POLITICALLY, BRITISH COLONIALISM IN CANADA began with the acquisition of Quebec (Treaty of Paris, 1763), yet the colonial coordinates had been set long before, in the Northwestern and Western territories as well as on the Atlantic coast. From the late eighteenth century onwards, the Hudson's Bay Company (founded in 1670) had developed a powerful influence in Canada's West. It had won a partially bloody and competitive battle with the North West Company in Montreal by the year 1821, when the latter was forced to merge with the Hudson's Bay Company. The Hudson's Bay Company exerted its near-monopoly over an area that extended from Hudson Bay to the Pacific coast until the company sold its territory in 1870 to the Dominion of Canada, which had been dismissed from its colonial status three years prior. As the fur trade had prevented the establishment of major agricultural settlements in the West, the Atlantic coast had become the first place for settlements. With the Peace of Utrecht (1713) the colony of Acadia, which had been predominantly inhabited by French settlers, was placed under British rule. In 1749, mainly for strategic reasons, the military Fort Halifax was founded in Nova Scotia (New Scotland), the English name for Acadia. The subsequent deportation of 7,000 Acadians in 1755 was an “ethnic cleansing” that later inspired authors including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882; Evangeline, 1847) and Antonine Maillet (1929–; Pélagie-la-Charrette, 1979).