université Paris 8) suggested that there were spatial limits to colonial authority in New France. Depending on their ability to connect with a wider local network of Indigenous intermediaries, the soldiers’ escape attempts could be successful, thus highlighting the discrepancy between colonial claims and practical control of the land. This presentation echoed Thomas Peace’s (Huron University College), which discussed the interconnected experiences of Acadians, Mi’kmaqs and British settlers in the Maritime Peninsula. He explored the process through which imperial rule in the area went from being expressed locally to becoming an abstract diplomatic idea, culminating in the superimposition of a unified vision over the variety of experiences of the region. While land was at the center of previous presentations, Thomas Blake Earle (Texas A&M University) foregrounded the aquatic space itself and the contested application of international treaties. Fisheries in the area relied on access to moving halieutic resources. The fluid nature of the maritime environment thus made these treaties unstable, especially after 1818 and the implementation of the 3-mile line along the shore. Zachary Tingley (University of New Brunswick) also focused on water and its expediency in linking together the Indigenous, settler, non-human and international experiences of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. These presentations centered around the concept of “spaces of power” (Mancke, 2005), proposing the exploration of the shared history of the region conjoined with that of settler-Indigenous relationships.
Recovering Indigenous land and religious sovereignty
10Agnès Trouillet (Université Paris Nanterre) highlighted how 17th-century Dutch maps largely erased the presence of the Lenape tribe in present-day Delaware. A close analysis of these maps, however, sheds light on the spaces where the Lenape resisted invasion and even waged war against the Dutch, namely with the Lenape occupation of Dutch buildings such as Nassau Fort. The Lenape thus successfuly protected their land rights well into the 18th century. Gilles Havard (CNRS) was interested in one particular Indigenous figure of resistance to land encroachment, the Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe, who opposed the Transylvania purchase ceding a vast tract of Cherokee land to North Carolina land speculator Richard Henderson in 1775. Two Cherokee factions were thus opposed, one that signed the treaty and another which waged war alongside Dragging Canoe to secure the land. Molly, a Cherokee woman whose struggle was described by Casey Price (University of Tennessee), fought a similar fight on a smaller scale. Maps show that she managed to retain her land despite the appropriation of land plots all around her property by white settlers and the destruction of Cherokee land by the agricultural practices of European settlers. Relying on the matrileneal tradition of her tribe, she managed to prevent her son from seizing her property. Thomas Croisez (European University Institute) described resistance to missions, one of the tools used to secure the compliance of Indigenous people when it came to trade or land settlements. Colonial Louisiana was a space where diverse approaches to missions, whether Spanish or French, were implemented without great success, as Native Americans attacked French missionaries and Christianity gave way to factions among the Indigenous. Emmanuelle Perez-Tisserant (Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès/ IUF) showed that, although missions found more adherents in California’s central valley in the 1830s and 1840s, California and missions themselves remained Indigenous spaces. Indeed, added to the military dissuasion carried out by Native American individuals was the fact that most of the land was allocated to those Indigenous people living in mission towns.
11To conclude, this conference shed light on aspects of early American history which are seldom discussed in the academic field by foregrounding the power dynamics at play in a colonized and colonial America. It opened the way for more discussions on the various scales at which power is negotiated and resisted by featuring discussions on power at government and regional levels but also in communities, domestic spaces as well as in individual lives.
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Maïann Stachnik et Marie Rabecq, « Conference: “Spaces of Power and Contestation in Early America, 1607-1865” », Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/26533 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15i24
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