• Reply to Benoît Grenier and Alain Laberge

    Allan Greer I am grateful to Benoît Grenier and Alain Laberge for having taken the trouble to read my book and comment on my short polemic, “There was no Seigneurial System.” Indeed, I’m doubly grateful since I relied heavily on the extensive and rigorous research of these two historians in preparing Property and Dispossession. Why… Continue Reading

  • There was no Seigneurial System

    Allan Greer From elementary school books to encyclopedia entries to scholarly treatises, no work on New France is complete without a section on the “seigneurial system,” a phenomenon that supposedly shaped the agrarian society of this colony and set it apart from other colonial settlements.[1] Imposed upon Canada by absolutist France, so the story goes,… Continue Reading

  • Daniel Vickers: His Life and Work

    Stephen Hay Daniel Vickers’s life and his work grew together. His colleagues, students, and friends remember him for his love of his family, his services to others, and his humane scholarship. That scholarship applied a disciplined imagination to discover the patterns of borrowing, lending, and working in early New England. Born in Toronto, he was… Continue Reading