In 1953 the proprietor of the chateau of Bonneval at La Haye-Aubrée par Routot in the Norman department of Eure presented the French National Archives with a collection of eighteenth-century papers. They had been brought to the chateau by previous owners at the time of the French Revolution. The proprietor was unrelated to these shadowy figures, and the papers concerned neither his family nor the estate. Now deposited at the Archives Nationales in Paris, the 45 cartons of letters and business papers tell the story of the business activities of the Dugard family of Rouen. The earliest item in the collection is a bill of exchange dated 3 January 1658/59, and the last letter is from 1794. Most of the papers concern Roben Dugard, 1704-70, and a number of companies formed by him and several other Rouen merchants, among them the societé du Canada. Dugard and Company, as the societé may be called with less formality, was founded in 1729 to exploit the trade of Canada with France and the West Indies. Soon it directed its attention to the development of a Franco-Caribbean trade independent of its North-Atlantic commerce. The present history is a case study of a business partnership. The size and structure of eighteenth-century French business enterprises, the nature of French business finance, methods and maritime insurance, French commodities of trade and markets, and the relation of French business to government are all examined. So too is the manner and extent of the penetration of French business into Canada and the West Indies.

In considering the pattern of emigration in the context of migration history, Choquette shows that, in many ways, the movement toward Canada occurred as a by-product of other, perennial movements, such as the rural exodus or interurban labor migrations. Overall, emigrants to Canada belonged to an outwardly turned and mobile sector of French society, and their migration took place during a phase of vigorous Atlantic expansion. They crossed the ocean to establish a subsistence economy and peasant society, traces of which lingered on into the twentieth century.

Banks defines and applies the concept of communications in a far broader context than previous historical studies of communication, encompassing a range of human activity from sailing routes, to mapping, to presses, to building roads and bridges. He employs a comparative analysis of early modern French imperialism, integrating three types of overseas possessions usually considered separately - the settlement colony (New France), the tropical monoculture colony (the French Windward Islands), and the early Enlightenment planned colony (Louisiana) - offering a work of synthesis that unites the historiographies and insights from three formerly separate historical literatures. Banks challenges the very notion that a concrete "empire" emerged by the first half of the eighteenth century; in fact, French colonies remained largely isolated arenas of action and development. Only with the contraction and concentration of overseas possessions after 1763 on the Plantation Complex did a more cohesive, if fleeting, French empire first emerge.

The Fur Trade Revisited is a collection of twenty-eight essays selected from the more than fifty presentations made at the Sixth North American Fur Trade Conference held on Mackinac Island, Michigan, in the fall of 1991. Essays contained in this important new interpretive work focus on the history, archaeology, and literature of a fascinating, growing area of scholarly investigation. Underscoring the work's multifaceted approach is an introductory essay by Lily McAuley titled "Memories of a Trapper's Daughter." This vivid and compelling account of the fur-trade life sets a level of quality for what follows. Part one of The Fur Trade Revisited discusses eighteenth-century fur trade intersections with European markets. The essays in part two examine Native people and the strategies they employed to meet demands placed on them by the market for furs. Part three examines the origins, motives, and careers of those who actually participated in the fur trade. Part four focuses attention on the indigenous fur-trade culture and subsequent archaeology in the area around Mackinac Island, Michigan, while part five contains studies focusing on the fur-trade culture in other parts of North America. Part six assesses the fur trade after 1870 and part seven contains evaluations of the critical historical and literary interpretations prevalent in fur-trade scholarship.

The fourteen essays that comprise this volume concentrate on festival iconography, the visual and written languages, including ephemeral and permanent structures, costume, dramatic performance, inscriptions and published festival books that ’voiced’ the social, political and cultural messages incorporated in processional entries in the countries of early modern Europe. The volume also includes a transcript of the newly-discovered Register of Lionardo di Zanobi Bartholini, a Florentine merchant, which sets out in detail the expenses for each worker for the possesso (or Entry) of Pope Leo X to Rome in April 1513.