In the course of writing my thesis, I have collected important quantities of price quotations for roughly one hundred and fifty items that were traded in the colony of Quebec from 1688 to 1760 and I am pursuing this up to 1860. However, there was already a price index produced by Gilles Paquet and Jean-Pierre Wallot for the period after 1760 which was not meant as a measure of the cost of living than as a measure of changes in the general price level (I am trying to do the former, which is more complicated). My index for New France is complete up to 1763 and it means that I can link it up with the index produced by Paquet and Wallot to get an idea of the general price movement. What does it look like? Well, here it is.
This is still preliminary work, but one can see how prices evolved in the colonial economy of Quebec prior to Confederation.
Price index, Quebec from 1688 to 1860
Vincent Geloso 