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 Cabots 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 Essay on How should future generations contend with the French-English divide? Has this divide changed over the past 20 years, if yes how so?
... like to be in the English – French division. The linguistic battle among French- English has improved in Quebec over the past 20 ... institutions, to help the French survive (L7, S49). The French-English divide was further aggravated when the Quebec government decided to ... years with French being highly implemented in ...
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 Canadas leading economic historian, Harold Innis, the export trade in raw furs was the colonys raison detre. 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.
The Essay on Tensions between the French and English speaking Canadians
Tensions between the French and English speaking Canadians has been a topic issue for quite some time now. Throughout the years it has been questioned as to wether or not the French and English speaking Canadians have the potential ability to be together as a nation. Various votes have been held in order to try and establish what the people of Canada feel about this situation. However, the history ...
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 religionwhich now assumed far greater importance in their lives than it had since the early seventeenth centurysuccessfully 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.
The Essay on French Canadians, and English Canadians
Throughout the 20th century, the relations between the French and the English in Canada had a significant negative impact on Canadian history. The defining moments that changed French-English relations in Canada were the WWI conscription crisis, the creation and the governing of the Union Nationale Party in the 1930s, and Quebec’s Quite Revolution in the 1960s. The WWI conscription crisis ...
