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NEW FRANCE

The French presence in North America was spearheaded by the exploration of the Gulf of St.
Lawrence and the great river leading inland by Jaques Cartier in the 1530s. The English
immediately contested the French claims on the grounds that they conflicted with prior
English claims dating from John Cabot's landings on the east coast of North America in
1497, thus setting off a struggle which was to dominate the history of the region until
the Treaty of Paris in 1763. 
The first French settlements of any consequence were at Port Royal in Acadia (now
Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia) and Quebec (now Quebec City). Both were captured by the
British in 1614 and 1629 respectively, but the French reclaimed Quebec in 1632 and began
developing an enormous inland region extending southward from the St. Lawrence to the
Gulf of Mexico, not so much for settlement as to support the lucrative trade in furs
which they, and their rivals the English, were intent on promoting. The fur trade of New
France was initially organized on a private commercial basis, but in 1663 the whole
enterprise was brought under the direct control of the French King who entrusted the
day-to-day running of his colony to a governor, a senior administrator called an
intendant, and the bishop. 
New France developed under a constant threat of English invasion. The English
persistently sought to undermine French control of the east coast region known as Acadia
and to cut off French trade with the Indians in the areas inland from the English
settlements which were developing along the coast of what is today the eastern United
States and, further north, in the region around Hudson Bay. In the course of these
conflicts both these two great European powers became involved in the on-going conflicts
among the North American Indians with whom they were in contact for purposes of the fur
trade. The most important of the Indian contests involved the Hurons, who had become
allied with the French, and the Iroquois who sided with the English. In the late 17th
century New France was seriously threatened when the Iroquois overwhelmed the Hurons, but
the French recovered and resisted English domination for another half a century. 
The viability of New France as an economic and political entity has been the subject of
scholarly controversy in recent years. The traditional literature on New France paints a
picture of a loosely-knit, unprosperous and over-regulated collection of settlements
which eked out a marginal existence with the help of frequent subsidies from the
government of France. In Acadia and the settlements along the St. Lawrence from east of
Quebec City inland to Montreal, the main activities in traditional accounts were a
largely subsistence type of agriculture, which seldom yielded a surplus for export, some
heavily-subsidized industrial activities, such as wooden ship-building, and small amounts
of mining and small-scale manufacturing. In the view of influential scholars, such as
Canada's leading economic historian, Harold Innis, the export trade in raw furs was the
colony's raison d'etre. It was the fur trade that accounted for what success the colony
had, but, at the same time, by absorbing available labour and capital, this leading
industry also made it difficult for other kinds of productive activity to develop. 
Recent scholarship challenges this traditional view of New France. The Canadian
historian, W.J. Eccles, has taken Innis to task for exaggerating the importance of the
fur trade in New France. In his own work Eccles has presented evidence to show that life
in New France was better than could be found in the British colonies to the south. Even
more telling is the empirical work which has been done on the matter by a new generation
of economic historians who have painstakingly begun piecing together the fragmentary
statistical data which survives as a record of the French experience in the New World.
Morris Altman, for example, has constructed estimates of Gross Domestic Product in Canada
from 1695 to 1739 which show that fur-related activity accounted for only some 10 to 15%
of per capita GDP, approximately the same as the non-agricultural sector, leaving
something like 70 to 75% for agricultural production. The same data also suggest that per
capita GDP was growing throughout the entire period, leading him to conclude that, The
colony was able to overcome its geographical and climatic disadvantages to develop an
economy that was as productive as the one constructed by its southern neighbors.
Moreover, since the farmers, who were the mainstay of the economy, retained most of any
increased output, my estimates suggest that the laboring folk of Canada were becoming
increasingly well off. 
Whether economically anaemic or robust, British military force eventually overwhelmed the
French outposts in America. After a bitter war waged on several fronts during the years
1749 to 1763, the British captured the great French stronghold, Louisburg, on the coast
of Cape Breton, expelled the Acadians from their settlements in Nova Scotia, destroyed
many of the smaller towns and farming communities along the St.Lawrence, and, eventually,
captured and burned the city of Quebec itself. 
Following their defeat, the French inhabitants of the St.Lawrence region resumed their
traditional way of life as best they could. Immigration from France, never very important
after the initial settlement of New France, ceased. The British allowed the existing
population to maintain their religion and provided them with a measure of political
representation by way of an elected assembly with the authority to advise the British
governor. They were also allowed to retain the old French civil law. Economically and
politically, however, the French majority in the region, which would eventually become
Lower Canada, then Canada East, and eventually the province of Quebec, was dominated by
an English-speaking minority made up of immigrants from Britain and from the British
colonies to the south. While the British had some reason to expect that the French
population would soon be assimilated into a growing English-speaking culture, this was
not to happen. As Eccles writes: 
The French Canadians, concentrated in their seigneuries, bound together by their
language, their old culture, and their religion-which now assumed far greater importance
in their lives than it had since the early seventeenth century-successfully resisted the
continual fumbling efforts of the Anglo-Canadians and British officials to assimilate
them, to make them over into English-speaking Protestants, or at least to exorcize their
divisive language. All that this accomplished was to strengthen what the conquerors
sought to eradicate.