Merchant and Plebeian Commercial Knowledge in Montreal and Quebec, 1760–1820

Conventional cultural constructions of French Canadians hold that they were dressed in homespun cloth. Analyzing advertisements from Quebec’s three leading newspapers, as well as a vast number of depositions from the rich criminal court records of this colony, this article argues that French Canadian inhabitants were steadily incorporated into British trading and consumption networks. This was not simply an urban phenomenon; by 1800 a large proportion of rural inhatibants actively consumed imported manufactured goods. In turn, as this article demonstrates, their increasing desire to acquire British ready-made clothing became part of a broader assimilative process at work in the colony following the British Conquest.