This innovative interdisciplinary study offers a comprehensive analysis of the French, Dutch and English colonization of northeastern North America during the early and middle decades of the seventeenth century. It is the first book to pay serious attention to the European economic and political factors which promoted colonization, and it argues that the prime determinant was the uneven development of agricultural systems in western Europe.

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Jane Brierley is a Montreal literary translator, writer, editor, and former president of the Literary Translators Association of Canada. Her translations of science fiction stories have appeared in a number of Tesseract's anthologies, and she has translated three of Élisabeth Vonarburg's science fiction novels: The Silent City, The Maërlande Chronicles, and Reluctant Voyagers. In 1990 she won the Governor General's Award for best English translation.

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• Winner, Prix Lionel-Groulx

Bitter Feast is a welcome and important contribution to 17th-century studies. All serious students of Canadian history should regard it as essential.

Canadian Book Review Annual

It is engrossing, enlightening and even lively reading. It is easy to see why the book was a prize winner when it first appeared in 1985. It will be a long time before a more comprehensive and readable work on the fur trade appears.

Anthropologica

Delage's arguments are diverse, elegantly constructed, and based on a wide range of respectable interpretative concepts ... The originality of his work lies in the diversity of material that he synthesizes and the structure that he gives to his subject matter.

Culture