Antiracist History & Theory

Possession and Dispossession in Corporate New France 1600-1663: Debunking a 'Juridical History' and Revisiting Terra Nullius

Anonymous

Factsheet

Description

This factsheet unpacks how the French Crown outsourced the expensive and financially risky colonial project to companies like la Companie de la Nouvelle-France. The fact sheet also looks at the role of historians in legitimizing the actions of colonizers through reliance on colonial sources.

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References

  • Cavanagh, Edward. “Possession and Dispossession in Corporate New France, 1600- 1663: Debunking a ‘Juridical History’ and Revisiting Terra Nullius.” Law and History Review 32.1 (February 2014): 97-125

Source Authors

Edward Cavanagh

Events

Keywords

'actual possession', 'in the name of the king', 'intertribal' hostility, 'pact of friendship', 'settler rights to land', 'territorial occupancy', charters, colonial perceptions, colonial powers, commissions, Compagnie de Caën, Compagnie de Nouvelle-France, company-loyal merchants, corporate entities, corporate title, corporations, demographic fluctuations, Doctrine of Discovery, double standards, European conflicts, European perceptions, financial, gaslighting, historians: retroactive real-estate agents, inaccurate claims, indigenous clients, indigenous communities, indigenous land ownership, Indigenous peoples, Indigenous rights to land, indigenous stewards, Juridical History, la Compagnie, Land Dispossession, land ownership, legal canon, legal fiction, legal historian, merchants, Missionaries, property, property rights, royal commissions, Royal Proclamation, Seigneuries, settler histories, settler survival rates, stock farming, Tabula rasa, Terra Nullius, territorial rights, The British Crown, the crown, the French Crown, Usufruct, usufructuary rights