Trade or raid: Acadian settlers and native Americans before 1755
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Trade or raid: Acadian settlers and native Americans before 1755 Rosolino A. Candela1 · Vincent J. Geloso2 Received: 12 January 2020 / Accepted: 17 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Could North America have been settled more peacefully, with fewer property rights violations against Native Americans? To answer this question, we utilize the case of French colonists of Atlantic Canada (the Acadians) and a Native American tribe (the Mi’kmaq) between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the areas around the Bay of Fundy in the modern provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Under a relative state of anarchy, both the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq were able to minimize the relative returns to using violence by adopting rules of collective decision-making that favored consensus-building. By prioritizing consensus, distributional coalitions were faced with higher decision-making costs, making it difficult for concentrated interest groups within each society to capture the gains from fighting and spilling them over as external costs over the rest of the population. As a result, both the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq were able to reap the benefits of productive specialization and social cooperation under the division of labor. Keywords Anarchy · Collective decision making · Property rights JEL Classification D74 · N11 · P14
1 Introduction Could North America have been settled more peacefully, with fewer property rights violations against Native Americans? If so, what institutional conditions could have allowed resources to be allocated via exchange rather than theft? The general depiction of the relationship between settlers and natives is one that starts in the seventeenth century with tension and violence despite significant trade between the two groups (Bennett 1955; Demsetz 1967; Vaughan [1965] 1995; Washburn 1988; Carlos * Rosolino A. Candela [email protected] Vincent J. Geloso [email protected] 1
Mercatus Center At George Mason University, PPE 1A1, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA
2
School of Management, Economics and Mathematics, King’s University College, London, ON, Canada
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Public Choice
and Lewis 2010). In the United States, the relationship became increasingly violent with the American Revolution and reached its zenith after the Civil War (Leach 1988; Mahon 1988; Utley 1988; Hughes 1991; Roback 1992; Anderson and McChesney 1994; Anderson and Hill 2004; Gregg and Wishart 2012). In Canada, a similar pattern is observed (Wade 1988; Jacobs 1988; Surtees 1988).1 This general pattern can be described as one in which raid becomes increasingly utilized over trade (Anderson and McChesney 1994). There is, however, one striking exception to this pattern: the French settlements in the areas around the Bay of Fundy in the modern Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick until 1755 (at which point the British Army and Navy deported most of the Acadian population). Historians and anthropologists agree that the French colonists of
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