Canadian Papers in Rural History, Volume III

Alan A. Brookes was a teacher in the Department of History at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

Like its two predecessors, Canadian Papers in Rural History, Vol. III is a potpourri of essays which vary widely in subject matter and quality. Among the nine papers there are a number of small vignettes. Some are better done, such as John Clarke’s piece on John Askin, “The Activity of an Early Land Speculator,” and Gerald Bloch’s short but thoughtful portrait of Robert Gourlay and his British-moulded vision of agrarian reform. Others, like Alan Skeoch’s antiquarian essay on plowing technology, Darrell Norris and Victor Konrad’s dull and labourious over-analysis of house types in Grey County, and Bruce Batchelor’s vague and scant account of the Saskatchewan Land and Homestead Company’s activities in Alberta, are much weaker. John Mannion has submitted a thorough and readable account of the commercial activities of Waterford merchants in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, yet it is difficult to perceive how the topic is even remotely connected to the most peripheral eddies — let alone the mainstream — of Canadian rural history.

Despite its weaker links and idiosyncracies, the volume makes a major contribution by bringing the “New Rural History” to Canada in force. The three major papers, plus several of the vignettes, are distinguished by their systematic research and quantitative analysis. R.M. McInnis in his “Reconsideration of the State of Agriculture in Lower Canada in the First Half of the 19th Century,” Peter Russell in “Upper Canada: A Poor Man’s Country? Some Statistical Evidence,” and Professor Akenson in his own essay, “Ontario: Whatever Happened to the Irish?” increase substantially the depth and the level of precision and critical analysis in Canadian rural history. Together with Professors Clarke and Norris and Konrad, these authors rely upon such sources as assessment rolls, censuses, land records, deeds and detailed field work; all of them assail “traditional interpretations” based upon “impressionistic,” qualitative evidence — the travellers’ accounts, pioneer novels, and autobiographies that were the stock-in-trade of the “old” rural, social historians. McInnis’s review essay not only challenges many of the accepted causes of the “crise agricole” in Lower Canada, but even ponders whether there was a long-term, structural “crisis” at all. Peter Russell attacks the overly “optimistic ...” and “conventional view that the backwoods of Upper Canada could rapidly transform a pauper immigrant into a yeoman farmer” (pp. 144, 137). Finally, Don Akenson acerbically dissects the “accepted myth” that Ontario’s Irish were an urban people, and gives a solid whack of his shillelagh to several other (lesser) stereotypes of the Mickeys and the poor, unfortunate authors who have adopted them in Canada.

It should be noted, though, that even these more detailed, more thorough, and more critical, iconoclastic forays are not without their weaknesses. Often, the quantitative disclaimers produce mixed signals, and with both McInnis and Akenson, the counter-hypotheses appear at times to be almost as tentative or fuzzy as the tenets they assail. Russell spends 14.3 pages statistically convincing us that the average farmer could clear only about one and one half acres per year rather than the usually claimed four acres, before resorting to some completely qualitative, literary evidence to restore a less pessimistic balance that rural Upper Canada was probably better than the U.K. One cannot help suspecting that Russell’s findings might have been more optimistic had he chosen 15 townships from southwestern rather than eastern Ontario. Norris and Konrad provide a fine example of just how poorly quantitative history can be done. In a manner typical of the early writings of the “new” history, the major papers all raise more questions than they answer, conclude with a call for more research, and leave one with a vague feeling of unease. But that is probably precisely what the authors intended.

Canadian Papers in Rural History, Vol. III provides us with substantial doses of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Yet it is frequently lively, stimulating, and provocative; it unequivocally points the way for future studies, toward more quantitative, local micro-studies of rural areas and issues. Along the way, Paddy Akenson better watch out, for them Mickeys is an awful foigtin’ bunch.