This thesis does not attempt to trace British policy in Canada in the late eighteenth century, nor to discover the springs of that policy in other parts of the Empire or in Europe. It is only incidentally concerned with many of the statutes and ordinances pertaining directly to Canada, for their import was not always understood by the French-Canadians in the way that they were intended in London or even in Quebec; likewise, the military phases of the dispute between Great Britain and the American colonies, and even the invasion of Canada in 1775-76 have been most summarily treated. The vast volume of secondary material upon the late eighteenth century in Canada deals almost exclusively with these subjects, either justifying British policy, attacking it from the point of view of the modern French-Canadian, or attempting to reconcile these divergent views. Instead, this thesis attempts to disoover the effects of the transfer of authority from French to British hands, in so far as that transfer affected the population of Canada in 1760. It is thus primarily concerned with the reactions of one generation of French-Canadians to the substitution of British for French rule, and to the economic and social changes that they encountered as a result. The fact that these reactions were frequently negative or else rested upon an erroneous conception of the policy of the British government has often led to the conclusion that they were either negligible or non-existent. [...]

Note: 2 page 212s, 2 page xxvi (at end).

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