Less-entrepreneurial groups reconsidered: the case of French- and English-Canadians in the late nineteenth-century United States

Past research assumes that ethnic groups that are underrepresented in self-employment—so-called “less-entrepreneurial groups”—are unresponsive to variation in small-business opportunities across urban places. The present study challenges this assumption by examining 1900 U.S. Census data on retail proprietors, comparing two less-entrepreneurial groups: English-Canadians, a group culturally similar to the U.S. Anglo-American majority, thus fitting the definition of a U.S. mainstream group; and French-Canadians, a group culturally different from Anglo-Americans, especially regarding language and religion, thus fitting the definition of a U.S. nonmainstream group threatened by marginalization. Results show that English-Canadians’ odds of retail enterprise are constant across the urban-regional hierarchy, while those of French-Canadians are significantly higher in peripheral than in core locations. These findings extend past research by showing that a nonmainstream group that is supposedly less-entrepreneurial reacts to the threat of marginalization by pursuing small-business ventures in spatially remote places, where barriers to self-employment are relatively low.