Pays d'en Haut

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Pays d'en Haut, Bellin around 1755

The colonists of New France in the 17th and 18th centuries referred to the area around as pays d'en haut ("Oberland, land up there"; also as a plural tantum : les pays d'en haut , "countries (eien) up there") the Great Lakes , westward to the upper reaches of the Mississippi .

The pays d'en haut was not a formally defined regional authority with clearly defined boundaries, but was defined in contrast to the pays d'en bas ("lowlands"), the areas on the St. Lawrence River , where French colonization also co-existed This was accompanied by permanent settlement and the establishment of political structures, while the French presence in the pays d'en haut , which was permanently inhabited exclusively by Indians , was limited to military and trading posts as well as a few missions . If the settlements of the pays d'en bas were organized as manorial in seigneuries , this was subject to it pays d'en haut directly to the governor of New France until 1760, the end of this institution.

In addition to this structural definition, pays d'en haut also had a geographical frame of reference. The areas on the central reaches of the Mississippi (the pays d'Illinois ) , which are also claimed to be in New France and are just as sparsely populated, were no longer counted as pays d'en haut .

See also

  • Upper Canada , so named from 1791 to 1841, an administrative unit, it ended in the west with the Lac superieur , at the same time an English-language name as a declaration of war on the French "Pays d'en Haut"
  • Lower Canada , geographically similar to the pays d'en bas

literature

  • Gilles Havard: Empire et métissages: Indiens et Français dans le Pays d'en Haut, 1660–1715 . Septentrion / Presses de l'université de Paris-Sorbonne, Sillery and Paris 2003.
  • Claiborne A. Skinner: The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2008.
  • Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 . Cambridge University Press, 1991.