Trade or raid: Acadian settlers and native Americans before 1755

Similar to the United States, relations between Native Americans and settlers in Canada, which had worsened gradually and mildly between 1776 and 1867 (Surtess 1988), deteriorated rapidly after independence in 1867. Akin to the American colonial era, Native American policy for colonial Canada was mostly managed from the British capital, as it was the British who would shoulder the burden of conflict through sending troops. After American independence in 1776, the British were even keener on avoiding conflicts between Native Americans and Canadian settlers as they needed the Native Americans to supplement their own troops on the Canadian frontier (see Allen 1996). In terms of violence, the Handbook of North American Indians (Vol.4 on relations between settlers and natives, and Vol. 13 on Plains tribes) makes it clear that conflicts in Canada prior to 1867 were fewer and less intense than in the United States during the same period. Only after Canada became a country did violence increase. These differences between Canada and the United States from 1776 to 1867 suggest the possibility that in the presence of an involved and capable state, management by a colonial power imposes some restraints on the ability to raid. However, we leave this topic for future research.

The plural of Mi’kmaw is Mi’kmaq. Most of the literature uses these terms, although older historians and anthropologists used the Micmac/Micmacs convention for writing.

This is similar to the case of Medieval Iceland studied by Friedman (1979) and Solvason (1993). While the label of pure statelessness did not strictly apply, the state was weak enough that one could argue it was a close approximation. Acadia seems to have been a similar close approximation of statelessness.

Few papers in that literature have attempted to measure the outcomes from anarchy. They tend to concentrate on the conditions that made statelessness an equilibrium. There are exceptions however. For example, Friedman (1979) uses a limited quantity of information to document living standards. Geloso and expand. Another exception concerns the case of Somalia (Leeson 2007a; Powell et al. 2008). We add to these exceptions.

For a version of this argument that is better embedded in economic history, one should consult Ogilvie and Carus (2014). It can also be framed in terms of the recent contribution of Acemoglu and Robinson (2019) where societies that want to achieve growth and development must remain narrow corridor between lawlessness and authoritarianism. In that corridor, rulers provide security but they are constrained (either de jure or de facto) from abusing the tools that allow them to provide security. Related to this point, see also Piano (2019), Boettke and Candela (2020), Geloso and Salter (2020), and Piano and Salter (2020).

One may conjecture that if such a situation is inefficient, then as Leeson (2020) would suggest, this raises another question: why will this situation prevail as the status quo? As Holcombe (2018, p. 253) argues, the point of the Coase Theorem applied to government (or the PCT) is not to conclude that transaction costs are low and that resources are allocated to their highest valued uses, but rather that when resources are not allocated to their highest-valued uses, the reason is that transaction costs stand in the way. In politics, special interest groups face low transaction costs of bargaining with each other and therefore can make public policy for their benefit. Because the masses face high transaction costs in organizing as an interest group, this excludes them from the political bargaining process. As a result, the “efficient” outcome in this case will be for resources to be allocated to the highest valued uses among individuals in the low-transaction-cost group, but costs are dispersed among those in the high-transaction-cost group, who cannot bargain to mitigate them. None of this necessarily implies that there is not the possibility for the high-transaction-cost group to bargain with the low-transaction-cost group to allocate resources more efficiently. As Coase (1960, p. 34) states, “Pigovian analysis shows us that it is possible to conceive of better worlds than the one in which we live. But the problem is to devise practical arrangements which will correct defects in one part of the system without causing more serious harm.” For example, it has historically been the case that authoritarian political elites have ceded power to a parliament as form of political exchange and unintendedly created a path toward the rule of law, which has reduced the transaction costs of devising more inclusive political institutions as well as greater security of the property rights among the masses of the population (see Kiser and Barzel 1991; Barzel 2000, 2002; Congleton 2011; Candela 2020).

Anderson and McChesney (1994) use “negotiating” in their work, but we use the term “trade,” hence our modification of the terminology.

Under the constraint that α and β must be between 0 and 1, that α > (1 − α) and β > (1 − β).

The narrower (wider) the distribution of the gains (costs) from violence, the greater the chances of violence being used. The wider (narrower) the distribution of the gains (costs) from violence, the greater the chances of using trade.

Bouchard (1999, p. 81) priced muskets in New France (modern day Quebec) at somewhere between 10 and 30 livres between 1720 and 1740 while Geloso finds that incomes per person during the era fluctuated between 93 and 136 livres (2016, p. 131). This fails to include the cost of maintaining a working firearm.

It is also important to point out that none of the colonies during the eighteenth century were net fiscal contributors to their empires: metropolitan governments expended more on them than they extracted in revenues (Davis and Huttenback 1982; Desbarats 1997).

One such example is the deportation of the Acadians in 1755. This was pushed for by the Massachusetts colony, and though London had explicitly disapproved, they ended up paying for it nonetheless (Geloso 2015). See more in Sect. 4.3.

Gregg and Wishart (2012) considered the social cost of the removal of the Cherokees from the areas they occupied in Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia during the 1830s. This is an important example, as popular imagination concentrates largely on the postbellum era as the era of violence towards Native Americans. However, as Gregg and Wishart show, the budgetary cost alone represented 3% of the US GDP in 1830. For Cherokees, direct costs represented 17.13% of their GDP. For comparative purposes, another costly war in American history, World War Two, constituted a burden equal to 1.88% of GDP. The social costs for Cherokees were even higher.

Such conflicts between settlers and natives occurred in regions such as Quebec, New England and New York in spite of a much larger fur trade than in Acadia (Delâge 1970; Leach 1988). This suggests that comparative advantage was in itself not sufficient.

The reduction in population is largely attributable to the introduction of diseases to which First Nations had never been exposed. However, the magnitude of their population decline places the Mi’kmaq among the groups that suffered least from this problem.

See Leeson (2014, pp. 155–169) for other examples.

Historians recognize that Acadia was a much less hierarchical society than Quebec was Heaman (2015). Historians also extend this judgment to the American colonies even though the comparative body of literature is smaller on this front (Griffiths 1992; Hodson 2012). In addition, attempts to impose formal rules were impeded by the lack of “administrative stability” and the inability to erect an “efficient bureaucracy” (Harris 2008, p. 56).

Which earned the Acadians the nickname of the “neutrals.” The British also were aware that they held no grip on the Acadian countryside (Harris 2008, p. 56).

The seigneur could impose the frontage tax of the cens, the conceded land area tax of the rente, the land sale tax of the lods et ventes, as well as a wide array of ancillary taxes that depended on the features of his estate. The seigneur also imposed the mandatory minimum labor provision of two to three days of work per year (known as the corvée) which could be avoided by paying a fee amounting to twice the daily wage rate for unskilled workers.

In 1720, after the cession of the region to the British, governor Richard Philipps claimed that trade between Acadia and New England stood at 10,000 £—a large part of which consisted of fur pelts. There is uncertainty as to which type of monetary units Philipps was referring to (New England currency, Halifax currency, Sterling currency or French currency. Simultaneously, the Acadians also traded with the French colony of Cape Breton, situated in the northern part of Nova Scotia. In 1740, it is believed that they traded for 26,939 livres (roughly 3.87 livres per person in Acadia) of which 20.1% was from skins, hides or furs (Clark 1968, pp. 207, 255–259).

We use the British spelling of dyke because it is the one used in the Canadian economic history literature on the topic (Saunders 1935; Clark 1968; Upton 1979; Wynn 1979; Griffiths 1992; Gwyn 1998; Faragher 2006, 2014; Kennedy 2008, 2013, 2014; Harris 2008; Hodson 2012; Caron 2015) and in the wider literature on farming in the area of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (Longley 1936). We prefer to respect established conventions on the topic by using the British spelling.

They hunted seal in January. In February and March, they hunted otter, beaver, moose, bear and caribou. As of April, they fished (smelt, herring, shad, sturgeon and cod later in the summer). During the summer, they also hunted pigeon, partridge, hare and rabbit. Foraging and gathering yielded such edibles as roots, blueberries, beechnuts, wild pears and cranberries.

The sources are not always precise as to which grain is being discussed, but wheat tended to be the main crop in both Quebec and Acadia.

A good illustration of this relative wealth is exemplified in the work of Griffiths (1984) where the period from 1713 to 1748 is labelled as a golden age. The Acadian data provided by (Leblanc 1979) suggest a compounded growth rate for Acadia of 4.73% per year between 1710 and 1755. The data for Massachusetts and the whole of the thirteen colonies provided by Rabushka (2008) suggest slower growth rates of 2.57% and 3.25%, respectively.

Geloso (2015) observes that the reaction in London to the deportation generated a backlash that pushed colonial officials, when they took over the larger French colony of Quebec in 1760, to tolerate the French-Canadians (their faith, their institutions, and their customs) and to eschew any talk of deportation.

This is unsurprising given the Mi’kmaq were outnumbered by more than 20 to 1 (Bock 1978, p. 117; Upton 1979, p. 78).

There was a notable incident in 1779, when a group of Mi’kmaq attacked local British settlers in Miramichi, raised a French flag and asserted support for the American revolutionaries. The uprising was subdued by British troops and the British forced the Mi’kmaq tribe of the area to change chiefs (Patterson 2009, p. 50).

There was a fear in 1793 that there would be a French invasion (Upton 1793, p. 83), and fears of an American invasion in the early 1800s (Upton 1979, p. 86).

Andrew Nurse (2004, p. 128) describes the post-1760 decisions of the Mi’kmaq in the following terms: “By 1760 the Mi'kmaq leadership had little option but to accept whatever deal was offered (…) the British Crown, in the form of the colonial administration (…) held sole legal authority over Nova Scotia with the legitimate right to make law unilaterally, including the regulation of the Mi'kmaq economy.” From there, the British established Mi’kmaq reservations which they gradually reduced in size at the behest of local settlers (notably after the migration of Empire loyalists to Canada) and granted themselves the right to confirm the selection of chiefs (Bock 1978, pp. 117–119).

There are other pieces of supporting evidence as well. Using import per capita figures, which are frequently used as a proxy for income growth, Gwyn suggests that the region stagnated economically until the mid-nineteenth century (1998, p. 168), while available evidence for Quebec suggests that the region experienced mild growth up until the 1850s (Paquet and Wallot 2007; Geloso and Bédard 2018; Geloso and Lindert 2020).

The 1701 census is available in the 1871 census of Canada, fourth volume, which compiles summaries for most censuses prior to that point (Public Archives of Canada 1874). The census of 1707 is detailed in the work of Clark (1968, pp. 234–235) but does contains some errors in calculation. Readers should consult the compilations available here (https://​139.​103.​17.​56/​cea/​livres/​doc.​cfm?​ident=​R0231&​cform=​T), which are drawn directly from Library and Archives Canada (Series G1, Vol. 466–1).

This approach is known as the welfare ratio approach. One should consult Allen (2001) for details about this approach, which is meant to create purchasing power parities that are superior to using exchange rates.

Geary-Khamis dollars estimates do not exist for the American colonies. For Britain, estimates of income exist in both forms.

See notably Gerschenkron (1947) for a detailed methodological discussion of this approach.

French cords are smaller: 48 cubic feet as opposed to 128 cubic feet.

Lunn (1942, p. 118) suggests 70 to 80 lb, but it is important to note that she is referring to the French pound (489.5 g) as opposed to the British pound (453.6 g).

To arrive at this estimate, we took the population figure of 8,600 from the middle of the eighteenth century for this region as given by Carlos and Lewis (s2011, p. 72).