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Excerpt From Chapter 2 B French-Regime coins, Currency and Counters INTRODUCTION La Nouvelle France [New France] was the French colony that encompassed northeastern North America, from Newfoundland to the Great Lakes region. European colonization began in the early 1600s. Acadia, Newfoundland and Hudson's Bay were detached from the colony in 1713. The remaining regions continued to operate within France's imperial framework until New France's conquest and dismemberment in 1758 - 1763. That administrative context determined what money circulated and the legislative policies affecting currency and exchange until the 1760s. Numismatic accounts of currency in New France, published before the 1970s, had a governmental perspective, based on legislation and on the correspondence between royal officials in the colony and their superiors in France. Thus, we have an ample account of monetary problems, as perceived by the king's officers; the laws they passed to deal with the apprehended difficulties; and other administrative measures pertaining to currency. Looking back from an era with a well-informed and highly-intrusive government, the government records seemed to be sufficient evidence for reconstructing the history of circulating currency in Nouvelle France. Adam Shortt's two-volume Documents Relating to Canada Currency, Exchange and Finance during the French Regime (1925 - 1926) and his subsequent collection of documents for Nova Scotia under French and British rule provided researchers with published sources and these collections became essential reference works. Reliance on government records, however, assumed that royal officials had a comprehensive and accurate knowledge of circulating currency and took it for granted that laws passed by the metropolitan and colonial governments achieved their authors' intentions. A wider range of evidence demonstrated the weakness of these assumptions. It was not just the documentary evidence that laws reflected administrators' momentary enthusiasms and that legislation was not enforced with rigour or consistency during the French Regime that undermined these assumptions. It was the physical evidence provided by archaeology and by shipwrecks, which disclosed how fallible administrators were in ascertaining what was going on and in effectively influencing monetary practices in New France. Glib assertions that the colonists were strangers to copper and base currency collapsed in the face of plentiful evidence that copper doubles and liards, as well as brass dardennes, were the everyday money of colonists. Archaeologists also revealed that Spanish-American silver was nearly as important to exchange in the French colonies as it was to transactions in the British possessions. Smuggling between empires, which resident officials understated, helped introduce Spanish colonial silver. This silver currency supplemented the small supply of French metropolitan coins of noble metals. One area for which there is little physical evidence is that of private paper currency. Merchants used letters of exchange and obtained credit certificates from the crown and fur-trade monopoly; private individuals issued personal "bons" allowing creditors to draw set amounts from those owing money to the issuer. Few examples of these private instruments have survived. By comparison, government card money from 1685 onward is well documented and examples of eighteenth-century issues are numerous. By its' novelty and notoriety, card money remains a popular subject for publications about this era. This portion of the bibliography begins with accounts of the paper currency, counters (jetons) and copper and silver coinage in circulation in Old-Regime France, of which the North American colony was an offshoot. ANONYMOUS <<Card money of Canada>>. - CA :Vol. 1, no. 2 (Oct, 1872). - p. 53 - 54. - report from "Herriot's Travels", an early but very cursory treatment of the subject <<Canadian trade and commerce in the seventeenth century>>. - CA : Vol. 1, no. 3 (Jan. 1873). - p. 130 - 132. - report from "Memoirs of North America", superficial treatment of mercantile practices and primitive currency in French Canada <<Card money and French coins in Canada, in 1716>>. - CA :Vol. 3, no. 2 (Oct. 1874). - p. 64 - 65. - mostly consists of the text of two letters: May 12, 1716 and Sept. 6, 1717 regarding the withdrawal of card money, since superceded by Adams Shortt's text "Documents Relating to Currency, Exchange and Finance During the French Regime" <<Reviews>>. - CA : Vol. 5, no. 4 (April 1877). - p. 194 - 196. - review of Charles Anthon's article "The 'Gloriam Regni" in the ANJ, Jan. 1877 wherein Anthon presents proof that these coins from 1670 were meant also for circulation in Canada <<Playing-card currency of the French Regime in Canada and later currency of the French Regime in Canada>>. - CNJ : Vol. 4, no. 3 (March 1959). - p. 72 - 73, ill. - illustrations of four notes of different denominations AMIENS, A. ANTHON, CHARLES ANTON, WILLIAM T., Jr. ; KESSE, BRUCE Forgotten coins of the North American colonies : a modern survey of early English and Irish counterfeit coppers circulating in the Americas : including a report on the recent site inspections of the Machin Mills Mint, and a study of the Buste Enfantin coinage of Louis XV circulating in colonial America. - Iola, Wisconsin : Krause Publications, 1992. - 91 p., 10 pl. - reprint of the 1990 edition BAZINGHEN, (FRANCOIS-ANDRÉ), ABOT
DE BERRY, M. BISSETT, CHARLES P. |
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