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  • Throughout the eighteenth century, the French and British empires mobilized thousands of labourers in Canada through a system of mandatory labour known as “corvée.” This social arrangement was rooted in the feudal obligations of French peasants to landowners. Under the French regime, corvée was a custom, an obligation, and a form of obedience, a “local affair” embedded in an agricultural way of life that retainined a sense of reciprocity with mechanisms to discourage exploitation. However, with the British conquest of Quebec in 1763, and, later, the American Revolution, the corvée system assumed new dimensions. The British recognized the need for labour power in an underpopulated region and coopted the corvée customs for their own imperial ends. Though British officials retained some French statutes, they enacted new laws mobilizing the male inhabitants of New France to work in state enterprises (such as iron mining and logging), with Labourers holding little to no input into how the colonial state viewed their well-being. Leaning heavily on corvée as a form of conscription, the British army’s surging demand for workers in Quebec precipitated wide-spread protests. This crisis forced the royally appointed governor Frederick Haldimand to ratify a new provincial code regulating the use of corvée. Workers of War and Empire from New France to British America, 1688-1783 chronicles the transformation of the corvée system over a century, positioning French Canadian workers at the center of the narrative. -- Publisher's description

  • The article examines the evolution of Canadian corvée labour in the late 17th- and early 18th-century French Empire. In New France, tenants, referred to as habitants, rented land from seigneurs in exchange for several taxes. The labour tax, or corvée, required habitants to work on their seigneur’s estate for one to two days a year. Additionally, habitants were responsible for providing corvée for building any public infrastructure that the community required. From the Nine Years’ War (starting in 1688) to the construction of the Chemin du Roy (1732), colonial officials experimented with mass corvée labour mobilization in Canada. A number of factors allowed habitants to challenge authority when they felt the colonial élite had violated their right to subsistence. When drafted annually into forced labour for the construction of Québec and Montréal’s fortifications, groups of habitants refused to show up for work, called upon their superiors to protect them from service, or collectively discussed mutiny if conditions did not improve. During the first three decades of the 18th century, corvée was a negotiated process, with habitants constantly putting forth their own definitions of acceptable labour mobilization.

Last update from database: 1/26/25, 4:10 AM (UTC)

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