The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the former editor of the journal Ontario History. He is the author
of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality and Canadian History to
1967, and the co-author of The College on

Despite is sweeping title, this book is really a study of two
seigneuries located on the St. Lawrence River below Trois-Riviиres
during the mid-17th and early 19th centuries. Edinburgh University
historian Colin Coates charts changes in human occupation from the
period of initial European settlement until the onset of
industrialization.

This study purports to break new ground in literature on the
seigneurial system by incorporating a dual focus on landscape and
community into a cultural history revealing the self-perceptions of
rural dwellers. The disparity between such a grand objective and its
execution results from the book’s attempt to approach ecological
history in a location too circumscribed to be convincing. Coates settles
for the lesser concept of landscape, but his treatment of aboriginal
landscapes is virtually nonexistent and the succeeding chapter on
seigneurial landscapes is essentially about ownership. Habitants did
transform the land in their desire thwart mosquitoes, erect dwellings
close to navigable waterways, and pursue agriculture, but the author
makes the surprising statement that their choices “had more to do with
economics and cultural traditions than local ecology.” So at pains is
Coates to emphasize the dominance of European thought that he says that
the only native field crop they adopted was maize. In fact, there were
good reasons why the habitants and their successors in early Ontario
planted this crop: corn was versatile in use, more easily transported,
and more readily grown among stumps.

The book is stronger on the human side in handling family relations and
lines of community and authority, but self-perceptions of these rural
dwellers break to the surface only occasionally. In attempting to build
a chapter on industrial landscape around an iron mine and smelter, the
author reveals the weaknesses in his larger approach. The book concludes
with seigneur Elizabeth Hale’s attempt to portray a picturesque
landscape in painting.