Place Royale
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Transcript
Place Royale became one of the settlement's early commercial spaces. Markets reveal a colonial city's practical priorities: food supply, regulation, currency, taxation and access to trade.
Montréal's location near the St. Lawrence and routes into the continental interior made it a major node in the fur economy. That economy depended on Indigenous knowledge, transportation networks and political relationships, even when European merchants tried to control the terms.
The square later changed as the city expanded beyond its old walls. What had once been central became marginal and then, much later, historic.
Old Montréal survived partly because economic activity moved elsewhere before preservation made the old fabric valuable again.