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[The article examines the 1842 manuscript census] as an appraisal of ethnic weighting in the Montréal labour force, [in order] to estimate the relative sizes of four cultural communities [i.e., French Canadian, Irish Catholic, Irish Protestant, and other Protestant] and the social distances among them. The logic of grouping is schematized...in terms of shared language or religion. Since each community occupied a distinctive niche in the urban economy, it is possible that ethnic differences, often cited as a root of the violence of the 1840s, may have veiled its economic basis. For this reason, the ethnic partition of work, coupled with differential vulnerability of the several communities to economic stress, becomes critical to interpretation of the volatility of the 1840s. --Author's introduction