Between Two “Consumer Revolutions”: Groceries and Other Foodstuff Purchases at Lower Canadian Country Stores, 1809–67

Abstract

An analysis of the account books of five different Lower Canadian country general stores between 1809 and 1867 shows that ordinary households had access to, and purchased, an increasingly wide range of groceries and other foodstuffs over the period. As in Upper Canada, grocery purchases were “routine – part of many families’ culture,” and some commodities may even have been mass consumed. Foodstuffs supplied by global trade networks coexisted with products of domestic manufactures. Foodstuffs consumption also displayed characteristics associated with the “consumer revolution” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as others usually deemed to have been part of the “mass consumption societies” of the twentieth century.