Subsistence crops – the grains and other food items necessary to a people's survival – were a central preoccupation of the early modern state. In New France, the principal crop in question was wheat, and its production, consumption, exchange, and regulation were matters to which the government devoted sustained attention. Power and Subsistence examines the official measures taken to regulate the grain economy in New France, the frequency and nature of state interventions in the system, and the responses these actions provoked. Drawing on social and political perspectives and methodologies, this book brings rural and agricultural history into conversation with colonial political economy. Louise Dechêne shows that unlike in early eighteenth-century France, where the marketplace dominated and trade was transparent, the grain economy in New France was hypercentralized and government measures were increasingly harsh. Attentive to the conflicts arising between producers, merchants, consumers, and colonial administrators over the allocation of the harvest, Dechêne offers a revealing perspective on the operation of political power in a colonial setting. Lively, elegant, and wry, Power and Subsistence provides insight into the last era of French rule in North America – and, in part, how that era came to an end.

Louise Dechêne (1928–2000) was professor in the Department of History at McGill University and author of Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal and Power and Subsistence: The Political Economy of Grain in New France. She is a recipient of the Governor General's Literary Award and twice winner of the Lionel-Groulx Prize.

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"Le partage des subsistances au Canada sous le Régime français, a pioneering work on the regulation of grain supply and distribution in New France, shaped the field in its original form. This translation – an important addition to English-language historiography in New France – is crucial to understanding the evolution of state-society relations and forms of authority in Canada over time." Helen Dewar, Université de Montréal