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Following their colonization of America in the 17th and 18th centuries, the French drew up inventories for the resources of the occupied or coveted territory. Being able to describe all this wealth, natural history thus became the ultimate colonial knowledge and one of the central cogs of the French Colonial Machine. Also, the textual legacy of this activity is considerable and various points of view are taken into account: an enterprising settler, for example, will not see Louisiana’s resources in the same way as a travelling metropolitan official or a botanist on assignment. However, the colonial perspective is widely spread and all these texts, or almost all of them, are evidence of the appropriation of American plants, minerals and animals. The position of indigenous people and slaves – whether of indigenous or African-American origin – as actors in the process of knowledge creation depends on the context and the author’s stance. This thesis focuses on a small number of compelling texts from the natural history corpus of the French mainland colonies in America. Four authors who worked in or visited Canada (Kalm), French Guiana (Barrère) and Louisiana (Le Page du Pratz and Dumont de Montigny) are studied in depth. We first examine the different contexts of knowledge acquisition. Subsequently, we analyze the colonial resources inventories available at that time and how the sources are managed. Lastly, we conclude by looking at how these naturalist writers transmit to their European readers their newly acquired knowledge and the impact that their work will have.

This thesis is an exercise in historiography that deals with the ways French, Quebec and US researchers interested in the Pays d’en haut in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have referred, over the past 35 years, to the theme of Native agency. To represent the Native peoples as agents, as they really are, for what they do and not as bit players of a Europeo-centric narrative, this seems to be the rule of the language game ethnohistorian play. However, when we look at the production of the specialists of these Native societies, we rapidly come to the conclusion that the national question and, more broadly, the dynamics of identity inherent to the communities of researchers, still have a considerable impact on these narratives. In order to understand these dynamics, it is useful to develop a historiographic perspective that is rooted in the sociology of science. I will refer more specifically to the works of Bruno Latour and Pierre Bourdieu on controversies among researchers. The idea is to see how researchers, by situating themselves in relation with their peers through alliance, avoidance or opposition, structure an ethnohistorical project. A project that is devoted to knowing better the Native other, but also a project that needs to pass the postcolonial test and hence refers to an area of postcolonial studies that is itself structured through contentions. By seeing how, through the generations, an ethnohistorical model of good practices is constructed and restructured, how collectives of researchers are built, one learns about the world of Native people, but also about the world of the researchers. It is in this perspective that I conduct the analysis of historiographic narratives produced by renowned practitioners of studies on the Pays d’en haut, ethnohistorians who, a few years after having published their main work on the subject, take stock of the situation in regards with Native agency. The historiographic propositions of Bruce Trigger, Richard White and Gilles Havard will allow us to cover the evolution of the field of ethnohistory since 1985.

This thesis presents representations of the traditional ritual practices of the Iroquoians and Algonquians that the French Jesuit missionaries have revealed in their writings. Sometimes in spite of themselves, the missionaries describe Indigenous people endowed with religious powers, descriptions which we will examine. The territory analyzed is therefore mainly that of the missions, namely the St. Lawrence Valley, the surrounding country and the Great Lakes region, a slice of America that remained largely Indigenous during the period of interest to us, namely from 1632, date of the first Relations with the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune, until 1724, the date of publication of the book Mœurs des Sauvages by Joseph-François Lafitau. This careful examination of the Jesuit works reveals, from a perspective of gender history, excerpts relating to rituals and spheres of activity of Aboriginal men and women. These results are confronted with numerous studies on First Nations or on the Jesuits and their North American missions. This multidisciplinary convergence then leads us to ask: what do missionaries see, or do not see, in the role of men, women, and to some extent, “men-women” and “women-men” within Aboriginal rituals, and in what circumstances?

Subdelegates of the intendancies indirectly served the king of France at the local level. The study of their institution in five intendancies offers an original point of view on the Ancien Regime state and its administration. Subdelegations existed in all the provinces of the kingdom: in those known as pays d’élections, pays d’États or pays d’imposition, as well as in the colonies. Studying them makes it possible to question this typology and especially the centralization of the Kingdom of France. By comparative prosopography, 687 subdelegates in the 159 subdelegations of the intendancies of Caen in Lower Normandy, Fort-Royal in the Lesser Antilles, Lille in Flanders, Quebec in Canada and Rennes in Brittany are studied. This method allows for inter-provincial and transatlantic as well as intra-provincial comparisons and a multiscalar analysis of the royal administration. Subdelegations emerge as institutions of intendancy, in the service of the monarchy and exercised by local notables. Taxation, civil justice or administrative litigation, investigations, surveys and statistics, royal militia and corvée, public contracts, epidemics and assistance, supervision of municipalities, many powers concern them. In practice, they varied between provinces and between subdelegations. Everywhere, magistrates, mayors, marine commissioners or other notables served as subdelegates. Between bureaucracy and patronage, they participated in a limited administrative centralization. Subdelegations mainly generated multiple mediations of royal power, transforming it through provincial variations and local translations.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, historians’ attention was turned towards the disappearance of a bourgeoisie canadienne which should have made the transition from commercial to industrial capitalism. These studies began, so to speak, with the end, in attempting to define the long-term historical consequences of the Conquest on an as-yet ill-defined group that in principle included some merchants. This thesis follows new investigations in both Europe and the USA which have permitted to look anew, often with a cultural history approach, at merchants of the Early Modern period. Focusing on a Montreal merchant outfitter (marchand équipeur) and his family, the investigation first seeks to determine if the Canadian merchants’ culture (broadly defined) was similar to that of their French counterparts who worked on the same business level. A second aim is to evaluate the leeway available to individuals in face of the general conditions of the trade and the role of networks in the merchants’ career. Finally, the thesis attempts to define the self-conception of these men while looking at their lifestyle and the various roles they played in their community. To complete such a study, we have chosen to look « wide and deep » like micro-historians have before us. The study examines the long life of the équipeur, Jean Alexis Lemoine dit Monière, who chose to settle in Montreal in 1715 and whose career Louise Dechêne had followed until 1725. After her, historians have since pictured Monière as a typical marchand équipeur. But he might not have been typical, he might even have been a « limiting case ». The thesis follows him to the end of his life and looking for all the opportunities that were offered to him along the way. It accords considerable importance to the material and immaterial legacy of his father, Jean Lemoine, and to what Monière passed on to this son, Pierre Alexis and a few nephews. Situating Monière between his father who emigrated from Rouen, his brothers and his own son, permits us to see the emergence of a profession, that of équipeur. We look at how Monière, who died in 1754, was prepared to embrace the merchant’s profession and how he perceived the way he should work as an équipeur. This study affords a better understanding of merchants’ culture, broadly conceived, in early French Canada. Exploring a variety of sources and using a micro-historical approach, we hope to have followed Dale Miquelon’s suggestion to look (again) at the merchants’ world with the eyes of the people of the times in order to answer today’s questions.

This study compares methods of information gathering in two territories that became part of the British Empire after the Seven Years’ War. We bring these two extremely different regions into the same frame by asking: how did the British gather information about the populations of Canada and Bengal? Our study is part of several historiographical currents that offer a rereading of the history of Great Britain and its colonies, which is the subject of our first chapter. In the next chapter, we explore the post-conquest era in Canada. After the conquest of this territory (1759-1760), British authorities faced the task of administering the Canadian population. At first, they tried to implement a new governmental regime deemed suitable for the Canadian context. However, since the majority of the population they governed was of different religious denomination (Catholics) and of French origin, they had to modify the regime ten years later. In the third chapter, we look at the British presence in Bengal after the battle of Plassey in 1757. The British, through the East India Company, acquired a certain influence over local authorities, which allowed them to govern indirectly via the Mogul Empire’s governors, the nabobs. Nevertheless, cultural differences were much more significant than with the Canadian population of European origin: the Mogul Empire was a Muslim polity, with a Persian administration, and much of the population was Hindu. From our reading of the official correspondence, between the colonial administrators and the metropolitan government in the first case, and between the agents of the company and its directors in the second, we affirm that in both situations the British tried to gather more information. However, important institutional and cultural differences distinguish the types of information sought as well as the approaches to collecting information. The results of our research ultimately converge on one point: the search for information passed through a whole range of local intermediaries. In the last chapter, after having explored the “information order” implemented or adapted by the British in each colonial context, the study considers how colonial information was received and shaped by the metropolitan authorities. To this end, the efforts of officials and parliamentarians to learn about colonial conditions during the drafting of two laws, the Quebec Act (1774) and the Regulating Act (1773) are highlighted through a reading of the Parliamentary debates. Here also, many differences are visible. To become informed about Canada, British authorities relied heavily on the help of the colonial administrators who stayed in Canada after the regime change. However, in the Indian case, they depended mostly on documentary sources, namely the books of the EIC.

Since the arrival of social history in the 1960s, the military history of Canada under the French Regime has been enriched by several studies of soldiers. Historians of justice have also investigated the rank and file as a social group. These studies – which were not exclusively devoted to soldiers – adopted a quantitative approach. Though historians have viewed various aspects of soldiers’ lives, none have singled out criminality. That is precisely what this thesis attempts to do, by exploiting principally the judicial archives. More precisely, it analyzes criminal trials involving soldiers, relying as well on Ancien Regime jurisprudence to help place soldiers’ criminality in perspective. The trials offer a view of the different forms of this criminality and of some of the contributing factors. Lastly, several trials in addition to the colonial correspondence show that the army, not just a war machine, also played role in the rehabilitation of soldiers inclined to criminal behavior.