The Agricultural Trap Thesis of economic development in Quebec is comparable to the Staple Trap Thesis of economic development in Newfoundland. The latter is the proposition that Newfoundland's relative poverty and its persistent external dependence is a consequence of the absence of significant agriculture in its economy. It has had no agricultural stage, and, perhaps, no stages at all in its development. The Agricultural Trap Thesis is the proposition that Quebec's economic experience is a consequence of its having an agricultural stage from which it emerged only with difficulty because of the feudal nature of its land alienation and tenure institutions. New France, a fragment of the mother country, became fixed in feudalism, identifying it with things French to be protected from the capitalistic predilections of British conquerors, long after the system had been abolished in France itself. The influence of the fur trade notwithstanding, francophone Canada did not experience the passage from agriculture to commerce depicted in Adam Smith's stages of economic development.
Feudal agriculture, not commerce in furs, was the substance of la survivance of francophone Canada. The fur trade was part of the frontier character of North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When the frontier moved to the interior, after 1763, and the fur trade passed (was taken ?) from francophone Canada, the residual was an established agricultural economy. It was Europe, specifically, the feudal agriculture of seventeenth century France, that shaped the economic substance of francophone Canada, not the exigencies of a mercantilist fur trade on the American frontier.
Frontier conditions in New France, if anything, deepened the French and feudal character of its agriculture.
In northwest France the soil was deep and wet. It required a heavy, wheeled plough that could ridge fields for drainage, and expose the soil for drying. The implement made to meet these conditions, la charrue, was difficult to turn and required a wide headland. For this reason holdings were formed into long, thin fields to reduce the space given to headlands and to reduce the number of turns. Usually, where there were streams or rivers, fields were oriented to place their short side against the water. Whether habit or the presence of deep, wet soil was the cause, the habitants of New France adopted la charrue, and divided their holdings into long narrow fields stretching back from the St. Lawrence River. What had been done in France was done in New France.
French settlers learned from the native North Americans, how to build canoes and how to cope with scurvy; but they did not grow native crops, corn and tobacco, as the English did; nor did they adopt, to the same extent, the land intensive practices that the English learned from the natives. Agriculture in New France was the agriculture of old France.
The presence of an open frontier did not challenge the feudal character of agriculture in French America. Feudalism developed in Europe in a period in which `waste' lands were abundant. It was organized to continually absorb available empty land. In Russia, feudalism deepened as new lands became available. Indeed, it has been argued that feudalism flourishes whenever labour, rather than land, is the scarce factor (See Chapter 3.). In this view, capitalism emerged in Europe as a consequence of an increasing scarcity of land. It is not surprising, then, that French feudalism survived in America. The surprising thing is the emergence of full-blown capitalism in British North American colonies, which also had an open frontier. The presence of an open frontier, by itself, does not account for the emergence of capitalistic land alienation and tenure institutions in America. It presented no challenge to feudal agricultural institutions in New France.
The Agricultural Trap Thesis of economic development in Quebec is not an explanation of what happened there, even in economic matters. It is a description, a simple reconstruction, of the economic aspect of what happened. It characterizes the Quebec economy in a way that exposes its distinctiveness. The fur trade was transcontinental, and was not peculiar to the economy of New France. Both the United States and, especially, Russia had important transcontinental fur trades. As in the other two cases, in New France the fur trade was important to the economy, but was not its substance. The economic substance of New France was agriculture, feudal agriculture, with a very thin binding of its own, directly related commerce. Commercial activities associated with the fur trade supported the development of agriculture in its earliest period, but they were not permanently integrated into it. When the fur trade passed to the British, the commercial activity that remained in francophone Canada was the thin layer of commerce associated with a relatively self contained, agricultural economy. From an economic point of view, what distinguishes francophone Canada from the other regional economies of the Canadian federation is the unique growth path that it has experienced in consequence of the nature and evolution of this distinct economic structure.
By 1641, under fur trade monopolies, the population had risen to 240 souls. In 1642 the first religious settlement on Montreal Island built a mill with gun ports, allowing the building to double as a fort. In 1663, though only 10 of the 70 seigneuries that had been granted had sizeable populations, there were 3,000 souls, mostly in Church settlements clustered about Quebec, and on Montreal Island. These were the first two periods: company settlement, 1608--1641, and Church settlement, 1642--1663.
In 1663, establishment of direct control by an Intendant, an immediate representative of the King, resulted in an average annual immigration of 500 souls over the remainder of the century. Between 1663 and 1672, 1,000 unmarried women were sent out from France. When the Carignan-Salieres Regiment, was recalled to France, in 1668, some 400 soldiers and their officers remained behind.
After 1700, the colony entered a fourth period marked by war between England and France. Only 4,000 additional settlers came out. Population increase in the fourth period was largely the natural increase of the colonists. By 1720 the population was 24,500 souls; by 1760, about 70,000 souls, not counting natives.
In a century when the population of France did not grow, and that of England grew by just 25%, the much faster natural increase in New England and New France was evidence of the overall success of agricultural settlement in both colonies.
New France was much more than a line of fur trading posts. It may be that, before 1700, `New France ... [was] valued commercially solely for its fur trade.' (Easterbrook and Aitken, p.~89), but there was much more to the colony than that for which it was commercially valued by France. `Quebec had a seminary, a hospital, and a convent before it had a population'. Laval University was founded before Harvard, the former in 1635, the latter in 1636. In 1704, the home government thought it necessary to proscribe the making of fur hats in the colony, and, in 1736, to proscribe the manufacture of linen. In 1733, forges were set up at St. Maurice to make iron for ships' parts and for settlers' effects. Between 1730 and 1750, encouraged by the Intendant, shipbuilding and auxiliary production of such accessories as rope and tar were part of the economy of Quebec city and of other centers along the St. Lawrence.
The colony was not simple. There was friction between the fur trade monopolies and individual traders, who found their way to English buyers at Albany. There were also frictions, typical of a more complex society, between Hugenot protestants and Catholics, between Gallican and Ultra Montaine Catholics, and between `peasants and lords', that is, habitants et seigneurs.
Complex or not, New France was on the very frontier of European civilization. The winter and the aboriginals could not be dealt with without help. There were years, in the seventeenth century, when the colony had to rely on foodstuffs brought out from France. As late as 1689, a settlement at Lachine was attacked by Iroquois who left 24 settlers dead, and captured 42 others, none of whom were ever heard of again.
Pierre de Saurel was one of the first [of the Carignan- Salieres] to receive a seigneurie from the king. Though not, strictly speaking, a noble, this gentleman-warrior from Dauphine had the ambiguous official status of one `living nobly'. By acquiring a seigneurie and marrying Catherine LeGardeur, a daughter noblesse, Saurel carved out a secure niche for himself in the colonial aristocracy. In 1668, three years after his arrival at the mouth of the Richelieu, Saurel had a manor house built there. A small log structure, but it was still three or four times the size of the settlers' cabins that surrounded it. Soon stables, a stone windmill, and a chapel were added to the collection of buildings in the `fort de Saurel', while colonists laboured to clear fields outside the walls (Greer, p.~9.).
Au Fort ... de M. de Saurel ... on y trouve des boeufs, des vaches, de la volaille ... Ils ont de beaux lacs poissonneux et la chasse abonde en tout temps (Greer, p.~9.).
It was only in 1672, however, that Pierre de Saurel was actually granted the lands at the mouth of the Richelieu as a fief. By this time he had been calling himself `seigneur' and acting as such for several years. His ascendancy apparently was based largely on pre-existing (military) habits of subordination (Greer, p.~9.).
At first, seigneurial revenues were inadequate. Seigneurs, their sons, and even their daughters, might have to handle the plough and harvest grain. Being noble, however, they or their offspring were the recipients of lucrative positions in the colonial government, the military, or the fur trading monopolies. In time, seigneurial revenues were enough, and aberrations from feudal practice declined.
Since rental revenues were inadequate [in the beginning], demesne farms assumed a special importance for supplying the needs of seigneurial families. In 1681, Pierre de Sorel had 150 arpents [acres] of his own land under cultivation or in meadow. This was about twenty times the average arable of his habitant-tenants; it amounted to more than one-third of all the cleared land in the seigneurie. Besides providing grain, the demesne farm supported forty-three head of cattle, sixty-two sheep, and eighteen goats. Considerable labour was required to work on an establishment of this size and the seigneurs of seventeenth-century Canada had at their disposal hired hands -- often indentured servants -- as well as corvee labour, in some cases where they were able to impose that feudal labour service on their peasants, and occasionally, the efforts of members of the seigneurial family. Pierre de Sorel had six servants and his neighbour, St. Ours, had three, in 1681. Demesne agriculture was not a truly seigneurial enterprise, but rather a direct exploitation of private property, a supplement to deficient seigneurial revenue. As rent-paying peasants became more numerous in the eighteenth century, and as indentured labour ceased to be available, demesne farms quickly declined in importance (Greer, pp.~9-10.).
Husbandry was European and simple.
Canadian farmers ploughed their fields in the fall and the best of them again in the spring, using the costly and cumbersome wheeled plough with fixed moldboard that produced the ridged field -- a rise of one foot in a width of about nine -- providing an element of drainage. Sometime between mid-April and mid-May, seed was broadcast by hand and harrowed in. Although oxen were often, perhaps most often used for ploughing, drawing the triangular harrow was a job for horses, as their greater speed was necessary to break up the clods before they had dried and hardened. The grain was harvested sometime after the middle of August with a serrated sickle, the scythe being confined to haying as it knocked too much ripe grain from the head. When the sheaves had ripened, they were carried to the barn and stored. Grain was threshed with a flail as needed, usually beginning the following January. The gain was then winnowed in baskets made of thin wooden strips (Miquelon, p.~200.).
From the point of view of the peasants, agriculture was a success in New France. It did not supply a surplus for export in most years, but, then, it was not undertaken as a commercial venture. The habitants were better off than their counterparts in France. By the eighteenth century, they were almost universally tenants of land. New France did not have the mix of labourers, part labourers, and very small holders that characterized rural life in France. There were labourers. They were better fed, clothed and housed than in France. Their position, like that of the artisans in Quebec or Montreal, was a consequence of the relative shortage of labour in relation to land, and the desire of the French government to encourage settlement. They could move from seigneurie to seigneurie. They could specialize in clearing holdings to be sold to new settlers, or to the sons of established habitants. All, however, within feudal institutions. The labourers at the St. Maurice forces were not wage labourers as found in capitalist industry. Given the nature of French feudalism in the period, the rights of the peasants were upheld in the courts, which were dominated by the Crown rather than the seigneurs. Habitants were further protected from exploitation by special regulations intended to encourage immigration; and, like serfs the world over, they were able to protect themselves from exploitation by not producing a surplus that would be subject to greater seigneurial exactions.
There was little capitalistic exploitation, and, in consequence, there was a slower rate of economic growth, and an extensive, rather than an intensive, growth path. Seigneuries multiplied, not in competition with, and not substantially dependent upon, but largely separate from the major commercial operation of the colony, the fur trade. This is what gave Quebec its distinctive economic character. There were other factors, possibly the climate, and the relatively slow rate of growth of population in France during the period in which New France was settled. These also reduced the rate of growth in relation to the rate in New England. Primarily, however, feudalism set the distinctive character of the economic growth path of New France.
There was some commercial exploitation of the seigneuries.
The de Ramezay family, seigneurs of Sorel in the First half of the eighteenth century, particularly the widow, Charlotte de Ramezay, were among the foremost producers of wood in New France; they furnished, for example, much of the timber used in the ship yards of Quebec City. Besides Sorel, the de Ramezays owned other fiefs, some of them with no agricultural development, on the Yamaska and the upper Richelieu and they drew on the timber resources of all of them, transforming many of the logs into lumber in their Chambly sawmill (Greer, p.~92).This kind of commercial exploitation of seigneurial holdings was exceptional.
Commercial activities related to seigneurial agriculture were thin. There was capitalistic commercial exploitation of the fur trade, but that was substantially separate from seigneurial activity All commercial activity took place in Quebec, Three Rivers and Montreal, not in the country side. Profit from the fur trade accrued in France, and profit from other ventures was eaten up by inflation during the wars of the eighteenth century. These circumstances, quite apart from any `decapitation' of the colony following the Conquest, explain the undisputed assertion that there were few francophones, and very little francophone capital in the colony's commerce after 1763. In francophone Canada, the pattern of economic growth was set in feudal agriculture.
By means of a stout plank extended from the side of the small bateau or a dinghy lowered from a larger vessel, passengers and cargo alike were delivered to a stretch of shore referred to as the quai aux barques from which it was a short walk to the market square surrounded by the houses of merchants. The town was really two long streets intersected by numerous cross streets in which for the most part, officers, soldiers, merchants, artisans, and labourers lived cheek by jowl. At the beginning of the century, only about 1,300 people occupying fewer than two hundred houses lived in the city [of Montreal]. A spurt of growth in the postwar period raised the population to nearly 3,000, by 1731. Ten years later, 3,575 people occupied 457 houses (Miquelon, p.~145.).Quebec, at 5,000 souls in 1740, was considerably larger than Montreal.
As people spread out and became rooted in the St. Lawrence Valley, they knitted together the landscape with roads. Trails passable by simple carts came into being with the first grist mills, and others, perpendicular to the St. Lawrence, with the first inland, or second-range, settlements. roads were an early necessity around Quebec and on Montreal Island, where settlement was less decidedly riparian. In the later seventeenth century, trails already connected the numerous stockade forts that protected Montreal Island and the adjacent south shore. Public through-roads, built by the authority of the state, were longer in coming. Considerable density of settlement and a degree of wealth were necessary to make them a realizable alternative to the river. The road that has received the most attention from historians is the chemin du roi along the north shore from Quebec to Montreal, built primarily between 1731 and 1737 ... a dirt road up to seven metres wide, ploughed and harrowed like a field, with occasional corduroy, ditched and supplied with culverts, wooden bridges and ferries -- or in some cases, leading to fords. Before the end of the Old Regime, there were also roads from Montreal to Fort Chambly and Fort Saint-Jean, along the Richelieu and Chaudi\`ere, and connecting most of the settled south shore. This realization of a network of connecting roads was related to the increased keeping of horses (Miquelon, pp.~192--193.).
What sorts of things did the habitants need in addition to what they could supply themselves? The answer would have changed over time as seigneuries were established and a degree of ease achieved. Some quasi luxuries, such as dinner ware and eating utensils, eventually would be purchased. So long as new holdings were a substantial portion of all holdings, however, demand centered on a minimum set of necessary settlers effects.
Inventories of the St. Denis store from 1764, 1775 and 1786 show that, apart from the exceptionally large supply of rum at the time of the second inventory, the value of the total stock and the proportions of the various types of merchandise remained roughly unchanged. ... Textile products generally accounted for more than half the store's value. These ranged from cheap Irish linens to fine silk and included a variety of taffetas, camblets, calicoes, velvets, serges, moltons, muslins, and gauzes. In a related category `sewing supplies' comprised needles, thread, patterns, bordering, buttons, buckles and so on. Much of this material was probably used by habitants making Sunday finery; clothing for everyday use was made mainly from homespun. Certainly readymade clothes made up a small proportion ... particularly after 1764. There were hats, stockings, ladies' shoes, and some `red caps', but most items in the habitant costume were not available at all. `Personal accessories' include large quantities of ribbon and handkerchiefs as well as looking glasses, combs, and inexpensive jewellery. ... a supply of pots, pans and other `domestic utensils'. ... few tools (mainly axes) but substantial quantities of nails as well as some paint and window glass. `Agricultural implements' were also quite limited and consisted almost entirely of harnesses, scythes, sickles, and ploughshares. ... stoves from the St Maurice Forges and ... [for] local blacksmiths ... bar iron and steel. `Non-food consumables' are salt, an important staple import, as well as soap, alum, candles, and lamp oil. Food products (rice, cheese, chocolate) make up a small part of the stock ... ice skates and leather brought in from Quebec City tanneries. (Greer, pp.~156--157)These were what a country merchant had to sell. At the time this list was drawn up, in the district in which it was drawn up, (The Richileau River district, mid eighteenth century) the habitant would sell primarily wheat, but, perhaps, also horses. Earlier, the market would have been for mixed foodstuffs.
The towns of Quebec and Montreal were the principal markets -- not negligible ones in an economy of marginal surpluses, but insufficient to complement a growing rural population. But during the 1720s there was a significant reversal of this major tendency. Export markets became an important factor for the agricultural sector, and there was a healthy, sustained rise in the prices of agricultural commodities (Miquelon, pp.~204--205).The `towns' included the colonial administrators, the military, those involved in the fur trade, in the forges, in ship building, and in commerce. The external markets were Louisburg and the West Indies.
Specie, the principal means of exchange, was indispensable for investment.
Often money seemed to be not so much a medium of exchange as an imported commodity that the merchant supplied to favoured habitants wishing to purchase land, hire labourers, or pay seigneurial dues. In the earliest time, when the habitant was just getting started, there would have been no surplus to sell, and when sons wanted to open new holdings, even if the land was not to be bought, there would be an additional demand for settlers' effects. Where would the money, the extra purchasing power come from? (Greer, p.~160.).
The canoemen were typically illiterate young farm boys. Some rented out their muscle for a summer of hard paddling to and from the entrepots of Detroit and Michilimackinac. Others, for 150 to 300 livres, a new pair of leggings, a breechcloth, and a cotton shirt, wintered in the West. Some of them the West claimed permanently for its small French communities in Illinois and at Detroit or for the Indian tribes. But most returned to the farmsteads of the St Lawrence with much to remember and to tell (Miquelon, p. 155).
A demographic "sounding," which lumps together voyageurs and engagees, suggests that about 18 per cent of the Canadian males born from 1680 to 1719 and surviving beyond fifteen years made fur-trade journeys west, participants in the trade during the first half of the eighteenth century. The participation rates that reflect the revived trade of the thirties and forties are in the range of 20 to 25 per cent. From this ... emerges an image of the man going west: young, and usually a younger son who delayed marriage until his late twenties and then, most often, renounced the fur trade. Can we not conjecture that the one third who continued to go west after marriage included a large proportion of marchands voyageurs and fewer engagees ? For most participants, was not the trade a transitory occupation to overcome an economic necessity that postponed marriage and settled life? (Miquelon, p.~ P.~156).
The fur trade in New France was as competitive as the Newfoundland fisheries, until 1627, when it was monopolized by the French government and given to the Company of New France. In return for monopoly the Company was to settle the territory to which the monopoly applied, thus ensuring the political survival of France in America. Monopolization was not a success in two ways. First, legal monopoly, in this period and later, was unable to control the competitive tendencies of an easily exploited, common property resource. Second, the monopolists did not encourage settlement. By 1650, there had been three successive grants of monopoly. All were revoked for want of fulfillment of settlement conditions.
Geographic extension of the fur trade down the St Lawrence was rapid, but competition from the Hudson--Mohawk drainage basin came in the form of violence among the various tribes of the native North Americans who did the actual hunting. In the late 1630s, Iroquois, armed by Dutch settlers, attacked and dispersed the Huron living along the upper St. Lawrence River. Following a brief decline, because of the attack, the trade out of Montreal extended up the Ottawa, away from the Iroquois, and crossed Lake Nipissing to Sault Ste Marie and the Strait of Michilimackinac north of Lake Michigan. After 1663, under the care of the Intendants, and supported by three years of counter attacks against the Iroquois by French regular troops, the Montreal trade reasserted itself on the Lower Great Lakes, and extended into the northern portion of the Mississippi basin.
As distances increased, the trade was reorganized. By 1713 voyageurs were carrying supplies to Michilimackinac and coming back with furs gathered by coureurs de bois who traded directly with the Indians.
Expanded and reorganized, the Montreal fur trade continued to face competition. The Dutch had been replaced by the English, who also encouraged the Iroquois to interlope and to violently disrupt trade on the upper St. Lawrence and the Lower Great Lakes. Again the French were forced to use the Ottawa route, but again the adjustment led to an expansion of the trade, this time down Lake Michigan to the head waters of the Mississippi. Following this route, Rene La Salle reached the mouth of the Mississippi in 1682.
The colony established at New Orleans was politically separated from Quebec, and administered directly from France. Trade on the Mississippi was thereby removed from the span of Montreal's interests. Indeed, the Mississippi became a channel by which French traders could escape the controls of New France.
In this period, 1663--1713, without the benefit of monopoly, and extracted somewhat from the constraints of imperial policy, the fur trade organized itself to meet its own technical and economic constraints. Like the Newfoundland fishery, the fur trade exploited a common property resource. `Harvesting' was a small scale operation involving little capital: in the fishery, small boats and a small crew; in the fur trade, individual native trappers with snares and a gun, and individual coureurs de bois with trade goods and a canoe. In both trades competition and consequent excesses of activity at the level of harvesting led to gluts and severe price fluctuations. In the fur trade, as eventually in the fishery, licensing was used to control supply. It was no more successful in the fur trade than it would be in the fishery. In both industries, the predominance of distant `overseas' markets, led to specialization in harvesting, on the one hand, and in trade and the purchase of supplies, on the other. Neither harvesters nor traders could supervise one another, though each was essential to the other and exposed to being exploited by the other. For this reason loose, informal, and easily breakable contracts characterized the relationship between fishermen and outfitter-marketers in the fisheries; and short term contracts, rather than employer-employee relationships, characterized transactions between the `wintering partners' and the `Montreal partners' in the fur trade. Such arrangements began to take shape in the fur trade in the second decade of the eighteenth century. The Newfoundland fishery developed them only when its overseas trade definitively separated from harvesting with the end of the migratory fishery after 1776. In that period, 1776--1820, in both industries, oligopoly characterized the supply and overseas trade operations, and competition characterized harvesting.
Resource stocks in the fishery had greater powers of recovery than those of the fur trade. Frontier competition in the fur industry decimated the animals, forcing rapid penetration of the interior of the continent in search of new supplies. On the West Coast competition reduced the Sea Otter to near extinction.
The point is, however, that the tendency to competition and decentralization that characterized the cod fisheries, also characterized the fur trade. If the fur trade united a large portion of the continent under the government of Quebec, it was a consequence of the political and military control exercised over the trade. It was not a consequence of the characteristics of the trade itself. France used monopoly and political control to keep its fur trade empire intact despite forces of competition that exercised themselves continentally. `Competition in the fur trade was fundamentally competition between drainage basins.' (Easterbrook and Aitken, p.~78.): the Hudson--Mohawk, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson Bay, and the Mississippi. Further, France kept its empire intact by political and military means, the cost of which was out of all proportion to the commercial returns from the fur trade.
... these military measures seemed at the time very effective. But they were also very expensive ... . The St. Lawrence fur trade provided no sound basis for such expenditures ... . In an economic sense, a very large investment was being made to preserve a relatively small income \dots . Costs which were unwarranted from a commercial point of view were necessary as an investment in empire (Easterbrook and Aitken, p.~85.).The fur trade of New France was an economic instrument of French expansion in North America, not its economic substance. Given the competitive decentralization inherent in the industry, most evident in the 1660s, when Radisson and Groseillers successfully turned to Britain for capital to develop a competing trade out of Hudson's Bay, the fur trade was a treacherous instrument on which to depend.
Between 1713, when Britain acquired undisputed control over the coast of Hudson Bay, and 1763, when France virtually withdrew from North America, the fur trade out of Montreal continued to suffer from political abuse and eroding competition on its harvesting frontier. In a last attempt to maintain a territorial base in America, France encumbered its fur trade routes with forts and garrisons. In response, the British constructed only one fort on Lake Ontario, but they raised competitive pressure by encouraging French agents to deliver furs to Albany and to Hudson Bay posts.
The most important threat to the French, however, was not competition in the fur trade, but the advance of a British agricultural frontier. The Ohio Land Company, formed in 1744, penetrated French territory in 1752. Consequent, open, violent conflict led to Virginia's declaring war on France in 1754. Britain's victory, in 1763, entailed withdrawl of France from America, and yet another reorganization of the fur trade out of Montreal.
After 1763, the trades of Albany, Montreal, and Hudson's Bay competed with one another in British domestic and re-export markets. British colonial policy, in its general attempt to restrain the New England colonies, favoured Montreal over Albany. In 1774, the Quebec Act reserved all the territory west of the Appalachian height of land for the Montreal trade. At that time a number of Albany interests, including John Jacob Astor, moved to Montreal. After 1776, and particularly after Jay's Treaty in 1794, British Montreal was excluded from the United States midwest. Astor then moved back to Albany where he organized the American Fur Company in 1809. By then, Lewis and Clark, agents of the United States federal government, had completed their expedition to the West Coast, so the new company established a post, Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River.
Excluded from the United States, but freed from government interference in British North America, traders at Montreal organized in response to the exigencies of the trade itself. They began a process of merging operations at the level of external marketing, and of extending the harvest farther to the north and west. By the turn of the century, there were only two companies working out of Montreal: the North West Company and the X Y Company. Given the short term character of the partnerships that constituted these companies, overall organization of the trade was very fluid. By 1804, through natural termination and renewal of contracts, all Montreal fur trading interests were in the North West Company. After 1811, when the North West Company purchased Astoria, there were only two fur trading companies in the northwest: the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company.
For a brief period monopoly and centralization in the fur trade appeared to provide a basis for a transcontinental economy. Putting aside the question of whether the trade could be called the basic economic activity of British North America after 1800, this appearance did not last. Pressured by Montreal's entrance into the British market, after 1763, the Hudson's Bay Company had used flat bottomed, shallow draft York Boats to reach trappers in the interior of the central plains, thereby gaining a decided cost advantage in the transportation of trade goods and furs. When the `wintering partners' of the North West Company showed a preference for the Bay connection, the trade out of Montreal was again threatened.
The flexibility of the partnership arrangement in Montreal, typical of long distance exploitation of an easily harvested common property resource, made adjustment relatively easy. Contracts extended over short periods, three to seven years (18 years in 1804), and could involve any number of agents (100 in 1804). When the final contract constituting the North West Company expired in 1822, dominant Montreal interests bought into the Hudson's Bay Company, and the trade out of Montreal was terminated. The weakness of the economic characteristics of the trade with respect to continental unity, evident during the French regime in the activities of Radisson and Groseillers, was evident again in 1822. We can catch Easterbrook and Aitken out in a self contradiction as they make this point despite themselves.
In the early years, indeed, the principal problem of the North West Company was not internal unity by external competition (p.~167.). ... The critical weakness of the North West Company lay in the looseness of its internal structure. Originally no more than a temporary and informal association of traders, it never entirely rid itself of the defects inherent in this form of organization (p.~185.).
By 1822, in any case, Montreal's fur trade had lost its importance. Settlement west of the Appalachians was well under way. The frontier was on the Ohio by 1800, and on the Mississippi by 1830. Selkirk had established the first settlement on the Canadian prairies in 1811, though admittedly well in advance of the agricultural frontier there. Mercantilism was giving way to laissez-faire in England, where the building of canals, and the industrial revolution were well advanced. The United States had passed through its turnpike era and was approaching its period of `canal mania'. Cotton, wheat, cattle, and, in Canada, timber and agricultural produce, were the exports on which commercial export activity focused. The passing of the fur trade from Montreal hardly caused a ripple in the colonial economy. It belonged to an earlier era of European national policy, the period of Mercantilism and initial settlement in America. When that period ended, the fur trade retained importance only beyond the agricultural frontier. The Hudson's Bay Company, the longest lived of the great Mercantilism monopolies, continued to be an agent of British imperialism, until the 1860s, when political organization related to other economic activities in British North America was called upon to replace it.
The fur trade, and the fur trade monopolies, French and British, were successful as instruments of empire in seizing and delineating territory. They were not successful in settling and holding the territory gained. In the long run, as an instrument of political and economic integration in French and British North America, the fur trade failed.
The Conquest eliminated the French in governmental and military activities. It damaged and supplanted merchants who had relied on capital markets and goods markets in France. The seigneuries, however, could co-exist as easily with British as with French civil, military and commercial operations; because they were not substantially dependent upon them. La survivance depended on the habitant.
The growth path of the economy of francophone Quebec was that of seventeenth century French feudalism. Without aggressive exploitation by an indigenous, capitalist bourgeoisie, it expanded extensively, until faced with the evident economic superiority of its neighbour's capitalism. In the first half of the nineteenth century it went into crisis and submitted to radical institutional change. Radical change, notwithstanding, the dye was set. The economy of francophone Quebec has continued to be distinguished by its feudal roots, and by the growth path dictated by those roots.
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