100 books like A Great and Noble Scheme

This book by Naomi Griffiths is excellent for anyone who wants to understand who the Acadians were (and still are)—and how they came to be considered a people distinct from French. The book is indispensable to grasp the basic characteristics of Acadians in the 17th and 18th centuries and the many challenges they faced. As Griffiths shows, the deportation did not destroy the Acadian community. In spite of a horrific death toll, nine years of proscription, and the forfeiture of property and political rights, the Acadians continued to be a cohesive community in Nova Scotia and other areas where they settled. Instead of destroying the Acadian community, the deportation proved to be a source of inspiration in the formation of a strong Acadian identity in the 19th century and beyond.

As the title proclaims, this is a book about one particular Acadian Deportation, that from Prince Edward Island. It occurred three years after the first wave in 1755, and it had France not the Anglo-American colonies as the destination. It was largest of all the different forcible Acadian removals, and nearly half of those sent to France perished due to shipboard illnesses and shipwrecks. Lockerby undertook meticulous research and summarizes it in this book. Before this publication came out—and there is a French-language version as well—this chapter in the saga of the Acadian people had been little and poorly understood. The headquarters for this mass deportation was the Canadian national historic site of Skmaqn—Port-la-Joye—Fort Amherst, which happens to be the focus of my next book, Ancient Land, New Land.

This book offers a personalized, non-academic look at what it means for one Acadian to be part of the collective Acadian community. The author traces his family history all the way back to the time of the Acadian Expulsion and beyond. That ancestor was Joseph LeBlanc (Tyler's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather). With descendants scattered across modern-day Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, the LeBlancs provide a window into the diverse fates that awaited the Acadians when they were expelled from their Acadian homeland. Some escaped the deportation; others were deported and later returned to the region, but not to same areas as those had been taken over by new settlers. In sum, the book is biographical approach to the history of the Expulsion.

It comes as a surprise to many, but no Acadians were deported to Louisiana. It was a French colony in 1755, and those making the decisions about where the deportees were to go did not want to strengthen any French colony. They chose the Anglo-American colonies so there could be assimilation. The reason so many Acadians—renamed Cajuns—ended up in Louisiana was because of later migrations; voluntary migrations, not forced deportations. This book examines the growth, evolution, and political involvement of Louisiana's large Acadian community between the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and 1877, the end of Reconstruction in Louisiana. It’s a study that offers a good introduction to the Acadians (Cajuns) of that state.

Boucher’s book was one of the first to look beyond initial Indigenous-European contact in the Greater Antilles to focus on interactions between colonizers and the people they called “Caribs”: the mobile, multiethnic inhabitants of the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles.

Boucher convincingly shows that far from being reduced to slavery or extinction, the Lesser Antilles’ Indigenous inhabitants remained important military and political players, particularly during the seventeenth century, on which much of the book focuses.

He further explores how Indigenous actions influenced European stereotypes of the region’s inhabitants, giving rise to exaggerated depictions of fierce cannibals.  

Chasing Empire Across the Sea is a multi-sited study of French colonial empire-building in the Atlantic World. Focusing on the colonial administrations in Quebec, New Orleans, and Martinique, the book’s emphasis on the fragility of colonial-metropolitan communication and the challenges this posed to French imperial sovereignty reminds readers of the vulnerability of early modern European empires. It also allows for a better understanding of the political structures and geographies that conditioned the French colonial enterprise.

Owen White’s excellent book has given Algerian wine the place it deserves in the wine history of both Algeria and France. Wine production, introduced to Algeria by French settlers in the late 1800s, was an anomaly because the majority Muslim population of the colony did not drink. But it became essential to the French wine industry because it was commonly blended with the then-anemic wines of southern France to make wines with colour and strength. Even so, many French wine producers regarded Algeria as a rival and there was a constant tension between producers who needed Algerian wine and those who resented it. It was resolved when Algeria won independence from France and the wine industry there went into steep decline. 

How better to understand the motivations of decolonizing peoples than to go to one of the most influential sources of anticolonial philosophy?

Frantz Fanon’s Marxist critiques of nationalism and imperialism, his psychoanalytic discussion of the dehumanizing effects of colonization on individuals and societies, and his framing of decolonization as an inherently violent process all pull the reader into the perspective of a liberation seeker, forcing them to question narratives of anticolonial violence that have emerged from Western archives.

Fanon’s writing is essential reading for today’s students of decolonization.

Countless books have been written about America’s war in Vietnam, but I suggest you start with Fredrik Logevall’s Embers of War.

This Pulitzer Prize winner reads like an epic novel, winding the reader through the years leading up to Washington’s fateful military commitment to Vietnam with remarkable empathy for all involved. Logevall is a talented historian, whose mastery of the field and extensive use of untapped sources keeps pace with his beautiful writing style. You won’t want to put this one down.

Archipelago of Justice is a compelling study of the role of law in building a legal infrastructure for the early modern French colonial empire. Paying attention to the colonial councils in the Atlantic colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe and the colonies of Île de France (today Mauritius) and Île Bourbon (today Réunion) in the Indian Ocean, Wood posits the centrality of French law in connecting scattered French colonial possessions into a unified imperial whole. Global in focus, it is one of the few books that have decidedly surpassed the tendency to write French colonial histories within a single oceanic framework.