Alexandra L. Montgomery
I study eighteenth-century colonization schemes in the far northeastern coast of North America, a region which is today Maine and the Canadian maritime provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and PEI and was known in various indigenous languages as the Dawnland. Despite the region's coastal location, deep into the eighteenth and even nineteenth century the area had more in common with the trans-Appalachian west than the white settler colonial east: power remained by and large in Native hands, and Europeans were few, far between, and politically unable to assert the kind of sovereignty which they claimed on maps other imperial documents.
It was not, however, from lack of trying on the part of European empires. My project examines efforts—largely British, but some French—to import large numbers of white settlers in an attempt to change the demographic and political realities of the Dawnland. Despite a historiographical narrative that sees settlement—particularly British settlement—as haphazard and with little official support, the projects in the Dawnland were state-sponsored to varying degrees; some were even funded directly by the British Parliament, and reveal a very different way of thinking about the role of settlement in eighteenth-century North American empires.
In the face of Native power and inter- and intra-imperial competition, however, these schemes gained little traction until after the American Revolution. Indeed, tensions between imperial and colonial plans for the region fed into the conflict and helped shape the meaning and location of the modern US-Canada border, while the Loyalists displaced by the war proved to be the key to finally transforming the Dawnland into a bastion of the British Empire.
My Master's thesis (Dalhousie University 2012) explored New England family migration to Nova Scotia and attempts to transform the colony into a loyal Protestant bulwark in the years before the American Revolution.
I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with my PhD in 2020. Currently, I am the manager of the Center for Digital History at George Washington's Mount Vernon.
Supervisors: Daniel K. Richter
Address: University of Pennsylvania
Department of History
College Hall 208
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6379
It was not, however, from lack of trying on the part of European empires. My project examines efforts—largely British, but some French—to import large numbers of white settlers in an attempt to change the demographic and political realities of the Dawnland. Despite a historiographical narrative that sees settlement—particularly British settlement—as haphazard and with little official support, the projects in the Dawnland were state-sponsored to varying degrees; some were even funded directly by the British Parliament, and reveal a very different way of thinking about the role of settlement in eighteenth-century North American empires.
In the face of Native power and inter- and intra-imperial competition, however, these schemes gained little traction until after the American Revolution. Indeed, tensions between imperial and colonial plans for the region fed into the conflict and helped shape the meaning and location of the modern US-Canada border, while the Loyalists displaced by the war proved to be the key to finally transforming the Dawnland into a bastion of the British Empire.
My Master's thesis (Dalhousie University 2012) explored New England family migration to Nova Scotia and attempts to transform the colony into a loyal Protestant bulwark in the years before the American Revolution.
I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with my PhD in 2020. Currently, I am the manager of the Center for Digital History at George Washington's Mount Vernon.
Supervisors: Daniel K. Richter
Address: University of Pennsylvania
Department of History
College Hall 208
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6379
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While little ultimately came from the land boom—most grants were escheated to make way for incoming Loyalists in the 1780s—I use the interest from Philadelphians as a lens to re-examine colonial understandings of empire, space, and power in the years immediately before the American Revolution. I argue that while western lands were very important, west was not the only direction of expansion on the minds of elite colonial speculators.
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While little ultimately came from the land boom—most grants were escheated to make way for incoming Loyalists in the 1780s—I use the interest from Philadelphians as a lens to re-examine colonial understandings of empire, space, and power in the years immediately before the American Revolution. I argue that while western lands were very important, west was not the only direction of expansion on the minds of elite colonial speculators.