French approach to mixed marriages in 1600s Americas

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This quote from The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire by Francis Jennings, 1984 provides wonderful insight on how the French could pull tremendous resources from North America with a small population of French. The secret is dropping racist thinking.

With a very small resource of ethnically French population, the French colonies amplified their manpower by tolerating and assimilating the children of intersocial liaisons. These offspring of mixed unions became especially valuable in the basic French strategy of controlling large native populations by planting a network of forts and trading posts among them. By the end of the seventeenth century the French had created and mastered a politico-economic empire extending over the vast regions of the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes environs, precisely the territories where the bulk of commercial peltry originated. (79)

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