The “hot topic” in economic history recently seems to be that of market integration. A great deal of the attention has been given to european prices from the 1600s to the late 1800s. Some attention has been given to the North Atlantic (Canada, Britain, France, the USA), but what attention has been given to Canada starts more often than not after 1840 or 1850. How did integration look between Britain and the Canadian colonies before 1840? Well, it does seem to have been converging slightly when one looks at the coefficient of variation for wheat and oats. This integration, using prices in Quebec, was weaker in the years of war than it was in the years of peace after the French wars when integration fully began. These results are preliminary and new data sets should be included as soon as possible to expand the results to a greater sample of cities, but these are encouraging nonetheless.
Coefficient of variation, 6 years moving average, between Quebec and Britain
Vincent Geloso 