History
The original inhabitants of the Maritime Provinces were the Micmacs and Malecites , Algonquian-speaking peoples who lived a semi-nomadic life based on crop cultivation, fishing and hunting. Never numerous, both groups were ravaged by the diseases they contracted from their initial contacts with Basque and Breton fishermen in the late sixteenth century. Consequently, they were too weak to contest European colonization, although the Micmacs were later employed by the French to put the frighteners on the colonists of northern Maine. Founded by the French in 1605, Port Royal , on the south shore of the Bay of Fundy, was Nova Scotia's first European settlement, but it was razed by Virginian raiders in 1613 and abandoned the following year. In 1621, James I, King of England and Scotland, granted " Nova Scotia " - as New Scotland was termed in the inaugural charter - to William Alexander, whose colony near Port Royal lasted just three years. The French returned in the mid-1630s, establishing themselves on the site of today's Annapolis Royal and this time designating the region as the French colony of Acadie . These competing claims were partly resolved by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 - when Britain took control of all the Maritimes except Cape Breton Island and today's PEI - and finally determined after the fall of New France in 1759, a British victory tarnished by the cruel expulsion of the Acadians from their farms along the Bay of Fundy. With France defeated and the British keen to encourage immigration, there was a rapid influx of settlers from Ireland, England and Scotland as well as United Empire Loyalists escaping New England during and after the American War of Independence. This increase in the population precipitated an administrative reorganization, with the creation of Prince Edward Island in 1769 and New Brunswick in 1784. The new, streamlined Nova Scotia prospered from the development of its agriculture and the expansion of its fishing fleet. Further profits were reaped from shipbuilding, British-sanctioned privateering and the growth of Halifax as the Royal Navy's principal North Atlantic base. In 1867 Nova Scotia became part of the Dominion of Canada confident of its economic future. However, the province was too reliant on shipbuilding and, when this industry collapsed, Nova Scotia experienced a dreadful recession, whose effects were only partly mitigated by the mining of the province's coalfields and the industrialization of Cape Breton's Sydney , which became a major steel producer. Most of the pits and steel mills were closed in the 1950s, and the province is now largely dependent on farming, logging, fishing and tourism.
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