Commerce et crédit à l’île Jésus, 1734–75. Le rôle des marchands ruraux dans l’économie des campagnes montréalaises

This article studies the merchants who operated in the countryside of the Montreal region in the eighteenth century. These retailers furnished the peasantry with manufactured and exotic goods as well as raw materials. They were also engaged in the wheat trade, as this grain was their customers’ principal means of payment. In accepting delayed payment or in lending money outright, these merchants also become the peasants’ creditors. If this outline of the merchants’ activity is now familiar, certain aspects of their impact on the rural economy remain unclear. One of these is examined here: What were the consequences of their role as creditors? The weight of evidence favours reducing the importance that historians have ascribed to merchants as participants in the agrarian economy: on the one hand, merchants were not the peasants’ sole creditors; on the other, their position in the credit network reflected more their need to extend credit to peasant customers than any active role as lenders. The activity of these merchants seems to be limited essentially to the sphere of exchange.