The Slow Rush of ColonizationIn 1760, after Montcalms defeat at the Plains of Abraham, the French Empire was definitively expelled from the Saint Lawrence Valley. This history is well known. Less well known is that this decisive victory had its roots almost a hundred years earlier, when settler colonial systems of power first took root on the peripheries of the Maritime Peninsula (the places known today as Quebec, Maritime Canada, and New England). Drawing on the concept of