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About Helen Dewar
Helen Dewar is an historian of the Atlantic World and French colonization in North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. She is a professor of history at the Université de Montréal (Québec, Canada). Her research interests focus on the links between state formation and empire building; the legal history of empire; the development of chartered companies; and questions of maritime jurisdiction. She also has a long-standing interest in material culture and heritage preservation and has worked with local museums in Nova Scotia. Her first book, Disputing New France: Companies, Sovereignty and Law in the French Atlantic, 1598-1663 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), demonstrates that empire formation in New France and state formation in France were mutually constitutive. Through its exploration of heretofore-neglected legal suits among privileged trading companies, independent traders, viceroys, and missionaries, this book foregrounds the integral role of French courts in the historical construction of authority in New France and the fluid nature of legal, political, and commercial authority in France itself. More recently, she has been examining the regulation of mobility and access to resources in different aqueous spaces (ocean, estuary, river, interior tributaries) by both French and Indigenous actors, notably in "Corridors of jurisdiction: The Role of Aquatic Spaces in Sovereign Claims-Making in New
France (1600s-1620s)," in Before Canada: Northern North America in a Connected World (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023), 221-246.
Helen Dewar is an historian of the Atlantic World and French colonization in North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. She is a professor of history at the Université de Montréal (Québec, Canada) and the author of Disputing New France: Companies, Sovereignty and Law in the French Atlantic, 1598-1663 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).
For more information on the book, click here
NBN Episodes hosted by Helen:
August 30, 2025
The Poseidon Project
Welcome to "Oceanic Studies." An interdisciplinary podcast that examines the past, present, and future of ocean governance In 1609, the Dutch lawyer…