Maritimes

The Atlantic provinces, which were the centre of British North America before Confederation and have been its periphery since. This was Mi'kmaq and Wolastoqiyik territory, and then Acadia, a French farming society established from 1604 that built dyked marshland farms and stayed deliberately neutral in the Anglo-French wars. Neutrality did not save it: Britain deported the Acadians between 1755 and 1764, scattering some eleven thousand people to the American colonies, England and eventually Louisiana, where their name became Cajun. Their farms were given to New England settlers. The region filled again after 1783 with around thirty thousand Loyalists from the revolting colonies, including some three thousand Black Loyalists whose promised land was poor or never granted, and over a thousand of whom left for Sierra Leone in 1792. Halifax's harbour made it an imperial naval station, and by the mid-nineteenth century Nova Scotia and New Brunswick had one of the largest merchant fleets in the world, built of local timber in local yards. Wooden shipbuilding collapsed with the move to steel and steam, and Confederation in 1867 redirected trade from the sea to the interior. Nova Scotia elected an anti-Confederation majority the following year and was refused release. The Halifax explosion of 1917, when a munitions ship detonated in the harbour, was the largest man-made blast before nuclear weapons. Out-migration has shaped the region for a century. Newfoundland stayed out of Canada until 1949. The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world. Prince Edward Island hosted the 1864 conference that began Confederation and then declined to join until 1873. Halifax remains the region's largest city.

• Existed: 1605 CE – present
• Type: Entity