Habitants And Merchants In Seventeenth Century Montreal

Dechêne's work, when first published, constituted a major milestone in the development of methodology and use of sources. Her systematic examination of difficult and massive documentary collections blazed a number of new trails for other researchers. Her judicious blending of numerical data and "qualitative" findings makes this book one of the rare examples of "new history" that avoids the extremes of statistical abstraction and anecdotal antiquarianism. Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal won the Governor-General's Award and the Garneau Medal from the Canadian Historical Association when it first appeared in French.

Habitants et marchands, Twenty Years Later includes eleven essays, seven of which are in French, that highlight current research in Quebec studies. Danielle Gauvreau, Dale Miquelon, and Louis Michel survey recent developments on population, merchants, and rural society respectively. Allan Greer studies Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Amerindian to be beatified. William Wicken analyses relations between Mi'kmaq and Acadians. Bruce White and Thomas Wien examine the fur trade, with White focusing on the Lake Superior region and Wien on the St Lawrence Valley. Catherine Desbarats looks at the role of the state as a buyer of goods and services in Canada. Mario Lalancette and Alan M. Stewart study the evolution of Montreal's urban geography in the seventeenth century. Geneviève Postolec analyses matrimonial practices at Neuville, and Sylvie Dépatie examines the urban and peri-urban countryside in Montreal's gardens and orchards. The collection offers valuable perspectives on both the history of New France and the socio-economic history of colonial societies.

A study of the black experience in Montreal.

Covering a period that runs from the founding of the colony in the early seventeenth century to the conquest of 1760, People, State, and War under the French Regime in Canada is a study of colonial warriors and warfare that examines the exercise of state military power and its effects on ordinary people. Overturning the tendency to glorify the military feats of New France and exploding the rosy myth of a tax-free colonial population, Louise Dechêne challenges the stereotype of the fighting prowess and military enthusiasm of the colony’s inhabitants. She reveals the profound incidence of social divides, the hardship war created for those expected to serve, and the state’s demands on the civilian population in the form of forced labour, requisitions, and billeting of soldiers. Originally published posthumously in French, People, State, and War under the French Regime in Canada is the culmination of a lifetime of research and unparalleled knowledge of the archival record, including official correspondence, memoirs, military campaign journals, taxation records, and local parish records. Dechêne reconstructs the variegated composition and conditions of military forces in New France, which included militia, colonial volunteers, and regular troops, as well as Indigenous allies. The study offers an informed and ambitious comparison between France and other French colonies and shows that the mobilization of an unpaid, compulsory militia in New France greatly exceeded requirements in other parts of the French domain. With empathy, sensitivity to the social dimensions of life, and a piercing insight into the operations of power, Dechêne portrays the colonial condition with its rightful dose of danger and ambiguity. Her work underlines the severe toll that warfare takes on the individual and on society and the persistent deprivation, disorder, fear, and death that come with conflict.

French settlers distanced the indigenous people and flora and fauna to create a landscape that by the mid-eighteenth century had become recognizably European. British industrialists and landowners attempted similar appropriations with far less durable results and the area remained a heartland of French-Canadian life, with a sense of cohesive community. This community spirit, rooted in agrarian landscape, was channelled into the developing sense of colonial nationalism of the 1820s and 1830s. Drawing on maps by explorers and surveyors, correspondence documenting the conflict between a backwoods priest and his parishioners, a gentlewoman's sketchbook, and the documents of a bitter court case between a seigneur's wife and a local priest, Coates illuminates the development of the region and the social, cultural, and economic ties and tensions within it, providing insights into the often hidden values of a rural community.

A study of the local school board as a key political and social institution in Protestant communities in Quebec.

In The Christie Seigneuries, Françoise Noël provides a detailed case study of the Christie Seigneuries in the Upper Richelieu Valley (in what is now Quebec) during the period from the French surrender to the British in 1760 to the commutation act of 1854 ending seigneurial tenure. While most seigneurial studies have focused on the censitaires, Noël examines the administrative practices of the seigneurs themselves. She reveals that management practices of seigneuries were influenced more by the personality of the seigneur and his family circumstances, as well as changing economic conditions, than by the judicial rights of the seigneur.