Politics & Power Quote by Harry Johnston

Nova Scotia doesn’t “come into being” so much as get narrated into legitimacy. Harry Johnston’s phrasing turns colonial conquest into a tidy administrative side effect: “another result” of “adventurous” expeditions, as if empire were a natural byproduct of curiosity and rough weather rather than a deliberate project with winners, losers, and bodies. The sentence is a masterclass in how imperial prose launders violence through bland causality.

Johnston, an explorer and imperial administrator by disposition, writes from the late-Victorian/Edwardian habit of treating the map as a record of European initiative. His intent is less to argue than to normalize: in the reign of James I, British ventures happen; colonies follow. That royal timestamp matters. It places Nova Scotia inside a story of dynastic ambition and early modern competition (Spain, France, England) where overseas territory becomes proof of national vigor. “Adventurous” does double work: it flatters the expeditions as brave and open-ended, and it quietly erases the institutional machinery behind them - financiers, charters, militarized settlement, and legal fictions that reframe inhabited land as available.

The subtext is possession without confrontation. Indigenous peoples don’t appear; French claims and Acadian histories vanish; “British colony” arrives as the default endpoint of exploration. That’s the cultural trick: the sentence offers a clean origin story that makes empire feel like history’s proper order. Read now, it’s a reminder that colonialism often advanced not only by ships and guns, but by sentences engineered to sound inevitable.