Agriculture within the Seigneurial Régime of Eighteenth‐Century Canada: Some Thoughts on the Recent Literature

Abstract

IN AN ATFEMVI' to untangle competing analyses of the rural economy in early America, Allan Kulikoff notes with some relief that historians do partly agree in their descriptions: the self-sufficient farmer does not appear in account books, probate inventories, and tax records, and rural households eem instead to have exchanged both among themselves and within markets near and far.' But when the patterns of exchange are analysed, the agreement collapses, very roughly, according to Kuliko[I; into two strands: into 'market historians,' who document the spread over regions and time of competitively priced exchanges, and 'social,' often 'Marxian' historians, who point instead to important and resilient non-commercial gift, exchanges between eighbours and kin. At the heart of the debate lies uncertainty as to the goals, constraints, and choices governing the behaviour of family farms. 2 In the context of early Canada, the seigneurial form of tenure lends such uncertainty its own peculiar flavour. Historians have struggled to assess the burden of exactions imposed by seigneurs, and parted ways over the ef[•ct of inheritance practices and market signals on 'peasant' production. This article will evaluate some of the arguments and