I devoted the early years of my career to studying the seigniorial regime in Canada, the rural economy, farming families' material lives, social structures, and the family and family networks in rural Quebec in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. In recent years, in co-operation with other scholars, I have been pursuing research into local institutions, including parish fabriques, sedentary militias and school syndics, so as to better understand the ways in which elites were recruited and renewed in the pre-capitalist Quebec countryside.