Canada

Article Outline

Introduction; Land and Resources; People; Arts; Economy; Government; History; The 21st Century

Land Tenure

New France developed as a largely rural society, as farmers cleared land along the St. Lawrence and adjacent rivers. These farmers, called habitants, held their land under the seignorial system. Land in New France was granted in the form of seigneuries to large landlords, or seigneurs, who in turn granted acreages to farming families. In return the farmers had to pay annual dues to the seigneur in the form of produce, labor, or sometimes money. New France’s farm families lacked export markets—they were hundreds of miles from the ocean—and so they produced mainly for themselves rather than for sale. The members of large farm families worked together to raise wheat, vegetables, and livestock. As younger family members grew up and married, they cleared new land. The farmers had little opportunity for formal education, but they lived better than did most peasants in France at the time.

Seignorial lands usually brought little income to their owners, and owning seigneuries did not confer noble status. However, land ownership was another sign of prestige for the colonial elite. Few seigneurs lived on their estates or gave them close attention. Most seigneurs lived in the towns, and many had careers as military officers.

French and British Rivalry

Territorial Disputes

In the 1680s New France was again at war with the Iroquois, partly over control of the fur trade but also as an offshoot of war between France and England. The English and their Iroquois allies attacked the settlements on the St. Lawrence in King William’s War (1689-1697), but New France now had a permanent garrison and could strike back. New France’s soldiers, notably Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d’Iberville, raided the frontiers of New York and New England with their indigenous allies and seized most of the English trading posts on Hudson Bay. After almost a decade of guerrilla warfare, the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) merely confirmed each country’s possessions before the war, even returning Acadia, which the English had captured, to the French. In 1701 the Iroquois made a comprehensive peace with New France and sought to remain neutral in future conflicts between the two countries.

In 1702 a new war, Queen Anne’s War, broke out between France and Great Britain (a new union of three countries headed by England). By the Peace of Utrecht that ended the war, France was compelled to yield its land in Newfoundland, although it kept seasonal fishing rights on the north side (the French Shore), and its claims to Hudson Bay. The Acadian mainland was also ceded to Britain. However, the French kept their forts and trading posts on the north side of the Bay of Fundy, maintaining that this was Mi’kmaq land that had never become part of Acadia. The Acadians who lived under British rule became the neutral French, tied to neither the French nor the British, but always distrusted by the British. They and the Mi’kmaq were the only people living in the colony, which the British called Nova Scotia, until the seaport of Halifax was founded in 1749.

The Fur Trade

Fur trade forts dotted the continent, and Montréal’s merchants continued to control the lion’s share of the fur trade, which grew and spread westward. The French approached the fur trade differently than the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). The French went into the back country to collect furs, but the HBC generally preferred to establish posts at shipping ports and let the indigenous trappers bring their furs to the posts. Although the HBC made a generous profit, its trade was often intercepted upstream by Montréalers who met the trappers on their home ground and bought the best of their furs.

The French fur trade operations were extended far to the west by military officer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye, and his sons. They explored almost to the Rocky Mountains in the 1730s and 1740s and established a string of fur trading forts. The fur traders who followed them established routes along the Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers. The French forged alliances, based on the trade, with the indigenous peoples of the west, and this meant that French soldiers, traders, and missionaries could move with relative ease across the continent. But since the indigenous nations trapped and traded the pelts and European hatters processed them, the fur trade never provided work for more than a few hundred French colonists.

The French and Indian War

With the outbreak of the French and Indian War, Britain began a relentless attack on France’s colonies. The conflict began in the Ohio Valley, where traders from the 13 colonies were beginning to settle. This British expansion threatened Louisiana’s links with the rest of New France. The British also threatened the French on the Atlantic coast. In 1755 Britain rounded up and deported some 7,000 Acadians, destroying the century-old Acadian society of Nova Scotia.

The Acadians were replaced by settlers from New England, who occupied the productive diked farmlands that the Acadians had created by the Bay of Fundy. Some of the deported Acadians were sent to France, and some eventually went to Louisiana, where their present-day descendants are known as Cajuns. Some retreated to the woods to avoid being sent away and settled farther north on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. After 1764 the British allowed some deportees to return, and in the last part of the 18th century a few came back to join the refugees in these new settlements.

For several years New France’s forces, led by the experienced French general the Marquis of Montcalm, held their own against the large and very costly assault by British forces. In a global military contest, Britain was compelled to devote one-seventh of its army—20,000 soldiers—to face down a few thousand French troops, supported by militia and indigenous allies, in North America. But Louisbourg fell in 1758, and its population was deported to France. In 1759 three British armies pushed toward the St. Lawrence heartland. After a summer-long siege of Québec, the young British general James Wolfe won the battle of the Plains of Abraham and captured the city. Montréal fell the following summer and New France came under British rule.

The conquest did not end all the fighting. The final stage was a widespread indigenous campaign in the spring of 1763, under Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa, against the western posts where British garrisons had recently replaced the French. Most of these posts were in the southern and western territories of Canada that now form the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The indigenous nations of the area resented the 13 colonies’ westward expansion onto their lands, and joined the uprising to force them back. However, they were unable to sustain their attack or to sever British supply lines.

British North America: 1763-1841

By the Treaty of Paris in 1763, New France with its 65,000 settlers (except western Louisiana) was ceded to Britain. At that point, what is now Canada comprised the British colonies of Québec, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Rupert’s Land. Québec was the new name for the colony of Canada, which had reached from Labrador to Missouri but was now reduced to the lower St. Lawrence valley. Nova Scotia comprised all of what had been Acadia and Île Royale, and Newfoundland included Labrador. Rupert’s Land, which was the name for the Hudson Bay drainage area, continued to be a monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

King George III of Britain sought to pacify Pontiac’s allies with his Royal Proclamation of 1763, which recognized indigenous sovereignty with certain qualifications. It committed Britain to negotiating treaties with the indigenous peoples to acquire land before allowing settlers to move in. The land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, including Canada outside the lower St. Lawrence valley, was set aside as a reserve, the so-called Lands Reserved for the Indians. This angered people in the 13 colonies, who felt they were being deprived of rights to western land that had been given or implied in their original colonial charters.

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Land Tenure

French and British Rivalry

Territorial Disputes

The Fur Trade

The French and Indian War

British North America: 1763-1841