On Being Surprised: by New France’s Card Money, for Example

Abstract

This article tries to disrupt conventional views about New France’s card money and about money in general. Treated as a quirky footnote to Canadian history, card money is usually seen as a monetary expedient for solving a problem of coin shortage. Money itself is often seen as a transparent category occupying an autonomous sphere of horizontal exchange, disconnected from politics and social relations. Money is also one of the last bastions of Eurocentric narratives of progress with universal pretensions. Envisaged through thick description, with attention to language, materiality, plural exchange practices, and the violent setting in which it was deployed, card money acquires new meanings. As a semi-permanent exception to official understandings of money, and as part of a transatlantic network of debt, periodically defaulted upon from metropolitan centres of calculation, monnoye de carte looks less like a picturesque local substitute for absent coin, and more like a useful global technology of imperial formation. Throughout, the article muses on the nature of surprise: colonialist versions can confine places, things, and people into alterity; more open-ended versions can productively unsettle us.