This chapter is distinguished by its close attention to place and space, and its consistent effort to assess the imprint of human activities upon the land of British North America. It draws from a wide range of sources. In addition to “standard” histories of British North America or parts thereof—such as Hilda Neatby, Quebec, 1760-1791 (1966); Gerald M. Craig, Upper Canada: The Formative Years, 1784-1841 (1963); Fernand Ouellet, Lower Canada, 1791-1840 (1980); and W. Stewart MacNutt, The Atlantic Provinces, 1712-1857 {1965)—it is indebted to R. Cole Harris and John Warkentin, Canada Before Confederation: A Study in Historical Geography (1974) and The Historical Atlas of Canada Volume I, From the Beginning to 1800, ed. R. Cole Harris, and Volume II, The Land Transformed, 1800-1891, ed. R. L. Gentilcore (1987 and 1993). Also helpful was R. Louis Gentilcore and C. Grant Head, eds., Ontario’s History in Maps (1984). Other works whose information and insights have been incorporated into several parts of the chapter are: Douglas McCalla, Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada 1784—1870 (1993); Fernand Ouellet, Economic and Social History of Quebec, 1760-1850: Structures and Conjunctures (1980); and Suzanne E. Zeller, Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation (1987).
A small handfol of books by fellow historical geographers provide inspiration, information and fine examples of the sort of work upon which this chapter is based. They are Serge Courville, Entre Ville et Campagne. L’essor du village dans les seigneuries du Bas-Canada (1990) and Serge Courville, Atlas historiquedu Quebec: Population et territoire (1996): Eric Ross, Beyond the River and the Bay (1970); Stephen J. Hornsby, Nineteenth Century Cape Breton: A Historical Geography (1992); Thomas F. Mcllwraith, Looking for Old Ontario: Two Centuries of Landscape Change (1997); J. David Wood, Making Ontario: Agricultural Colonization and Landscape Re-creation before the Railway (2000).
The opening section of the chapter owes something to Simon Schama, “The Many Deaths of General Wolfe,” pp. 3-70 of Dead Certainties (1992), and to the following: Olive R Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times (1997); A. J. Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Hunters, Trappers and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660-1870 (1974); C. Grant Head, Eighteenth Century Newfoundland. A Geographer’s perspective (1976); W. Gordon Handcock, Soe longe as there comes noe women. Origins of English Settlement in Newfoundland (1989); and Suzanne E. Zeller, “Nature’s Gullivers and Crusoes: The Scientific Exploration of British North America, 1800-1870,” in John L. Allen (ed.) North American Exploration, Volume 3 A Continent Comprehended (1997), pp. 190-243.
Discussion of the adjustments in trade and policy after 1760 rests, in part, upon the author’s own research pubhshed in “A Province Too Much Dependent on New England,” Canadian Geographer, 31 #2 (1987), pp. 98-113; “A Region of Scattered Settlement and Bounded Possibilities,” Canadian Geographer 31 #3 (1987), pp. 319-38; and Timber Colony: A historical geography of early nineteenth century New Brunswick (1981). For an understanding of colonial administration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there is no better source than Philip A. Buckner, The Transition to Responsible Government. British Policy in British North America, 1815-1850 (Westport, CN; Greenwood Press, 1985). For discussion of American-British influences on Upper Canada in the early decades of the nineteenth century see Jane Errington, The Lion, the Eagle and Upper Canada. A Developing Colonial Ideology (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987). For the rebellions see Allan Greer, The Patriots and the People. The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993) and Mary B. Fryer, Volunteers & redcoats, rebels & raiders: a military history of the rebellions in Upper Canada (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1987).
The story of immigration and settlement is an important one for this period. The classic, still unrivalled, work here is Helen Cowan, British Emigration to British North America. The First Hundred Years, Rev. ed. (1961), first published in 1928, but it has, thankfully, been followed by a small bookshelf full of more narrowly focused works. Chief among those used here are Donald H. Akenson, The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (1984); W. Cameron and M. M. Maude, Assisting Emigration to Upper Canada: The Petworth Project 1832-1837 (2000); W. Cameron, S. Haines, and M. M. Maude, English Emigrant Voices. Labourers Letters from Upper Canada in the 1830s (2000); Bruce S. Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach (1988); Cecil. J Houston and W. Sheamus Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links, and Letters (1990); Hugh J. M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy 1815-30: Shovelling Out Paupers (1972); Marianne McLean, The People of Glengarry: Highlanders in Transition,
1745-1820 (1991); Peter Thomas, Strangers from a Secret Land. The Voyages of the Brig Albion and the Pounding of the First Welsh Settlements in Canada (1986); and Catherine A. Wilson, A New Lease on Life: Landlords, Tenants and
Immigrants in Ireland and Canada (1994). Other more general treatments of value include J. M. Bumsted, The People’s Clearance: Highland Emigration to British North America, 1770-1815 (1982). The cholera epidemic is dealt with by Geoffrey Bilson, A Darkened House: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Canada (1980). My overall sense of the patterns of cultural loss and retention among immigrants to British North America derives from lohn J. Mannion, Irish Settlements in Eastern Canada: A study of Cultural Transfer and Adaptation (1974).
The sketches of work and life and the detailed discussions of particular settings that follow rest on a wide range of materials, including several articles to be found in Canadian Papers in Rural History Volumes 1-10, ed. D, H. Akenson (1978 to 1996), contemporary accounts, and such works as G. R de T. Glazebrook, Life in Ontario. A Social History (1968) and Jane Errington, Wives and Mothers, Schoolmistresses and Scullery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada, 1790-1840 (1995). I owe a particular debt to Allan Greer’s Peasant, Lord and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes, 1740-1840 (1985) for my discussion of the AUaires; to Peter M. Ennals, Land and Society in Hamilton Township, Upper Canada, 1791-1861, PhD dissertation. University of Toronto, 1978, for my treatment of Hamilton Township, and to the reprint of Gubbins’ New Brunswick Journals, 1811 & 1813, edited by Howard Temperley, (1980) for my New Brunswick discussion. My debt to Margaret Atwood’s Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) is also clear.
The discussion of early towns can be extended from a variety of sources, including materials in the Historical Atlas of Canada; Yvon Desloges, A Tenant’s Town. Quebec in the Eighteenth Century (1991); Serge Courville et Robert Garon, Atlas historique du Quebec: Quebec, Ville et capitale (2001); Phyllis Lambert and Alan Stewart, eds.. Opening the Gates of Eighteenth Century Montreal (1992); Donald Kerr and Jacob Spelt, The Changing Face of Toronto (1969); J. M. S. Careless, Toronto to 1918: An Illustrated History (1984); Peter Ennals, “Cobourg and Port Hope: The Struggle for Control of ‘The Back Country’,” in J. David Wood, ed.. Perspectives on Landscape and Settlement in Nineteenth Century Ontario (1975), pp. 183-96. T. W Acheson, Saint John: The Making of a Colonial Urban Community (1985). Finally, Eric Ross, Full of Hope and Promise: The Canadas in 1841 (1991) offers a finely wrought portrayal of a large part of the territory considered here, and Samuel V. LaSelva’s The Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism: Paradoxes, Achievements, and Tragedies of Nationhood (1996) grapples intriguingly with matters barely caricatured in the concluding sentences of the chapter.
World History
