Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?: Montreal, 1819-1849 9780773584037

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE: Points of Departure
CHAPTER TWO: Colonial States
CHAPTER THREE: Internal Dynamics
CHAPTER FOUR: Cuvier’s Feather
CHAPTER FIVE: Agency and Constraint
CHAPTER SIX: “C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!”
CHAPTER SEVEN: Towards a Cubist Portrait
CHAPTER EIGHT: Imaginary Lines
CHAPTER NINE: An Industrial City
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

WHY DID WE CHOOSE TO INDUSTRIALIZE?

Études d’histoire du Québec /Studies on the History of Quebec Magda Fahrni et/and Jarrett Rudy Directeurs de la collection / Series Editors

1 Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal Louise Dechêne 2 Crofters and Habitants Settler Society, Economy, and Culture in a Quebec Township, 1848–1881 J.I. Little 3 The Christie Seigneuries Estate Management and Settlement in the Upper Richelieu Valley, 1760–1859 Francoise Noel 4 La Prairie en Nouvelle-France, 1647–1760 Louis Lavallée 5 The Politics of Codification The Lower Canadian Civil Code of 1866 Brian Young 6 Arvida au Saguenay Naissance d’une ville industrielle José E. Igartua 7 State and Society in Transition The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838–1852 J.I. Little

8 Vingt ans après Habitants et marchands Lectures de l’histoire des XVII e et XVIII e siècles canadiens Habitants et marchands, Twenty Years Later Reading the History of Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century Canada Edited by Sylvie Dépatie, Catherine Desbarats, Danielle Gauvreau, Mario Lalancette, Thomas Wien 9 Les récoltes des forêts publiques au Québec et en Ontario, 1840–1900 Guy Gaudreau 10 Carabins ou activistes? L’idéalisme et la radicalisation de la pensée étudiante à l’Université de Montréal au temps du duplessisme Nicole Neatby 11 Families in Transition Industry and Population in Nineteenth-Century Saint-Hyacinthe Peter Gossage 12 The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec Colin M. Coates

13 Amassing Power J.B. Duke and the Saguenay River, 1897–1927 David Massell

21 Done with Slavery The Black Fact in Montreal, 1760–1840 Frank Mackey

14 Making Public Pasts The Contested Terrain of Montreal’s Public Memories, 1891–1930 Alan Gordon

22 Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions atlantiques, 1776–1838 Michel Ducharme

15 A Meeting of the People School Boards and Protestant Communities in Quebec, 1801–1998 Roderick MacLeod and Mary Anne Poutanen

23 The Empire Within Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal Sean Mills

16 A History for the Future Rewriting Memory and Identity in Quebec Jocelyn Létourneau 17 C’était du spectacle ! L’histoire des artistes transsexuelles à Montréal, 1955–1985 Viviane Namaste 18 The Freedom to Smoke Tobacco Consumption and Identity Jarrett Rudy 19 Vie et mort du couple en Nouvelle-France Québec et Louisbourg au XVIIIe siècle Josette Brun 20 Fous, prodigues, et ivrognes Familles et déviance à Montréal au XIX e siècle Thierry Nootens

24 Quebec Hydropolitics The Peribonka Concessions of the Second World War David Massell 25 Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec The Taschereaus and McCords Brian Young 26 Des sociétés distinctes Gouverner les banlieues bourgeoises de Montréal, 1880­–1939 Harold Bérubé 27 Nourrir la machine humaine Nutrition et alimentation au Québec, 1860–1945 Caroline Durand 28 Why Did We Choose to Industrialize? Montreal, 1819–1849 Robert C.H. Sweeny

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WHY DID WE CHOOSE TO INDUSTRIALIZE? MONTREAL, 1819–1849 Robert C.H. Sweeny

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston  •  London  •  Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015

ISBN 978-0-7735-4537-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-4538-0 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-8403-7 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-8409-9 (ePUB) Legal deposit third quarter 2015 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from Memorial University of Newfoundland. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. All photographs unless otherwise stated are by the author. All historical artwork unless otherwise stated is from the collection of the author.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Sweeny, Robert, 1952–, author Why did we choose to industrialize? : Montreal, 1819–1849 / Robert C.H. Sweeny. (Studies on the history of Quebec = Études d’histoire du Québec ; 28) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued also in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4537-3 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4538-0 (pbk.). – ISBN 978-0-7735-8403-7 (ePDF). – ISBN 978-0-7735-8409-9 (ePUB) 1. Industrialization – Québec (Province) – Montréal – History.  2. Montréal (Québec) – Economic conditions – 19th century.  3. Industrialization – Social aspects – Québec (Province) – Montréal.  4. Industrial revolution – Québec (Province) – Montréal.  5. Industrial revolution.  I. Title.  II. Series: Studies on the history of Quebec ; 28

HC118.M6S94 2015  330.9714’28

C2015-901339-9 C2015-901340-2

Set in 11.3/13 Filosofia with Filosofia Grand Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

For Élizabeth-Anne and Charlotte-Anne Malischewski

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Contents Figures and Tables xi Acknowledgments xv Abbreviations xix Introduction 3

chapter one Points of Departure 16

chapter two Colonial States 32

chapter three Internal Dynamics 52

chapter four Cuvier’s Feather 87

chapter five Agency and Constraint 112

chapter six “C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 143

chapter seven Towards a Cubist Portrait 181

chapter eight Imaginary Lines 225

chapter nine An Industrial City 279 Conclusion 311 Notes 337 Bibliography 377 Index 425

Figures and Tables figures 1.1 Relationship between the historian and her or his object of inquiry  •  18 1.2 Berger’s conflicting cultural outlooks on time  •  19 3.1 Quarterly averages of monthly discounts and bimonthly cash in the vault for the Bank of Montreal  •  65 3.2 Value of notes protested by the Bank of Montreal drawn by people or firms who would subsequently fail  •  67 3.3 A comparison between when notes were drawn and when they were protested by the Bank of Montreal  •  68 3.4 Linkages between people and firms that failed, 1825–1827  •  71 4.1 Four instances of successful social reproduction by peasant families on seigneurial land in the Richelieu Valley, 1831  •  94 4.2 W.H. Bartlett, Woodlot at Montreal, 1841  •  98 5.1 Property owners in 1825  •  131 5.2 The dominance of landlords and their ethnic composition  •  132 5.3 John Adams, Ste-Marie suburb in 1825  •  133 6.1 John Adams, Map of the City and Suburbs of Montreal, 1825  •  after page 144 6.2 John Adams, detail of St-Joseph suburb, 1825  •  150 6.3 Number and relative size of developed lots in each suburb  •  153 6.4 Size of developed lots in St-Joseph ward in 1825  •  154 6.5 Distribution of 606 artisans and 170 labourers listed in the 1819 directory  •  160 6.6 Example with translation from one of Viger’s notebooks  •  165 6.7 Jacques Viger, “Rapports de la Population avec les Maisons habités”  •  166 6.8 Number and value of built properties owned by landlords versus single proprietors in two adjacent wards  •  168 6.9 Size and marital status of all households in the 1825 census  •  170

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Figures and Tables

6.10 Size and marital status of all households by ward in the 1825 census  •  171 6.11 Household size according to the number of households in the building  •  174 6.12 Distribution of the 2,764 people in 589 households in the 351 inhabited buildings of St-Joseph suburb  •  175 6.13 Assessed value of the 565 town centre properties in 1832  •  177 6.14 Number and value of built properties owned by landlords versus single proprietors in the eastern suburbs in 1832  •  179 7.1 Bank protests in Montreal from January 1820 to May 1824  •  184 7.2 Contrasting credit practices in Montreal, 1820–1824  •  186 7.3 Roles of people and firms in Bank of Montreal protests during three distinct periods  •  187 7.4 Profiles of discounters and drawers protested by the Bank of Montreal during three distinct periods  •  188 7.5 Size of masters’ households linked to the 1825 census compared with all other census households  •  195 7.6 Ste-Marie properties insured by John Pickel Jr  •  198 7.7 Ste-Marie properties insured by John Molson Sr  •  199 7.8 Youville Stables  •  206 7.9 Coade’s bas reliefs commissioned by the Bank of Montreal, 1819  •  207 7.10 Demographic composition of census households headed by doctors  •  217 7.11 Number and value of properties owned by doctors in 1825  •  219 7.12 Number and value of properties owned by doctors in 1832  •  220 7.13 Number and value of doctors’ properties identified during the commutation process of the 1840s  •  221 8.1 Robert Duncan, Wesleyan Church, Gtr St James Street, 1846  •  228 8.2 Robert Duncan, detail of panorama showing a canoe and a dredger, 1846  •  230 8.3 James Cane, detail showing the Sulpician estate, 1846  •  231 8.4 map ’s geo-referenced edition of James Cane’s Topographical and Pictorial Map of Montreal, 1846  •  after page 232 8.5 Notre-Dame Church  •  235 8.6 D.B. Viger’s Place Royale property  •  236 8.7 Gillespie Exchange  •  237 8.8 Bonsecours Market  •  238



Figures and Tables xiii

8.9 8.10 8.11 8.12

Bank of Montreal  •  239 Sulpician business offices  •  240 Monastère de Bon Pasteur  •  241 Number and assessed annual revenue of units owned by landlords and single proprietors in two adjacent wards in 1848  •  244 8.13 Fluidity in property ownership, 1825–1848  •  246 8.14 The distribution of the franchise in 1842  •  251 8.15 Frequency of servants in occupied households in 1842  •  253 8.16 Frequency of labourers in the 1848 tax roll  •  254 8.17 Variation in the average rents along 120 streetscapes in 1848  •  255 8.18 Relative value of town centre properties in 1825, by Viger’s three ethno-linguistic classifications  •  262 8.19 The 200 town centre properties owned by women in 1825, 1832, and 1840  •  264 8.20 Quintile land values in the town centre, 1825–1848  •  267 9.1 Roddick Gates, 1925  •  280 9.2 Key Plan to the Chs E. Goad & Company’s Atlas of the City of Montreal, 1880  •  284 9.3 map ’s geo-referenced edition of Chs E. Goad & Company, Atlas of Montreal, 1880  •  after page 284 9.4 Domestic servants and skilled labour in 1881  •  288 9.5 Concentrations of three cultural communities and their institutions, 1881  •  290 9.6 Contrasting views of the Protestant community  •  291 9.7 Where the merchants and manufacturers who were ‘of’ their firm lived and worked in 1880  •  296 9.8 Value of each property in the city in 1880  •  298 9.9 Distribution of property by gender in 1881  •  302 9.10 Square metres per entry in Lovell’s directory, 1880  •  304 9.11 Montreal City and District Savings Bank building, 1870  •  307

tables 3.1 Notes drawn by craftsmen and protested by banks in Montreal  •  74 3.2 Number of firms by rank order signing apprenticeship contracts or hiring journeymen before notary to work in Montreal, 1820 to 1829, showing their observed-by-expected indices  •  84

xiv

Figures and Tables

4.1 When did suppliers come to Montreal?  •  104 7.1 Doctors in Montreal in the 1820s  •  212 7.2 Physicians, surgeons, and dentists practising in Montreal, 1842–1845  •  215 7.3 Properties owned by doctors on the tax roll of 1848  •  222 8.1 Size of buildings in Montreal in 1825 and 1846  •  233 8.2 Quintile distribution of lot sizes in 1825 and 1846  •  233 8.3 Occupational titles provided by the 1848 tax roll  •  247 9.1 Quintile distribution of entries in Lovell’s by gender, in square metres  •  305

Acknowledgments I learnt to reason at the dining room table. My parents, Joan Walsh and Tom Sweeny, had prepared my brother and me well, with regular visits to the local library, Tuesday nights at the Mechanics Institute, and Sunday visits to museums. By my teen years, suppertime debates were a highlight of the day. As my brother Jim and I went at it, with the active participation of my father, my mother would keep a bemused watch. However, she usually had the last word: “The things you know for sure aren’t so.” My mother died in 1986 and my father in 2005. There is a lot of both of them in this book. Jim has offered unwavering, but always critical, support to my work, which is how it should be. Our parents would not have wanted it any other way. Since 1988, Élizabeth-Anne Malischewski has been my most cogent critic, caring confidante, and strongest supporter. Without her, this book would never have been written. Our daughter, Charlotte-Anne Malischewski, has taught me the importance of time, and that is something every historian should know. Graduate students are taught to read acknowledgments carefully to establish the work’s intellectual genealogy. I do not want there to be any possible misunderstanding: my mentors were the late George Rudé, Richard Rice, and the late Louise Dechêne. The extent of my intellectual debts to them is evident in the pages that follow. Here, I would like to express by deep gratitude for their having chosen to befriend an angry young man and to treat him as their intellectual peer. Forty-five years ago, at college, I met Ron Thériault, and we have been best friends ever since. He has heard more about the ideas in this book over their long gestation period than anyone else. His bemused and critical reception for each of my latest enthusiasms has helped keep me on track. Much of this book was made possible by an unusual experiment in historical practice, the research project known as the mbhp – the Montreal Business History Project. There I was privileged to work with and learn from some fine historians. I would particularly like to thank Jane Greenlaw,

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Grace Laing Hogg, Gilles Lauzon and Hélène Paré for choosing to share parts of their journeys with me. Twenty-five years ago I moved to St John’s, Newfoundland. There I discovered a wonderful culture and I would like to thank my gracious guides: Anita Best, Chris Brookes, Jerome Canning, Linda Cullum, the late Stuart Pierson, Fran Warren, and the Maxse Street gang. At Memorial University, Valerie Burton has been an exemplary colleague. She has sceptically and perceptively commented on much of my work and, through her own practice, helped me to better appreciate my responsibilities as a teacher. When you work on a problem for close to forty years, you meet and learn from many people. Here I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Richard Lanthier, the late John Laffey, Alfred Dubuc, Joanne Burgess, Louise Larivière, Brian Young, Bernard Dansereau, Peter Orr, Martha Stewart, Alan Stewart, the late Christiane Malet, Kate McPherson, Gwen Schulman, Bob Morris, Tom Wien, Bob Hong, Eric Davis, Barb Neis, Bill Wicken, Sherry Olson, Gerald Sider, Andrew Rolfson, Verena Winiwarter, John Bishop, Ruth Perry, and José-Luis Oyon. I wrote the first draft of this journal in 2009 during a three-month stay in Sucre, Bolivia. There, as my work progressed, I benefited greatly from critical readings by Élizabeth-Anne Malischewski, Gerald Sider, Richard Rice, Valerie Burton and, when back in Canada, by Sherry Olson. The journal has gone through two subsequent redrafts, and in each case I continued to benefit from the sage advice of Élizabeth-Anne and Valerie. I am particularly indebted to Élizabeth-Anne for insisting on the importance of completing the work. Alfred Dyck, an earth scientist and honest friend, acted as outside reader on several chapters. Charlotte-Anne Malischewski and Liam Bennett helped render the introduction more accessible. The completed manuscript benefited greatly from the deft and empathetic copy-editing of Judith Turnbull. I would like to express my appreciation for the decades of professional service provided by staff at the Archives nationales du Québec, dépot de Montréal (now the ba nq -m ), and the Archives de la Ville de Montréal. I have discussed my research results with colleagues at more than a hundred academic conferences in Quebec, Canada, and abroad over the past forty years. These gatherings are a fundamental venue for the exchange of research results. My own work has benefited greatly from the comments and suggestions I received, while I learnt much of what I know about the history of the world and the evolving state of historiography from the di-



Acknowledgments xvii

versity of papers, debates, and conversations at these meetings. All of these conferences were only possible because of the extraordinary voluntary efforts by busy academics and staff who take on these responsibilities in addition to their normal workloads. I am pleased to acknowledge the debt that I and my colleagues owe to these hundreds of people around the world. Support for differing aspects of my research came from the following public institutions: the Fonds pour la Formation de chercheurs et l’aide à la recherche, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and Geoide, all of whose support I gratefully acknowledge. I would be remiss, however, if I were not also to note that one of these public institutions is no longer with us, another is being wound down, while sshrc faces continuing budgetary restrictions and government interference in setting council priorities. Political interference has also seriously affected mun . Academic freedom can only flourish in a healthy, publicly funded environment. At no time in our history have we needed more the new ideas and creative solutions that only academic freedom permits.

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Abbreviations aha a sq banq bma cha eha ehs fcar gis grsm ihaf lac map mbhp mma mrb mun rin savm shm ssha uqam

American Historical Association Archives du séminaire de Québec Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec Bank of Montreal Archives Canadian Historical Association Economic History Association Economic History Society Fonds de recherche du Québec Geographic Information System Groupe de recherche sur la société montréalaise Institut d’histoire d’Amérique française Library and Archives Canada Montréal, l’avenir du passé Montreal Business History Project McCord Museum Archives McGill Rare Books Memorial University of Newfoundland Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale Service des archives de la Ville de Montréal Société historique de Montréal Social Science History Association Université du Québec à Montréal

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WHY DID WE CHOOSE TO INDUSTRIALIZE? Leaphorn had said something like “Even so, you couldn’t expect to find anything except randomness in the way the rain fell.” And Haskie Jim had watched the rain awhile, silently. And then he had said, and Joe Leaphorn still remembered not just the words but the old man’s face when he said them: “I think from where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.” Tony Hillerman, Coyote Waits, 1990

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Introduction Humanity has just passed a historic watershed. For the first time in 6,500 years the majority of people on earth no longer work the earth. The worldwide eclipse of the peasantry highlights how truly global industrial society has become. Qualitatively new relationships between people, between people and things, and between people and nature define industrial society. And yet widely differing societies all over the world have industrialized. How can we explain these new relationships in light of such diversity? Why did the myriad choices people made in quite specific times and places result in the emergence of common patterns? This book chronicles my four-decade search for answers to these questions. It offers a new explanation of why we chose to industrialize. I argue that this fundamental transformation of human society was neither natural nor inevitable. Societies industrialized because of the choices people made when faced with particular, unprecedented opportunities and constraints. Their choices were formed by history, and so both time and place mattered. What had gone before and where they were in the world defined the nature of these novel opportunities and constraints for the people in each society. In turn, their choices made history as they redefined opportunity and constraint for themselves and others. In time, through this complex interplay of individual and collective choices – what historians call human agency – new structures of authority and power emerged to channel, if not control, the maelstrom of change unleashed by the making of the early modern world. Indeed, the discovery of new trade routes from Europe to Asia, the European invasion of the Americas, and the Euro-American trade in African slaves combined to precipitate unprecedented change everywhere. These changes both challenged long-held beliefs and undermined existing patterns of human relationships. Both of these aspects would be of fundamental importance to why we chose to industrialize. No society has industrialized within the accepted values and belief systems of pre-industrial society. This does not mean that religious beliefs are incompatible with industrialization. Quite the contrary, all of the earliest

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

societies that industrialized became far more religious than they had been prior to industrialization, while the role of religious fundamentalism in currently industrializing societies is a major feature of the contemporary world. What it does mean is that the intellectual and cultural basis of pre-industrial society was challenged by new ways of thinking before any significant economic change took place. Thought preceded action. Key to understanding the later emergence of the qualitatively new relationships characteristic of industrial society was the early modern world’s massive shift to the systematic use of unfree labour. From the Quechuaspeaking silver miners of Potosí to the West African slaves of the Caribbean, from the newly enserfed peasants on the great plains of eastern Europe to the Hindis indentured and enslaved by the Mogul and European powers in India, and to the newly colonized Han of the Q’ing dynasty, unfree labour shaped the opportunities and constraints of the early modern world. Unfree labour was itself not new. What was new was its widespread use in the production of commodities for an international market. Furthermore, as ethnic, religious, and cultural differences frequently marked the divide between master and servant, serf, or slave, the use of unfree labour on such an unprecedented scale became inseparable from the modern construction of race. The global changes of the early modern world have been the subject of extensive study in both history and the social sciences. As the pioneering ‘world systems theory’ and the more recent ‘Atlantic World’ historiography suggest,1 however, the tendency has been to concentrate on the general unifying factors. This study takes a different tack. I think we can best understand the general by studying the specific, for global change is the result not of distant abstract forces, but of the decisions many different people make in their specific local conditions as they respond to what is happening around them.2 If we are to understand change in terms of the choices people make, then a focus on the specific is essential. The specific time and place chosen for this study is Montreal from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the late 1840s, when industrialization began. Situated on an island at the northern limits of a large and fertile plain, Montreal’s 12,000 inhabitants in 1815 serviced a fully settled and prosperous agricultural region. Feudal relations on the land combined with vibrant craft and mercantile communities in town to make for a surprisingly European city. By the late 1820s, immigration from the British Isles had transformed Montreal into a majority English-speaking town. Debates over a



Introduction 5

nationalist, liberal, democratic project dominated public life in the 1830s, until they were repressed by force of British arms in 1837–38. Then, a topdown transformation of both local and colonial governance led to Montreal becoming the capital of the United Canadas in 1843. As the British government dismantled its mercantilist policies in the mid-1840s, Montrealers chose to industrialize.

How Is This Book Organized? This book has a chronological narrative structure. By and large, the subject matter is treated chronologically because time matters in history, but that is not the chronology structuring this narrative. Instead, I tell the story as I lived it. How my research evolved over almost forty years frames the entire work. I chose to write this book as a journal of discovery because in retrospect I realized that the way I asked the questions largely determined my research results. I asked better questions as I learnt to listen to what the variety of sources I was examining each had to say. Developing new ways of knowing the past and new ways of doing history took me a long time. Problems I first encountered in the late 1970s and early 1980s were not properly resolved until well into the twenty-first century. Thus, in this narrative, I will return time and again to the problems of knowing and doing history. Here too, I learnt, thought best precedes action. Unlike most historical monographs, this study is not introduced by a review of the secondary literature. Instead only brief, quite pointed summaries of specific debates appear. The limited and focused nature of these historiographical discussions is deliberate. I discuss the secondary literature when it directly influenced my work. In the opening chapters, I use the historiographic debates to capture the tenor of the times while recognizing how they shaped my initial research agenda. Soon, however, it was my own research that generated the key conceptual questions: What is the relationship between a source and the evidence it contains? Does the economic dichotomy between internal and external factors make historic sense? What is the relative importance of class and gender? What alternative strategies exist for understanding the past? What does it mean to adopt a post-colonial perspective? Is it necessary to understand capitalism? Each of the book’s chapters examines a set of problems that I was dealing with more or less simultaneously. None are straight-forward narratives,

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

nor are they restricted to a single historical problem. This too was deliberate, for as I reconstructed my journey of discovery, I became increasingly aware that I might be creating the false impression that I had known where I was going. My work was never as coherent, or as clear-sighted, as that would have required. Thus, the lack of a clear linear narrative and the only partial resolution of most problems were both intentional; the apparent confusion was real enough. In my experience, research is a messy business. The opening pages of each chapter explain the logic linking the diverse sections, and the concluding page or pages highlight the key lessons learnt. I suggest you read both before engaging with the substantive parts of each chapter. The opening chapter on “Points of Departure” discusses theoretical concerns that influenced my reception of a significant historiographical moment. In the mid-1970s, a qualitatively different way of thinking about industrialization was formulated in Britain. This new way of thinking freed me to ask radically different questions of the Canadian experience. Chapter 2 is titled “Colonial States” because the distinction between settler colonies and slave colonies is fundamental to my argument, but I also explore a more metaphorical meaning. A colonial state of mind characterized both the dominant historiographical approach in the relevant Canadian literature and the methods used more widely in historical research. Understanding how theory and method were so closely entwined is a key purpose of this chapter. Developing new methodologies proved essential to breaking with this colonial mindset. I demonstrate the power of this alternative approach through the next two related chapters, “Internal Dynamics” and “Cuvier’s Feather.” Drawing on the transition debate, which explored the origins of capitalism, in “Internal Dynamics” I examine the conflicting dynamics of merchant capital and craft production in pre-industrial Montreal and conclude that, rather than a clear dominance of commercial interests, most merchants served the craft world. In “Cuvier’s Feather,” I explore the complex relationships between town and country. There is an extensive historiography on the rural world of New France and Lower Canada, and I argue that, as in many other countries, the weight of these well-established schools of thought is the central conceptual problem we need to overcome. I illustrate how this might be done, using firewood as a case study. Exploring how peasants and merchants interacted led me to reject as ahistorical the widely accepted di-



Introduction 7

chotomy of internal/external forces in economic history and to conclude that in this instance town/country relations were roughly equitable. Taken together, these examinations of pre-industrial urban and rural life forced me to rethink my most basic assumptions of time, space, and historical causality. In “Agency and Constraint,” I critically examine the most influential mainstream and progressive historical epistemologies to conclude that they share a common professional approach that effectively denies the primacy of inequality to understanding our world. I argue that in order to critically understand the past, we need to develop not just new methodologies, but also a qualitatively different epistemology. Evoking recent work in aboriginal studies, I explore merchant credit relations in the Newfoundland inshore fishery and property relations in late preindustrial Montreal to illustrate how agency and constraint exist in a creative tension that is constitutive of every historical source. Recognizing that each source is the product of the inequities of the society that produced it is vital to developing a historical theory and method that can help change the world. Equipped with this new insight, I critically examine the census returns, tax rolls, city directories, and an ordnance survey of pre-industrial Montreal. In “C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée,” I conclude that far from being “routinely generated nominal series,” these sources were attempts by their authors to make sense of and help to bring order to a rapidly changing world. The novelty and scale of their rethinking of the world have been lost to us because of their very success, for to a significant degree, the world they first imagined is the world we now inhabit. If each source is such an eloquent witness to past inequalities, then a genuinely radical alternative to bourgeois historical theory and method is possible. In “Towards a Cubist Portrait” (chapter 7), I challenge the legitimacy of narrative and propose a qualitatively different approach, using multiple sightings of historical processes with each sighting rooted in a particular source. I illustrate how fruitful such a consciously contradictory approach can be by re-examining monetary protests and apprenticeship contracts, two of the principal sources I had used to examine the internal dynamics of Montreal’s craft world. Just as this reassessment challenged my earlier characterization of coherent craft communities, my discovery of a rich and quite surprising source revealed how seriously I had mistimed the fundamental shift in the value of movable property. These new insights

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

built on a shared realization by a minority of my colleagues of the need to challenge long-established understandings of the imperial relationship through a post-colonial perspective. Equipped with these new conceptual insights and analytical tools, I examine how the social and spatial mobility of physicians and surgeons were so intertwined that they explain the professionalization of medicine. This discussion of cubism as historical method concludes with an assessment of what has been discovered so far. In “Imaginary Lines,” I extend my reach to include both historical geographic information systems and the surviving built environment. The deconstruction of a commercial map celebrating late pre-industrial Montreal is contrasted with numerous period constructions in an exploration of how gender, class, and ethnicity shaped and were themselves reshaped by the emergence of a market in real estate. The practical and theoretical significance of gender revealed by these processes raises fundamental challenges for historical materialists. Here, I restrict my comments to why our presumption of the primacy of production is both historically and theoretically wrong. I then return to the historical material to discuss how these new forms of inequality, generated by the commodification of nature, posed insurmountable problems for the liberal democratic project that had inspired many of the earlier changes and political movements in the city. Chapter 9, the last substantive chapter, takes a leap of thirty years to describe the “Industrial City” of Montreal in 1880. This chapter is not offered as a proof of my earlier explanations, but rather as an illustration of how in a particular time and place the choices and processes that led to industrialization restructured the use of urban space. I critically assess descriptive evidence from four distinct sources: the Goad insurance atlas, the 1881 census, the 1880–81 city directory, and the 1880 municipal tax roll. The resultant cubist portrait challenges widely shared assumptions of the nature of early industrial society. I argue that fundamental changes in gender and ethnic relations were necessary to support this new social order, which was itself ecologically unsustainable. Thus, the new order required qualitatively different ways of thinking about nature, which may well be the ultimate legacy of the choice people made to industrialize. I start the book’s conclusion with a summary of my major findings. This might profitably be read before you engage with the substantive parts of the book, as it offers a synopsis of my journey. Knowing where you are going, and why, may aid you in navigating what is at times a challenging voyage. I then discuss the implications of my findings for our understanding of lib-



Introduction 9

eralism, an issue at the heart of recent historiographical debates. I conclude by offering a succinct statement of who, what, where, and, above all, why we chose to industrialize.

Rethinking History This book chronicles a four-decade critical engagement with people who try to understand and explain the past. Much of this struggle has taken place against the backdrop of the neo-liberal transformation of university life.3 Neo-liberalism privileges the personal and the individual over the social and the collective.4 Its triumph in the academy has rendered my central concerns irrelevant to most of my colleagues in economic his­ tory. Put simply, if one actually believes that there is no alternative to the market, then asking why we chose to industrialize is a rather silly question. We did because we could. Once it was technically and politically possible, it was the only “rational choice.” For those who share this point of view, the question is not why we chose to industrialize, but merely how and to a lesser extent when and where. I have chosen not to critique this literature here because systematically engaging with the research of people who think like this would have made for a very different type of book.5 It would not have allowed me to tell my story, for in the eyes of the majority of historians writing today, both my initial questions and those that only emerged as the research progressed are quite literally beyond the pale. Thus, my principal historiographical argument is that I discovered why we chose to industrialize thanks to a radically different historical theory and method. Explaining how I came to understand the need for such a new way of thinking about history structures much of this book. Now, the triumph of neo-liberalism is not how the last forty years in the profession is generally seen. Instead, as hundreds of historiographical syllabi show, the changes that matter have been two fundamentally antithetical shifts in how we think about history. The first, dating from the 1960s and early 1970s, saw the rise of a politically engaged and totalizing social history. Known as ‘socialist humanism,’ this new approach challenged the presumed legitimacy of political history and by extension its primary subject: the nation-state. Furthermore, it consciously contributed to a democratizing of both the subject matter of history and how it was to be practised. The second shift, starting in the mid-1980s, saw a profound questioning

10

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

of the social and its related structures in favour of a turn to linguistics, discourse theory, post-structural analysis, and, more generally, the cultural. This multi-faceted approach privileges identities, texts, and ambiguity. My change of tense here is deliberate, for the cultural turn, unlike engaged social history, is still with us. Its rise is closely associated with the breakthrough of gender as a key analytical category. A series of now-canonic texts have been used to date with some precision the rise and reach of each approach.6 The problem with this portrait of the profession is that for the vast majority of practising historians these disciplinary transformations never happened. Nor, even for the distinct minorities of historians who were affected, did they ever happen with the rapidity and clarity that a whole historiographical industry now simply assumes. Furthermore, this profoundly misleading meta-narrative about our own discipline’s past ignores completely how people become historians and what they do once they have achieved this privileged status. Finally, this imagined past posits an unsullied autonomy for intellectual history that is simply untenable. History, particularly in its Anglo-American variants, is a decidedly empirical discipline. Historians generally eschew theory. Most historians’ only sustained encounter with theory is in graduate school, which is why particular theories and methods tend to have remarkably long shelf lives. In the midst of the Cold War, when an engaged social history was allegedly dominant, few North American departments promoted it. None of the leading graduate schools in the United States or Canada offered employment to any of its stars.7 I was fortunate enough to have taken my undergraduate degree with one of its leading lights, George Rudé, but that was because I studied at Sir George Williams, the ymca ’s adult education college in Montreal. Engaged social history had a greater impact in England, but not the rest of the British Isles, largely because of the Workers Educational Association and the unparalleled success in the late 1970s of the History Workshop movement.8 The limited influence of the new social history in North America cannot simply be attributed to the Cold War. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was not class – the central analytical category of the new social history – that mattered in the United States, so much as race. Indeed, the most influential works by the two leading social humanists in America, Eugene Genovese and Herbert Gutman, were as successful as they were because they ap-



Introduction 11

plied the new theory and method to rethinking aspects of race in America. Neither Gutman’s pioneering work on ethnicity and class formation nor Genovese’s work on political economy had anywhere near the same resonance.9 Perhaps more importantly, engaged social history was not the only new game in town. Two qualitatively different approaches competed for graduate students and research funding. The first was a social science history championed by the sociologist Charles Tilly at Harvard. It stressed the impor­ tance of politics to understanding modernity. It proposed a non-Parsonian theory of the mutually constitutive interactions between the state and social protest for Western Europe.10 Two of the younger scholars shaped by this approach, William H. Sewell Jr and Joan Wallach Scott, would go on to be key players in the new cultural history.11 Chronologically the second but in appeal probably the leading alternative approach to an engaged social history was quantitative social history. It is difficult now to recapture the odd combination of intense interest for some and complex fears for many in the profession that this alternative once embodied.12 The approach’s founding text by Harvard’s Stephan Thernstrom was published the year after E.P. Thompson’s seminal The Making of the English Working Class. Characteristically, it used the past to better understand a contemporary concern in the social sciences; in this case, social mobility.13 Two large urban history projects of the 1970s, on Philadelphia and Hamilton, spawned numerous less ambitious attempts on campuses across the continent.14 At the same time, cliometricians developed a quantitative approach, known as the new economic history, whose counter-factual arguments were, if anything, even more controversial.15 In Canada, the central political issue was neither class nor race, but the national question. Despite Quebec’s having the most radical student and union movements on the continent, socialist humanism had limited appeal in that province in the 1960s and 1970s. An inter-university centre for European history was established in Montreal largely through the efforts of George Rudé, but no major work in Quebec history claimed to have been inspired by this approach. Instead, historians debated the future of Quebec by offering conflicting interpretations of its past. In this highly politicized context, legitimacy mattered, and so, not surprisingly, the theoretical references were most often to the Annales, the most influential of the French schools, or to mainstream American work.16 With their

12

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

strengths in demography, historical geography, and sociology, the appeal of quantitative social history was particularly strong on the francophone campuses. In English Canada, a small group of largely unilingual, new left, graduate students created a very different situation. They commandeered control of the labour history committee of the Canadian Historical Association in 1975. This provided them with the basis for one of the longest-living offshoots of engaged social history in the world: the journal Labour/Le Travail.17 Thus, the timing and impact of engaged social history were considerably more complex and in fundamental ways less significant than what the meta-narrative would have us believe. They certainly did not have the transformative effect on the profession that those of us who were involved had hoped, but this political failure in no way meant that “the social” as a subject of inquiry was eclipsed by “the cultural.” Every year thousands of scholars from North America and Europe meet at the Social Science His­ tory Association, and every second year similar numbers attend the European Social Science History Conference. In size, only the annual American Historical Association (aha) meetings and the bi-decennial World Congress of Historical Sciences can compare. Here in Canada, for decades interdisciplinary social science history projects have dwarfed all other funded research in the profession. Furthermore, for many of the established historians who did take the cultural turn, it was more of an evolution than a radical shift.18 They had never endorsed the revolutionary project that was implicit in both socialist humanism and the debates surrounding structuralism, for they had never moved beyond a belief in a democratic ethos fully consistent with advanced capitalist values.19 This necessarily meant a disarming of the most politically explosive elements of the social critique of knowledge and power developed by Michel Foucault, which were unapologetically structural. This depoliticization was greatly facilitated by Foucault being read out of context, for the Anglo-American academy’s dependence on translation introduced a major time lag. Foucault’s reception in Quebec, where he was read at the same time as in France, offers a useful corrective. In his lifetime, Foucault’s contributions were understood as part of a series of exceptionally wide-ranging interdisciplinary debates involving Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Gilles Deleuze, Edgar Morin, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu,



Introduction 13

and Michel Aglietta, to cite but the most frequently read of these men, and the fact that they were all men was in many ways more important than their theoretical disagreements. Taken in context as part of a debate on modernity while Quebec experienced its own Quiet Revolution and then struggled with the aftermath, Foucault did not have anything like the same impact he would posthumously have in the post-modern,20 neo-liberalizing, AngloAmerican academy. What is important in understanding these later professional choices is not a shift from the social to the cultural, but a rejection of the political. The very idea that academic work should serve a larger project to change the world had been lost. Fully consistent with the larger neo-liberal transformation of the world, this fundamental change in what academics thought possible or desirable started well before the 1989 democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe and the crushing of the potentially revolutionary movement in Tiananmen Square. Those events confirmed rather than caused the abandonment of revolutionary politics in the academy. Thus, by the mid-1990s, when certain texts associated with the cultural turn were beginning to achieve canonic status in historiography courses, graduate students were unwittingly participating in a retroactive validation of the present in the past21 whereby select texts were presented out of context as the key turning points for the discipline as a whole. Take, for instance, the way gender has been subsumed in and by the cultural turn. If we all had taken the cultural turn as a result of Joan Scott’s 1986 article on gender in the American Historical Review,22 then it would follow logically that gender is a conceptual tool whose legitimacy within the profession was established decades ago. Nothing could be further from the truth. Gender, class, and race are not just conceptual tools; these analytical categories are fundamentally political weapons, because they offer critical ways of understanding how power is exercised. And since universities are such highly gendered institutions, establishing gender as a key analytical category has necessarily been a very long and ongoing and as yet far from complete political struggle in every discipline, faculty, and school. The earliest monographs I know that successfully used gender to completely overturn a long-established historiographic understanding of how a past society worked were both published in 1990.23 Since then I have read fewer than a dozen others. Such slow progress on such a fundamental issue speaks eloquently to the continued power of the forces arrayed against recognizing gender as a legitimate analytical category. Gendered

14

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

relations privilege men in the academy, and we have systematically used our positions to maintain those privileges. Indeed, the neo-liberal transformation of the academy, by its privileging the individual at the expense of the collective, has in many ways reinforced the barriers to a gender-based analysis while successfully relegating class to the dustbin. This denial of the historical complexity and ongoing nature of struggles within our own discipline is not just potentially misleading; it has subverted the apprenticeship of a whole generation of younger historians. Unaware of the actual content and portent of past debates, most younger scholars have been left bereft of the critical understanding and, more importantly, the historical perspectives necessary to oppose the neo-liberal transformation of the academy. Even highly laudable attempts to critique the new orthodoxy encounter serious difficulties in articulating a histori­ cally grounded reassertion of the importance of the political.24 For a work that spans the 1970s to the 2010s, the highly selective, when not distorting, historiographical understandings that I have been criticizing pose a real problem. In this work, my limited, but pointed, historiographical discussions are designed to address this problem by stressing the political nature of these disputes. Their explicitly political nature will surprise many graduate students, for this sort of engagement with the larger issues of our time is no longer expected, or indeed accepted, by most in the social sciences and humanities. Furthermore, I frame these debates in terms of my own political and theoretical evolution. The result is not offered as an alternative meta-narrative; nor could it be, since what it chronicles is at best a disjointed, non-linear, and unfinished story. By consciously reinserting both the political and the personal, I am essentially saying, despite all appearances to the contrary, that historiographical debates are not about the past. They take place firmly in the present, and their primary concern is how we should rethink the past in order to fashion a different future. Rethinking history requires us to be critically aware of how our profession works – how the creation and maintenance of informal and formal groupings through the design of courses, the supervision of graduate students, the writing of reviews and letters of recommendation, the evaluating of grant requests, the organizing of conferences, the editing of journals, the serving on committees of funding agencies and professional associations, and the extraordinarily convoluted world of academic publishing all necessarily promote particular viewpoints while censoring others. One



Introduction 15

does not have to agree with Ludmilla Jordanova, that these professional activities are the only thing that defines history as a discipline,25 to recognize their importance. The chapters that follow do not offer such a detailed sociology of knowledge production, for this is a historian’s journal of discovery, not an academic’s memoire, but they were written with a clear awareness of how and why history as an academic discipline works to impose the normalcy of the present onto qualitatively different pasts. Our disciplinary denial of the complexity of the relationships between past, present, and future, which I have been criticizing, builds on a shared way of thinking about time that is now common to both mainstream and most progressive scholarship. In advanced capitalist cultures, we tend to conceive of time as the empty homogeneous space through which we progress. But, as Walter Benjamin argued, a historical materialist “time of the now” would recognize the linkage that our “own era has formed with a definite earlier one.”26 Such a “now of knowability” marks this entire work, for it chronicles a re-“searching” for answers to questions that were not just marginalized by neo-liberalism, but were formulated in conscious opposition to it. We live in a neo-liberal age, one whose very triumph imperils our future. Being critically aware of this, I argue, greatly facilitates understanding the achievements and the ravages wrought by liberalism when it really was new. As I take you through the myriad struggles that shaped my current understandings of why we chose to industrialize, may my mother’s words of wisdom guide you as well: “The things you know for sure aren’t so.”

Chapter One

Points of Departure

I came to the subject of why we industrialized with certain partially formed ideas about how we should explore the past. Two questions framed my fumbling towards a coherent historical theory and method. How does our being in history influence our use of sources? Can we avoid imposing present-day thoughts and concerns on a past that would not have shared them? I sketch my preliminary answers to these questions in this chapter’s first section. My early work benefited greatly from a unique historiographical moment. In the mid-1970s, a century-old explanation of the Industrial Revolution came under direct attack by innovative research in Britain and Canada. This significant conceptual breakthrough, discussed in section two, offered not only a new point of departure, but a partial road map for the initial stages of my journey. Advancing beyond those early stages required, however, a new historical theory and method. This subject is discussed in detail over the course of the entire work, but in the interests of clarity, I conclude this opening chapter with a brief outline of its major points.

Being in History History is a problem-oriented discipline, and so the key question is almost always why. Knowing what, when, and where may help answer the ‘why’ question by establishing the context and thereby eliminating improbable answers. But at its core, history is concerned with what motivated people in differing times and places to do what they did. Recognizing this primacy of the ‘why’ question has significant implications for how we design our



Points of Departure 17

research strategies and for what types of evidence we privilege in our explanations of people’s motivations. Building on the insights of the Annales school,1 my early research strategies generally started with the articulation of a problématique, which is a theoretically informed model of causality. As we shall see, rarely did my hypotheses prove valid. Indeed, many of the most important lessons learnt owed more to serendipity than to scientific rigour. Nonetheless, this approach has the great merit of framing the problem in the present, and as I came to understand historical research as a dialogue between a particular present and a specific past, this process helped me to be more aware of my own historicity, for as the great French historian of Catalonia, Pierre Vilar, succinctly observed, “Historians are in history.”2 Critical awareness of our being in history, or historicity, matters because one of the greatest dangers in historical research is present-mindedness. This is when we impose the concerns of our own time and place on another time and place, and as a result we mistake our own motivations for those of past peoples, who in all likelihood would have thought radically differently than we do. Early on, I found the work of Jean Chesneaux, a French historian of early twentieth-century China, and John Berger, an English novelist and art historian, to be particularly useful in avoiding the pitfalls of presentmindedness. In Du passé faisons table rase, Chesneaux3 argued that the relationship between the historian and the particular point she or he examines is more important than the relationship she or he enjoys with all the rest of history. My updated version of one of his graphics in figure 1.1 illustrates this going back in, rather than through, time. Note the way the recent past looms over the historian, symbolizing the weight of our own historicity. The historian does not travel back over the whole span of time to reach the object of his or her inquiry. The connection is immediate and direct. Thus, the two arrows represent the two poles of the historical distance between historian and subject matter. We need to be not only conscious, but also respectful, of this distance if we are to avoid present-mindedness. John Berger4 in Pig Earth, the first volume of his moving trilogy on the fate of the modern peasantry, also used graphics to illustrate a fundamental historical problem. He contrasted the understanding of past, present, and future that characterized peasant societies, with that typical of advanced capitalist cultures. In the former, the past is a rich wellspring of resources to draw upon, while the future is uncertain and plagued with unforeseen

18

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

Hungary 1956

Thatcher elected

Implosion of USSR 9/11

WWII

Historian in the present

Wall Street Crash

Wall Street collapse

WWI Boxer Rebellion FrancoPrussian War

Crystal Palace Exhibition London, 1851 First railroad

Figure 1.1  •  Relationship between the historian and her or his object of inquiry. The direct nature of this relationship means the historian need not take into account any of the events of the intervening years when researching the Crystal Palace Exhibition, although those events necessarily influence one’s perception of that object. Source: Jean Chesneaux, Du passé faisons table rase.

but inevitable difficulties. By contrast, in contemporary cultures, the past pales in comparison with the future. Present-mindedness is often the product of failing to recognize the significance of these differing temporal outlooks. Our disciplinary conventions on how to use historical evidence illustrate this problem rather well. Contemporary historical thinking distinguishes between qualitative evidence, which is about the nature of things, and quantitative evidence, which is about the number of things. The post-war shift to abstract mathematical models in economics led to a much greater weight being accorded to quantitative methods in history and a relative de-emphasis on qualitative evidence. Modelling combined with rational choice theory now completely dominates economic history, while, more broadly, social science



Points of Departure 19

Advanced capitalist society

Peasant society Past

Present

Future

Past

Present

Future

Figure 1.2  •  Berger’s conflicting cultural outlooks on time. Instead of the past being a wellspring to draw on during future difficulties, it pales in comparison with an expanding future. Source: John Berger, Pig Earth.

history has been fundamentally redefining what constitutes history since the 1960s. This latter approach applies to the past the wide array of methodologies developed to make sense of the present by anthropologists, demographers, geographers, linguists, political scientists, and sociologists. Quantitative historians explain the past through abstract models that rely on quantitative evidence most frequently drawn from what they conceive to be routinely generated nominal series. These sources – primarily, but not exclusively, census returns, tax rolls, city directories, and baptismal, marriage and funeral records – contain a great deal of descriptive information. They also contain the names of people, so one can link them together and develop composite portraits of thousands, indeed potentially millions, of people in the past. Statistical methods are then applied to this descriptive information, conceived as distinct variables, to prove explanations of causality. This approach answers the ‘why’ question by deducing from observable patterns in the quantitative data why change happened. This method of constructing a discourse of historical proof allows quantitative historians to bypass altogether any need to examine qualitative evidence. I think this type of quantitative analysis is ahistorical, that is, outside history. It substitutes statistical analysis in the present for a properly grounded understanding of the past. There can, however, be no doubt of the academic success of this method. In many areas of history, it has led to a privileging of ‘hard’ quantitative evidence over ‘soft’ qualitative evidence. A sad tale, drawn from that most quantitative of our subdisciplines, demography, neatly illustrates the problem inherent in this way of thinking.

20

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

There have been two demographic revolutions in the history of western Europe: the first saw family size increase significantly in the early modern period, and the second saw family size drop dramatically in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Since the 1960s, population growth in developing countries has been a major public policy concern. Substantial resources were invested to discover why the second demographic revolution happened, so that the lessons learnt might be applied to those countries where people continue to have large families. All of the early research showed that the change first occurred in the homes of professional middle-class men. This encouraged international agencies, such as the International Monetary Fund (imf ) and the World Bank, to finance economic development projects that would hasten the development of local middle classes. After billions of dollars were invested without any decline in family size, qualitative research in developing countries, first presented at the Nairobi United Nations (un ) Conference on Women, indicated that the key variable was not the occupation of the male head of household, but the level of education attained by girls. The more education they received, the greater the control they later exercised over their family’s size. Now, those professional middle-class European men of the late-nineteenth century were more often than not married to highly educated women, but that was not a variable in the census, and so, armed with impressive Pearson correlation factors, we had attributed the second demographic revolution to the wrong factor, leaving one to wonder what the environmental footprint of our species would be if development funding over the past half century had been directed primarily towards female education. Many, indeed most, historians did not adopt quantitative methods. People working on political, national, military, or diplomatic history – what was considered to be ‘history tout court’ until the late 1950s – continued to privilege qualitative evidence generated by elites. In their work, the presumed importance of particular restrained groups of largely wealthy, powerful, white men, and of the papers they left, needed no justification. Nor, given their privileged position in the academy, were most ever likely to be called to account. But even in more innovative fields, most historians in the 1970s and 1980s continued to rely primarily on qualitative evidence. These historians considered the treatment of historical evidence to be a methodological, not an epistemological, issue; it was a question of ways of doing, rather than ways of knowing. Generally guided by the existing literature in the field, they identified an object of inquiry and then located



Points of Departure 21

as much material about that subject matter as possible. These historians were not naive. The pitfalls of particular sources were recognized and widely discussed in the secondary literature. Indeed, it was to resolve this problem of ‘biased’ sources that the best of these historians threw the net so widely they were able to capture all or nearly all of the surviving historical references to their subject matter. The task of then reassembling these shards from the past into a coherent narrative for the present was considered to be an essential part of the historian’s craft. Although one eschewed qualifications like ‘definitive,’ because of course the questions we ask are the questions of our time and not for all time, nevertheless the aim was to produce the key work in a field. Matt Damon trenchantly ended the barroom discussion in Good Will Hunting by invoking this disciplinary logic: “You just haven’t read your Vickers!” The Vickers in question was the prize-winning Farmers & Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, 1630–1850 by Danny Vickers, my generation’s leading historian of colonial America. I, on the other hand, had read my Vickers, but that did not help me win the argument. It was 1995 and I had been invited at the last minute to stand in for a colleague at a round table on Farmers & Fishermen organized by the International Journal of Maritime History.5 I was the last of five to speak, and as everyone else had been so enthusiastic, I confessed that it felt like I had read another book. In a fundamental sense, I had. Vickers had combed through centuries of documentary evidence produced in this Massachusetts county, collecting every reference to work he could find. He then thematically reconstructed the nature of work in this colony of settlement. Everyone else had read the evidence and found it convincing. I found it disembodied – an evidential reconstruction stripped of the context provided by the sources that alone could give the evidence historical meaning. This method could capture neither the changing meaning of work as people aged nor the transformation of the work environment within households. Most tellingly, Vickers could find no explanation for the coming of the factory system to Lynn. When years of serious research of the highest quality fail to elucidate the most fundamental of changes, then the problem is likely to be epistemological, not methodological. Since the late 1980s, this epistemological challenge has been taken up largely by a new generation of historians in the Anglo-American academy. Influenced by Michel Foucault’s idea of the primacy of the knowledge/power nexus in modern societies, Paul Ricoeur and Hayden White’s

22

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

reformulation for history of Jacques Derrida’s “il n’y a pas d’hors-texte” and to varying extents by Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories, these scholars have promoted a post-modern and post-structural approach to the use of qualitative evidence. In so doing, they challenge the earlier, modern belief in definitive knowledge, stressing the derivative and partial nature of any representation of reality. If what actually happened is not knowable, how it was spun is. I will return to these diverse and challenging ways of knowing at several points in the book, for there is much to learn from a critical engagement with this scholarship. Here, I would simply observe that much of these scholars’ work, in using qualitative evidence to explore identity politics in the past, mistakes the historically exceptional for an inherent exoticism of the past. And this is not simply a failure to take sufficient care in placing the evidence in its historical context. It follows logically from their conscious denial of the possibility of apprehending reality. It is an epistemological stance that facilitates the invocation of ahistorical psychoanalytic theories while, ironically, reflecting the cultural dominance of the neo-liberal worldview, with its emphasis on the individual at the expense of the social. It is not surprising that there are serious problems inherent in both overly quantitative and overly qualitative approaches. After all, it is not a historical distinction, but one that historians simply borrowed from the social sciences. In the early 1980s, the Canadian historian Richard Rice developed an alternative approach.6 Instead of focusing on the types of evidence within a source, Rice argued for the primacy of the relationship between each source from the past and the question that the historian is asking in the present. If the processes that generated a source are directly relevant to the question being asked, then Rice called the contents of the source “phenomenal evidence,” because changes over time within the source would have been the product of the historical phenomenon being examined. By contrast, the contents of a source would be called “epiphenomenal” evidence when they were the product of processes unrelated to the question being asked. Thus, depending on the question the historian asks, the same evidence could be phenomenal or epiphenomenal. Phenomenal evidence, Rice argued, exists independently of the historian. It thus has the requisite ontological autonomy – that is, its own being – to provide the basis for an independent test of a historian’s hypothesis. Epiphenomenal evidence does not. Although it may be used for historical description and can enrich our historical understanding, epiphenom-



Points of Departure 23

enal evidence cannot provide a sufficient basis for a historically grounded discourse of proof. Two examples will hopefully clarify this fundamental distinction. Censuses are undertaken to fulfill specific information needs of the state. In nineteenth-century Canada, census makers asked quite detailed questions about agricultural production, but not about all of it. Field crops and larger animals figure prominently, but poultry, market gardens, preserves, and, save for fish, most forms of canning were ignored. Now, the former was gendered male and the latter female and that is not insignificant. However, the reason the census was so restrictive was that the Canadian state had no part in the management of local markets, nor was it directly interested in the self-sufficiency of farm households. Here, one might argue, was where the gender politics mattered. On the other hand, the state had a significant and rapidly growing role in the export of grains, dairy products, and meat. Thus, agricultural censuses can be used to test historical explanations of the role of the state, but the historian studying the development of farming should use the actual returns only as partial descriptions. In nineteenth-century Lower Canada/Quebec, the default marriage regime was a community of property between husband and wife administered by the husband, but with the wife enjoying a veto power over sales of real property. If this was deemed to be an inappropriate arrangement, a marriage contract could be drawn up before a notary public prior to the wedding. This contract would specify how real and movable property was to be managed until death do they part. These contracts are phenomenal evidence for the historian interested in how prospective couples and their parents envisaged managing the couples’ future household. For the historian concerned with the relative wealth of prospective couples, however, these contracts offer only epiphenomenal evidence. As I worked with these challenging concepts of Chesneaux, Berger, and Rice, I began to think of the past as part of a process that encompasses both us in the present and our myriad, yet indeterminate, futures. From such a perspective, history can be thought of as a series of evolving dialogues between our diverse presents and their many pasts that contribute to shaping our futures. Thus, historical explanation requires not just that we allow the diverse voices from the past to be heard, but that we explain why these particular voices have survived for us to hear. Listening attentively to what each source has to say is the best way to assess the meaning of the evidence each

24

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

one contains. This requires not only respecting the historical distance between our own being in history and the specific time and place in the past that we are examining, but also recognizing that any general explanation we develop through this dialogue is derivative, not definitive. Other starting points would certainly generate differing and perhaps contradictory explanations. This approach rejects singular, linear explanations of reality in favour of complexity.

Challenging the British model My first formulation of the central question of this book did not sufficiently recognize this complexity. For a number of years, I limited myself to asking what social and economic changes had permitted the Industrial Revolution. By asking the question in this manner, I obviously accorded priority to socio-economic change at the expense of intellectual and cultural factors. What may not be so obvious is the historiographical weight that the term Industrial Revolution carries. A rich historiographical tradition has essentially conceptualized it as the socio-economic transformation of Great Britain between 1760 and 1850. Taking the experience of one country’s industrialization as a model against which one evaluates other historical experiences favours singularity over complexity. Arnold Toynbee first popularized the term Industrial Revolution while teaching at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1878 to 1883. A posthumous collection of his work, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, appeared in 1884. In a remarkably prescient analysis, he introduced many of the themes that historians debated for the better part of the next century. He started with urbanization and population growth and then linked the Industrial Revolution to an agricultural revolution that involved enclosures, the elimination of much of the yeomanry, and the rise of large landlords, many of whom he argued came from the merchant class. The key element in the Industrial Revolution, he argued, was the replacement of medieval regulation by free competition, but in his analysis, he stressed a number of other factors: the absence of internal tariffs; the development of first canals and then roads to foster internal trade; the significance of foreign trade and shipping; the central role of protection for domestic industry; the importance of a handful of technical innovations in the cotton industry and of Watt’s improvements to the steam engine; the development of a coal industry; and the role of the putting-out system. And in quite moving



Points of Departure 25

terms he discussed the problem of pauperism. Toynbee concluded his discussion of the “Chief Features of the Revolution” with the observation that “the effects of the Industrial Revolution prove that free competition may produce wealth without producing well-being.” Much of Toynbee’s Lectures was devoted to a critical assessment of the development of political economy in the works of Adam Smith, the Reverend Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Throughout this analysis there is an unresolved tension between social concerns and liberal political economy. The same tension would mark the next major work in the field, Paul Mantoux’s 1912 La révolution industrielle au XVIII e siècle.7 Mantoux argued that industrialization took place in steps. The putting-out system, where generally a merchant distributed work to many dependent households, undermined the older craft workshops and so paved the way for factory production. He explained that these steps and their associated division of labour resulted from the development of regional and then national markets. This market-led explanation would be further developed after the Great War by T.S. Ashton, who wrote the introduction to the 1923 English edition of Mantoux, and by John R. Commons and the Wisconsin school of labour history in the United States.8 By then, however, the tension between social concerns and liberal political economy had been resolved by a historiographical division: on one side, a socially committed tendency that has often been social democratic or communist, and on the other, a resolutely liberal approach. On the socially committed side, three contributors from between the wars stand out. R.H. Tawney’s works on agrarian problems, religion, and the rise of capitalism extended the analysis of town–country relations back into the sixteenth century,9 as he movingly described the destruction of pre-industrial rural life in England. In a radical critique of mercantile control of craft production, strongly evocative of nineteenth-century “producer ideology,” Norman Ware’s 1924 Industrial Worker 1840–1860 extended the analysis to the United States. In 1930, Ivy Pinchbeck’s Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 seriously addressed the contribution of paid work by women for the first time. In a series of works published between 1924 and 1948,10 T.S. Ashton, who taught economics at Sheffield and then Manchester before occupying the chair in economic history at the London School of Economics, systematized the liberal position. Population growth and urbanization, owing to

26

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

improved agriculture practices, encouraged the development of free markets, which led to enhanced competition that resulted in technological change. Mechanization reduced the dependency on both skilled and manual labour, as animate sources of power were replaced by inanimate sources, most notably coal-fired steam. The human costs were real, but Ashton considered them to be the consequences of administrative inefficiencies, political pandering to special interests, and the exigencies of war, rather than of any fundamental economic processes. Furthermore, these costs should be set against the far greater costs paid by countries with similar increases in population that did not industrialize, such as Ireland in the mid-nineteenth and China and India in the early twentieth centuries. Ashton’s synthesis constituted a model for industrialization. This historical model was used repeatedly to explain why a country had failed to industrialize. Compared with Britain, the country was missing some key element. So, for example, France failed to modernize its agriculture, while Canada, which Ashton thought was industrializing as he wrote the preface to his 1967 edition of The Industrial Revolution, had an insufficient population. Nor was this just a historical model; for fellow liberal economist F.A. von Hayek, the godfather of neo-liberalism, Ashton’s synthesis both confirmed the dangers of state intervention and showed the naturalness of capitalism.11 Working with Ashton in his retirement, Walt Rostow, a Harvard economic historian, would develop a highly influential model for engineering sustained economic growth in developing countries.12 Both the progressive and liberal schools focused on internal factors, although this was more clearly the case for liberals. In retrospect, the silence on imperialism and the slave trade was astounding. Ashton, for example, could discuss the disastrous famines of Ireland, India, and China without once mentioning the role of British imperialism. None of the British historians and economists I have been discussing took the slave trade seriously, and this despite the pioneering work by C.L.R. James in the 1930s and the remarkable 1938 doctoral dissertation at Oxford by Eric Williams.13 In post-war Britain, the two tendencies clashed in the ‘standard of living debate,’ which the feminist economic historian Pat Hudson, writing in 1997, described as the “most vitriolic and ideologically loaded debate amongst economic historians this century.”14 Asking whether or not the lot of workers improved with industrialization, this debate saw a simplistic dichotomy replace historical thinking. It was as if the social relations, lifestyle, and sense of community of mid-eighteenth-century English



Points of Departure 27

craftsmen and day labourers were not completely different from those of workers a century later. Clearly, at both times these people worked, but what it meant to be a worker had changed in quite fundamental ways. Fortunately, a way of out of this impasse appeared and from a most unlikely source. With the hope of reviving the Popular Front successes of the late 1930s and war years, the Communist Party of Great Britain established in the immediate post-war years a series of professional groups for its members and sympathizers. One of these was the Communist Party History Group, which had sections on ancient, medieval, early modern, and nineteenth-century British history and included a subgroup for teachers. The group was responsible for launching the journal Past & Present, and a number of its members made significant contributions to debates on both the English Civil War and the Industrial Revolution. George Rudé perhaps best epitomized the group’s historical theory and method when he asked who stormed the Bastille? The answer was not an unruly mob, as generations of scholars blindly following Edmund Burke had assumed, but tradesmen and women acting out their own political and ethical ideas.15 This “history from below” approach recognized the importance of the inherent cultural values of the popular classes in pre-industrial Europe – values that these historians argued constituted a moral economy that contrasted sharply with the values of an industrial economy. The group disbanded after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, when most members left the party. But many former members of the group remained active as historians on the left. Two of the youngest members chose to teach in centres of adult education, rather than universities, and through that experience would come to author major re-evaluations of the Industrial Revolution. The most influential, and perhaps the single most important work in history in my lifetime, was E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963. Thompson reconceptualized class. It was, he argued, a relationship, not a thing. Furthermore, if the objective social relations of class can be described in economic terms, its subjective and therefore political meaning can only be understood culturally. Thus, the working class of England took generations to be formed. Those who struggled for the People’s Charter in the 1840s were qualitatively different from the craftsmen and -women of pre-industrial England. The impact of Thompson’s writings – and of this book in particular – was enormous. It launched a socialist humanist movement within Anglo-American

28

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

historical circles that challenged and in important, albeit limited, ways transformed the profession. In the early 1970s, there emerged within socialist humanism the periodical History Workshop Journal. It was born of a collective of workerhistorians and professionals that had first formed in 1966 at the Trades Union Congress–supported Ruskin College in Oxford. Edited by mostly young scholars, HWJ nonetheless bore the stamp of its mentor Raphael Samuel, who had been the youngest member of the Communist History Group and was a lecturer at Ruskin. Not just a journal, HWJ was for a time a social movement. In 1973, Samuel published the single most important reassessment of industrialization to appear in more than a generation. His article “Workshop of the World” directly challenged all the basic premises first synthesized by T.S. Ashton and only recently reasserted for all of western Europe by Harvard’s David Landes in his The Unbound Prometheus. In “Workshop of the World,” Samuel advanced a radically new vision of the nature of industrial England in the mid-nineteenth century. He argued that the economy of this the leading industrial power in the world was characterized by “combined and uneven development.” In all sectors, modern industry depended on hand tools as much as, if not more than, it did on machine tools. This ‘combination’ was possible because Mantoux’s stepladder approach was wrong. It was simply not true that manufactories had replaced workshops and then factories replaced manufactories. Factories only appeared at particular places in the complex production cycle of finished goods, usually fairly early on, to address a bottleneck in the production cycle. Upstream and downstream from these modern factories, smaller productive units developed that relied on older ways of producing goods and that faced cutthroat competition. This led to seriously deteriorating working conditions. This uneven development, which saw a massive expansion of smallscale productive facilities in almost every line of work, created a low-wage environment that actually discouraged technological development, as new machines would be more expensive and less reliable than human labour. For those of us fortunate enough to be working on Canada, the significance of Samuel’s conceptual breakthrough was regularly reinforced by a brilliant series of case studies by Ian McKay. In his first article, based on a master’s thesis completed at Warwick, McKay explored the first of the five ways he posited that skilled labour had encountered industrialization. He then went on to study each one.16 McKay argued that this variety of experi-



Points of Departure 29

ences meant that there could not have been a shared reaction within the emerging working class to the processes of industrialization. The lack of a common experience helps explain the remarkable social stability in industrializing Victorian Canada. The combination of my theoretical questioning with these novel insights into the nature of industrializing societies had already positioned me outside the historiographical mainstream before I even started on my journey. How far outside I would only discover much later,17 but this initial distancing from any disciplinary consensus allowed me glimpses and echoes of a very different society from the one most of my colleagues thought they were studying.

Towards a New Theory and Method As the first colonial town in the world to industrialize, Montreal offers a particularly revealing perspective on the dynamics of imperialism. This is not, however, why I chose to spend my life studying this relatively small town in a minor colony of the largest of the European empires. My reasons were at once both more mundane and more enriching. I chose to focus on Montreal because its overlapping French and English legal traditions have left a unique documentary legacy. The city’s rich variety of sources permits a much closer analysis of how and why people chose to industrialize than is possible for any other town or city in the Americas. This sheer variety of sources poses serious problems, however, for the sources so rarely, if ever, concord. This discordance forced me to think differently about how we should do history. By choosing to focus on sources, I unwittingly broke disciplinary conventions. After all, historians are far more interested in the evidence a source contains than in the source itself. How we treat evidence is an important methodological question in history, but because I started with sources, I came at this question from a quite different angle – indeed, so different, that I soon realized it was an epistemological, not a methodological, question. It was not about what we do; it was about how we know. Each source from the past has differing things to say to us in the present because each source was created under specific conditions for quite particular purposes. Thus, each bears witness to particular and, in all likelihood, unique sets of historical circumstances. Furthermore, each source subsequently had its own history, which explains why it survived into the

30

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

present. I call the combination of all these unique qualities, proper to each source, its historical logic. If I am right about this, then each piece of historical evidence is necessarily shaped by the particular source from whence it came. Historical evidence, then, can never simply be facts cited in support of a historical interpretation, but are always statements whose meaning and import are circumscribed by the historical logic of their source. Several important, indeed subversive, corollaries flow from these relatively simple propositions. The disciplinary concern about biased sources is misplaced. If all sources have their own logic, then all sources are biased and so the distinction is meaningless. The much more appropriate question is this: Given the historical logic of a particular source, is the evidence it contains appropriate or not? This primacy accorded to the historical logic of a source over the evidence it contains can create paradoxical situations. All the available written evidence may support a particular explanation, and yet the historical logic of the source does not permit that explanation. The great merit of recognizing the significance of the historical logic of sources is that it allows us to apply the distinction Richard Rice drew between phenomenal and epiphenomenal evidence. If the historical logic of a source is consistent with the question(s) we are asking, then the internal patterns of change the source reveals can be used to test our hypothesis of why these changes happened. If not, then this evidence should only be used to describe the past conditionally. Applying this distinction does require an explicit discussion of the historical logic of each source, and as tedious as it may sound, I think this an unqualified good. In such discussions, our present-day assumptions are made explicit, and this renders our own historicity visible and open for critique. In short, it ensures that our present is present, which is necessary if we are to respect the historical distance of a conversation between a present and a past. A new type of discourse of proof in history results from applying this distinction in this way. Unlike the controlled Euclidean logic so often used in the pure sciences, this discourse of proof is neither linear nor strictly cumulative. Rather, it is analogous to the triangulation techniques used in surveying. The analysis of each source provides a unique sighting of a historical phenomenon or process, and it is only by critically aligning diverse sightings that one builds a complex image of the phenomenon or process



Points of Departure 31

being studied. I call the composition that results from the use of multiple, necessarily contradictory, and always partial sightings a cubist portrait. Cubist portraiture resolves the representation dilemma that has plagued historical method ever since the cultural turn. It does this by putting into practice Jean Chesneaux’s idea of respecting the historical distance between the historian in the present and the object of study in the past. Admittedly this does involve a sleight of hand – transposing his historical point from the object to a source generated by that object – but the result is a transparent and, more importantly, refutable discourse of proof. For the analyses can be disproven either by challenging the definition of a given source’s historical logic or by providing differing sightings based on alternative sources. In both cases, a more accurate understanding of the past in relation to our present is the result. We can’t ask for anything more.

Chapter Two

Colonial States

Montreal is the largest of an archipelago of islands located just east of where the Ottawa River joins the St Lawrence in its northeasterly flow to the Atlantic. The small group of Counter-Reformation Catholics who founded the settlement in 1642 could not have gone any further. Just upstream from their palisades, the St Lawrence rose fifteen metres in what the peasantry came to call the Lachine Rapids because they knew that, despite his numerous voyages to the west, this was as close as their lord, Sieur de Lasalle, would ever get to China. For half a century it was the most westerly outpost of the French invasion of America. Then, in 1701, representatives of thirtyeight apparently differing indigenous peoples signed the Great Treaty of Montreal,1 which would permit the dramatic expansion of New France west to the Rockies and south to Louisiana. For the next 120 years, it would be from Montreal that the fur trade of a continent was organized. From its inception, Montreal was a creature of imperial geopolitics. In this chapter, I review the staple theory, long the hegemonic approach in Canadian historiography, before discussing my experience in a consciously counter-hegemonic research group in the 1970s and 1980s, the Montreal Business History Project (mbhp) at McGill. This discussion has three parts. I start with our choice to focus on notarial deeds as a particularly rich source of phenomenal evidence. I then briefly review the methodological problems we faced in working on four specific questions. The image of the Montreal economy that emerges from these dossiers directly challenges the long-held belief in the centrality of merchant capital to an understanding of the town’s economy. To test the validity of this novel finding, I examine in detail what merchants imported and exported in 1825, the peak year of the trade cycle.



Colonial States 33

Challenging Staples As capital of the “Empire of the St Lawrence,” Montreal occupies pride of place in narratives about nineteenth-century Canada.2 This prominence better reflects the influence of two complementary historical theories than it does historical reality. Since the late 1920s, the staple theory has had a remarkable influence on the writing of Canadian history. Strengthened by the development of the metropolitan thesis in the 1950s, the staple theory would receive a new lease on life in the 1960s. Staples are basic goods, and economists have long used the term to describe the raw materials that were an important part of trade patterns in the pre-industrial world. Wool in Tudor England and tobacco in colonial Virginia were staples. In Canada, however, staples are not just trade goods; they are thought to explain the very existence of the country. Harold Innis developed the staple theory to answer the question, Why is Canada a separate and quite different country from the United States?3 Prior to Innis, historians had assumed that Canada was created as an act of political will by the “Fathers of Confederation” in defiance of the logic of both geography and economics. Innis disagreed: “The present Dominion emerged not in spite of geography but because of it.”4 Innis argued that the interactions between environment, technology, and communications shaped political institutions. A series of staple trades, first fur, then timber, lumber, wheat, pulp and paper, and finally mineral resources, had not only shaped the economy, but had also determined the political structure of Canada. As Innis and his colleagues worked on the histories of the various staple trades, a succinct synthesis emerged. Staple trades were the motor of the economy, and these exports financed the importation of finished goods from more advanced economies. These trades had, however, potentially deleterious effects over the long term. They favoured the development of commercial interests over industrial interests, which meant that the economy was highly dependent on external markets. They aggravated regional disparities.5 The severity of the Depression of the 1930s exposed these widespread weaknesses, and as a result, unlike in Great Britain, liberal and social democratic historians in Canada came to share a common reading of the country’s economic history.6 This broad consensus was strengthened by wide acceptance of J.M.R. Careless’ metropolitan thesis in the 1950s.7

34

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

Careless argued that the commercial nature of the Canadian economy combined with its colonial character to create a hierarchy of urban centres, with each exercising control over its own hinterland. From the 1820s until the 1930s, when it was displaced by Toronto, Montreal stood atop this colonial hierarchy. The staple theory took on a new importance in the 1960s, amidst growing concern with regional disparities and with the increasing presence of American foreign direct investment in both the resource sector and, more importantly from a nationalist perspective, secondary manufacturing. In 1963, Mel Watkins proposed a revised staple theory to conceptualize these twentieth-century problems.8 Watkins argued that a staple trade could generate growth in three differing ways, depending upon how the trade was linked to the rest of the economy. If the necessary supplies for the trade were produced locally, or if the staple was subsequently transformed locally, or if the staple producers themselves made a sufficient profit that they were able to create a market for local production, then a staple would have a positive impact on economic growth. These upstream, downstream, and final demand linkages became the basis for a comparative evaluation between staples or between differing regions producing the same staple. Although developed as tools for contemporary analysis, these concepts were soon put to work on historical disputes, as in John McCallum’s high­ ly influential Unequal Beginnings, which in comparing mid-nineteenthcentury Upper and Lower Canada concluded that the economic inferiority of French Canadians had nothing to do with national oppression but was simply the result of their poorer agricultural linkages.9 Within this general consensus, the only serious debate concerned the timing of industrialization. Was it set in motion by Conservative prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald’s 1879 National Policy, with its three planks of protecting local industry with tariffs, building a transcontinental railroad, and peopling the prairies with immigrants from Europe to provide a home market for central Canadian manufactures? Or did it happen after 1896, under the Liberal Laurier government, when large numbers of immigrants finally came to the “last, best west” and generated a wheat boom, which resulted in the construction of two more transcontinental railways prior to the Great War. In print, there was only one voice, way out in left field, that doubted that Canada was a latecomer to industrial capitalism. Stanley Bréhaut Ryerson was a prolific historian and public intellectual, writing hundreds of articles for the Communist Party of Canada’s publi-



Colonial States 35

cations and editing their theoretical review. In what had been intended as a critical contribution to the centennial of Confederation, Ryerson published the second volume of his people’s history of Canada in 1968. Unequal Union proposed a radical reconsideration of the national question.10 Ryerson argued that the failed Rebellions of 1837 in both Upper and Lower Canada were aborted bourgeois democratic revolutions. Furthermore, the revolt in Lower Canada constituted a national democratic movement analogous to the independence movements of a decade earlier in Latin America. The forced union of these colonies in 1841 by Britain created an unequal situation that favoured the conservative Anglo-Scottish merchants of Montreal and the large landholding families of Upper Canada at the expense of the democratic interests of the majority of petty commodity– producing families active in farming and the crafts. The result, over the subsequent thirty years, was a top-down industrialization financed by the colonial state, which mobilized the labour of both immigrant Irish Catholics and French Canadians. From this perspective, Confederation was an undemocratic restructuring of a colonial state faced with the intractable social problems of an industrializing society. Understandably, Ryerson’s argument was more popular in Quebec, where his Capitalisme et Confédération11 was widely adopted as a college text, than in English Canada. Historians at the newly established Université du Québec à Montréal (uqam ), where Ryerson now taught, were in the forefront of the revisionist scholarship. Largely through the work of the Groupe de recherche sur la société montréalaise au 19ième siècle (grsm ) in the early 1970s,12 the beginnings of industrialization were pushed back to 1848, when a rebuilding of the locks on the Lachine Canal first permitted the harnessing of hydraulic power for factory use. In English Canada, young scholars influenced by E.P. Thompson and socialist humanism were also actively questioning the timing of industrialization. This ‘new labour history’ built on the analysis of H. Clare Pentland in his unpublished doctoral thesis “Labour and the Development of Industrial Capitalism in Canada,” defended at the University of Toronto in 1960.13 Pentland had argued that until the early nineteenth century, labour relations in New France and British North America were highly paternalistic, but that with the expansion of the population of Upper Canada in the second quarter of the century, a home market was created that laid the basis for locally based industrialization.14 First through an alternative press, then through their control of the journal Labour/Le Travail, and finally in

36

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

a number of prize-winning books, Russell Hahn, Gregory S. Kealey, and Bryan D. Palmer challenged the disciplinary consensus and helped push back the timing of industrialization in Ontario to the third quarter of the nineteenth century.15 These largely complementary movements in the 1970s involving progressive historians of Quebec and of English Canada modified the timing of industrialization without challenging the staple theory. Staple trades were still considered to have been the motor of the colonial economy, and these exports of raw materials were thought to have financed the importation of finished goods. Now both of these propositions could be tested. On the one hand, one could analyse imports and exports to see if trade was unequal. Was it really a question of trading raw materials for finished goods? Or, on the other, one could examine the local economy in light of the maniacal trade cycles of the nineteenth century to see if exports really were the motor driving the local economy. But it was not until the late 1970s, fully fifty years after the staple theory was first formulated, that historians began to question it. The first crack in the wall was discovered quite by accident and it happened under rather inauspicious conditions. The hall for the occasion, like the hotel, had seen better days. Proximity to the Rimouski train station and a moderately good restaurant were about all one could say for the place. In 1977, trains were out of fashion, and in late October, few people had chosen to take the long drive down the south shore of the St Lawrence to the administrative centre of the Gaspé Peninsula. So, for this annual meeting of the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française (ihaf) , there would be no concurrent sessions. At the front of the almost full room, two young graduate students, Margaret Heap and Joanne Burgess, began with some trepidation to present their results.16 Heap and Burgess worked for the grsm at uqam, and they had come across several years of complete runs of the Quebec Commercial List, a seasonal newspaper published in Quebec City between 1818 and 1835. It reported the shipping news, but not just in a column; the whole newspaper was nothing but shipping news. Each registered vessel that entered or left the port was listed, along with its homeport, destination, master’s name, detailed listings of its cargo, and to whom it was assigned or by whom it was shipped. Since all Montreal shipments to Europe would have had to clear the Port of Quebec, Heap and Burgess thought they would just cull the paper to establish a clear ranking of the city’s major staple houses. And that is where the problem lay. In 1818, prior to the merger of the North West and Hudson’s Bay companies, the Nor’westers and their furs fig-



Colonial States 37

ured prominently, but after the 1821 merger, there were no staple houses, major or minor, to report. To be sure, some Montreal houses were shipping potash, a by-product of land clearance used as a bleaching agent in the cotton industry, but that was it. The conclusion was inescapable, even if understandably Heap and Burgess did their best to tone down the implications. If Montreal was becoming the major mercantile centre of British North America in these years, and no one yet doubted that this was the case, then its prominence was not due to the staple trades. Something else, no one knew quite what, had to explain the situation.

An Alternative Approach Having made a fortune from refining sugar beets, Alfred Baumgarten clearly wanted people to know that he had arrived. His initial plans for a Second Empire mansion on McTavish Street required the demolition of three recently built townhouses. When his daughters made their debut, he added on a ballroom large enough for 200 people, complete with a fully sprung floor of his own design. Started in 1885 and completed in 1902, excluding the servants’ quarters and kitchens, the mansion ran to more than a thousand square metres. After his death in 1919, McGill bought the mansion as a home for its principal, Sir Arthur Currie. Too auspicious for his successors, it became home to the Faculty Club, but even its members found the two-storey Gothic gallery a bit too much, and so they divided it into a billiards room downstairs and a dining room upstairs. It was there, amidst the opulence of the gilded age, on a warm June day in 1976, that my journey really began. Earlier that morning I had responded to an advertisement for a research assistantship with the Montreal Business History Project. This was a newly formed group funded by Phyllis Lambert née Bronfman and headed by two junior members of the McGill History Department, Richard Rice and Brian Young. The mbhp was established to conduct an inventory of historical business records kept by private firms, companies, and corporations in the city. The interview had gone well and I was now being introduced to the some of the historians in the department over lunch at the Club. It took almost three years to complete the inventory,17 but by 1979 Richard Rice, Brian Young, and I had worked out an informal partnership. We considered the company to be the institution that had most transformed society, and thus decided that each of us would study the evolution of a major nineteenth-century Montreal business. Rice would study the

38

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

Grand Trunk Railway; Young would examine the dominant religious order in the city, the Sulpicians, as a business institution; Alfred Dubuc, my master’s supervisor at uqam , was invited to join us to continue his work on the Molson’s brewing and banking interests; and I would take on the Bank of Montreal. The project was too ambitious and too ill thought out to be funded, although Young would succeed the following year in getting support for his research. Meanwhile, I secured funding from the Museum of Man in Ottawa to research specific aspects in the history of early nineteenthcentury Montreal and hired six people to work with me over the summer. Our research reports that summer were less important than our discoveries.18 We discovered that several of us shared a passion for a radically different type of historical practice, and in working for the first time in notarial archives, we discovered the type of source material that we believed would allow us to do that new type of history. It is difficult to convey the excitement that notarial archives generate among researchers. Their scale is forbidding, for they contain millions of documents accumulated over centuries. The documents use a highly formalized and formulaic legal language. Until the mid-nineteenth century, most are handwritten and for the neophyte extremely difficult to read. Some are almost impossible to decipher, even for experienced researchers. In Quebec, they were kept all folded up, often tied with a ribbon, in chronological order in small cardboard boxes. Some notaries did keep nominal indexes, but these are often incomplete. More frequent were repertories that listed in chronological order deeds by their title. However, each notary had his own style (there were no female notaries in Quebec until the twentieth century) and titles of documents varied greatly, so one could not select by title alone. When we started our research, the practice was to call up the deeds box-by-box, and so if we were interested in a particular type of document, we would have to go through many boxes in a day to find the few that were relevant. Furthermore, we would usually have to read most of the first page of each document before we could decide whether it was relevant or not. Notarial archives are dusty, difficult of access, arcane, and frequently frustrating, so why the excitement? In part it has to do with how these archives were constituted. Notaries are common in continental Europe, Scotland, and Latin America. They cover some of the same legal terrain as solicitors in the English commonlaw tradition in that they often deal with family matters and property transactions. Notaries public, to give them their proper name, record



Colonial States 39

agreements between people or firms. A notarized deed is a particular type of public document, hence the term notary public. In nineteenth-century Montreal, a deed could be produced as proof in a court case or in less formal dispute resolution mechanisms involving the parties. These deeds were not, however, at the time, available to the public. Each principal party received a copy, and a copy was kept with the notary. These collections in the keeping of the notaries were called ‘greffes,’ and when a notary retired, his greffe was deposited with the prothonotary, an officer of the court. Notarial archives are composed of these transferred greffes, and only those lost through fire or other incident at the notary’s office are missing. For Quebec, we estimate that more than 98 per cent of all notarized deeds prior to 1900 have survived. Different jurisdictions have had differing survival rates and, importantly, differing rules governing when greffes deposited with the prothonotary become available to historical researchers, but the truly exceptional survival rate in Quebec meant that for the nineteenth century and earlier we were dealing with one of the finest notarial archives in the world. Notaries acted as public witnesses to agreements between private parties. They recorded the intentions of the parties to the agreement in case there should subsequently be a dispute. Deeds were read aloud, and any changes required were noted in the margin and initialled by all the parties to the agreement, who then signed their name, or if illiterate affixed their cross, at the end of the agreement. Although deeds were drawn up by a single notary, or by (one suspects in many cases) one of his clerks, the reading out of the deeds and the subsequent signings were formally witnessed by two notaries. In Quebec, under the Custom of Paris,19 only a very few types of agreement were required to be signed before notaries public. The two most important were the marriage contracts I mentioned in chapter 1 and inventories of the property belonging to a community of property between husband and wife upon the death of one of them.20 This means that the vast majority of deeds were written because one or both of the parties to the deed chose to have the agreement notarized. It took us several years of work with these deeds before we began to understand the historical significance of their choices. Initially, we were simply fascinated by the rich variety and detail of these accounts of people’s intentions. During the first summer in the archives, I scheduled biweekly debriefings over a beer in Place Jacques Cartier, which largely consisted of sharing the ‘really neat’ stories that we had

40

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

just read. Only one of us, Hélène Paré, had had any experience in these archives, and I vividly remember the awe with which we would listen to her weave together the information from a variety of deeds to tell a complex story about a family or firm. For young historians who considered human agency essential to explaining historical change, these documents revealed the myriad motives of the people of pre-industrial Montreal. Unlike the routinely generated sources (tax rolls, census returns, and city directories) upon which so much of North American and British social history at the time was based, these documents showed people actually doing things. It is for good reason that we call them ‘deeds’ or, in French, ‘actes.’ Here, in these hundreds of thousands of deeds detailing the intentions of the tens of thousands of residents of pre-industrial Montreal, we thought we could find the answers to questions that, for other towns and cities in the Americas, historians could only ask. Our method that summer hardly merited the name. We focused on the 1820s, because it was the first decade of large-scale immigration after the Napoleonic Wars and the Museum of Man was especially interested in Scottish immigrants. We chose particular notaries based on their relative importance in the archives and the very limited language skills of some team members. From within these greffes, we selected deeds that dealt directly with the research topics the museum had assigned or, more broadly, with the business community of Montreal. For each selected deed, we wrote up a brief six-to-seven-line summary of its contents. By September, we had completed about 2,500 forms, and over the winter I typed up a nominal file that generated cross-references to almost 6,000 individuals and firms. By contrast, the census of 1825 had identified by name only 4,455 residents in this town of 22,500 people. Convinced we were on to something, Richard Rice succeeded in getting three years of limited funding from the Fonds de recherche du Québec (fcar) to explore structural changes to Montreal’s pre-industrial business community. McGill reciprocated by providing us with a proper office, and in the summers of 1980 through 1982 our team swelled to a dozen members. That first summer we decided to focus on particular types of transactions and to develop distinct research cards for each one. We developed cards for leases, protests, supply contracts, partnership agreements, and assignments, and a single card to handle obligations, transfers, acquittances, and discharges of debt.



Colonial States 41

We learnt our first important lesson from the leases and protests. By the end of the summer, we had some 300 leases on file, dozens of which had subsequently been the object of a protest for non-respect of the lease by either the tenant or the landlord and for which we had a completed protest card. The lease card was our most-detailed research tool, as it allowed for the recording of some eighty-six variables in the lease. However, when we analysed the series in tandem, we discovered to our horror that not one of the protests was about anything we had thought important enough to record on the lease card. Landlords protested because tenants disturbed other residents or because their stacks of firewood were not being properly maintained. Tenants protested because they had been denied the right to keep poultry in the yard or to have visitors in the late evening. In every case, when we returned to the archives, we found that the lease had contained a clause relating to the issue in dispute, but we had not thought it impor­ tant enough to record. The minutiae of daily life were at the heart of these disputes between landlord and tenant. Clearly, if we were interested in what socio-economic changes permitted the Industrial Revolution, then the evolution of tensions between those who controlled property and those who were propertyless was a fundamental historical indicator. But did this mean we had to record everything? The answer was far from clear, in part because we had not thought through the full implications of our serial approach to the notarial archives. Deeds in the archives are organized in series; they are in the chronological order by which the notary witnessed them. These are historical series in that they are the product of processes of another time and place. We knew this from very early on because of one of the many revealing discoveries Hélène Paré had made in the greffe of Étienne Guy. Guy was a member of a long-established landowning and professional family in Montreal, and as this might suggest, his greffe dealt with some of the more prominent families and institutions in town – that is, except for Thursdays. Paré had noted that regularly on that day, and on that day alone, farmers and craftspeople of the parish of St-Michel de Lachine, some ten kilometres distance from Montreal itself, came to have their agreements notarized. Or, as Paré suggested was much more likely, once a week Guy made the trek out to Lachine to do business in a local tavern; stains on a number of the deeds and the deteriorating handwriting over the course of the day were presented as supporting evidence. Therefore, if we analysed the content of this greffe

42

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

without considering this particularity, we would be comparing apples and oranges, or more appropriately, those who drank brandy and wine with those who drank rum and beer. The situation becomes even more complicated when, as we were doing, one selects out of various greffes the deeds that relate to a particular topic, say the leasing of property, for the resultant series is by definition ahistorical. As a series it does not possess any historical coherency that bears witness to its creation in the past, understandably because we had just created it in the present. Now the norm in France, a world leader when it came to historical analysis of notarial deeds, was precisely this type of serial creation in the present by the historian, so we found little to guide us there.21 Fortunately, after extended discussions within the group, a consensus began to emerge. If for a specified period of time we selected all of a particular type of deed, then the changes revealed by the patterns we found could safely be assumed to have actually happened. Similarly, if one selected all of the deeds of a particular type signed by a person or firm, then the changes within the series would also be historically meaningful. Furthermore, by defining the parameters of a series, either temporally or in terms of who signed the deed, we could develop manageable research strategies that would permit a much greater depth to our data collection. Although both the temporal and what might be called the actor-centred approach seemed to solve our problem, it became evident when we began to analyse the cards for obligations, transfers, quittances, and discharges that the latter might well be the better way to go. An obligation creates a creditor/debtor relationship. In a transfer, the creditor sells or exchanges an already existing debt to another person or firm, who thus becomes the creditor. In an acquittance, the creditor recognizes that part of the debt has been paid back, while the creditor gives a discharge when final payment has been made. Thus, for every debt you would expect there to be a single obligation and a discharge signed before notary, but perhaps there were a number of transfers and probably many acquittances. In fact, we encountered most debts for the first time only at the point of transfer. When the debt was created, the parties had not come before a notary to formalize the relationship. Why should they have done so when transferring the debt if it had not been necessary before? We hypothesized that this was the case because the new creditor was socially more distant from the debtor than the previous creditor had been, for every such transfer contained a clause obligating the old creditor to use his or her influence to ensure the proper repayment of the debt.



Colonial States 43

Earlier, when introducing the notarial archives, I mentioned that we did not initially recognize the historical significance of the choices people made in having their agreements signed before notary. Our debate about obligations and transfers really marked the beginning of an exploration of what these choices had meant to these people in the past and how their choices constituted a constraint for historians using these sources in the present, for if the social distance between the parties mattered, then even if someone collected all of a particular type of deed, he or she would still miss the many similar transactions between people who had chosen not to go before notary. Cost was clearly a factor in this decision, since a notary vie de ses actes (lives from his deeds). However, as we worked through the historical logic of each source, why and under what circumstances it was created and then survived, we realized the importance of both community and family in these decisions not to go before notary. If close social ties existed between the parties, then they would presumably have had better ways of resolving a potential dispute than recourse to the formal, legalistic guarantee of a notarized contract. Ironically, it was a sequence of notarized deeds (protests, bonds, and awards) that highlighted for us the importance of these community-based dispute-resolution mechanisms. Protests were one of the most common forms of deed. There were thousands of protests for the non-payment of a debt, what we came to call ‘monetary protests.’ There were protests against wind, rain, and storm by masters of vessels who had lost part of their cargo and wanted to file an insurance claim. There were, as we have seen, many protests over leases. There were protests over the non-respect of an agreement. But the type of protest we found most intriguing involved a nonnotarized agreement that one of the parties now found to be unfair, for these often initiated a process of community-based arbitration. In such cases, within a week of the initial protest, both parties would appear before the notary and sign a ‘bond’ that established a two-person board of arbitration, one chosen by each party. Board members were empowered to choose a third member should they be unable to reach agreement. Each party to the bond committed himself or herself to respect the decision of the arbitrators. A short time later (though some commercial disputes did take months), the parties and the arbiters would meet at the notary’s office for the reading of the ‘award.’ This was clearly an exceptional process. Instead of a protest before notary being the first step to either court action or debtor’s prison, the protest used the office of the notary to call on respected authorities in the

44

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

community. Frequently, it seemed that this process was initiated because the agreement itself had dealt with unusual matters, issues for which there were unlikely to be community norms. I vividly remember one such case involving the building of a wooden frame to hold a steam engine in a potash manufactory. It turned out to be much more work than the master carpenter had anticipated. His protest led to the potash merchant and himself each naming a master carpenter and joiner to resolve the dispute. Presumably, after several such awards, a norm for this new type of work would have emerged within the craft community and thus rendered further recourse to a notary unnecessary.

Problems with Our Method Much of our work in the notarial archives came to focus on four broad areas: supply contacts, the commutation of property, credit, and the craft world. Each proved to be important in the tale I have to tell, but here I would simply like to discuss how our application of these methodological lessons in turn created new problems. Long ago, in his seminal history of British brewing, Peter Mathias stressed the importance to the Industrial Revolution of inputs from the rural world.22 We also knew that the scale of the British Army’s presence would have made it an important purchaser of locally produced goods in the colony, far more important, we suspected, than the Civil List, which had nearly monopolized historical analysis of the economic impact of the colonial state.23 In order to assess both of these somewhat divergent factors, we developed a large research card for supply contracts that required detailed information on the parties involved but left ample blank space for a summary description of what was to be supplied. We deliberately threw the net wide, and for the 1820s, we harvested well over a thousand deeds chronicling diverse supply lines linking town and country, wholesalers, and assistant commissary generals and master masons and carpenters to their suppliers for large construction projects. This file provided the starting point for detailed studies of select commodities (stone, potash, and firewood) and of the role of the colonial state as a purchaser of local goods. A significant problem in the construction of this series, however, was the problematic nature of the very concept of a supply contract. When a peasant receives an iron stove in exchange for bushels of wheat, or cords of firewood, is it a supply contract or simply barter? Note how



Colonial States 45

the former suggests commercial, market-oriented production, while the latter smacks of subsistence farming. As we would discover, the summary nature of our descriptions of these deeds simply increased this danger of present-mindedness. Commutation of property involves the change of property rights from one property system to another, in this case from the feudal seigneurial regime to franc aleu, the French equivalent of free and common soccage. Starting in 1841, feudal tenants on the island of Montreal, and in two other seigneuries also held by the Sulpicians, gained the right to opt out of the seigneurial regime. This required a commutation agreement between the Sulpician order and the tenant for the payment of compensation to the lords for their loss of feudal privilege. The Special Council24 had decreed what the rules for compensation would be, so these deeds of commutation were printed forms with blanks to fill in the necessary details. They were all signed before the Sulpicians’ in-house notary. Thus, unlike many of the other types of deed we analysed, commutations were not spread out over many greffes and each deed contained relatively few variations. This research was in support of Brian Young’s study of the Sulpicians as a business institution. His primary concern was to establish the order’s cash flow from commutations. Since there were thousands of commutations over a forty-year period, we opted simply to record the principal variations in tabular format, one line per deed. While this approach was in keeping with accepted practice, it recorded only the most basic information. Unfortunately, as we shall see, it was easy enough to mistake the resultant impressive stacks of datasheets for something more than they were. In addition to the obligations already discussed, we analysed two other important types of credit documents in the notarial archives: monetary protests and assignments. Protests were lodged when, after a three-day period of grace, a promissory note, draft, or bill of exchange came due and was not honoured.25 There are tens of thousands of monetary protests in the notarial archives for the pre-industrial period. Having learnt our lesson from the obligations, I opted for an actor-centred approach and created two series, one for each of the city’s two banks. My logic was that the directors of chartered banks were legally obligated to their shareholders to defend the bank’s interests, and so it was far less likely that personal or social ties would get in the way of a protest being lodged. If a person or firm defaulted on an instrument of credit, in all likelihood the bank would protest. Unfortunately, again as we shall see, having defined each series

46

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

by a bank, I found it easy to treat the content of the series as if it were the result of that institution’s actions. Assignments were a Scottish notarial practice introduced after the Conquest to deal with firms in financial difficulty where there was no bankruptcy legislation.26 Often, these deeds contained detailed listings of the assets and liabilities of the firm and so contained the names and amounts of the hundreds of people and firms owed money by the firm or owing money to the firm. I processed all the assignments for the 1820s. I then created a nominal cross-reference file, which showed how each person or firm was affected by the various assignments. This file became the principal analytical tool. There were, however, two problems. First, a number of assignments did not include complete listings of their creditors and debtors. Second, and much more importantly, we have no way of knowing what happened with firms where the creditors chose not to impose an assignment. This was, after all, a Scottish practice, and it is quite possible that creditors of Canadien firms informally continued the practices that had been the law under the French Merchant’s Code prior to 1763. Thus, while the file is complete, in that it includes all notarized assignments, it is still only a part of a larger picture of unknown dimensions. It was during our second year of fcar funding that we elaborated what would be our most ambitious research strategy. One might debate the importance of leases in the overall scheme of industrialization, but there could be no question of the centrality of craft production. This is where everyone since Adam Smith agreed that the greatest transformations had to have taken place. Craft production in Montreal loosely followed a European model. Young men and, in a limited number of trades, young women entered into apprenticeships between the ages of 13 and 16 for a period of generally four to five years. They normally would live in their master’s or mistress’s household and were paid with room and board for their labours. Upon successful completion of an apprenticeship, the youth would be considered a journeyman and as the name implies would travel around working as a skilled craftsperson for a number of different masters. This period of waged employment could extend from ten to twelve years, and it allowed these craftspeople to perfect their understanding of the trade by working with and learning from different masters. It also allowed them to save funds, so that when they married they might open up their own shop and themselves become masters or mistresses in their chosen trade.



Colonial States 47

Four of our most experienced members, Jane Greenlaw, Linda Lemaire, Peter Orr, and Hélène Paré spent several months developing research cards that would record all the myriad rights and obligations contained in hiring contracts for domestic servants, apprentices, and journeymen. We decided, after a great deal of discussion, that these cards had to allow for the recording of the exact juridical discourse of the body of each contract, for we had already begun to suspect that the devil was very much in the detail. Over the next several years, Greenlaw and Lemaire located all 914 local hirings of apprentices, as well as the 314 hirings of journeymen, to work in the city between 1820 and 1829. They recorded on research cards the bulk of these contracts prior to Linda Lemaire’s untimely death in a car accident. I completed the task later in the decade. The remarkable disparity in the number of hiring contracts in these two series was immediately evident. Over the decade, there was more than one apprenticeship contract for every male between the age of 14 and 17 living in Montreal in 1825, but only one journeyman contract for every eight males between the age of 18 and 30. This would prove to be an important factor in deciphering the historical logic of these series, but the sheer number of apprenticeships also pointed to the significance of the craft world. Four hundred and seven local masters hired apprentices over the decade in forty-seven different trades. From musical instruments to steamboats, from cabinetry to haberdashery, in this colonial town people were learning almost every trade one could imagine.27

An Ever-Changing Hierarchy The scale of many of the transactions revealed by the supply contracts indicated a complexity to the local economy that the existing historiography had simply not grasped. Nor was this merely a question of large army purchases, for local steamboats proved to be astoundingly voracious consumers of spruce. Supply contracts for large construction projects, ranging from the Lachine and Rideau canals to the new Notre-Dame Church, the largest north of Mexico, highlighted the centrality of craft. When preliminary analysis of these construction trades revealed numerous craft family dynasties,28 we realized that despite their impressive numbers our apprenticeship contracts were in all likelihood only half the picture because so many people would have learnt their trade within the family. Perhaps most surprising of all, the pattern of assignments indicated a clear

48

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

disjuncture between the business cycle in Britain and the fortunes of the mercantile community in Montreal.29 Finally, the value that urban land had reached by the 1840s, as indicated by the deeds of commutation, showed Montreal to have long since passed that symbolic watershed for a colony of settlement, where rents from local real estate eclipsed profits from trade with the mother country. As our analysis of these dossiers proceeded, a heretical idea began to form. Perhaps Montreal was not primarily a mercantile centre after all. There was one good way to find out. Among the years for which the Quebec Commercial List has survived was 1825, the peak year of the first international business cycle driven by British industrial production. If Montreal lived to the rhythm of a mercantile beat, then this would be the year to show it. Joanne Burgess graciously lent her copy of the List to the mbhp, and I generated a detailed cross-reference file of all firms identified as being involved in imports and exports over the year. The image that emerged from the analysis was complex, but clear.30 The List identified all firms and individuals to whom goods were assigned on inbound vessels, but for outbound vessels, it identified only those firms and individuals who had directly consigned goods for export. Thus, many more people and firms were identified as importers than as exporters. For this reason it is best to deal with them separately, and I start with the exporters. The sheer number of firms involved in exporting the produce of the Canadas to colonial and international markets came as a surprise. One hundred and fifteen different firms consigned goods for export in 1825. Seventy-one firms shipped to only one colony or country. A further nineteen firms shipped goods to only two regions. This geographic concentration meant a specialization in the goods being shipped. Firms that traded with New Brunswick tended to specialize in supplies for the timber camps: axes, saws, and food supplies, most notably beans and salt pork. Firms trading to the West Indies shipped some biscuits, presumably for the slaves, but mostly staves for the hogsheads of sugar, molasses, and rum that so dominated Caribbean exports. Upper Canadian grain, timber, and deals (roughly cut thick planks of wood) characterized shipments to Ireland. Most firms active in this the peak year for exports of the entire decade shipped nothing to Great Britain. Thus, profit centres of Lower Canadian trade were primarily to be found in colonial markets. Here, the staple theorists’ assumption that an unequal trade handicapped local development



Colonial States 49

was clearly unfounded. If anything, the economy of the Canadas enjoyed an advantage, with merchants frequently shipping semi-manufactured or finished goods to colonial markets that supplied in return raw materials or semi-manufactured goods. Quebec City did have staple houses, 8 of the 115 firms shipped substantial volumes of timber and deals. Only one had a Montreal connection. Peter McGill & Co. consigned nine shipments of potash and timber; by comparison, William Price & Co., McGill’s Quebec City partner, had thirtysix timber consignments that year. Although few in number, these staple houses accounted for 39 per cent of the sailings from the port of Quebec that were not in ballast. Timber and deals accounted for the overwhelming bulk of these shipments by volume, but by value the situation was not quite so clear-cut. Exports of semi-manufactured wood products, most notably for ship construction and barrels, probably equalled a little more than half of the value of all timber and deals shipped from the port that year. Furthermore, the staples that were exported were primarily re-exports, as they came overwhelmingly from the white pine timber valleys of Upper Canada. In 1825, Lower Canada was actually a net importer of pine and a selective exporter of higher-valued hardwoods, most notably oak.31 By the 1820s, several of the British North American colonies had developed significant shipbuilding manufactories.32 In Quebec City, and as we shall see in Montreal as well, large ocean-going three-masted vessels were built for export to the British market. Logically known as ‘colonialbuilts,’ these vessels ranged from 300 to over 600 registered tons and would for the most part be used in the East Indian trade out of Britain. In 1825, sixty-four of the vessels that cleared the port of Quebec for Great Britain were on their maiden voyage, having been built in the yards of Quebec City and Montreal. They would almost all be sold immediately upon arrival in Britain.33 The value of these highly complex machines, the equivalent to today’s Airbuses, equalled the value of all the timber and deals exported from Quebec that year. Thus, our detailed examination of all firms exporting via the St Lawrence River in 1825 confirmed and extended the earlier findings of Heap and Burgess. Not only were there no major staple houses in Montreal, but even in Quebec City they were relatively few on the ground, although this was clearly not the case in the port. Wood products dominated by both value and volume the port’s activities. However, in terms of the value added to these products, a reasonable estimate would be 40 per cent raw materials,

50

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

20 per cent semi-manufactured, and 40 per cent finished goods. Furthermore, only a small proportion – in terms of both value and volume – of the quite varied non-wood exports were unprocessed goods. Hundreds of firms and individuals were assigned imports during the 1825 shipping season. Textiles and metal goods dominated the imports from Great Britain, as anyone familiar with the nature of British industry in 1825 would probably have suspected. What might not have been expected, and certainly surprised us, was that these goods were almost without exception semi-manufactured. The colony as a whole did not import enough clothing to dress the members of its own Legislative Council. Textiles from the four corners of Asia and Europe, as well as from the mills of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and the Scottish Lowlands, were there in all their profusion and splendour. More than thirty-five different types of textile were listed. These fabrics would be made up into finished clothing in the tailoring and dressmaking shops of Quebec City, Montreal, Kingston, and York and in tens of thousands of homes across the Canadas. When it came to metal goods, a similar situation prevailed. The colony imported hoop iron, but not iron hoops. The hundreds of blacksmiths and the dozens of founders in the colony would be adding the final value to these imports. In sharp contrast to the situation with exports, Montreal-based firms and individuals were prominent as importers. Montreal was home to five of the colony’s six most important importing firms. These firms all carried out business with a number of geographic regions, both as importers and as exporters, but they were primarily importers. The scale of their imports strongly suggests that the bulk of their goods would have been transhipped to Upper Canada. These dominant firms were the Canadian houses of leading mercantile firms in Britain and theirs was the truly imperial presence in the colony. The image that emerges, therefore, is complex. Atop the mercantile world of Montreal stood a handful of powerful firms with a strongly imperial vision. Below them, in an ever-changing hierarchy, were hundreds of firms specializing in the importation of a bewildering variety of goods. What almost all of these smaller firms shared was the understanding that it would be the hands of local artisans or the unpaid domestic labour of women that would transform their imports into a finished product. Thus, Montreal was a major mercantile centre, for it controlled the export trade to Upper Canada; however, most merchant firms serviced the workshops and manufactories of this quickly growing town.



Colonial States 51

Neither this new understanding of how imperial and colonial worlds interacted nor the various linkages between mercantile, craft, and household economies it suggested could be addressed, let alone explained, by the staple theory. The theory’s basic assumption – that trade was so unequal it effectively hindered economic development – was simply wrong. Imports were essential to colonial craft production, while local craft production and manufacturing activities were both key to colonial exports. Convinced that the staple theorists’ belief in the primacy of external factors was the result of a colonial state of mind, I concluded that to identify the socio-economic changes that permitted Montreal to be the first colonial town to industrialize required a detailed examination of the town’s internal dynamics.

Chapter Three

Internal Dynamics

Lord Durham was categorical: “I expected to find a contest between a government and a people: I found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state: I found a struggle, not of principles, but of races.”1 His analysis left no doubt in the minds of generations of English-Canadian historians that ethnicity was the key internal dynamic to Canadian history.2 Indeed, they frequently mistook ethnicity for a natural construct. Ethnically determined history is almost always racialized history. Certain cultural, and not infrequently physical, characteristics are considered to be part of the essential character of an ethnic group. Rarely far removed from racial stereotypes, this essentialist reasoning posits an unchanging core of values, beliefs, and practices as defining a particular ethnicity. It is this unchanging character that makes these assumptions ahistorical, for in history everything changes. Essentialism need not assume negative characteristics,3 but positive or negative, it always dehumanizes, because it denies that people are making choices. For most of the twentieth century, ethnically essentialist reasoning was a largely unquestioned practice in Canadian historiography. The “lazy history” of essentialist reasoning so long dominated the literature on the Montreal business community that ethnic stereotypes and related “mentalités” were simply assumed to be valid categories of historical analysis.4 I found this approach deeply repugnant, and so I categorically refused to carry out any ethnic or linguistic analysis of my data. Instead, I looked elsewhere for inspiration in the conviction that a holistic approach would reveal historically grounded social groups and actors. Montreal had a hierarchical mercantile community and a strong craft culture, and it was surrounded by a countryside where peasants held



Internal Dynamics 53

their land in a seigneurial regime. Where else were these three elements present? The obvious answer was in many continental European towns from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and so it was to this literature that I turned for theoretical guidance. Strongly influenced by what I found there, I then analysed the relationships between banking and business cycles and merchants and craftspeople in a search for the internal dynamics that would explain why this colonial town industrialized. This chapter starts with a review of the transition debate, perhaps the single most important contribution of historical materialism to the understanding of capitalism in the twentieth century. I then explore how these ideas might help us better understand the dynamics in the mercantile and craft communities of Montreal in the 1820s. This exploration consists of first a three-part discussion of the role of banks, followed by an analysis of the crafts. Banks were new and highly suspect institutions in early nineteenth-century British North America, and so elected officials monitored them closely. I use their parliamentary inquiries to explain why banks posed such problems. Then the focus shifts to two types of notarial deeds, monetary protests and assignments, to establish the role banks played in determining the rhythm of the economy. The analysis of banking concludes with a discussion of which crafts received bank financing. The nature of the craft communities is then explored, first through provisions of the apprenticeship contracts and then, finally, through the remarkable differences in the patterns of notarized hirings of apprentices and journeymen.

Lessons from Europe The European historiography framed the question of internal dynamics within a larger debate on the development of capitalism. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, two main currents dominated the discussions: a renewed interest in the transition debate and a whole new field called ‘protoindustrialization.’ Each approached the question from a quite different angle. The transition debate dealt with three questions: why in feudal times change in the countryside differed from change in the towns, the role of long-distance trade, and the differing paths to capitalism opened up by merchant capital and craft production.5 By contrast, proto-industrialization was concerned with how the putting-out system and cottage

54

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

industry in the countryside, linked to demographic change, had prepared the ground for subsequent industrialization.6 Given the focus of my own research, the transition literature seemed the more relevant. The original transition debate ran from 1950 to 1956 and was a multifaceted response to an exchange between the Cambridge economist Maurice Dobb and the former Harvard economist Paul Sweezy. In Studies in the Development of Capitalism, published in 1946, Dobb had argued for the primacy of internal factors, stating that changes in the countryside permitted capitalism to later emerge out of craft production in the towns, following what Marx had called the revolutionary path. In a 1950 review for Science and Society, Paul Sweezy, although on the whole laudatory, took exception to three of Dobb’s points. First, relying heavily on the Belgian urban historian Henri Pirenne, Sweezy argued that long-distance trade was central to the development of urban life in the late Middle Ages and that it was in these towns and cities that the Renaissance broke the bonds of feu­ dalism. Second, rather than positing a direct transition from feudalism to capitalism, Sweezy argued that for centuries Europe was neither feudal nor capitalist and instead small-scale commodity production thrived. Third, Sweezy considered that Dobb had misunderstood what Marx meant by the term revolutionary; for Sweezy, it simply meant the revolutionary transformation of the forces of production through the introduction of the division of labour and new technologies that permitted production on a much larger scale. Thus, many of the manufactories of eighteenth-century Europe, although controlled by merchants, were in his eyes revolutionary. Much of the ensuing debate turned on the question of whether or not the ‘prime mover’ of economic change was internal or external. While there was more than a fair share of teleological reasoning, the debate clarified the nature of feudal social relations in the countryside. While large estates, seigneuries, or manors were the basic administrative unit within feudalism, the basic productive unit was the family farm operating within and depending upon a larger rural community. Thus, surpluses extracted by lord and Church from the peasants came in the form of extra-economic taxes, such as the tithe, or social obligations, such as forced labour. This predominance of small family farms meant that peasant accumulation was a genuine possibility. It was not the largely changeless world Sweezy had assumed. Change, however, meant differentiation: some peasant families became richer, while others grew poorer. This placed stress on the peasantry as a whole, undermining its ability to resist further exactions from the aristocracy and the Church. Over centuries, this slow process of change



Internal Dynamics 55

crucially affected the nature of emerging capitalist societies. In what was widely seen as the most significant contribution to the entire debate, Kohachiro Takahashi analysed the prime mover in the case of Japan.7 Japan represented perhaps the best-case scenario for the external forces argument. After all, mainstream historiography clearly posited the centrality of the ‘opening’ of Japan by the American Commodore Perry in the 1850s to any discussion of the 1868 Meiji Restoration, which ushered in the modernization of the Japanese state. Takahashi demonstrated that the roots of the Restoration, however, were much older and they were primarily internal. They lay in a social transformation of the countryside dating from a land reform initiated by the early Tokugawa Shogunate. This reform had permitted the subsequent development of a usurious intermediary class, the jinushi, who held title to the land without working it. It was this social group, along with the aristocracy, that most benefited from the mid-nineteenth-century commutation of the feudal regime after the Meiji restoration. Takahashi argued not only that this undemocratic topdown transformation of the economy laid the basis for the subsequent militarist and expansionist Japanese state, but that the countries where fascism triumphed in twentieth-century Europe had experienced a similar transition. Such transitions ‘from above’ were qualitatively different than revolutions ‘from below,’ such as the Puritan revolution of the 1640s in England or the French Revolution of 1789. A central concern in the debate was what Marx had meant by the revolutionary path to capitalism. In Capital, Marx had written: The transition from the feudal mode of production is two-fold. The producer becomes merchant and capitalist, in contrast to the natural agricultural economy and the guild-bound handicrafts of the medieval urban industries. This is the really revolutionizing path. Or else, the merchant establishes direct sway over production. However much this serves historically as a stepping-stone – witness the English 17th-century clothier, who brings the weavers, indepen­ dent as they are, under his control by selling their wool to them and buying their cloth – it cannot by itself contribute to the overthrow of the old mode of production, but tends rather to preserve and retain it as its precondition.8 Participants discussed this distinction in terms of the major trades of the late medieval and early modern world. Thus, they linked long-distance

56

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

trade and the nature of change it engendered with the historical role of merchant capital, which was seen to be following a ‘non-revolutionary path.’ However, this support for Dobb over Sweezy rarely went beyond a general macro-economic description and largely assumed, rather than clarified, the contradictory nature of the interests of artisans and merchants. A related issue was the role of the state in the early modern period and whose interests it really served. Since merchant capital emerged as the financier of the state in this period, this was frequently cited as proof that merchant capital was too compromised to really “contribute to the overthrow of the old mode of production.” The few who took up Sweezy’s challenge to examine how merchant-controlled manufactories actually operated tended to be less categorical in their rejection of his critique. In 1956, George Lefebvre, the grand old man of French revolutionary historiography, closed the debate by declaring enough of theoretical discussions, time to return to the archives. And, at the age of 82, he most probably did! Although a number of unanswered questions remained, the debate had shown that seemingly old historical questions were indeed relevant to the struggles of the twentieth century. The renewed interest in this debate in the 1970s and early 1980s suggests that once again the transition from capitalism to socialism was a real possibility. The range of topics this time around was much wider, reflecting the variety of paths to socialism on offer.9 The role of the state was re-examined.10 The political significance of the imposition of serfdom on central and eastern Europe became the subject of a major controversy.11 The failure of the early leaders – Holland and northern Italy – to make the transition to industrial societies received international scrutiny,12 while in a most ambitious historical revision, the American Civil War was reframed as a product of the transition.13 It was, however, the work of three francophone historians that most influenced my understanding of the historical processes involved. Within the mbhp , the most influential of the European texts on the transition was a reflection by Albert Soboul on the significance of the French Revolution in understanding the paths: “Du féodalisme au capitalisme: La Révolution française et la problématique des voies de passage.”14 For Soboul, the central issue in the transition from feudalism to capitalism was how the threefold problem facing the peasantry – feudal dues, access to land, and survival of the rural community – was resolved. Were dues abolished without compensation for the lords, or were the lords compen-



Internal Dynamics 57

sated, so that the change was more formal than real? Did the peasantry as a whole gain access to sufficient land to maintain and develop family-based agriculture? What happened to the rural community? Did it maintain precapitalist solidarities, or as was the case with the enclosures in England, was it torn apart? How each of these questions was resolved depended in part on the nature of the relative strength of other social groups and classes in the society; the questions did not represent a conflict just between peasants and lords. The way in which each society resolved this threefold problem would determine the very structure of capitalism in that society. Two important points flowed from Soboul’s analysis. First, multiple forms of capitalism were possible, since there could be various solutions to his threefold problem. Second, while Takahashi’s top-down versus bottom-up distinction was important, it was inadequate to grasp the complexity of the many possible resolutions to these problems. Therefore, it could not, on its own, explain why the resultant capitalism was democratic or not. The other major European influence was the remarkable book by Guy Bois, Crise du féodalisme.15 Bois’ study of late medieval Normandy challenged the dominant demographic model in French historiography, which had argued that population change was the motor of the feudal economy. Bois considered population change important but insufficient. One had to know why populations increased or decreased, and this, he argued, took us to the heart of evolving social relations in the countryside. Bois proposed a socio-economic model of the cycles of feudalism that would explain both the emergence of a wage-earning population from within the peasantry and the reasons why the aristocracy increasingly turned to a centralized monarchy. In short, he explained how the new features of early modern France emerged from within feudal society. Lower Canada of the 1820s was centuries removed from Bois’ Normandy, but I was very impressed by the elegance, clarity, and coherency of Bois’ structural approach. For years, I would hope to achieve something comparable. In the mbhp , we all considered Louise Dechêne’s work on New France and Lower Canada to be a model of historical research.16 It was her formulation of the relationship between feudalism and capitalism that most influenced my thinking. She argued that there were two simultaneously existing modes of production in New France: feudal peasant agriculture and capitalist commercial society. To describe the relationship between these two modes, she used the term ‘imbrication’: an overlapping of distinct

58

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

modes that made a larger discernible pattern. Such conceptual complexity and recognition of difference seemed to me both subtle and most appropriate. As I interpreted Dechêne, both modes had their own internal dynamics and so were in transition. Thus, it was not a question of peasant agriculture being transformed by commercial capitalism; rather, the society born of the merchant-dominated fur trade and the society born of the peasant clearances of seigneurial land were both in transition towards something new. Debates within the mbhp over how to apply these insights to Lower Canada marked our first formal theoretical statement at the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française congress in Compton in the fall of 1983.17 Our presentation of the transition theory assumed the validity of an imbrication of the two modes and the primacy of internal factors while calling for a detailed analysis, craft by craft, of the relative strengths of each of the paths in pre-industrial Montreal. In short, we argued that the transition was a daily struggle that shaped people’s lives. In my own work I pushed the envelope even further. In May of 1984, I proposed to the second Canadian conference on business history at Trent University the following theoretical synthesis of the transition debate: 1 The manner in which the peasantry is differentiated by the introduction of capitalist relations in agriculture, within each social formation, will determine certain fundamental aspects of the subsequent structure and dynamics of capitalism within that social formation. 2 The objective economic distinction between the creation of value in production and its subsequent realization through the commercial sector is the basis for a significant socio-economic contradiction. 3 This contradiction is not between merchant capital and industrial capital per se, but rather within the realm of production itself. 4 Who controls production? Do commodity producers maintain their independence and thereby retain the greater part of the surplus value created in their production? The path described by Marx as revolutionary. Or, do those whose principal basis of capital accumulation is in the commercial sector, building on that basis, insure an appropriation of surplus value through either



Internal Dynamics 59

direct or indirect control of production? The path described by Marx as non-revolutionary. 5 The dialectical tension between these two paths is potentially present within each specific productive trade and it is only on the basis of a detailed study of the organization of each trade that a summary, for a given social formation, of the trends can be achieved. 6 These two contradictions, differentiation of the peasantry and paths, find their economic synthesis in the nature of the town/ country relations in the transition. 7 These infrastructural developments directly influence the historical development of different social groups within the society: groups with differing objective interests. 8 There is a dialectical relationship between the relative strength of these differing groups and the political and ideological manifestations within the social formation. 9 This is why Marx used political rather than economic terms to qualify the two paths: the greater the presence of the revolutionary path and the extent to which the peasantry is successful in making the transition to being independent capitalist farmers, the more consequential will be the bourgeois democratic transformation of the society.18 If you think the structural lessons I drew from the transition debate contradicted those learnt from working with notarial archives, you are not alone. A number of my colleagues in the mbhp considered my approach to be so structural that it accorded an insufficient place for human agency. So, too, did Gregory S. Kealey, the leading proponent of socialist humanism in Canada and the commentator in our session at Trent. The structure-versus-agency issue had just been the subject of an important debate within progressive historiography. It had started with a series of publications by E.P. Thompson19 and then developed into a wide-ranging discussion within the pages of the History Workshop Journal.20 I attempted quite unsuccessfully, as Greg remarked, to straddle the fence. On the one hand, I thought we needed a modest and respectful relationship with our sources in order both to hear what they had to say and to better understand their silences. On the other hand, I was still enough

60

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

of a student of George Rudé’s to believe that when the final instance came, economic factors would be determinate.

Investigating Banking Democracy came to Lower Canada in 1791. For the first time in its 183-year history, this European colony of settlement would have an elected assembly. The franchise was limited to those who met the property qualification on the grounds that independence of means guaranteed independence of thought. It was, however, gender blind. Men and women with sufficient property could vote. Lower Canada was the first majority Catholic jurisdiction within the British Empire to gain these democratic rights. In the mother country, property-holding Catholics would not vote for another thirty-eight years. The property qualification was initially quite high, but the inflation associated with the long years of war against first revolutionary France and then Napoleon’s empire made almost all property owners eligible by 1815. Peasants holding land in feudal tenure had the right to vote. Indeed, they constituted the vast majority of the electorate, and they took to it like ducks to water.21 Although executive powers lay with the Governor in Council, elections to the House of Assembly were often hotly contested affairs that lasted for days. With only one poll per riding, voters often had to travel long distances over extremely poor roads to exercise their franchise. There was no secret ballot, so electoral contests resembled horse races. You knew the size of the lead at all times – hence the importance of mobilizing the vote quickly, particularly since the returning officer could declare the contest over whenever he (there were no female electoral officers in Quebec until the Second World War) considered enough people had voted. Understandably under these circumstances, loose political affiliations soon formed, and by 1809 two political parties had emerged: the Scot party, which supported the governor and Colonial Office policies, and the Patriote party, which advocated a largely liberal reform agenda.22 The Assembly kept a watchful and critical eye on the governor and his Executive and Legislative councils, and the relationship was often a stormy one. In 1809–10, the Assembly’s criticisms of Governor Craig’s policies led to treason charges being laid against the leader of the Patriotes, Pierre-Stanislas Bédard, and the seizure of their newspaper Le Canadien. In 1814, the Assembly instituted impeachment proceedings against chief



Internal Dynamics 61

justices Sewell and Monk, a matter only resolved by a Privy Council ruling in 1817. In 1822, the Patriotes, acting through a Constitutional Association,23 used mass rallies and petitions to successfully oppose a Colonial Office proposal that would have transferred the entire Montreal area to Upper Canada. Although the elected Assembly and the non-elected Legislative Council did manage to agree on a surprisingly large number of points,24 whenever an issue involving the interests of councillors arose, it was sure to be the subject of close scrutiny in the Assembly. Since many councillors were prominent merchants and no issue before the Assembly affected the leading mercantile houses of Quebec City or Montreal more directly than banking, it was understandable that the Assembly accorded considerable time and energy to the colony’s three chartered banks. Each bank had to provide detailed annual reports, and between 1826 and 1830, three legislative hearings were held on banking in Lower Canada. Political animosity was not, however, the only reason for these measures. Banks had exceptional powers and so merited the closest of scrutiny. In Lower Canada, chartered banks were new,25 and they were the only business institutions that benefited from limited liability. If a merchant firm ran up large debts, the personal assets of the partners could be seized. By contrast, the owners of banks were protected; shareholders’ liability was limited to what they had invested in the bank. Furthermore, a bank charter was literally a licence to print money. Banks were under no legal obligation to maintain reserves of government bonds, nor were they required to convert the notes into gold upon demand. Widespread confidence in the fiction that paper money had any real value developed only very slowly because while the notes of the chartered banks were the principal paper currency in circulation in the colony, their exchange value depended on the confidence people had in each issuing bank.26 Thus, the notes of each bank traded at a discount or a premium vis-à-vis every other paper currency. Face value was no guarantor of exchange value. Perhaps most importantly, the banks were engaged in financial and monetary dealings that were at best obscure and, for most in this preindustrial society, either immoral, illegitimate, or both. Banks in the colony did three basic things: they discounted commercial paper; they speculated in currencies, and they dealt in bills of exchange. To finance these activities, they generally used their own share capital and currency rather than deposits.

62

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

Discounting meant the purchase of a promissory note, draft, or bill at less than its face value and before it was due. In the Montreal of the early 1820s, people would present these instruments of credit at biweekly meetings of bank directors, who would assess the reputations of both the drawer and the endorsers of the note. This assessment, together with how long a time it was before the instrument came due, established the discount rate. A note that was due in three months’ time and was backed by reputable names could be discounted up to 5 per cent. In a society where the law on usury established a maximum annual interest rate of 6 per cent, a discounting practice that meant an effective annual interest rate of closer to 20 per cent was for many people simply immoral. Others considered the system of discounting unfair, for the key role played by directors in this process meant that these prominent merchants could use bank capital to underwrite their own activities. Banks also speculated in the many and varied currencies in circulation. The colonial government issued neither coins nor notes, so the circulating mediums either came from abroad, in the form of coins and notes, or were paper money issued by local banks. Coins, as they circulated, became worn and thus lost part of their intrinsic value, while the value of paper currency varied greatly. Thus, there was always money to be made in currency trading, but banks did not limit their trading to this activity alone. In its early years, the Bank of Montreal emptied the colony of almost all of its silver coinage, shipping hundreds of thousands of pounds worth to Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York, where they commanded a high premium for use in the China trade. Understandably, few members of the House of Assembly saw what the colony gained by such a drain of its hard currency and its replacement by paper money of uncertain value. When bank officials compounded the situation by discounting in Quebec City their own notes issued in Montreal, one can readily understand the harsh questioning they faced from the elected members of the Legislative Assembly. It was, however, the business of bills that generated the greatest controversy. Banks were involved in three distinct types of activities linked to bills of exchange. The first and most important was the financing of longdistance trade. An exporting firm would draw a bill on the presumed value of a shipment. It would then sell the bill to a bank, which in turn would sell it to an importing firm, so that the importer could pay its British suppliers. Copies of the bill would be shipped on separate vessels to the supplier, and the first bill to arrive would be sold to a British country bank or currency



Internal Dynamics 63

dealer, who would then present it for ‘acceptance’ by the firm that had received the Canadian exports. The great merit of this convoluted system was that international financial obligations could be met without any actual money being sent across the seas. The problem was that if the accepting firm had not been able to sell the goods it had received for the price assumed in the bill, then the firm would refuse to accept the bill. The bill would then be returned up each link of the chain of credit until it arrived back in the colony, and the bank would present it to the firm that had first drawn it and demand repayment. This whole process could take six to eight months, so only rarely would the firm still have the funds it had received from the bank. Months before these would have been reinvested into next year’s operations. Lower Canada had, as we have seen, a diverse international and intercolonial trade, but certain commodities, notably timber and deals, were far more important than others. When an economic downturn affected the construction market in Ireland or Great Britain, not just dozens, but hundreds of bills drawn on the presumed value of the timber shipped that year would be returned for repayment and all more or less at the same time. Thus, it would appear that the banks were responsible for these commercial crises. In fact, they were conveyor belts linking colonial and imperial economies. Banks drawing bills on their own account further compounded the cyclical problems caused by these ‘real bills,’ for at least the latter had been drawn on the presumed value of a shipment of goods, while bills drawn on the banks own account had no underlying commodity guaranteeing their worth at all. Whenever the value of imports exceeded that of exports there developed a demand for these bills of exchange drawn up by the bank. At the peak of each boom in international trade, Britain dumped large quantities of semi-manufactured goods into colonial markets, and so the trade imbalance that called into being these bills of account regularly preceded a crash. Indeed, banks helped finance the scaling of the maniacal heights of each of the nineteenth-century trade cycles. Thus, just when many of the real bills were coming home to roost, a bank could be faced with large calls on its own reserves, leading to further restrictions in available credit. Both the colonial government and the British Army financed their operations in the Canadas by drawing bills on the government in London. Britain’s victory over Napoleonic France meant that this was the best paper in the world. No one could conceive of the British government defaulting, and so from 1815 until the American Civil War, these bills always commanded a

64

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

premium in New York, a particularly high one during periods of commercial crisis. Through the good offices of the Legislative Council, several of whose members were also bank directors, the Bank of Montreal established an exclusive purchasing arrangement for these bills with the colonial administration. Over the decade of the 1820s, the bank purchased £660,000 worth of government bills. The government thus received prompt payment at par or very close to par, while the bank pocketed the considerable profits from the sale of the bills in New York. Such private appropriation through public administration was precisely what the Patriote reformers had long complained about. Thus, as the colony experienced the effects of the first major international crisis in the history of capitalism,27 following the crash of the British market in December 1825, it is not surprising that the elected members of the House of Assembly organized three inquiries into banking, each one more penetrating than the last. Historians are most fortunate that the elected members of the House took their responsibilities so seriously. The series of statistical returns generated by the banks in response to the questions posed by members, particularly during the last inquiry, permit a detailed description of banking activities that are possible for relatively few banks anywhere in the pre-industrial world. My compilation, in figure 3.1, of two of the series into quarterly averages allows us to see an entire business cycle at a single glance. In preparation for the last of the really large shipments of silver to the United States, at the beginning of 1822, the bank’s cash in the vault stood at record levels. It would be halved by the end of the year and then for the next year rise in tandem with the discounting business of the bank. In 1824 and early 1825, the discounting business took off. It would peak in May of 1825 with an unprecedented £151,092 in monthly discounts. Then an unrelenting decline set in. By the end of the year, discounts were down by almost a third. The year 1826 was marked by a further sharp decline in discounting, while the first quarter of 1827 was the worst since early in 1822. Spring brought only slight relief. Stagnating discounts and declining cash in the vault characterized the situation until late in 1829. This graph reveals a classic boom/bust cycle, one we have come to expect when viewing economic series. However, for the people living in Montreal at the time, this would have been a most unusual and unexpected experience. In pre-industrial societies, economic crises were caused by either bad harvests or war. A commercial crisis without any such apparent cause



Internal Dynamics 65

140

Thousands of pounds current +

120 +

100

+ + + +

80 60 40

+

+ +

+

+

+

+

+ +

+

+

+ +

+ +

+

+

+ +

+

+

+

1822

1823

Monthly discounts

1824

1825

1826

1827

+

+

+

1821

+ + +

1828

1829

+ Bi-monthly cash in the vault

Figure 3.1  •  Quarterly averages of monthly discounts and bimonthly cash in the vault for the Bank of Montreal. Cash was used to purchase bills and notes and to redeem the bank’s own paper currency, so the steep rise in discounts up to the spring of 1825 indicates the frenetic nature of this boom, while the exceptionally low cash on hand in 1826 indicates the severity of the crisis the bank faced. Source: Appendice n , Journal of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, 1830.

was unprecedented. Driven by overproduction of cotton goods, Britain’s economy crashed in December 1825. By the spring of 1826, it had dramatically affected the economies of the Americas and western Europe. My series, however, reveals an oddity. The timing is not right. Discounting by the Bank of Montreal peaked in the spring of 1825, long before the December crash in Britain unleashed its maelstrom. Indeed, with producers of cotton goods forced to dump their excess production on colonial and international markets, the summer of 1825 saw British exports to British North America reach an all-time high.28 Hence, one would have expected discounting, which reflects the level of mercantile activity being financed by the bank, to increase rather than decrease over the shipping season of 1825, as this was the major centre handling textile imports for the Canadas. This historically significant disjuncture cannot, however, be explained by further analysis of these series. Initially, I assumed that it could, and so armed with a calculator and a well-worn copy of Floud’s Quantitative

66

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

Methods for Historians,29 I spent weeks looking for statistically significant relationships that would explain the unusual movements in discounts, cash in the vault, and sales and purchases of bills of exchange. It finally dawned on me that this question – Why did bank directors and officials make the decisions they did? – is not a quantitative one. These series describe the results of their actions, not the reasons for them. Understanding their motivations requires sources that were created by the crisis as it developed in Montreal. Fortunately, Clio has not just been kind to historians of Montreal, she has been exceptionally kind to them, for two major series of notarial deeds chronicle these turbulent years in detail: protests and assignments.

Banking on Empire Word must have been out on the street for weeks, but the answer that Henry Griffin, notary public for the Bank of Montreal, recorded on June 23, 1825, removed any lingering doubts. A promissory note drawn by auctioneers and brokers Spragg & Hutchinson on April 20th for £945.6s.10d. and endorsed and then discounted at the bank by one of the town’s leading importing houses, Gillespie, Moffat & Co., would not be honoured. John Spragg was blunt in his answer to Griffin’s clerk: the “amount due Spragg & Hutchinson by Porteous & Nesbitt is about £19,255, which is the cause of them not being able at present to pay the s’d note.”30 This was the 106th protest lodged by Henry Griffin on behalf of the bank since March. Spragg’s response meant that the assignment to creditors by Porteous & Nesbitt two weeks earlier would have profound ramifications for the bank. By the end of February 1826 – that is, just before news of the severity of the crisis in Britain reached the colony – Griffin would lodge a further 504 protests. As figure 3.2 makes clear, the bank faced not one but two crises. The first stemmed from its discounting of bad paper in the spring of 1825 and the second from its discounting over the winter and spring of 1826. The effectiveness of the bank’s response to the first crisis is also clear. From June through to the fall of 1825, the bank dramatically reduced both the number and value of notes that required protesting. Furthermore, fewer of these notes were drawn by firms that are known to have subsequently failed, so there was a much greater chance of repayment. The bank faced greater difficulties in resolving the considerably longer second crisis.



Internal Dynamics 67

Thousands of pounds current

28 24 20 16 12 8 4 0 O ND J F MAMJ J A S O ND J F MAMJ J A S O ND J F MA 1825 1826 Notes drawn that month which would subsequently be protested Notes drawn by people or firms known to have subsequently failed

Figure 3.2  •  Value of notes protested by the Bank of Montreal drawn by people or firms who would subsequently fail, from October 1824 to April 1827. The intractable nature of the impending problems facing the bank stemmed from the bank having discounted so many notes drawn by firms or individuals who would fail and thus not be able to honour the notes that the bank had already discounted. Source: Deeds of Henry Griffin, Bibliothèque et Archives national du Québec, dépôt de Montréal (ba nq -m ).

I will deal with each crisis in turn, but certain general points apply to both. The bank generally discounted commercial paper shortly after it had been drawn or, in the case of drafts and bills, accepted.31 Months could pass between the discounting of a note by the bank and the date it came due. The term was generally sixty or ninety days. When the bank faced a crisis, it was important that it act quickly, for as figure 3.2 indicates, recovering funds would not be easy, since so many of the firms subsequently failed. In such cases, the bank had two options: it could wait for a partial payment when trustees liquidated the assets of the firm; or it could lodge claims against the endorsers. The first was a potentially long process, while the second was costly.

68

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

£18,599

£10,771

£2,850

£3,778 £4,513

August July June May Month the April note was drawn March February

September £3,469

August £22,617

July £13,298

June £6,723

Month the note came due and was protested

Figure 3.3  •  A comparison between when notes were drawn and when they were protested by the Bank of Montreal. By the end of June, if not before, the bank would have realized the severity of the crisis it was facing, as £18,599 of notes and bills discounted in May and not due until August were bad. Source: Deeds of Henry Griffin, ba nq -m.

When the first crisis hit, the bank acted very quickly. Indeed, given the timing of the drawing of notes that subsequently required protesting, it is clear that bank directors and officials must have already been on their guard from very early June if not from late May. Bad paper drawn in May accounted for one-sixth of that month’s record discounts, but for less than a cent on the dollar of the June discounts. As figure 3.3 clearly shows, despite this quick action, the bank could not avoid very serious losses over the summer of 1825, as the bulk of the bad paper discounted in the spring of 1825 had been ninety-day notes: those drawn and probably discounted in March came due primarily in June, those from April in July, and those from May in August. By September, the worst was over, as the losses on notes discounted over the summer were so negligible. Such a rapid and effective reaction to the crisis could only have been achieved by drastically restricting access to credit. During the summer of



Internal Dynamics 69

1825, the bank cut its discounting operations in Montreal by a third. Who would have been affected by such a strategy? Most notes drawn in June, July, and August would have been for purchases of imported goods by local merchants, auctioneers, brokers, forwarders, and country merchants, for it was too early in the year for substantial purchases of local agricultural products or for outfitting the timber camps. The dominant importing houses, which stood atop the Montreal mercantile community and whose partners often sat on the board of the bank, would therefore not have been directly affected. Many of their clients, however, would have faced increased difficulty in financing their purchases. The dramatic success of the bank’s strategy strongly suggests that accepting fewer notes was only part of the strategy. The bank must also have demanded better paper by requiring more endorsers and restricting its business to only the most credit worthy of firms. The nature of the firms that assigned their assets to trustees for the creditors in 1825 and early 1826 confirms this analysis.32 Dry goods merchants, grocers, and an auctioneer and broker were the causalities of the first crisis. Cobb & Emerson and Porteous & Nesbitt, both dry goods firms, failed in the spring of the year; two middling-sized grocers, wine, and spirit dealers then followed: A & L Glass and Ware & Gibb. Early in the New Year, after John Spragg had absconded to Vermont, the firm of Spragg & Hutchinson assigned its remaining assets to trustees for its creditors. The scale of the credit linkages between these firms leaves little doubt that this was a domino effect. Once the two dry goods firms went down, there were bound to be serious difficulties for those with whom they did such a considerable business.33 The timing of their assignments in May and early June is also significant, for the amounts owing must have stemmed from at least the previous year’s shipping season. If the ramifications of these early failures were clear enough, the reasons why these firms failed remained clouded in mystery. The key firms that failed as a result of the second crisis were of a qualitatively different order. Furthermore, we know what caused the crisis in this case and it was not a simple domino effect. The two largest assignments involved McKenzie, Bethune & Co. and Maitland, Garden & Auldjo. These import merchants had become active in the spring and summer of 1825 in financing the building of ocean going vessels in Montreal for the British market. This venture into ‘colonial-builts’ was new to Montreal shipyards, and the scale of these firms losses suggests just how significant financing

70

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

this new economic venture had become for the bank as it recovered from its losses in the summer of 1825. MacKenzie, Bethune & Co. was responsible for just under a fifth of all ocean-going tonnage built in Montreal between 1824 and 1827. Between December 1825 and March 1826, the Bank of Montreal discounted £2,925 of their notes, which would subsequently require protest. The crash left MacKenzie, Bethune with two large vessels, the Bencoolen and the Rifleman, in the stocks of Alexander Young at the foot of the current in Montreal. Maitland, Garden & Auldjo was responsible for almost a third of the ocean-going tonnage built in Montreal between 1824 and 1827.34 Through its Quebec City office of Garden & Auldjo and William Maitland’s Canada Shipbuilding Company, the firm’s partners were also heavily involved in shipbuilding in Quebec City.35 In July 1825, the firm borrowed £15,700 from the Bank of Montreal and then in August a further £10,000 from bank director John Richardson36 to finance its shipbuilding operations. Over the fall and winter of 1825–26, the bank discounted £32,684 of the firm’s notes that would subsequently require protesting. The crash found the firm with 2,330 tons in the shipyards of Montreal and Quebec City. The assignment listed assets for the firm totalling £242,624, but a decade later its creditors had realized less than a third.37 Thus, the two crises were linked. The first crisis in the spring of 1825 was of unknown cause but of certain effect. It led to a serious restriction in discounting and a refocusing of the bank’s business on larger, wellestablished firms in Montreal. Several of these firms were venturing into the ‘colonial-built’ market that had proved so profitable in Quebec City. Banking on empire, the Bank of Montreal generously financed this expansion. By the winter of 1825–26, bank-financed construction in the shipyards of Montreal and Quebec City reached into the thousands of tons. The initial crisis in 1825 appears to have been of a commercial nature. Unquestionably, the losses that Maitland, Garden & Auldjo faced as a result of the failure of Spragg & Hutchison did not help matters, but at less than 5 per cent of their assigned assets, these losses were highly unlikely to have been a major factor in this much larger failure. No, the linkage was indirect, but all the more devastating. Banking on empire, the Bank of Montreal sought to recoup its losses by expanding into bankrolling shipbuilding for the imperial market on behalf of two of its more established clients. As a result, with the December 1825 crash of the British market, the bank



Internal Dynamics 71 £1067/£385 Porteous & Nesbitt Drygoods

£2119/£849

£12,485

MacNider & Scott Auctioneers & brokers

£88/£33 £540/£441

£450 £178 A. & L. Glass Grocers

£210

£2667

Spragg & Hutchinson Auctionneers & brokers £1641

£80 Cobb & Emerson Drygoods

£422

£15,719

£486

Robert Ritchie £60 £35 Trader £144/£95

D.W. Eager £181 £212 Trader £50 £822 Maitland, Garden & Auldjo Merchants/Shipbuilding £423/£361

Ware & Gibb Grocers

Alex Thomson Merchant

£255 /£180

£74/£68 £233 £51

£242 £172

S & W Spragg Drygoods £1628 Wm. Wilson Distiller

MacKenzie & Bethune Merchants/Shipbuilding

Stuart & Calcoff Auctioneers & brokers £84

Handyside Bros & Co. Distillers

£22

£304 £8

£210

J.I. Newton Trader

Jos. Nickless Stationer

1826

1825 10%

>25%

>33%

£265

1827 >50%

The significance of the liability on the books of the failed firm

Figure 3.4  •  Linkages between people and firms that failed, 1825–1827. The crisis was not simply a domino effect. Although the failures in the spring of 1825 were closely related, the major failures of the shipbuilding merchant firms in 1826 were primarily caused by the collapse of the British economy, while the resulting poor local conditions help explain the many failures in early 1827. When two figures appear on a line, the first is the amount owed when the first firm failed and the second indicates what it had been reduced to on the books of the second firm when it failed. Source: All notarial deeds for Montreal, 1820–1829, banq-m.

found itself far more exposed to external factors than it might otherwise have been. Despite greatly reduced discounting operations, monetary protests by the bank remained at worrying levels throughout the remainder of 1826. The prolonged recession that ensued, visible on figure 3.1, was in no small

72

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

measure due to the scale of the bank’s losses on financing colonial-builts. The failure of Maitland, Garden & Auldjo alone wiped out 30 per cent of the Bank of Montreal’s paid-up capital and was the principal reason for the bank’s suspension of dividend payments for the rest of the decade. The resulting tight credit situation, combined with the shipbuilding failures, led to the collapse of MacNider & Scott and the flurry of failures over the winter and spring of 1827 shown on figure 3.4.38 These failures indicate how difficult the situation had become for those involved in commerce without substantial capital reserves of their own. Thus, a detailed audit of the first capitalist crisis in the colony’s his­tory lends no support to the idea that the staple trades were the motor of the colonial economy. Indeed, some of the largest manufacturing activities in the colony were financed by merchants, drawing on support from their bank, and this seriously compounded the crisis in Montreal. In short, it is not grand general theory, but the particular and quite specific strategies and local relationships that explain the nature and severity of the crisis in Montreal. Numerous questions, however, remain. Is it important that outside shipbuilding so few producers seem to have failed? How unusual was the bank’s financing of shipbuilding? Does this largely commercial typology of the crisis suggest that craft production in Montreal had for the most part remained independent of merchant control? Did the activities of master craftsmen and manufacturers follow a different rhythm? In short, what was the configuration of the paths to capitalism in pre-industrial Montreal?

Discounting Crafts To answer these questions I returned to the monetary protests and conducted an analysis of how often notes drawn by crafts producers and manufacturers were the subject of a protest. Now, this method has the obvious drawback that only those producers who encountered difficulties would be the object of a protest. A producer receiving bank financing who met all of his or her obligations on time would not appear in the series as a drawer, although they might as an endorser for someone else who had encountered difficulties. Nevertheless, the patterns are revealing. Two banks were discounting notes in Montreal in the 1820s, the Bank of Montreal and the Bank of Canada. The short-lived Bank of Canada was formed in 1820 and had effectively ceased discounting by April 1824.



Internal Dynamics 73

As timing so clearly mattered, to compare the two banks’ discounting of notes drawn by manufacturers and craftsmen (not a single note drawn by a craftswoman was protested by either bank), I divided the data for the Bank of Montreal into two series. The first covers up to the end of March 1824 and the second from April 1824 until the end of July 1827. As table 3.1 shows, the two banks had qualitatively different relationships with the craft communities of Montreal. Only one in twenty of the notes protested by the Bank of Canada for which we know the occupation of the drawer39 was drawn by someone directly involved in production. Over the same period, 25 per cent of the notes protested by the Bank of Montreal were drawn by manufacturers or craftsmen. Then, leading up to the peak of the boom and through the dual-linked crises in discounting at the Bank of Montreal, notes drawn by manufacturers or craftsmen constituted a fifth of all notes protested for which we know the occupation of the drawer. Is this a lot? Well, that depends very much on how you view the relationship between banks and crafts in the pre-industrial world. For staple theorists, this level of bank financing of production poses a problem, but for those applying the theoretical lessons from the transition debate, this scale of bank financing is not surprising. After all, that debate had turned on the relationship between merchant capital and production. In terms of the transition, we should ask the question: Is this evidence that merchant capital used the banks to control production? We can see several patterns in the protest series. The first concerns the presence of trades with relatively large shops and high fixed costs: blacksmiths, brewers, distillers, founders, furriers, hatters,40 nail manufacturers, printers, shipbuilders, tanners, and tobacconists. Although there were not many individual firms in each of these trades in Montreal, they accounted for a third of the sixty-six firms known to have done business with the Bank of Montreal and seven of the thirteen firms in the Bank of Canada series. Nine of these trades also had high inventory costs. Particularly for those depen­dent on seasonally produced local produce or imported semi-manufactured goods, these inventories would have involved merchant capital at the point of acquisition and, quite possibly, for longer-term financing as well. It is important to note in this connection that none of these firms dealt directly with the bank. They were all first offered credit by a merchant firm that in the majority of cases then endorsed the note over to another firm before it was discounted at the bank.

Table 3.1  • Notes drawn by craftsmen and protested by banks in Montreal

Bank of Canada to April 1824

Number of Craft Notes Construction

Bank of Montreal to April 1824

Bank of Montreal to July 1827

# of # of # of # of # of # of Notes Firms Notes Firms Notes Firms

Carpenters 1 1 18 9 21 4 and joiners Masons 1 1 1 1 Painters 2 2 1 1 Plumbers 1 1 Surveyors 2 2

Food & Drink Bakers 1 1 Brewers 1 1 Distillers 3 1 4 1 1 1 Farmers 1 1 Leather trades Saddlers 1 1 Shoemakers 1 1 Tanners 2 2 Blacksmiths 2 2 3 2 Metal trades Engineers 1 1 Founders 1 1 1 1 Manufacturers 4 1 1 1 of nails Nail cutters 1 1 Tinsmiths 3 1 Needle trades Furriers 7 2 1 1 Hatters 5 3 1 1 27 3 Merchant 2 2 5 2 8 2 tailors Wood trades

Cabinetmakers 17 5 11 4 Carriage makers 2 2 Coopers 1 1 Gilders 5 1 Shipbuilders 2 2



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Table 3.1 • continued Number of Craft Notes

Bank of Canada to April 1824

Bank of Montreal to April 1824

Bank of Montreal to July 1827

# of # of # of # of # of # of Notes Firms Notes Firms Notes Firms

Druggists 1 1 1 1 Miscellaneous Printers 1 1 1 1 10 3 Tobacconists 2 2 6 2 Watchmakers 2 2 Totals

17 13 74 35 107 39

Sources: Deeds of Henry Griffin and Nicholas B. Doucet, ba nq -m .

The second pattern is the notable presence of luxury trades: cabinet makers, carriage makers, gilders, merchant tailors, and watchmakers, in addition to furriers and hatters. Here, merchants were much more likely to be clients than controllers. However, the offer of a credit accommodation might well have been a form of payment, particularly during difficult times. Third, we have throughout the period the regular presence of firms in the construction trades, most notably carpenters and joiners, who managed most of the town’s building sites. In interpreting these patterns, the question of timing is important. We are dealing with a small number of firms that only appeared in these series because they could not honour a debt. If we assume that a temporary financial difficulty was not particularly exceptional for most firms, then these patterns are indicative of which trades had access to bank financing as a normal part of their operations. If this assumption is valid, we really do have to listen to the silences in the series, since many, indeed most, trades were conspicuous by their absence. We should not blow out of proportion the temporary difficulties that firms and trades faced. Few of these firms are known to have failed. The protested note was generally paid within a short time. Only one of these firms, the distiller Handyside Bros. & Co., was forced to assign its assets

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to trustees for its creditors, and its failure appears to have been caused by an unsuccessful speculation in grain.41 Beyond the general patterns, these temporary embarrassments are historically significant only to the extent that they indicate a broader pattern that can be readily distinguished from the whole or when they occurred repeatedly. Hatters and printers provide an example of the former: clearly, both trades encountered serious difficulties coincident with the economic crisis. What is not so clear, without the details of the protests, is the significance of the second, where firms repeatedly discounted notes that would be protested. An illustration of the complexity is provided by the sequences of protests involving Cutter & Whittemore, nail manufacturers, in 1823. A sixtyday £150 note was protested on March 11th and the firm promised to pay the next day. On April 16th, another protest was lodged, this time for a thirty-day £150 note. On July 17th, Cutter & Whittemore received its third protest of the year for a sixty-day £135 note. All three notes were endorsed by the same two merchant firms: Wm & Jn Forbes and Horatio Gates & Co. Clearly, the first note was simply rolled over, and although the second may have been paid the next day as Whittemore promised, the firm was still in need of accommodating merchants.42 Is this extension of credit by merchants evidence of a control important enough to compromise the independence of the firm? Probably not in this case,43 yet Whittemore’s story hints at the many tensions and difficulties inherent in financing a large manufactory during the transition. It was a problem most craft producers in the city were not large enough to have to face. However, the presence of such large firms, which could take advantage of a merchant’s accommodation, would constitute formidible competition for the many smaller producers in Montreal. The manufactory did not need to succeed, or even survive for long, for it to force change in other workplaces in town.

Accounting for Crafts We cannot know the full extent of the craft world in pre-industrial Montreal. Our best starting point is probably with the people and firms that hired skilled labour or promised before notary to train a young person in a skill. Nevertheless, it is important to realize that notarized hiring contracts seriously underestimate the number of masters in the city. Most trades were



Internal Dynamics 77

composed of craft households. Masters hired apprentices according to the life cycle of their own household and that of their extended kin. If a son, younger brother, or nephew, or, in a limited number of trades, a daughter, younger sister, or niece of the right age, was interested in learning the trade, there would be no need for a notarized contract. Learning the trade within one’s own family was probably the norm among Canadien families in well-established trades44 and not especially unusual among English-speaking families born in the colony. Given where most immigrants were in their life cycle, it was probably more common for those masters who had only recently arrived to hire before notary an unrelated youth to join their young household and learn a trade. Certainly the challenge of cross-cultural living arrangements could in itself be a good reason to sign a notarized agreement. Would a Protestant master allow his Canadien apprentice to attend his confirmation lessons? What about the honouring of feast days? Would the young boy or girl be expected to work over the Christmas holiday season? What about attending night school? Or ensuring that the youth was not exposed to the corrupting influences of gambling and drink? There were many cultural clauses in these contracts between parents or guardians and the masters; indeed, there were more clauses related to these questions than to the quality of the teaching of the trade itself. And why not? After all, it was the custom for the young adolescent to live as a member of the master’s household. An extract from the agreement reached in 1821 between the Mailloux family of SteThérèse, about thirty kilometres north of Montreal, and Abel Thompson, a baker in Montreal, well illustrates many of these considerations: Thompson promises to provide boarding, lodging and wearing apparel suitable to the employment of him the said apprentice, to teach and instruct Gabriel Edouard Mailloux in the art and trade of a baker, allow him to follow the Roman Catholic religion, send him to evening school during the first two winters, with his father to pay expenses and it is further agreed that once a year Mailloux will be allowed to go visit his family in Ste Thérèse.45 Note amidst the otherwise straightforward language an allusion to his status, “suitable to the employment of him the said apprentice”; in many of the French contracts, the terms are even clearer: “suivant son état” (according to his state [in life]). These contracts defined a hierarchical

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relationship, and thus the parents were often interested in ensuring the best possible conditions for their child. The language that Godfroy Blanchard, master blacksmith of the parish of St-Hyacinthe de Yamasaka, accepted when he agreed to take on for two years the son of Marie-Anne Latulippe of faubourg St-Laurent, the widow of a day labourer, might have reflected the difficulty he had in finding an apprentice forty kilometres from town, but it undoubtedly represented what many women in her situation hoped for: “Blanchard s’oblige de le traiter doucement et humainement et de ne l’employer qu’aux ouvrages proportionnés à ses forces et capacités et ce faisant ordinairement par apprenti de cette espèce et à condition que ne sera pas tenu à faire plus que le train ordinaire de Blanchard, outre les ouvrages de la Boutique, lui montrer et enseigner son métier afin de le rendre capable de servir comme compagnon, le loger, coucher, chauffer, nourrir convenablement suivant l’usage de ce pays.”46 Marie-Josephte Roy, widow of Benjamin Wragg, appeared more fortunate in that she could turn to her brother-in-law, William Wragg, blacksmith and farrier of Montreal, when she placed her 16-year-old son, also called Benjamin, in an apprenticeship: Wm. Wragg promises to provide good and wholesome board, lodging, clothing and other necessarys fitting for an apprentice, to teach or cause to be taught Benjamin the art and trade of a blacksmith farrier as far as in his power, should Benjamin at any time within the period mentioned wish to join any other trade than that of a blacksmith farrier that William Wragg will be at liberty to bind him to such trade chosen by Benjamin when a suitable and proper Master shall be found to instruct him, to procure immediately 3 months day schooling and afterwards 3 months night schooling each winter provided he remains with him.47 Yet, as the corrections to the contract perhaps foreshadowed, and indeed as might have been suggested by a formalized contract within an extended family being needed at all, the agreement did not hold. A year before term, it was annulled with mutual discharge. Nonetheless, Roy was much more fortunate than Marie-Louise Laurin of faubourg St-Antoine. When this widow of Joseph Lamouche went before Pierre Ritchot, notary public, on August 17, 1821, she thought she had engaged her 15-year-old



Internal Dynamics 79

son, Joseph, to learn the trade from master shoemaker Toussaint Champeau, also of faubourg St-Antoine. It was not a good contract. Laurin and not Champeau assumed responsibility for the cleaning and mending of Joseph’s clothes, and although there were no guarantees as to the quality of the food and lodging, Laurin had to subsidize his upkeep with a Spanish dollar a month payable to Champeau as the term advanced. It was, however, she thought, a contract. A signed note to himself on the copy Ritchot kept in his greffe told another story: “N.B. J’ai informé M. Toussaint Champeau que le présent engagement est nul vue que la femme y mentionné n’est pas tutrice de ces enfants mineurs.”48 We are certainly a long way away from the treatment to be accorded William Alexander McLean by Jonathan Alger, blacksmith of Montreal: “Alger promises to provide comfortable board and lodging, washing, mending and wearing apparel complete fit and usual for such an apprentice as well as all other necessaries, both in sickness and health, and at the end of said apprenticeship to give to him a freedom suit of cloaths complete over and above his then cloathing provided he shall behave himself faithfully, to teach and instruct or cause William Alexander McLean to be taught and instructed in the trade and business of blacksmith and all matters and things thereto belonging.”49 As this selective sampling suggests, apprentice contracts signed before notary reflected the unequal power relationships between masters, parents, guardians, and apprentices. Almost all of the main bodies of the contracts start with a long list of obligations binding on the apprentice and his or her parents or guardians. The list usually ends with a special injunction binding on the parents or guardians should the apprentice abscond,50 and is followed by a much shorter list of the master’s obligations. Often the best that parents could hope for was the promise master blacksmith Martin Paquette made to Joseph Dubé, carpenter of faubourg des Récollets: to “nourir et loger [his son] à son pot et ordinaire.”51 The frequent appeal to community norms and values in these contracts is historically significant. To be sure, as we have seen, particularly unequal gender relations could undermine those values, but they also defined them. Pollyanna did not live in pre-industrial Montreal. No one could have expected the master to fulfill most of his promises, for he would simply not have been the person responsible for the washing, mending, cooking, or cleaning. He was master of more than just a craft. He was first and foremost

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

the master of a household. Moreover, it was this context of a family-based craft household that constituted the basis for normative community values. The prevalence of these values speaks directly to the question of the paths. People learnt and practised a truly remarkable number of skills in preindustrial Montreal. We have notarized hiring contracts for forty-seven different trades. The master of one in ten households in Montreal hired either a journeyman or an apprentice before notary in the decade of the 1820s.52 Among male adolescents, a formal apprenticeship was very common. One in four was bound to a master by a notarized agreement at any point over the decade.53 When one considers the hundreds of informal apprenticeships likely to have been going on within craft families, probably most male youth in town learnt a skilled trade. This prevalence of craft was not exceptional; it was how the pre-industrial urban world worked. That we remain largely ignorant of this productive culture is a remarkable testament to the power of bourgeois economic theory’s reification of the market in Western culture. In what context did apprentices learn their trade? Did it differ from the situation for skilled labour detailed in the journeyman contracts? To answer the first question, I examined in detail all of the formal apprenticeships in terms of where people learnt their trade. I established a classification system for all the known firms in each trade from 1824 to 1829.54 I categorized as ‘large’ any shop or manufactory where there was more than double the median number of people for that particular trade known to be working.55 In almost all of the major trades, there were rapid changes regarding the place where people learnt their trade. In 1824–25, only four out of ten apprentices learnt their trade in a relatively large shop. By 1828–29, these proportions had been inverted. The overall ratio stood at six out of ten, and in a number of trades, three out of four apprenticed in a relatively large shop. Furthermore, these relatively large shops tended to have English-speaking masters. What could cause such rapid change across a broad spectrum of crafts? I can think of two possible explanations and they are not mutually exclusive. As we have seen, the mercantile economy of Montreal experienced serious difficulties in 1826–27, and the recovery seems to have been slow at best. I examined each skilled trade to see if this crisis had an impact on the number of new apprentices hired. I found that the crisis had had little effect, with the exception of the usual suspects: hatters, printers, and shipbuilders. However, during uncertain economic times, perhaps



Internal Dynamics 81

the more-established firms felt better able to assume such long-term commitments. Montreal became a majority English-speaking city during these years, mostly due to immigration from the British Isles. Although there were still the poor and destitute, this was not yet an immigration dominated by a ‘shovelling out of the paupers’ policy. Later, in the 1830s and particularly in the 1840s, the nature of immigration to the Canadas would change dramatically. However, in these early years following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which had blocked large-scale immigration to the colonies for a generation, most of the immigrants who had chosen to remain under the British crown came with capital. Sometimes it was in the form of skills, other times in the form of modest savings, and in rare instances both. What is clear is that the vast majority expected to make a better life for themselves and their families in the colony than they had experienced in Britain or Ireland. By the end of the decade, apprentice-age children of immigrant families fresh off the boat would be unlikely to learn a trade from their parents. In their early years in the new country, most skilled migrants would work for wages as journeymen or domestic servants. Since small shops were most likely to hire from within their own neighbourhood or community, as well as from among people with whom they shared cultural, linguistic, and religious affiliations,56 the children of immigrants would more likely find employment in the larger shops. For those who had arrived earlier and perhaps had disproportionately swelled the ranks of masters in the early to mid-1820s, their own children were now likely to be of an age to learn a trade. These complex internal dynamics of cultural formation and differentiation in a colonial setting were the product of the choices people made. This dialectic of agency and constraint had nothing to do with the essential nature of particular ethnic groups, but as we shall see, it would have a profound impact on the nature of Canadian democracy. My first attempt to make this argument proved a disaster. Jean-Claude Robert, co-director of the Groupe de recherche sur la société montréalaise, ripped into my paper at the Canadian Historical Association meeting in Vancouver in June 1983. Our session was held in French and so few were there to witness it, but the effect of his critique of both my work and that of my younger colleague Gilles Lauzon, who was presenting his first paper at an academic conference, was little short of devastating. We both seriously considered throwing in the towel then and there.

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

In retrospect, I think the virulence of the rejection of our work had more to do with our stance on essentialism than with our argument about the transition. Both Gilles and I refused to presume that ethnicity was a determining factor. Neither his analysis of capital accumulation by masons nor my analysis of the crisis of 1825 privileged ethnic or national identities. We, of course, noted them, but they were not key to our explanations of change over time. In the wake of the sovereigntists’ defeat in the 1980 Quebec referendum and the subsequent crisis within the nationalist movement, this refusal could be taken to mean a denial of the national question. For progressive historians of Quebec to be understood as having done this at a cha meeting was tantamount to betrayal. This was certainly not our intent, but it does speak to the great difficulty we had within the mbhp in developing a Marxist framework that accorded due significance to national oppression. Path-breaking work within historical materialism had just begun to rethink nationalism. Indeed, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Hobsbawn and Ranger’s Invention of Tradition were early historiographic markers of the cultural ‘turn,’ and at least for me, therein lay the rub. How could we reject structuralist explanations when we were still so ignorant of this colony’s fundamental socio-economic structures? By mid-1984, however, my major attempts to uncover those structures had been sharply criticized by both G.S. Kealey and J.C. Robert, the leading English-Canadian and Québécois social historians of the nineteenth century. Clearly, my research was not convincing the people who should be interested in my findings. I turned to R.J. Morris for advice. The pre-eminent urban historian of his generation, Bob was then in mid-career and had just started to contextualize his work on Leeds by examining other quickly growing nineteenth-century cities. Fortunately for the mbhp , Montreal was one city that really caught his interest. Bob was intrigued but not convinced by my arguments, but he was sure that a good deal of my difficulty was the result of my own doing. I was using the wrong approach; an abstract theoretical introduction followed by a largely narrative and overly empirical blow-by-blow description was not how one should do history. He urged me to clarify my arguments by using analytical techniques to bridge the gap between explanation and description. He suggested a simple statistical test, known as ‘observed by expected,’ to highlight the principal differences within the craft communities in an objective manner. In this test, one compares the presence of a particular variable in a series with its frequency in different series. Is what one sees what one would expect?



Internal Dynamics 83

How often did masters hire apprentices or journeymen in light of the number of masters known to be in each trade? The results are presented in table 3.2. The observed-by-expected indices vary widely, with a number of important trades having fewer than half the number of journeyman hirings that one would have expected (that is, the index is below 0.5), but the number of apprenticeships are close – indeed, for shoemakers, extremely close – to what one would have expected (that is, at or near 1.00). Trades with a limited number of large shops or manufactories, such as printing and shipbuilding, would have very high indices, while trades with a significantly higher index for journeyman hirings than for apprentices signal anomalies that need to be explained. As is clear from table 3.2, with the obvious exception of shipbuilding, apprentices and journeymen hired before notary could not have shared similar experiences, since they worked in different trades. In shipbuilding, starting in late 1824, apprentices and journeymen were both employed in large numbers at four shipyards in the city. The size of these manufactories swelled dramatically, particularly at the yard of James Ellice Campbell, who worked for Maitland, Garden & Auldjo.57 It was there, in March of 1826, that both apprentices and journeymen experienced the “unfortunate calamity” of the first industrial layoff in Canadian history.58 Shipbuilding was a major industry in the Americas, and Montreal was a leading centre for the manufacture of steam engines. Thus, it is not at all unlikely that many apprentices and journeymen who first met building colonial-builts would once again work together in the shipyards of the Canadas, New England, or New York, equipping steamers for the canals and lakes of North America. Journeymen in the other two important sectors that hired before notary – tinsmithing and masonry – had much happier tales to tell. New hand tools were developed in New York City in the early 1820s that transformed the manufacture of tinware. Prices came down dramatically and markets expanded exponentially. For a relatively brief time, until enough new apprentices had been trained, journeymen tinsmiths in Montreal, and in all the other towns in North America, could write their own ticket and they did. Wages doubled in only a few years. The demand for skilled masons was of a different type. Large-scale projects in the region had the Montreal-based master masons who had contracted to build these canals and forts signing up journeymen to work for them. Faced with this competition for skilled labour, local masons rebuilding both commercial and religious buildings

Table 3.2  • Number of firms by rank order signing apprenticeship contracts or hiring journeymen before notary to work in Montreal, 1820 to 1829, showing their observed-by-expected indices Trade Shoemakers Carpenters and joiners Blacksmiths and founders Coopers Milliners and dressmakers Bakers Tailors Masons Butchers Cabinetmakers Saddler and harness makers Tinsmiths Brewers and distillers Painters and glazers Printers Confectioners Bookbinders Hatters Silversmiths Tanners Furriers Tallow chandlers Hairdressers Ship carpenters Watchmakers Carriage makers Carvers and guilders Tobacconists Wheelwrights Turners and block makers Bricklayers Roofers Gunsmiths

Firms Apprentices Journeymen # # Index # Index 82 162 1.04 56 64 0.61 39 45 0.61 35 70 1.05 27 68 1.32 23 36 0.81 22 63 1.50 21 24 0.60 18 23 0.67 16 33 1.08 16 34 1.12 11 36 1.72 10 3 0.16 10 15 0.79 10 46 2.42 7 11 0.64 7 8 0.60 7 12 0.90 7 5 0.38 7 6 0.45 5 6 0.63 5 9 0.95 4 6 0.79 4 92 12.09 4 4 0.53 3 12 2.10 3 7 1.23 3 4 0.70 3 7 1.23 3 5 0.88 3 3 0.53 2 – 0.00 2 3 0.79

10 0.22 11 0.36 18 0.83 11 0.61 – 0.00 6 0.47 16 1.30 25 2.13 2 0.20 23 2.57 8 0.89 44 7.16 7 1.25 4 0.72 – 0.00 6 1.19 – 0.00 3 0.77 3 0.77 1 0.26 11 3.93 2 0.72 – 0.00 27 12.08 – 0.00 3 1.79 1 0.60 7 4.18 – 0.00 2 1.19 5 2.98 3 2.68 – 0.00



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Table 3.2 • continued Trade Nail manufacturers Plasterers Brush makers Organ makers Bonnet makers Rope makers Jewellers Marble cutters Papermakers Brick manufacturers Comb makers Millers

TOTALS

Firms Apprentices Journeymen # # Index # Index 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 494

– 0.00 2 0.53 6 1.58 3 0.79 2 0.53 3 0.79 1 0.53 1 0.53 1 0.53 – 0.00 – 0.00 – 0.00 940



5 4.47 1 0.89 – 0.00 – 0.00 1 0.89 – 0.00 – 0.00 – 0.00 – 0.00 7 12.53 1 1.79 1 1.79 276

Note: Indices that are at least twice as high as one would have expected are in boldface. Source: All deeds signed before notary in Montreal, 1820–29, ba nq -m.

in the town centre, where wood construction was banned for fear of fire, often had to sign notarized contracts with journeymen just to keep them around. Once these three sectors are accounted for, however, the remarkable aspect of the journeyman contracts as a series is how little they reflect the relative size of the differing trades in the city. As was the case with the craftsmen who drew protested notes, the absences, or silences if you will, in the series are particularly eloquent. Now, colleagues in Quebec City had earlier examined a similar series of journeyman contracts. On the basis of their examination, they concluded that the crafts in Lower Canada had faced very serious, indeed terminal, problems. Joanne Burgess coined the phrase ‘precocious proletarianization’ to describe their position. Essentially, these Quebec City historians argued that, with the development of the staple trade in timber, the integration of the Lower Canadian economy into that of the British Empire completely undermined local crafts, because

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they could not meet the competition from Britain.59 Their principal proof lay in the wording of the journeyman contracts, which showed from early in the nineteenth century repeated instances of the division of labour and other examples of the devaluing of traditional craft culture in Quebec City. We found the same thing in Montreal. About a third of the contracts signed by journeymen before a notary over the decade show clear signs of a changing craft culture. Not only was there division of labour, but people were even hired to work as foremen, introducing a supervisory role that was completely incompatible with craft values and traditions. Thus, we both found the same patterns, but we drew diametrically opposed conclusions. Most trades had no such contracts, and those that did were limited to a small number of shops. We concluded that people signed these contracts because they were being asked to do something unusual, something for which there was not a community-based value system to guide what they should be paid or what this work might mean for their future employment. If you are only going to do part of a job, will you get the same wage? If you are only going to supervise, how is your remuneration to be calculated? For these quite legitimate questions, it would be best to have things spelt out in writing. In short, people went before notary to sign these contracts because of the exceptional nature of their work. If it was exceptional, then it should hardly be used to judge the rest of the craft world. Thus, these contracts did provide cases of mercantile control of production in particular shops and certain trades, but their historical logic suggests that the craft world of Montreal was primarily in the hands of independent masters engaged in household-based commodity production. If this was the case, then what was this town’s relationship to the countryside, where family-based commodity production also predominated? Could we perhaps use this same analytical method, based on a series of notarial deeds that we know does not cover all potential cases, to better understand a complex whole?

Chapter Four

Cuvier’s Feather

George Cuvier was a pioneering palaeontologist in early nineteenthcentury France.1 He was one of the most famous scientists of his day, in part because of a celebrated exercise in historical deduction. He had found the fossilized remains of a feather, but no other evidence of what the bird looked like. On the basis of his knowledge of ornithology, he identified the feather’s function, which allowed him to position the feather in an imaginary reconstruction of the wing. He then reasoned that if the wing looked like that, then the thorax of the bird must look like this, and so on. Thus, he reconstructed from the imprint of a single feather a bird that no man or woman had ever seen. He was able to do this because of his knowledge of the anatomy of birds combined with his careful study of the feather itself. Historical research into the pre-industrial rural world is a lot like this. We have numerous feathers, in the form of documents and other material remains, with notarial deeds being of particular concern in this chapter. However, before we can properly position our feathers, we need to combine these with a historical understanding of the nature of the society. It is this broader conceptual issue that has proved difficult for historians of the Lower Canadian countryside to grasp. In this chapter, I critically examine the major conceptual frameworks used to explain this rural world that had been developed by the 1980s. I propose an alternative approach that stresses the significance of social differentiation within the peasantry. I then test this approach by examining notarized supply contracts of firewood for the Montreal market. My analysis of this trade revealed that equitable town/country relations prevailed, a conclusion that led me to explore what this means for our understanding of the struggle for democracy.

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

Interpreting the Rural World In the 1920s, nationalist historians strongly influenced by the corporatist ideals of Italian fascism began to conceive of the Lower Canadian countryside as a world unto itself.2 They interpreted the relatively high birth rate as the ‘revenge of the cradle’: a conquered people re-establishing themselves through their demographic productivity. Imbued with a nonmaterialistic outlook on life – and how could it be otherwise, reasoned the historians, for these farmers had so little – this peasantry turned their back on the attractions and corrupting influences of both the modernizing British and the democratizing Americans. Thus, this inward-looking peasantry, for whom the basic values were faith, family, and farm, saved ‘la nation canadienne’ from assimilation. The historical role of saviour of the nation had been thrust onto this anonymous mass by the Conquest’s ‘decapitation’ of the traditional elites of New France. It had thus fallen to the peasantry to preserve the national culture for the better part of a century, until the Church was able once again to assume in the mid-nineteenth century its rightful position directing the institutional and spiritual life of French Canada. In the 1950s, members of the new Social Science Faculty at Laval University were largely responsible for the development of an alternative conceptualization of French Canada. Eager that French Canadians share equally in the post-war boom, these economists, sociologists, and historians looked to the past to explain the economic inferiority of French Canada.3 They drew a much more nuanced picture than had the Montreal School, arguing that the economic advantages historically enjoyed by Ontario over Quebec were largely a question of resource endowment and the technologies of the time.4 Rejecting the decapitation theory, they argued that in many ways French Canadians were the authors of their own misfortune. To be sure, the Conquest was important, for it offered a seat at the table of capitalism. Unfortunately, the selfish interests of Patriote middle-class professionals led to a rejection of this invitation to participate in the British path of progress and turned the struggle for democracy into the dead end of escalating ethnic tensions and inevitable defeat in 1837–38.5 According to Fernand Ouellet, on the farms of Lower Canada, a backwardlooking mentality was replacing an earlier frontier ethos. Accepting the restrictions of ancien régime France as natural and refusing to adopt new farming methods, the peasantry fell behind the more productive English-



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speaking and largely Protestant farmers of the Eastern Townships and Upper Canada. Things came to a head in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the onset of an agricultural crisis that only worsened over subsequent decades.6 In the highly charged political atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s, Ouellet was seen as ‘speaking white.’7 His advocacy of an alliance with British merchants as the appropriate strategy for French Canada in the early nineteenth century was taken to be an ill-disguised federalist stance on the national question. Judged ideologically impure, Ouellet was royally roasted by historians in Quebec, just as colleagues in English Canada toasted him royally. Here was a man you could not only talk to, but should read. Ouellet remains the only francophone historian of Quebec to have had all of his major works translated into English. Ouellet offered three major empirical supports for his narrative. First, Lower Canadian wheat failed to find an export market in Britain, while exports of wheat from Upper Canada continued to increase, despite the handicap of being hundreds of kilometres further away from this market. Second, a steady decline in tithes, which by legislation were pegged at 1/26th of the grain harvest, meant a turning away from cash crops such as wheat towards subsistence crops such as peas and potatoes, particularly on seigneurial lands. Third, the decennial agricultural census returns from the time they first appeared in 1831 showed a remarkable disparity in productivity on similarly endowed lands between those worked by FrenchCanadian peasants and those worked by English-speaking farmers. The first of Ouellet’s three empirical elements to be seriously examined was his assumption that one could derive reliable economic data from the tithes.8 Tithes, after all, were paid to the local parish priest directly; these payments were his (there still are no female priests in the Church of Rome) personal property.9 If one did not have a local parish priest – and settlement far outstripped the erection of new parishes in the early nineteenth century10 – it would be unlikely that one would pay a tithe. Furthermore, formal religious practices were very much on the decline,11 so people may simply have chosen not to pay the tithe. Jean-Pierre Wallot, the leading historian of a modernized Montreal school, mounted the most sustained critique. In researching the politics of early nineteenth-century Lower Canada, Wallot had seen no evidence of an agricultural crisis, so he started a fifteen-year search for an answer in the remarkably detailed inventories after death in the notarial archives.12

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Using research cards developed by Hélène Paré, he had research assistants sample thousands of inventories from rural and urban areas in and around both Quebec City and Montreal for a variety of occupations.13 Periodically, through the 1970s and early 1980s at the Institut d’histoire meetings, he would push back the onset of the crisis, because the standard of living chronicled by these inventories was continuing to rise. Finally, at the meeting hosted by the Université d’Ottawa in 1986, he informed the modest group in attendance that having reached the mid-1830s without finding any evidence of a decline in living standards, he had to admit he had been on a wild goose chase the whole time. He was now convinced that it was not a question of when: there never had been an agricultural crisis to begin with. Frank Lewis and Marvin McInnis, economists at Queen’s University, delivered the next blow. They noted the remarkable stability in the productivity differential between French-Canadian Catholic peasants and English-Canadian Protestant farmers as reported in the various decennial census returns.14 It looked to them as if it was a measurement problem rather than a historical reality. After all, French-speaking peasants neither measured their farms in acres nor their production in bushels, the two units of measurement used by the colonial census makers. These peasants used arpents and minots. An arpent, like an acre, is 200 feet by 200 feet, but the French king’s foot must have been smaller, for by English measure an arpent is only 188 feet square. A minot, on the other hand, is slightly larger than a bushel. Lewis and McInnis tried out their hypothesis on a sample of census returns for 1851 and found that the productivity differential simply disappeared. A decade later, a team led by the geographer Serge Courville confirmed the hypothesis for all lands held in seigneurial tenure.15 Although the hypothesis still left the vexing problem of the export figures, by the mid-1980s few researchers in the field were particularly concerned. Ouellet’s credibility had been so badly shaken that most were content to ignore this particular problem, as the very ground they were discussing was shifting. The arrival on the scene of a previously unknown historical actor, Théophile Allaire, who may now be counted among the best-known former residents of New France, changed for a generation how people thought about this rural world. Théophile Allaire was born the twelfth of fifteen children to a peasant household on Île d’Orléans and like many in the Quebec City region, the family migrated to the better lands of the Montreal plain. In 1753, Théo-



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phile procured “a modest portion of his father’s large concession” in the St-Ours seigneury in the Richelieu Valley, where after two marriages and several children he died.16 It was to all intents and purposes an uneventful life. Why then did he make such a dramatic entry onto the historical scene almost 220 years after his death? Allan Greer, a doctoral candidate at York University in Toronto, had plucked this peasant from the obscurity of the notarial archives, and for good reason. In 1759, Allaire’s first wife, Amable Ménard, died. In 1765, the newly established British colonial administration conducted an agricultural census. In 1767, Théophile Allaire himself died. With two inventories after death and a census return in less than a decade, we know more about Théophile Allaire and his family than we do about almost any other peasants in the colony. According to Greer, Allaire’s world was “a land of family farms,” with no significant differences between peasant families. Their lives were governed by the rhythms of an “agricultural calendar,” wherein household consumption determined production and “every household grew the same crops and in roughly the same proportions.”17 The onerous exactions of the seigneurs and the Church consumed any peasant surpluses that might have been produced.18 These were hard-working people practising subsistence farming. The only changes in the peasant world were the quantitative changes of the life cycle, with “the habitant family … expanding and contracting as one generation succeeded another.”19 What motivated the peasants was their desire to see all their offspring established on the land as well as they were. Greer argued that, given the serious constraints they faced, this would have been difficult. Since all the families were more or less the same and no qualitative change over time was possible, Greer chose the family for whom he had the most information to tell his tale. In Peasant, Lord, and Merchant, Théophile Allaire explains an entire century. Greer painted a touching portrait of this “habitant at home,” and although they were not quite as well off as some of their neighbours, the Allaires had a cast-iron stove and ample bedding.20 Strangely, no table was listed in either inventory, nor were there any plates, so Greer assumed “everyone ate directly from the pot.” There was also the perplexing problem of why shortly before he died, Allaire clear-cut his entire thirty-five-arpent woodlot.21 Greer assumed that the peasantry were limited to subsistence agriculture, which meant that they could not be expected to accumulate capital, and so qualitative change in this rural world necessarily came from the

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outside. He argued that the impact of merchant capital was as dramatic as it was negative. It “siphoned off much of any remaining surplus [after feudal appropriations] through retail trade”22 while reducing whole communities to a semi-proletarian status.23 Two major political events also took place in the valley. The revolting Americans invaded in 1775, and the repressive British first met defeat and then took a vengeful victory in 1837. Greer found it impossible to integrate these historic events into his history of the region, arguing that they could only be understood at the level of the colony as whole.24

An Alternative Approach Shortly after Peasant, Lord, and Merchant first appeared, John Herd Thompson25 organized a one-day conference at McGill, with Greer talking in the morning and Paul Voisey, the author of a work on farming in early twentieth-century Alberta,26 talking in the afternoon. All the invited participants sat around a large table. Louise Dechêne attended for the full day but did not enter into any of the discussions. The weight of her silence grew as the day progressed. As the session was about to wrap up, Thompson asked Dechêne if she had any comments. I can still hear her reply: “Yes, it has been a most interesting day: Allan’s peasants have no future and Paul’s farmers no past.” As Dechêne so acutely observed, Greer’s image of a stable, subsistenceoriented rural world placed his peasants outside history. Their choices could create neither a commercial agriculture akin to that which Voisey had described, nor the political modernity of a bourgeois democratic state. And yet both did happen. What role did the peasantry play in these historic transformations? Applying lessons learnt from Guy Bois and Louise Dechêne, I believed the key to answering this question lay in the cumulative effect of differentiation within the peasantry. From this perspective, a peasant family living in the 1760s should never be taken to represent a family of the 1830s, for they were separated by three generations of potential accumulation and certain differentiation.27 Applying lessons learnt from George Rudé, I came to the conclusion that political moments like those in 1837 could only be understood from the bottom up, which meant viewing them in their rich complexity extending back over decades and sometimes centuries.



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To help in placing my ‘feathers,’ I returned to the problems of the viability of the peasant community and of peasant access to land identified by Albert Soboul, because I believed that their resolution set the stage for the terms of commutation of feudalism itself. In short, our ability to explain both the emergence of commercial agriculture and the nature of the modern democratic state depends on critically understanding the transition in the countryside. Unlike much of Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the peasantry in Lower Canada lived on the land rather than in villages. Here, it took 200 years for a network of hamlets and villages to develop. Significantly, these villages were not home to those who worked the land. Thus, the early nineteenth-century emergence of identifiable rural villages and towns and the importance accorded their institutional life, most notably the parish church and the militia, were indications of a diversification within rural society, rather than a consolidation of the peasantry. Both differentiation within the peasantry, which was closely linked to the problem of access to land, and the internal dynamics of familial reproduction were, I thought, generating these qualitative changes in the nature of the rural world. Thus, Serge Courville’s data on the growth of villages seemed to me much more convincing than his explanation, which simply had villages growing, organically, as a by-product of a maturing countryside.28 Two fundamental and related changes were transforming the rural world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As long as unconceded land existed in a seigneury, the Custom of Paris obliged the lord to grant concessions to the legal offspring of his or her censitaires, the term used to describe those who held rights of usage under the regime. As land became scarce, the lords proved singularly adept at developing new methods for appropriating peasant surpluses on the older seigneuries and imposing more-restrictive conditions in the newer ones.29 Nonetheless, the possibility of extended families establishing themselves on the land over time seemed real to me. Indeed, I took Greer’s data on the location of four extended families who had been among the early settlers of his seigneuries, drawn from the 1831 census, as an example of what successful long-term peasant strategies might look like. As is clearly visible in figure 4.1, the distribution of these families’ farms indicates that the seigneurial boundaries spatially structured peasant agency.30 Only 4 of the 41 farms owned by a Péloquin were to be found outside the boundaries

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Péloquin Arpin Lamoureux Bousquet

Figure 4.1  •  Four instances of successful social reproduction by peasant families on seigneurial land in the Richelieu Valley, 1831. The children of peasants on a seigneury had the right to negotiate a land concession from the lord of the manor if unconceded land was still available. Over generations, differentiation of the peasantry took the form of successful families establishing strong kin networks within each seigneury. Source: Allan Greer, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant.

of Sorel seigneury. All 18 of the Lamoureux family farms and 16 of the 19 Arpin family farms were located in the seigneury of St-Ours, while all but 1 of the 21 Bousquet family farms were located in St-Denis. Once all the good farmland had been conceded,31 however, establishing more than one offspring would mean financing the purchase of an already existing farm – something only those with the necessary resources would be able to do. This change, I thought, would quickly reveal the dimensions of any earlier differentiation within the peasantry. In short, it would reveal a growing social, as opposed to agricultural, crisis within rural society. For



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the first time in the 200-year history of this colony of settlement, large numbers of peasants would not be able to establish their offspring on the land. Inequalities within farming households contributed to this social crisis of reproduction. Successful strategies for accumulation and reproduction on the land took generations. Their success required the subordination of individual interests for the benefit of the whole family, conceived in a highly patriarchal manner. The size of one’s trousseau, who one married, and the support the family was willing to extend after marriage were all constraints that weighed on young peasant women far more than on their male siblings. Legally, inheritance practices for the peasantry were gender blind and the custom was for shares to be roughly equitable, even after the Conquest introduced testamentary freedom to the colony. Practically, however, sons inherited land, while the daughters received movables. The much greater value of the former meant that sons often had to hypothecate their land32 to finance the shares of their siblings. Thus, even the land already in the family’s possession, as it passed to the next generation, often created a new debt load. In the short term, for many unmarried young women these gender inequalities meant either entering domestic service in the households of wealthier peasants or moving into the hamlets and villages in search of employment, with marriage to the propertyless male offspring of poorer peasants the most likely outcome. In the longer term, these same gender inequities would result in a major sexual imbalance in the industrializing towns and cities, to which far more young women came to live than young men. Different rules had always applied to the inheritance of the lord’s seigneurial domain rights than had applied to the peasant’s usage rights. However, with the increased value of seigneurial property and the changing cultural composition of dominant social groups in the colony, these differences took on a new significance. Ownership of the domain rights of lordship had to be equally shared by all offspring, and thus a young daughter brought her share of the family’s seigneurial rights with her into marriage. If she did not establish a separation of property by a marriage contract, her husband would administer her rights as lord. Consequently, cross-cultural marriages between recently arrived British merchants and seigneury-owning Canadiennes brought greater social cohesion to the dominant classes, precisely at a time when the peasantry were experiencing increased internal stresses. Through both marriages into seigneurial

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families and by outright purchases, urban merchants by the end of the eighteenth century had come to assume a prominence as seigneurs that rivalled that of British army officers and the long-established Canadien aristocracy.33 In this rural world, merchant capital became increasingly important in its own right. Its role was not simply one of domination and manipulation. Country merchants, even before the Conquest, had created webs of commercial and credit relationships that linked town and country.34 In turn, these webs made the merchants, in a certain sense, dependent on their peasant clients by tying them to the rhythms of rural life. This process continued unabated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the need for credit to finance purchases of farms increased, and it expanded rapidly following the Napoleonic Wars.35 The importance to Montreal dry-goods houses, auctioneers, and brokers of supplying semi-manufactured British textiles and metal goods to country merchants and village craftsmen of the Montreal plain was clearly visible in the assignments of the 1820s that I discussed earlier, while Jean-Pierre Wallot’s analysis of thousands of inventories after death revealed the increasing scale of consumer purchases by wealthier peasant families. With this as my provisional understanding of the nature of rural society in Lower Canada, it was time to find some feathers of my own to position.

A Case Study in Town/Country Relations I honestly cannot remember what the occasion was, but it must have been important, for it brought Richard Rice back to McGill’s main campus for one of his few visits since being denied tenure in 1984. We met and talked at the reception afterwards. I told him of my plan, with Grace Laing Hogg, to computerize and then publish all the firewood supply contracts. He strongly urged me to include the export contracts that had included some firewood and that we had simply photocopied and laid to one side in the early 1980s. In one of his last seminars at McGill, Rice had worked these deeds with his students, and he told me where to find the completed research cards in the mbhp files. It was early evening by the time I located them and dusk was settling over the city. The light was inappropriate for examining anything seriously, but it provided a sympathetic fallacy to the terrible sinking feeling in my stomach as I began to read. Here in my hands was incontrovertible proof that one of the central assumptions of my recently com-



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pleted doctoral thesis, and a core belief guiding much of what the Montreal Business History Project had done up to this point, was simply wrong. Few in number, a mere sixteen deeds, two of which may not even have been for export, chronicled the sale in the 1820s of 138,000 cubic feet of white pine timber, 1,000 cubic feet of oak, 500 cubic feet of ash, and “as much good, sound merchantable white pine timber as can be drawn by 9 good horses, minimum length of 25 feet, butted and clear of ware.”36 Compared with the tens of millions of cubic feet exported from Quebec City, or the 2,271,875 cubic feet of firewood to be delivered to Montreal and detailed in the other 293 supply contracts on file, they did not appear significant. It was not, however, the volume or even the value that mattered. It was the people. I knew everyone of the people involved, not just the Montreal suppliers and their notaries, but the intermediaries in the countryside and the farmers in the townships and seigneuries of southwestern Lower Canada who cut the wood and brought it to market. These were some of the very same people involved in supplying Montreal with its firewood. Just as the staple theorists had assumed the primacy of external markets, we had assumed the primacy of internal economic forces. Indeed, it was largely because they had assumed the one that we had assumed the other. Thus, we both believed that it made sense to discuss the economy of Lower Canada in terms of an internal/external dichotomy. What these few deeds showed so vividly was that this theoretical distinction made no sense historically. When rafts of square pine timber destined for export came down the St Lawrence, they were loaded with firewood for the Montreal market. The same people cut the wood, the same people delivered it, and the same people distributed it. How, then, could one cite this activity as evidence of either external or internal forces being the motor of the economy? Such an abstract distinction had no historical basis; we had all indulged ourselves in an arbitrary imposition of present-minded economic theory on a far more complex historical reality. Only a month into the project and a major theoretical assumption of how I understood the world to work had been shown to be wrong. After all, this internal/external dichotomy structures how we understand economics, politics, culture, indeed the entire social realm, where it is so central to legitimizing the nation-state. It would take a year to complete the project,37 but it would be more than a decade before I had worked out a satisfactory alternative conceptualization to replace the assumed naturalness of an internal/external divide.

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Figure 4.2  •  W.H. Bartlett, Woodlot at Montreal, 1841. The folkloric character of this engraving was typical of Bartlett’s romantic perception of Lower Canada and belied the economic significance of the wood trade in town/country relations.

When I deliberately chose to examine in detail the supply network for a basic, quite ordinary, albeit fundamental, commodity like firewood, I had hardly expected to face such a challenge. Although it threw out the window any plans I might have had to publish my thesis, it did confirm my reasoning in choosing to study firewood in the first place: a critical analysis of the ordinary things we use in our daily lives can be exceptionally enriching for our understanding of larger issues and relationships.38 Firewood was the basic energy source for the pre-industrial world. People cooked with it, heated their homes with it, and, in Montreal and a limited number of other places, fired their steam engines with it. Firewood was a commodity with a highly seasonal demand, but people and firms consumed a lot of it. When Peter Gzowski asked me on cbc’ s Morningside just how much, I said enough over the decade to make a stack of wood four feet high that ran all the way from Montreal to Toronto. He did not seem overly impressed. However, it required the felling of hundreds of thousands of deciduous trees by axe, the cutting of their trunk and principal branches by handsaw, the hauling of them by horse out to a navigable waterway, to then be cut into the required lengths and to be frequently split, before being



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loaded onto rafts and transported up to forty kilometres into Montreal. Once in town, the rafts were moored alongside the King’s Woodlot just east of the town centre, where carters waded into the river to transport the wood onto the beach. Here, things became considerably more complicated than the rustic engraving by W.H. Bartlett from 1841 (figure 4.2) might suggest. Firewood was an essential commodity. Without an adequate supply, people could die in a Montreal winter. It was therefore one of the most closely regulated commodities within the moral economy of pre-industrial Montreal. In 1818, responding to repeated recommendations of the Grand Jury,39 the town’s magistrates ordered that henceforth no merchant, trader, or carter could purchase firewood before it had lain on the beach for at least eight days. This restriction ensured that no one could corner the market and artificially drive up prices. Thus, every cord of wood had to be registered and tracked. Who brought it and when? Who bought it and when? Montreal newspapers periodically reported on prices and quantities for firewood, and they always published a summary of the annual report submitted by the officer in charge of the beach to the justices of the peace, so we know how much wood was delivered over the decade. The mbhp ’s supply contracts accounted for a tenth of the town’s consumption of firewood. The signing of a supply contract before notary was thus exceptional, and like the journeyman hiring contracts, the unusual character of the transaction would provide the key to understanding the historical logic of this source. Initially, we considered these contracts to be the product of the interests of Montreal buyers. Since contracts transferred ownership of the wood to the buyer, wood delivered under contract was exempt from the restrictions on purchases by intermediaries at the beach. Traders and wood merchants who had large contracts to fulfill throughout the year would want to ensure a secure supply in the off-peak periods. For example, a number of the larger contracts in the series were to supply the British garrisons.40 Wholesale traders, often working in syndicates, bid on these contracts, which involved deliveries to the region’s forts in late spring and early fall. Onerous conditions in a number of the contracts lent credence to the idea that the contracts were primarily for the benefit of the Montreal buyers. In half a dozen contracts, suppliers were required to sell all of their production to a particular intermediary and the fines for failing to do so were substantial. Other contracts bore witness to the tied relationships between suppliers and intermediaries that the provisioning of a shanty41

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could generate, and the debts were substantial. Debt and dependency could lead to losing control of one’s farm.42 Less-dramatic evidence of the unequal relationships was provided by the two out of three contracts where the suppliers hypothecated their property. Generally, they agreed to the legally questionable, but certainly all-encompassing, formulation of “all properties, movable and immovable, present and future.” On closer inspection, however, the individual and collective concerns and interests of the peasant suppliers became evident. As one would expect, almost all of the contracts involved at least one rural resident (297 of the 309). These 187 suppliers were overwhelmingly ‘cultivateurs’ or farmers; only two called themselves ‘habitant.’ Two-thirds of these suppliers only appeared once in the series. Volumes of wood were low. Three out of five contracts were for less than forty cords – that is, what two experienced men could produce in a month.43 Both figures underline the exceptional nature of these supply contracts. Most peasants supplying the town with firewood probably never signed a supply contract before notary. However, since almost all contracted deliveries were to be made in the spring and summer, those farmers who did sign a contract were free to sell the rest of their production later in the year, when prices were higher. Analysis of the discernible patterns of hypothe­ cated land, payments in kind, advances, co-operative practices, and social relations of production reveals fundamental aspects of not just this trade but the rural world itself. For the minority of farmers who were required to hypothecate a specific farm, we know something of the scale of their operations. Three-quarters of the fifty-three liens on specific properties involved first-time suppliers; this was understandable, since the first crop to harvest was the forest itself. These properties ranged in size from less than 30 to more than 150 arpents. Most were between 50 and 70 arpents with a house and assorted outbuildings already erected. Settlement was recent, as four out of five properties bordered on unconceded farmland, even though most fronted onto the St Lawrence River. Nonetheless, between a Paul Primeau dit Quarante Sous, still building his home on 50 arpents in St-Timothée, and a Germain Bro dit Pomminville, père, living in his stone house surrounded by numerous other buildings on a 100-arpent property in St-Joachim, there were clear differences. Payment for just under a third of all contracts was in kind, while one in ten involved a mix of cash and supplies. Not all the goods supplied were for



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use in production.44 However, fifty-four suppliers obtained a horse, while thirty-four deeds involved a total of forty-five fattened hogs and a further nine involved varying quantities of salt pork. Both the horses and the provisions were received in advance and in the latter case were clearly for use in the shanties. Ten deeds involved the advance of stoves. Eight suppliers were provided with skidders, sleds, and wagons, usually with the assorted leather and metal attachments needed for hauling wood. In the majority of the contracts involving advances of productive equipment, horses, or provisions, the amount of wood to be delivered would not constitute an entire winter’s production. These agreements often provided the peasants’ families with resources that would be useful for years to come or, in the case of provisions, for a whole winter’s work in a shanty. Understandably, most of these payments in kind were made prior to the delivery of the wood. However, almost all of the other contracts involved significant cash advances at the time of signing, while a quarter of the contracts stipulated scheduled payments prior to delivery. For the farmers, obtaining needed supplies or credit advances were clearly reasons for signing a notarized agreement. The frequent reoccurrence of family names in the series points to the importance of extended-family networks in the resettlement strategies of Canadien peasants moving into the southwestern part of the colony.45 Family constituted a significant resource to draw upon. In a third of the fifty-two contracts with partners and in a quarter of the fifty-five contracts with securities, two or more members of the same family, including four wives, signed the deed. These figures undoubtedly underestimate the role of families in the trade, since kin sharing a shanty were governed by familial norms and relationships. They would not have needed a notarial deed to spell out their respective responsibilities. Nonetheless, it is significant that in this series, family was not the most important source of co-operation. Partnerships with apparently unrelated people occurred twice as frequently as those with family members, and unrelated people offered security three times more often than did family members. This underlines the social nature of firewood production, particularly in the shanties. Furthermore, with twenty-six of the sixty neighbours identified in the hypothecated properties also appearing as suppliers in the series this co-operation was clearly based on widely shared skills. The contracts depict four differing types of social relations and at least three types of productive facilities. Petty commodity producers selling

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wood from their own farm was the most common situation. The supplier acting as an intermediary in a pyramidic network was the second most common situation. Here, the supplier neither cut nor owned the wood, as the terms and scheduling of these contracts would have necessitated subcontracting. The third type of social relation was a service contract whereby the supplier organized the cutting of wood owned by a third party. The scale of many of these contracts meant that the supplier was in fact a jobber, organizing fairly large work crews for, given the low prices, slim profits. The fourth type of social relationship in evidence was a hybrid of the second and third types and frequently involved timber or a combination of firewood and construction wood for export. In these contracts, the conditions laid down by the buyer were among the most explicit and constraining of the entire series. In short, a variety of social relationships involving a variety of workplaces and methods of production characterized the series, which is what one would expect from a trade involving a differentiated peasantry. Co-operation and complexity also characterized the descent to Montreal. The rafts used to transport the wood ranged in size from 45 by 16 feet to 100 by 34 feet, with most being 80 by 30 feet and constructed of the lighter softwoods used by the building trades. The larger rafts had a capacity of 100 cords. Built by tying together smaller units, called pagés, they could be broken up to run the Lachine Rapids.46 In one out of five contracts, the raft was part of the sale; in a further two out of five, it was only mentioned because once it arrived in port, the firewood was to be stacked on the edge of the raft to facilitate transfer to carts. In these latter cases, the sale was almost always for either a small or a very large number of cords. The small deliveries would have shared a raft, and so it was important that the contracted wood not be difficult to access, while transferring 100 cords to the raft’s edge meant many hours of slippery and dangerous hard labour. Contracts involving the sale of the raft itself were generally only for enough firewood to fill that raft. The draveurs, who worked the rafts, were only mentioned occasionally – for example, when the buyer was to assume part of their wages or to provide them with meals in town. On smaller shared rafts, co-operating suppliers might suffice, but on most rafts, waged labour would have been necessary. Ten rural intermediaries were identified in the series. Three supplied the British forts in the countryside, and two of these three clearly belonged to another social order altogether.47 Perhaps more revealing of the dynamics at work were the cases of the Dupuis brothers and of Jean-Baptiste



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Lebeau dit Caza. Both Antoine and Louis Dupuis first appeared as farmers in the series and then as commerçants de bois, traders, and finally wood merchants. On the way up, Antoine Dupuis accorded himself the title of ‘esquire’ when acting as security for his brother. The ten contracts involving Lebeau dit Caza revealed the series’ most impressive career advancement: farmer, laboureur,48 yeoman, habitant et marchand de bois, commerçant de bois, and finally marchand de bois. These differentiated suppliers, ranging from pioneering farmers to experienced intermediaries, traded with a differentiated mercantile community in Montreal. Eighty-nine buyers in Montreal declared twenty-nine different occupational titles. Differing patterns of advances, payments in kind, delivery dates, and conditions characterized each of the major occupational categories. In a third of the contracts, carters bought the wood, and in contrast to the one in six contracts involving merchants, use of cash was less frequent, advances larger, delivery dates more concentrated, and volumes per contract lower. These contracts leave the impression of a meeting of equals negotiating a mutually advantageous agreement. The careers of several of the leading carters in the series paralleled the experience of the Dupuis brothers and Lebeau dit Caza. In his forty-one contracts over the decade, François Caty went from carter, to commerçant de bois, to marchand de bois, to marchand de bois et d’autres objects. Joseph Beauchamps, Joachim Blais, and Jean-Baptiste Quintin dit Dubois made similar career moves, as did several artisans. However, it was the Bagg & Waite syndicate that sat atop this changing urban hierarchy for the better part of the decade. Contractors for the building of the Lachine Canal in the early 1820s, Abner and Stanley Bagg along with Oliver Waite and sometimes Andrew White, effectively monopolized the army firewood supply contracts in the city. Thus, the series chronicles a rich variety of situations and social relations. It was certainly not simply the product of Montreal merchants lording it over an undifferentiated peasantry. The agency of the suppliers was clearly visible in the way they organized production and delivery. Contracted firewood deliveries were concentrated in June and July; however, the suppliers regularly came into the city at other times of the year, frequently during the periods of peak demand for firewood in the fall and winter. The series contains clear evidence of differing strategies at work. In a number of the contracts involving merchants and bourgeois, these inter-

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Table 4.1  • When did suppliers come to Montreal? The 324 delivery dates, the 124 acquittances or discharges, and the 309 signatures expressed as a percentage of each activity Month

Jan Feb Mar Apr May June July Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec

Delivery Acquittance or discharge Signature

– – – 5 9 26 43 7 3 3 1 – 11 2 8 1 7 4 12 15 9 14 13 4 15 13 10 2 4 2 4 3 5 9 22 12

Note: For 3% of the deliveries, a month was not given. Source: All deeds signed before notary in Montreal, 1820–29, ba nq -m .

mediaries maximized their profits at the expense of the peasantry. One would expect this to be the case, as a notarized deed was the legal instrument of preference for those in power within this society. Furthermore, notaries working on behalf of the buyers drew up the deeds. If one were looking for peasant agency, this is not where one would think to look. Thus, it is the widespread evidence of these farmers’ familial and petty commodity producer strategies at work that are the most remarkable aspect of the series. These unexpected glimpses into a varied and differentiated peasantry were what allowed me to begin to place my feathers properly. The historical logic of this source stacked the odds against the peasantry. The deeds brought farmers, many only recently established on their land, in direct commercial contact with the Montreal mercantile community in all of its complexity. Nonetheless, these farmers regularly ensured their greatest possible advantage when it came to the sale of their produce. Later in the year, when they came to market as independent commodity producers, unhindered by any legal restrictions favouring the buyers, they would have presumably done even better. It was, of course, as independent producers that the peasantry supplied 90 per cent of the firewood consumed in town. Analysis of this source suggests that a hierarchically equitable relationship characterized town/country relations in the St Lawrence Valley. Hierarchy characterized both town and country, but it did not characterize town/country relations. Despite the many exploitative features detailed



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in the contracts, we concluded that because of the historical logic of the source, in the most important mercantile centre in British North America, exchanges between town and country were not particularly exploitative. Certainly, this countryside cannot be understood as having been a mere hinterland to Montreal. If the relationship was not fundamentally unequal here, why should we assume it was elsewhere?

Rethinking the Transition Like internal and external, town and country is one of the axiomatic dichotomies of how we see the world. This is an ancient division. Towns have been religious, ceremonial, and administrative centres for thousands of years. In the Middle East, North Africa, Asia, and pre-Columbian America, towns enjoyed a cultural pre-eminence that would only be achieved in Europe with the Renaissance. These relationships involved the systemic transfer of value from the countryside to the city. Urban residents literally lived off the countryside. In Lower Canada, seigneurial dues, import duties, and excise taxes transferred wealth from the countryside to Quebec City and Montreal. Military and colonial expenditures also greatly favoured these towns at the expense of the countryside. What is it that I mean then, when I describe town/country relations as equitable? Essentially, I am talking about the terms of trade. Is there a systematic or even systemic transfer of value from country to town that is inherent in the nature of the commodities being exchanged? In different times and places, the terms of trade have often proved unequal. Indeed, it was because of its systemically unequal nature that the fur trade had for so long been the principal source of profits for the Montreal mercantile community.49 In medieval Europe, however, trade between town and country, while highly cyclical, was not generally unequal.50 European trade with Asia in the early modern world was often unequal, favouring the Asian economies, until military intervention by first the Portuguese and Spanish and then the Dutch, British, and French forcibly changed the terms of trade. In the seventeenth century, European colonial empires institutionalized trade inequality through mercantilist policies.51 Then the massive introduction of unfree labour in the Caribbean and Latin America in the late seventeenth century and slavery’s expansion into North America in the eigh­ teenth created a structural basis for unequal trade that long outlasted both the mercantilist policies and slavery itself. As we have seen, the terms of

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trade between the St Lawrence Valley and the rest of the world revealed by the Quebec Commercial List in 1825 were relatively balanced. Historically, then, the terms of trade are an open question that needs to be answered for each specific time and place. Our analysis of the terms of trade in firewood showed that neither town nor country gained an unfair share of the value through the exchange of this essential commodity. It confirmed our hypothesis of a differentiated peasantry but also revealed a differentiated community of dealers, traders, commerçants, and merchants in town. In both town and country, accumulation was possible, and a key aspect of our findings was that the timing of the contracts pointed to peasant strategies for maximizing their accumulation. As independent petty commodity producers, they could bring to market the bulk of their production precisely when prices were highest. I have laid considerable stress on the question of this unencumbered access to the market of the peasants supplying firewood because of the particular nature of this market. As the regulations at the beach indicated, this market was part of a larger moral economy. The core principle underpinning pre-industrial moral economies was a just price for a just wage. What people paid for essential commodities should reflect what they were paid in wages. The widespread support for this principle flowed from the fact that wages were still part of a life cycle. Most people earned wages for a period of from ten to fifteen years, from when they had completed their apprenticeship, or had entered into domestic service, until they married and established their own family-based enterprise. Wages were not yet a life sentence that set apart a class of workers from their employers. Master craftsmen and their spouses had worked for wages when they were younger, and they fully expected their children to do the same before marrying and establishing their own businesses. If wages were too low, or prices too high, then young people would not be able to save up the funds necessary to establish themselves on their own after marriage. Thus, the acceptance of this principle of a just price for a just wage was tied to the longer-term viability of the craft world as a whole. In this sense, one can see Montreal’s highly regulated markets as a reflection of the importance of independent petty commodity producers, not just in the economy, but in the life of the town. They were sufficiently important that their interests and values were upheld through legal constraints governing the market. Thus, to use the terminology of the transition debate, the moral



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economy’s vitality reflected the importance of the revolutionary path to capitalism within the town’s craft communities. In turn, the structures that were put in place to defend the longer-term interests of independent commodity producers in town created a situation that directly benefited those peasants who could access this market, for both rural suppliers and urban consumers benefited from the explicit constraints placed on middlemen. The words “those peasants who could” are key to our understanding the dynamic nature of the processes I am describing. In the 1820s, peasant households only recently established on the land were still able to access this market. They were, however, occupying some of the last good farmland in Lower Canada. The 1831 census returns showed that already 30 per cent of rural households in the colony had insufficient land to live on. This rapid differentiation within the peasantry, as good land for the next generation became something a family had to purchase, signalled a social crisis of reproduction. I considered this to be the unresolved problem fuelling the growing militancy in the countryside during the 1830s. By assuming an unchanging peasantry, Allan Greer had completely missed the internal dynamic motivating the people to take up arms in support of the Patriote cause. Defeat of these progressive forces in 1837–38 meant that any resolution of the problem of the social reproduction of the rural world would be at best incomplete and much more top-down. Meanwhile, social differentiation within the peasantry began to generate a new spatial differentiation. The wealthier peasants established their extended families on the most fertile lands in the St Lawrence Valley. Middling peasants moved to outlying districts, where some of them would become cocks of the village. Most of the poorer peasants worked for wages on the lands of the wealthier peasants during the peak periods of agricultural activity, became increasingly dependent on seasonal employment in forestry, or worked for wages as unskilled labour in the growing hamlets and villages of the heartland – or a combination of all three. A minority moved to the outlying districts, including the more marginal lands of the Eastern Townships, where, without seigneurial dues to pay, farm families had a better chance of maintaining their independence. Significantly, given the scale of the crisis, very few people moved into either Montreal or Quebec City in this period. The social crisis of reproduction in the countryside remained in the countryside, where it would lay the basis for future regional disparities. In the shorter term, to return to Albert Soboul’s formulation of the problem of the transition, increasing

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difficulties in accessing land compromised the survival of a coherent rural community and weakened its ability to intervene effectively in the emerging debates over what to do with the seigneurial regime. As social differentiation created a more complex peasantry, the equitable nature of town/country relations permitted continued accumulation in both town and country. Seen in this light, the transition debate’s emphasis on a ‘prime mover,’ whether it be located in the countryside or aboard the ships engaged in long-distance trade, seemed to me to be simply a reformulating of the ahistorical internal/external dichotomy. I felt that a much more holistic conceptualization was needed. Furthermore, the debate appeared to conflate two separate historical processes: the transition to capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Indeed in the mbhp ’s earlier work, we wrote about “the transition to industrial capitalism.”52 This conceptual shorthand effectively hid a number of distinct issues. To define the transition more clearly, I argued that the relative importance of the differing paths in town and the degree of differentiation within the peasantry were in a state of creative tension. Economically, the tension between these two social processes defined the nature of town/country relations, while politically, it determined how democratic the society would be. In an ambitious reframing of Quebec history, I argued that the manner in which a predominantly capitalist society industrialized depended primarily upon questions of economic structure.53 What I had come to realize was that both paths led to capitalism. A merchant-dominated capitalism in alliance with large landed interests made for a different type of capitalism than a society composed primarily of independent commodity-producing households, but it was capitalism nonetheless. Therefore, what made the ‘revolutionary’ path so revolutionary was not the changes it wrought in the social relations of production or the forces of production, for we have seen in Montreal how the ‘non-revolutionary’ path of merchant control could introduce both; no, it was revolutionary in the political not the economic sense. It was the question of democracy that made both the paths and the differentiation of the peasantry historically important. Societies with large numbers of independent, property-owning, and commodity-producing households had the potential to create bourgeois democracies. Their ideal, most famously formulated in the opening words of the United States’ second constitution – “We the people” – resonated across broad swaths of the North Atlantic world. Despite a highly discriminatory application in terms of race, gender, and class, this idea of bourgeois right and its associ-



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ated principle of the rule of law were genuinely revolutionary achievements in human history. Societies that did not experience this type of revolutionary transformation – this included most of Europe, all of Latin America, and significant parts of Asia and Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – developed radically different ideas of how a capitalist society should be governed. My recognition of the importance of social reproduction to the democratic transformation of society only went so far. Although I understood that the viability of the craft world and the peasant world shared common ground, when it came to explaining how industrialization took place, I still privileged structural processes that had more to do with relations of production than with relations of social reproduction or with our relationship with nature. Respectful of the classic formulation by E.P. Thompson on time and work discipline,54 I argued that the change in the nature of waged work from task to time was emblematic of industrialization. Following the lead of Richard Rice and Jacques Ferland,55 I stressed the growing gap between the production of consumer goods and the production of capital goods. Why did unskilled labour using machine tools characterize the production of consumer goods long before this was the case in the making of capital goods? Third, I stressed the changing relationship between the creation and the realization of value. A long tradition in political economy had argued that this was apparent in the differing factions of capital, whereas I argued that one could see this at work within the developing working class itself, through the processes that socially constructed male workers as skilled and female workers as unskilled.

The Final Nail If access to markets was so important, why did the wealthier peasants of the St Lawrence Valley fail to take advantage of imperial markets for their wheat in the way that their Upper Canadian counterparts so clearly had from early on in the nineteenth century? In 1991, Thomas Wien finally answered this nagging question, left over from Ouellet’s research, in a paper to the Institut d’histoire, this time meeting in a rather depressing 1950s-style motel in the Sainte-Foy suburb of Quebec City. Wien presented, in two graphs, the results of his analysis of the exports of St Lawrence Valley grain and biscuits from 1660 to 1810. The first graph showed total exports, which had grown slowly but steadily, with the notable

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exception of the Seven Years War and two rather anomalous moments, one in the mid-1770s and the other early in the 1800s. He then presented the same data, but expressed in terms of production per capita. The steady growth was revealed to be simply the result of more farms producing grain as the farm population itself grew. The earlier changes, however, were now thrown into sharp relief. The Conquest had led to a dramatic drop in exports, and the anomalous moments were revealed to have been very sharp peaks of quite unprecedented exports. Wien’s explanation was simple enough. One of the impacts of the Conquest was the loss of the market for biscuits for the slaves of the French Caribbean. This loss was not compensated for by integration into the British Empire, because in the English Caribbean market Lower Canadian farmers faced competition from the ‘bread colonies’ of New York and Pennsylvania. The two extraordinary peaks were, Wien explained, caused by exceptional conditions in Europe. The first coincided with the last great subsistence crisis in western Europe: the failure of the French grain harvest in 1775. The second stemmed from Napoleon’s continental blockade of Britain. Temporarily deprived of access to European granaries, English merchants bought substantial quantities of Lower Canadian grain for the first and only time. Why then did the grain of the St Lawrence Valley not find a ready market in Europe when that of Upper Canada so clearly did? A substantially shorter growing season in Lower Canada meant its grain had to ‘winter over.’ The resultant flour would not consistently produce a white bread, while the flour of Upper Canada did. We had been comparing apples and oranges, or more precisely, flour thought fit to mix into Scottish biscuits and flour thought fit for bread at an English table. Unfortunately, Wien’s respectful analysis of the historical specificity of time and place failed to defeat prejudice masquerading as supra-human explanations of historical causality. In both nationalist writings and post-modernist cultural historiography, the hoary myths of collective mentalités live on.56 As these highly political works suggest, the linear, almost positivist, approach suggested by my metaphor of Cuvier’s feather is perhaps too simplistic and inappropriate after all. How we think of the past is very much tied to who we are in the present. In a society marked by ever-increasing inequality, the existence of a variety of opposing understandings of the past only makes sense, for the past is too important a prize to be simply awarded to the best research. In the 1990s, a



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frontal attack on the gains made by social history within Canadian historiography was launched by the profession’s most prominent neo-liberals.57 Meanwhile, among a younger generation of largely progressive scholars, the influence of discourse analysis and identity politics combined to further fracture an already uncertain subject. For my younger colleagues, it was no longer a question of how to place the feather, but whether there was a feather at all. My insistence on establishing a scientific basis for historical understanding was no longer a subject of debate, but rather proof of my outmoded way of thinking. Both the neo-liberal attack and the descent into discourse58 became inseparable from capitalism’s triumphant victory in the Cold War. For those of us who remained public intellectuals on the left, this period was fraught with ambiguity. The end of despised regimes that had been socialist only in name was unquestionably a good thing. Yet the rapidity with which the neo-liberal denial of the social and the ‘there is no alternative to the market’ ideology swept all before them left us stunned. How could such moments of human promise end so quickly in defeat? As the Soviet Union imploded, George Rudé died. In a memorial service held months later at the Sir George Williams campus of Concordia University, where he had taught for so many years, his widow Doreen recounted George’s last words: “Apparently we were quite wrong, but I think I would do it all over again, only better.” As I understood those words, doing it better meant rethinking my most basic assumptions of time, space, and historical causality.

Chapter Five

Agency and Constraint

The good-sized room in the convention centre at Mount Orford was almost empty. There could not have been more than a dozen of us there on that Saturday afternoon in the fall of 1996, gathered to hear Sylvie Vincent and Carole Lévesque talk. Both were anthropologists presenting papers on gender research into First Nations of eastern Quebec, Vincent on the Montagnais and Lévesque on the Naskapi. That is about where the similarities ended, and the methodological debate that followed was one of the most important in my thirty-five years of attending Institut d’histoire d’Amérique française conferences. Vincent was working on life stories among Montagnais elders who had lived on the land prior to the establishment of permanent settlements in the late 1950s.1 She described a narrative style unlike anything I had ever heard. She reported that if you asked an elder about something that had happened to them in, say, February of a particular year, he or she would not answer you directly. Instead, the elder would start telling you a story that began on the coast in the late summer and then travelled into the interior over the fall and winter months. After you had been properly informed of the temporal and spatial specificity of that particular year’s trek up to the point you had initially asked about, then and only then would the elder ‘answer’ your question. If at this point you asked a comparative question, about how this differed from other Februaries, he or she would answer directly. In other words, now that you knew what a February was like, you could understand what it was the elder was about to tell you. For the elder, however, the question was not yet answered. The story would continue through the landscape of spring and early summer until you were back on the coast again. Time and space were conceptually inseparable, so events never existed in isolation.



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Lévesque had worked under contract for the Naskapi, collecting information from their elders about their way of life prior to resettling the former mining town of Schefferville.2 She interviewed elders about a broad range of topics before returning to Quebec City, where she transcribed the interviews. She then took these transcripts and separated them into paragraphs, indexing each with a key word for the subject: berry picking, preparation of hides, drying of fish, and so on. These paragraphs were then reorganized into separate sections and chapters of a report. All the testimony from her many different informants about berry picking would be found together in the part dealing with berry picking, and so forth. This edited compilation was then used in the Naskapi school to teach the youth their history.3 Time and space were conceptually separate and thus things only existed in isolation. It would be difficult to conceive of two more contrasting approaches to understanding time and place. In light of Vincent’s demonstration of their inseparable nature within indigenous historical consciousness, in the subsequent discussion Lévesque’s method was criticized for bordering on cultural genocide. Lévesque did not really understand the critique; after all, she assured us, the book had been extremely well received by the Naskapi. They certainly had not thought it was bad history. Her response suggested that, as so much ethnographic work assumes, indigenous peoples should be thought of as timeless cultures.4 They differ qualitatively from nonindigenous peoples precisely in that they are outside history. In contrast, Vincent’s work revealed that the Montagnais had their own theory and method of history, one that might usefully inform and even transform our own ways of writing history. On a fine June day in 2007, Keith Carlson looked out over the packed lecture hall at the University of Saskatchewan with a rather wry smile and then began to tell his tale. Years before, as a graduate student, he had been hired by the Stó:lo- people of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. In preparation for self-government, they had wanted to know what the elders knew about how decisions had been reached within the community prior to the imposition of the Indian Act in the late nineteenth century. One of the elders proved to be extremely well informed on the topic, but Carlson had a problem. He could not find any confirmation in other sources for what this person was telling him. Then, in a series of transcripts dating from the late 1940s and early 1950s, he found what he was looking for. The next time they met, Carlson mentioned that the testimony of an elder some

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thirty-five years before confirmed what this elder had said. He replied, “Of course, he was my grandfather.” Understandably, Carlson was relieved, for now he had a clear line of generational transmission of oral testimony, but then the elder said, “I never really knew my grandfather. I was too young and by the time I returned from residential school he was already dead.” “How then do you know these stories?” Carlson asked. “My grandfather comes to me in my dreams” was the answer. At this point, Carlson stopped and asked the assembled crowd of historians attending the Canadian Historical Association meeting, “How do you footnote that?” No one had an answer and so Carlson resumed his story, for the best was yet to come. The elder explained to Carlson that in the days prior to their scheduled meetings, he would have a dream wherein his grandfather told him what he needed to know for the upcoming interview. Carlson must have looked flummoxed, for the elder asked him, “Why, do you think you decide what the questions will be?” The decade that separated these two conferences was rich in historical research into and about indigenous peoples around the world. We have, however, only begun the long and difficult task5 of critically analysing the Eurocentric nature of our profession’s accepted epistemologies and methodologies. By the early 1990s, I was convinced that the challenge posed by the historical consciousness of indigenous peoples was of a kind with the challenge posed by the historical consciousness of pre-industrial popular classes. The issue was not that these two very different groups of people thought the same way, but that neither could be properly understood within the accepted norms of the profession. This conviction sentenced me to several years of hard labour in the fields of historical epistemology. In this chapter, I first explore the approved ways of knowing in our discipline, concluding that what we know is very much linked to what we do and why we do it. I illustrate this through a Newfoundland interlude on how we constructed a historical knowledge of the inshore fishery that effectively silenced those most directly affected by fishery policies. This rather chilling exercise in present-mindedness is, I argue, symptomatic of a larger problem wherein ways of doing history have been subordinated to approved ways of knowing the past. While consistent with the fundamental bias in academic life that privileges mental over manual labour, this primacy of theory over practice can blind us to fundamental political issues. I illustrate this through a discussion of how the Americas and Europe are thought to differ. I show that theoretical assumptions were allowed to



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trump practical reality. As a result, few now see the significance of the early nineteenth-century struggle that pitted two conflicting visions of society against each other: a moral versus a liberal economy.

How Do We Know the Past? I start with the dominant approach in Anglo-American historiography, which I call ‘pragmatic empiricism.’6 Historical epistemology simply means ways of knowing the past, and this way of knowing is relatively recent. It dates from the height of the post-war boom. Its classic statement is E.H. Carr’s What Is History? First published in 1962, this work has never gone out of print. The growing acceptance of this approach coincided with the massive expansion of higher education and a corresponding growth in the number of professionally trained historians. This was no mere coincidence, for pragmatic empiricism was the first historical epistemology to assign primacy of place to peer review by professional historians. How do we historically prove something according to this approach? The discourse of proof must be based on empirically verifiable evidence, preferably drawn from primary sources whose provenance is known. Building an appropriate evidential base, however, always requires the historian to be highly selective. How do we know that the historian’s definition of what is significant in the past is correct? What safeguards do we have to ensure that this selection process is not self-serving? The pragmatic answer is another question: Does it make sense? To whom, you may ask? To other professional historians is the answer, people who are trained in the field and can therefore best judge both the appropriateness of the use of evidence and the reasonableness of the explanation of causality on offer. This way of knowing is not tautological, as both evidence and explanation are tested. Admittedly, this testing is not against the past, but against the expert knowledge of the past certain of us are culturally and institutionally recognized as possessing in the present. Professional historians, as the custodians of a cumulative knowledge about the past built up over many years, are therefore those best able to evaluate the reliability of a historical discourse of proof. This apparently eminently reasonable approach has several major implications for the writing of history. First, a firm distinction should be drawn between professional and non-professional historical writing. Mere knowledge of the past, as extensive as it may be, does not a professional

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historian make. Second, historical knowledge must always be put into its proper context, not in terms of the period in question, but in terms of what has been written about the period.7 Third, a rigorous process of doubleblind8 peer reviews should determine what is published. Conceptually, these three defining steps of how accurate and reliable knowledge of the past is generated in the present borrow heavily from a scientific model, which in turn accords considerable cultural credibility to this approach, particularly in advanced capitalist societies. The problem with this approach is threefold. The social, gender, ethnic, and racial composition of the body of professional historians is exceptionally narrow. Inevitably, this narrow basis of the profession influences what is considered historically significant. The long, difficult, and ongoing struggle to have the history of women considered on a par with the history of men is all too eloquent testimony of that. Even if this were not the case, if by some stroke of a magic wand we could ensure proportional representation of humanity in all its complexity throughout the profession, there still would remain two fatal flaws to this approach. The first is the normalizing influence of the academy itself. Particular types of sources, particular ways of approaching those sources, and particular ways of conceiving of change are consistent with the values and processes of academic life in advanced capitalist societies. As Carlson’s tale so vividly showed, others are not. The second problem is what Henri Bergson9 called the “retroactive justification of the present in the past.” Living in the present, we know how the past turned out. This inevitably influences our understanding of the past and makes us fundamentally different from the people who lived in the past. Just as we do not know what the future will hold, the people of the past did not know what their future would be; nor, in almost all cases, did they want our present to be their future. Carr fully recognized the legitimacy of this objection, which is why he argued that pragmatic empiricism necessarily imputes both a particular direction to history and a shared belief by professional historians in the appropriateness of that direction, which he called “history as progress.” We can perhaps better grasp the significance of how pragmatic empiricism redefined the discipline of history if we contrast it with the epistemology that it swept aside – the approach of R.G. Collingwood. A classicist and archaeologist of Roman Britain, Collingwood wrote extensively in the field of philosophy, and his posthumous The Idea of History was probably the



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most widely read English-language text in historical epistemology in the immediate post-war world. Collingwood argued that history is the study of the mind. What people of the past thought, and why they thought what they did, was the proper subject matter of the discipline. If we are to understand the motivations of individuals who lived in the past, we need to re-enact in our own minds their thought processes. When we re-enact the thoughts of a past historical agent, we do not think ‘like’ that agent, our thoughts are one and the same.10 Anything that cannot be rationally re-enacted in our mind is beyond the ken of the historian. It is outside history not because it is unimportant, but because we cannot rationally understand it. Thus, historians need to be humble before the vastness of the past and recognize that we can understand and explain only a very small part of it. Such modesty was not long a hallmark of the profession in any post-war society. Outside the Anglo-American world, the most influential approach in history in the twentieth century was the Annales school. Named after a journal founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch in 1929, this school has had a long and storied history.11 Their historical theory and method are most widely associated with the work of Fernand Braudel, who edited the journal from 1949 until 1968. Braudel distinguished between three temporal levels: geographic time, social time, and individual time. These three levels operate on quite different time spans, but it is primarily through the interaction of the first two that the la longue durée12 of historical significance is created. Upon assuming his chair at the Collège de France, in December 1950, Braudel warned against the seductive influence of individual lives and their brief events, for they are like fireflies on a beach, beautiful but ephemeral.13 Braudel’s denial of the centrality of individual human experience resulted in an emphasis on spatial determinates and structural influences. His approach presumed that the relative spatial immobility of geographic time framed the slow processes of change at the level of social time. Thus, human agency lost both its epistemological and its historical significance. In its place, Braudel proposed the “social mathematics … of game theory,” wherein a scientific discourse of proof consisted of cybernetic models that recognized not a historical time, but a supra-human time, “a mathematical, godlike time … external to men.”14 This approach had a remarkably wide influence in Europe and Latin America and inspired a number of scholars in Quebec, including two of my mentors, Alfred Dubuc and Louise

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Dechêne.15 By mobilizing a number of social science methodologies to explore extensive historical evidence, this approach promised an interdisciplinary human science for the modern world. Ironically, Braudel’s approach transformed the Annales into a journal that had far fewer contributions by non-historians and dealt far less with contemporary issues than had been the case prior to 1949,16 for under the joint editorship of Bloch and Febvre, the Annales had promoted quite a different theory and method of history, based on Henri Bergson’s concept of the durée réelle, or the temporal nature of reality.17 Bergson argued that the indeterminate, heterogeneous, and indivisible nature of time is best conceived as a creative evolutionary process. For Bergson, time is closely related to memory, which he argued enables us to see the past as both real and linked to the present. To conceive reality as a creative temporal process of becoming was both radically unconventional and potentially empowering. Both Bloch and Febvre were inspired by this oppositional humanism to develop concepts that would bring to the fore the role of human creativity in history. Bloch’s most famous contribution was his revolutionary use of aerial photographs to analyse the farming practices of medieval France. Then, having dethroned the written document from its defining place in historical theory and method, Bloch argued for a dramatic enlargement of the definition of historical evidence, to include all the myriad tracks from the past.18 For his part, Febvre developed the concept of an outillage mental, or mental toolkit, as what defines particular times and places. He argued that the historian must recognize the “psychological standpoint, which implies the concern to link up all the conditions of existence of the men of any given period with the meanings the same men gave to their own ideas.”19 While Febvre argued that this could best be achieved through empirical research, Bloch insisted on the importance of memory. They both agreed, however, that close collaboration with all the other disciplines of the human sciences was essential. This optimistic humanism, so evocative of the voluntarist anti-fascism of the Popular Front, would in France be eclipsed in 1949 by a histoire totale that was only understandable in the longue durée. Ironically, the subsequent triumph of pragmatic empiricism in Anglo-American historiography would lead many historians and social scientists to mistake this later Braudelian approach for a progressive historical theory and method. Both



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pragmatic empiricism and Braudel’s histoire totale, however, were very much products of the Cold War.20 It is not surprising, therefore, to find conscious echoes of this earlier optimism in the principal reflection on historical theory and method by England’s leading critique of the Cold War, E.P. Thompson. In the midst of his polemic on Althusser, Thompson took a brief intermission to discuss what constitutes a method “appropriate to phenomena which are always in movement.”21 This short digression was Thompson’s most extended discussion of historical theory and method. He argued that a single approach defines history as a discipline. He recognized no epistemological divide within the discipline.22 Some might consider Thompson’s stance a mere rhetorical device to strengthen his position against Althusser by invoking the legitimacy of the entire historical profession. I disagree, for he describes an epistemology that returns to the concerns of the earlier Annales school,23 shakes hands with Collingwood,24 and endorses history as progress.25 For Thompson, the overall coherency of the discipline was more important both epistemologically and methodologically than any internal divisions. Thus, in the single most important epistemological statement within socialist humanism, there is no recognition of the need for a distinct historical theory and method to understand the popular classes. To be sure, in his many articles and books, Thompson developed new theoretical concepts and pioneered innovative methods, but clearly he did not consider that they constituted a new epistemological approach. Thus, Adrian Wilson appears to be on solid ground when he argues that with Thompson one sees an enhanced critical awareness of how theory and evidence might interact, rather than a “new hermeneutical stance.”26 One of the great strengths of Thompson’s discussion of historical method is his recognition of what he called the “determinate properties” of the evidence. Historians enter into a disciplined dialogue with this evidence, interrogating it in order to “test hypotheses as to structure, causation, etc., and to eliminate self-confirming procedures.” He did not, however, specify just what those determinate properties might be or how one might go about establishing them. Leaving one to assume that because “the discipline requires arduous preparation; and that three thousand years of practice have taught us something,”27 all members in good standing of the discipline should know how to distinguish between appropriate

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and inappropriate questions or theories that may be put to the evidence. If and when this is not the case, critical debate within the discipline will suffice to correct the situation. In short, history as a discipline transcends divisions of class and gender. In 1983, Richard Rice challenged this consensual approach directly. He boldly declared that the history of working people requires its own theory and method; bourgeois approaches and techniques are not only inappropriate, but antithetical to the interests of working people.28 My exploration of dominant historical epistemologies within advanced capitalist societies confirmed Rice’s analysis. Leading progressive historians had failed to break with the philosophical foundations of a discipline that transformed the past into the exclusive preserve of a professional elite.29 This primacy accorded professional historical theory and method serves the interests of the bourgeoisie, for it safely establishes the historical parameters of any debate over the fundamental issues of our time. An alternative would require more than just sympathetic research; it involves a qualitatively different historical theory and method, conceived to serve the interests of working and oppressed peoples. Serving those interests requires listening carefully, not to abstract historical evidence, but to what working and oppressed peoples have said in the myriad sources we have from the past. For historical evidence never exists in isolation. Whatever its own determinate properties may be, such evidence always exists within sources that have their own distinct being or ontology. The specific historical character of each source involves more than just where it came from, why it was created, and why it has survived into the present. As products of unequal and unjust societies, historical sources always bear witness to the inequalities and injustices of their society. Serving the interests of working and oppressed peoples means critically analysing these sources so as to consciously bring these elements, often implicit only in the silences within the source, to the fore. This is why, when one abstracts evidence from a source without respecting its historical logic understood in this larger sense, the resultant understanding of the past is either misleading or simply wrong. The metaphor of an interrogation of the evidence, which Thompson frequently used to illustrate his argument, does not allow for such a critical understanding of the historical nature of sources, for agency is with the interrogator, while the evidence is constrained by the questions asked. A more useful metaphor might be that of a conversation between a historian



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in the present and distinct sources from the past. This at least allows for the possibility of a more equitable exchange because it does not presume who has agency and who is constrained. After all, to understand the past historically means, in part, that we come to critically appreciate how it is that the myriad constraints of our advanced capitalist society not only make the past appear so foreign to us, but also make it difficult for us to conceive of a world that was organized differently than our own. The urgency of this issue was literally brought home to me in the early 1990s by the environmental crisis in the cod fishery of Newfoundland. The destruction of the northern cod is one of the greatest environmental disasters in recent history; it was as if the great plains of North America had suddenly been rendered infertile. The collapse of the cod stocks – to use the instrumentalist language that so dominated any discussion of this ecological transformation of the North Atlantic – generated substantial debate within scientific, academic, and industry circles, not only about why it happened, but perhaps more importantly about why we had allowed it to happen. One of the most remarkable aspects of the debate was how both government and industry had effectively ignored the warnings of inshore fishers, those most directly affected, as the signs of an impending catastrophe built up over the 1980s and early 1990s. Here I was witnessing a construction of knowledge that effectively silenced the voices of working people. Good, critical work was being done on fishery science,30 so I began to investigate how the differing disciplines of the humanities and social sciences at Memorial University of Newfoundland had so constructed the project of engineering the modernity of Newfoundland that they had silenced the people most directly affected. The result was controversial, but the conclusion I reached seemed to me to be incontrovertible: people who live in differing types of societies, or do differing things within the same society, not only need to know different things, but need to know the same things differently.31 Recognition of this complexity is essential if we are to hear the varied voices of the popular classes in the pre-industrial world. It was the end of a long day of papers and the speaker was not well known – a doctoral candidate of Louise Dechêne’s presenting work on Nova Scotia of all places – so the dynamic presentation probably came as a bit of shock to most people in the musty lecture hall at Queen’s University. Clearly, no one was going to nod off during Bill Wicken’s 1991 paper to the Canadian Historical Association; he never stopped moving. The tale was

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a complicated one,32 involving the seizure of a New England schooner by Mi’kmaq off the coast of Nova Scotia in August 1726, their subsequent capture, and their trial in a Boston court for piracy. Or was it? Did the signing of a peace treaty in June at Annapolis Royal with the Wabanaki Confederacy mean that the residents of Merleguiche were no longer at war with New England? Or did the conflict continue until their captured relatives held in a Boston jail were returned home? The court record was ambiguous, but Wicken’s presentation of the context was nothing short of masterful. We were quite literally watching history in the making. In clear opposition to Derrida’s highly influential dictum “il n’y a pas d’hors-texte,”33 Wicken argued that texts can only be understood in their historical context, and in making this assessment, he considered the oral record to be as important as the written word. Soon Wicken would be making the same compelling argument before the Supreme Court of Canada, convincing them to overturn a century and a half of neglect and disrespect in the Queen vs Donald Marshall case.34 Racist reaction to this fundamental strengthening of treaty rights was so strong that the Court was forced to backtrack. First Nations and the Canadian government are still dealing with the resulting mess, but the lesson for historians of the popular classes could not be clearer. No single text should be accorded primacy, since historical understanding requires a theory and a method that respect both the complexities and the inherent differences of the past.

A Case Study of the Informal Economy I’se the b’y that catches the fish and takes ’em home to Liza

There will now be a brief interlude. In 1989, I moved to St John’s, Newfoundland, to take up a position at Memorial University. In 1991, I was asked to collaborate in a research project to computerize nineteenth-century accounting records of merchants involved in the inshore fishery on the Bonavista Peninsula. Although this research might appear to have been quite removed from questions relating to industrialization, I leapt at the opportunity. The Newfoundland cod fishery was the only staple trade in Canadian history that involved the majority of the people in a colony of settlement. Everywhere else, the argument that staples were the motor of the economy meant that most people’s labour was somehow or other less



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important. Here, staple trades had dominated the economy for almost 500 years, and the result, it was argued, was the most economically underdeveloped region in the country. If I could show that the staple theory did not explain Newfoundland’s socio-economic development, I would, I thought, be striking a fatal blow against the theory. If I could show that bourgeois theory and method prevented us from seeing how the popular classes of Newfoundland had made their own history, then, I thought, I would be making a powerful case for the urgency of an alternative theory and method in Canadian history. Over the previous fifty years, an interdisciplinary consensus had developed that defined the ‘traditional’ fishery of Newfoundland.35 These academics considered production to be organized around kin networks, which meant a relative absence of wage labour. Payment for labour in the fishery was through a non-exploitative share system, with a share for each member of the crew and one for the boat. There was, however, a clear gender division of labour, with the men literally manning the boats while the women processed the fish on shore. This division was strengthened by a patrilocal organization of production, which meant that upon marriage the woman left her family’s shore crew to join the shore crew ‘making’ the fish caught by her husband’s crew. Merchant capital dominated each fishing community through the control of credit and the prevalence of ‘truck,’ a form of barter. These ties bound fishing families to their local merchant. The prevalence of truck limited the role of cash in the local economy, while the quasi-monopolistic role of individual merchant firms favoured the development of an unequal exchange. The price of essential goods in the merchant’s store varied with the price of fish. Owing to the common-access resource nature of the fishery, the idea that you cannot ‘enclose’ the sea, competition maintained a uniformly small scale of production. This question of scale, combined with the dominant role of merchants, greatly limited any capital accumulation by fishing families. Thus, there was little or no differentiation between these dependent commodity producers and, therefore, little or no qualitative change over time. The traditional fishery was just like Greer’s peasant world; change in outport Newfoundland came from the outside. Dave Bradley, Bob Hong, and I computerized the indexes, ledgers, and selected journals for the only two firms whose business records had survived (of the eight merchant firms operating in Bonavista from 1889 to 1891), James Ryan and Philip Templeman. Following the lead of Marc

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Bloch, we approached these accounting records in inverse order. We started with the last one created, the indexes, moved on to the ledgers, and only then tackled the daybooks or journals. This approach allowed us to see how these sources had been constructed and, as with Roland Barthes’ onion, to better understand reality.36 The two selected firms were quite different. Ryan’s, a long-established firm with a complex network of barter shops and affiliated branch operations, dealt with twice as many people and sold them four times the amount as the recently established Templeman’s. Despite these differences, both firms’ records indicate that the late nineteenth-century inshore fishery was characterized by very significant social differentiation. It was our analysis of the indexes that first revealed the seriousness of the problems with the prevailing consensus.37 Families maintained multiple accounts, and most families had accounts with more than one firm. The clientele was not stable. People appearing on the books in one year were often absent the next, but it was those clients with an account at only one firm who were the least persistent. There was clear evidence of social differentiation among clients. A small number employed numerous nonfamily members, and it was this rather select group who appeared to have been most tied to their merchant suppliers. These results highlighted the potential significance of varying and, in all likelihood, quite selective access to credit. However, credit was not simply a means to exercise economic control; indeed, in light of the firewood research, I thought of it in terms of differing and probably conflicting strategies. Analysis of the ledgers of both firms revealed that the overwhelming majority of clients did not owe ‘their’ merchant enough to tie them to anything.38 Moreover, every year a significant number of clients who had received substantial credit advances simply walked away from these obligations. Merchants could only recover the expense of these unproductive credit advances by factoring them into the pricing policies at their stores. There were two alternatives: pay less for goods purchased or charge more for goods sold. Although profit margins on fish were in some years substantial, they were linked to volume and that was not something the merchants could easily influence, let alone control. Hence, firms charged more for goods sold at their stores. Since non-productive loans were a cost all merchants faced, competition between merchants would have had little or no impact on these price increases.



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Our analysis of the ledgers did not reveal a ‘traditional’ inshore fishery in outport Newfoundland. The majority of clients were not independent, full-time, family-based fishers. Further up the social structure, major producers were few in number. At Templeman’s, only one in twenty clients sold the firm more than $100 worth of fish products, while at Ryan’s it was one in ten. We don’t know how productive cod traps were in the late nineteenth century,39 but it is reasonable to assume that there was a significant overlap between the forty-four clients who sold Ryan more than $250 of fish and ownership, or at least usage, of the fifty-four traps noted in the 1891 census for Bonavista. Seen in this light, the unequal exchange of truck was not the result of merchants’ systematic exploitation of tied producers. The problem was not systematic, it was systemic: the product of sharply differentiated social relations of production and exchange within the fishery. Truck prices were onerous precisely because the ties did not bind. Individuals could and did get out. This individual exercise of human agency was, however, seriously circumscribed by age and gender. Young unmarried men were the most likely to walk. Their choices left the community to pay the bill. Families, with their heavier reliance on store-bought staples, would have borne the brunt of these costs. Still, the situation was not as linear as this might suggest. There were overlapping tensions: individuals were pitted against community, and producers against merchants. If unequal exchange justified – indeed, for some necessitated – these individual actions, such actions unquestionably weakened any community-based response to merchant strategies. These dynamics were politically and culturally significant, and the knowledge that the exercise of individual freedom had high social costs remained an important ethical dimension that shaped these fishing communities’ response to the widespread adoption of cod traps by fishing families after the First World War. Merchants used credit to respond to a fishery that was largely beyond their control. As intermediaries, merchants aimed at maximizing their volume of business, which necessarily meant, in a context where people moved about with such apparent ease and yet hierarchies were significant, developing strategies focused on particular clients. Admittedly, it is tempting to explain these strategies solely in terms of the political economy of the fishery – after all, catching and processing cod were the principal economic activities linking outport Newfoundland to the broader North At-

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lantic economy and beyond – tempting but ahistorical, because the salt cod trade was not, nor had it ever been, the only economic activity within these communities. However, the economic organization of most produc­tive activities – from housing construction and small-boat building to agriculture, food processing, and garment making – was local and informal in nature. Hence, at neither Ryan’s nor Templeman’s was the choice of which clients to favour with credit dictated by who brought in the most fish. The informal economy of outport Newfoundland was in continuous and complex interaction with the formal economy. Merchants had an interest in appropriating value created within the informal economy. The most obvious form of mercantile appropriation was the unequal exchange, which acted like a tax on the imports – flour, cloth, nails, twine – necessary for the functioning of the informal economy. Our analysis of the journals, which recorded the daily transactions at each store, revealed that this taxation was highly discriminatory inasmuch as the informal economy was highly gendered. Consistent with findings based on similar merchant records in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec,40 we found that women in pre-industrial rural communities consumed to produce goods for both the domestic and local economy, while men produced to consume tobacco and alcohol. Significantly, mercantile appropriation of value created within the informal economy depended upon a firm’s success in inserting itself as a ‘clearing house’ for the settlement of debts within the local economy. As intermediaries in the multi-faceted and hierarchical socio-economic structures of the outports, merchants like James Ryan and Philip Templeman aimed at maximizing their total volume of business, not just, nor even primarily, their trade in cod. The key to success lay in capturing as much as possible of the informal economy. Ryan and Templeman used credit to maximize the amount of the community’s total economic activity that passed through their books. For both firms, this meant extending their clearing house business to include all the myriad debts, obligations, and exchanges of the informal economy. Social differentiation within the fishery had been growing over the nineteenth century, but at a relatively slow rate until the introduction of cod traps in the 1870s. Use of this highly productive technology was not only costly, but required larger crews both on board and on shore to process the cod.41 The cod trap further polarized the communities, reduced significant numbers of people to increased dependence on wage labour, contributed to



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out-migration, and substantially modified the gendered division of labour. Within decades of its introduction, most families active in the inshore fishery no longer sold the product of their labour directly to the merchants. By the end of the century, more and more successful traders and dealers were diversifying out of the fishery and the result was a remarkable growth in the number of joint-stock companies operating in a variety of sectors.42 A majority of the remaining, predominantly poorer, fishing families reorganized production along kin lines and in so doing created in the twentieth century the ‘traditional’ inshore fishery of Newfoundland. Furthermore, many would participate in an exceptionally large populist co-operative movement. The Fishermen’s Protective Union (fpu ) attempted to address the most serious inequities stemming from the mercantile bottleneck represented by the Water Street merchants’ effective monopoly over exports of salt cod. Its ultimate failure should not hide from view its very real achievements. Before the union failed, significant numbers of fishing families had acquired cod traps and the basis had been laid for a reconstruction of the inshore fishery along patrilocal and patriarchal lines within newly emerging, but deeply rooted, community-based value systems.43 By the time the researchers from Memorial showed up in the 1960s, however, the novelty of it all had been lost across the great divide of the searing experiences of depression and war. How did these fundamental social transformations affect gender relations? In 1985, Marilyn Porter published what is undoubtedly the most widely read research note ever to appear in Labour/Le Travail.44 While accepting the timeless nature of the inshore fishery, she challenged the academic consensus on one fundamental point. The clear gender division of labour did not mean that women were treated unequally. They were the “skippers of the shore crew” and as such had both authority and respect within fishing communities. In her argument, Porter made very good of use of qualitative evidence created by women, in particular memoirs from the Labrador migratory fishery. This vision of an equitable and respectful role for women in fishing communities was strongly supported by the oral history research into the forming of Irish communities along the Southern Shore that merited the Guttenberg Prize for Willeen Keough.45 The partnership is even referenced in the opening verse of “I’se the B’y,” Newfoundland’s best-known folksong. This vision finds no support in any of the later nineteenth-century merchant records I examined or in the early twentieth-century shareholder records of the largest co-operative movement in the history of the island.

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Women’s vital economic activities were subsumed in the accounts of their husbands, brothers, and fathers. Women were absent from the lists of fpu shareholders. These silences in the sources speak to the social injustice of gendered roles in outport Newfoundland. Wives were never paid for any of their work in ‘making’ the fish.46 Female domestic labour earned only a fraction of the wages paid young men in the fishery. Merchant accounts are, of course, documents that chronicle constraints. How people feel and how other people treat them are not the subject matter of ledgers and journals. As we have seen, however, these double-entry accounts do have a great deal to say about the agency of fishing families and the constraints on merchants. The late nineteenth century saw significant differentiation within petty commodity–producing households. Many were driven to work primarily for wages, while merchants actively appropriated value in the highly gendered informal economy. The merchants were all men, and the people whose accounts they tracked were almost all men. Amidst all this turmoil, how could gender relations have remained unchanged? Surely, this must have acted as a major constraint on the agency of women as their communities were transformed. Moreover, this emerging inequality helps us to understand the highly gendered nature of the responses to the crisis in outport Newfoundland. It structured both the newly invented traditional fishery and the highly politicized co-operative movement that came to represent it. As I draw this interlude to a close, some more-general remarks are in order. The key processes visible in outport Newfoundland were not unique to the island. The informal economy, the gendered nature of work, the increasingly patriarchal public face of community life, the logic of the pricing strategies of merchants, the merchants’ ability to tax and to appropriate value from the myriad informal transactions within the community, the significant geographic mobility of young people, the importance of wage labour, and, what in many way is the synthesis of all of these, the increased differentiation were characteristics not of Newfoundland, but of life in rural British North America in the nineteenth century. The fish these ‘b’ys’ caught and their ‘Lizas’ made into a finished product was sold to southern Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America. This productive activity might have accounted for as much as quarter of the total economic activity in the outports. Elsewhere in rural British North America, the formal economy would have occupied a larger place. These differences in scale mattered, for they contributed to the differing cultural composition of the many societies in rural British North America. In rural



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Quebec and rural Newfoundland, the two quintessential ‘folk’ societies of Canada, the choices people made fundamentally shaped the national contours of these colonies of settlement. Why should the agency of all the other British North Americans living in the countryside be in any doubt? There, too, individual and collective choices created constraints for others, and these constraints – old and new – led many to leave. Some would return, for Rusty Bitterman’s telling observation that “externalities visited on familiar feet” applied throughout British North America.47 None of these societies were ever isolated, but as they transformed their environment, they too were transformed.

Tenants and Landlords My two explorations of the dynamics of rural British North America bracketed 1992, the five-hundredth anniversary of the European invasion of the Americas. Late that year, with my young family, I visited the north shore of the Dominican Republic where Christopher Columbus had first landed. It was an appalling reality check. This was the second of numerous trips to Latin America we would make as I became increasingly interested in understanding what the ‘America’ in British North America meant. How important was it that I was studying colonies of settlement? Did the settlers simply reproduce their cultures of origin? Or, what seemed more likely to me, were they, too, qualitatively transformed? In all of this, I was of course very much a person of my time. It was a time for reflection and new beginnings, particularly on the left, where many, perhaps most, were rethinking their most cherished beliefs and assumptions. For as Jean Ferrat had recognized long before I had: C’est un autre avenir qu’il faut qu’on réinvente, Sans idole ou modèle, pas à pas humblement Sans verité tracée, sans lendemains qui chantent Un bonheur inventé définitivement … Au nom de l’idéal qui nous faisait combattre et qui nous pousse encore à nous battre aujourd’hui.48 If people who live in differing types of societies, or do differing things within the same society, not only need to know different things, but need to

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know the same things differently, then I had my work cut out for me. The interdisciplinary consensus on why America and Europe differed seemed an appropriate point of departure. The distinction dates from Adam Smith and was the cornerstone of the staple theory. The New World differed from the Old because of its inversion of the fundamental economic relationship between people and land. In Europe, wages were low and the price of land high. In America, it was held to be the opposite; an abundance of land, ‘free for the taking,’ meant that high wages were necessary to entice people to work. How true were Adam Smith’s assumptions? Was America really that different from Europe? Wages were higher in British North America than in Britain, but then so too was the cost of living in a society snowbound for four to five months of the year. I knew that wages for domestic service had declined over the second quarter of the nineteenth century while wages for unskilled labour remained stable – a dual phenomenon I could not yet explain. However, unlike Smith’s late eighteenth-century Scotland, British North America was not yet a wage economy. For most people, working for wages was but a stage in the life cycle. Property, on the other hand, affected everyone. My initial foray into property relations took several forms. In the final years of the Montreal Business History Project, we had started to examine social rights to property as part of a broader examination of how gender and class interacted in the transition. Like that of a number of project members, my work on this complex problem would continue long after the mbhp broke up in 1989.49 I discuss some of my findings in the next section, but first I report on my preliminary examination of people and land. In the early 1990s, I computerized the only complete tax roll for early nineteenth-century Montreal. I used it to study property ownership in a popular-class neighbourhood that I attempted to link to city directories and a period map. In 1974, the Groupe de recherche sur la société montréalaise (grsm ) published an analysis of property ownership in Montreal based on cumulative tables compiled by Jacques Viger in 1826–27.50 Viger was the colonial official responsible for roads in the parish of Montréal. Paul-André Linteau and Jean-Claude Robert argued that the property holdings revealed by Viger demonstrated the significant role that property ownership played in the making of a Canadien bourgeoisie. Viger, of course, had made no such argument, but in my initial work with this source, I too ignored his aims and hence the source’s historical logic.



Agency and Constraint 131 By assessed annual income. The total of ward lists

By value of portfolio.

Consolidated total for the whole city

Number

> £200

> £2,500

> £100

> £1,000

> £50

> £500

> £20

> £200

> £10 < £10 500

Value

< £200 300 100

100 300 500

45%

15%

30%

60%

Figure 5.1  •  Property owners in 1825. The 1,698 proprietors named on ward lists included only 1,325 individuals, so the consolidated total drops by a fifth. The almost perfect inversion of the pyramid underscores the highly concentrated nature of property ownership. Source: Fonds Viger-Verreau, Archives du séminaire de Québec (a sq) .

Ironically, given my increasing awareness of the need to treat sources with respect in order to hear what they have to say, my first significant finding was the result of my failure to treat the source properly. The original source had been organized by ward and, within each ward, alphabetically by proprietor within three broad categories. I ignored all this, choosing instead to separate each line on the manuscript into two related database tables, one for the proprietor and one for his or her properties.51 Upon completion of the data entry, it was immediately evident to me that if properties in Montreal, by value, resembled a pyramid, the same could not be said for ownership. There were considerably fewer proprietors than it had at first appeared, because people owned properties in a number of different wards. Consolidating the ward lists reduced the number of owners of taxable property from 1,698 to 1,325 people, firms, or institutions. Moreover, when properties were organized by value, it was clear that property ownership was highly concentrated. A third of the properties, accounting for 60 per cent of the value of all taxable properties in the city, were owned by people, firms, or institutions with holdings worth more than £2,500. Less than 1 per cent of the city’s population, 222 people, estates, firms, or institutions, owned half of all the properties. Their holdings were worth almost four-fifths of the assessed value of the entire city.

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Value

Number

> £2,500

> £2,500

> £1,000

> £1,000

> £500

> £500

> £200

> £200

< £200

< £200 45%

15%

30%

60%

Owner of a single property Owner of multiple properties

30%

Value

15%

45%

Canadiens Anglo-Canadiens English & foreign

Figure 5.2  •  The dominance of landlords and their ethnic composition. Rentier capital was significant in all but the lowest-valued portfolios, while in terms of Viger’s ethnic classification, Canadien landlords did remarkably well. Source: Fonds Viger-Verreau, a sq .

Viger organized his lists for each ward into three categories: “Canadiens” for French-speaking people born in the colony; “Anglo-Canadiens” for the English-speaking people born in the colony; and “Anglais et étrangers” for everyone else. On figure 5.2, one can see why Viger considered ethnicity to be so important. English-speaking proprietors born in the colony had a completely different profile than did French-speaking proprietors. Very few simply owned their own home. If they invested in real estate, it was as a landlord. By contrast, immigrant proprietors and immigrant landlords had quite similar profiles, while those Canadiens who only owned a single property were overwhelmingly owners of small properties. The owners of high-value properties were overwhelmingly landlords, and the owners of middling-value properties were mostly landlords. Single proprietors constituted the majority only among those owning property worth £200 or less. We can readily see that, among all these landlords, Canadiens constituted a clear majority in every category. Immigrants could and did purchase property in the city. Indeed, foreign-born landlords were more evenly distributed than the Anglo-Canadiens, who were present only at the highest levels of this remarkable hierarchy. But what did this mean for access to land? If, as it appeared, less than one in four households owned property, could a popular-class family, native or foreign-born, reasonably expect to own its own home in this colony of settlement?

Dwelling Outbuilding

Figure 5.3  •  John Adams, Ste-Marie suburb in 1825. Single homes and assorted outbuildings on individual lots give the ward a rather bucolic image that proved to be singularly misleading. Source: Digitally drawn by the author from an original in McGill University Rare Books and Special Collections (McGill Rare Books [mrb] ).

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To answer this question I carried out a preliminary examination of SteMarie ward in the east end of the city.52 On John Adams’ ordnance survey, drawn the same summer Viger compiled his statistics, this neighbourhood runs for a mile between the St Lawrence River and St Martin’s Creek. The lots are large, and the space between buildings considerable. Modest, unattached dwellings front most properties, complemented by a small outbuilding or two at the back of the property. Several large estates backing on to the river, as well as the Molson brewery in the ward’s east end, hint at a more complex situation, but nonetheless the map conveys an impression of an almost bucolic, popular-class community of single family dwellings. The roll identified 259 proprietors of 413 properties in the ward, which would suggest that owner-occupied homes would be quite common. Indeed, 186 owners were listed as having only a single property in the ward. My analysis revealed, however, that most of the smaller properties were owned by landlords – a clear majority of the small properties owned by Canadiens and two-thirds of the properties owned by Anglais et étrangers. The prominence of Canadiens among the owners of smaller properties in this ward was therefore the result of an investment strategy by Canadien landlords, rather than a reflection of the relative economic status of this community. Now many of these landlords lived in the neighbourhood and were members of the popular classes, judging by those I was able to link to the Doige city directories of 1819 and 1820. These were complex communities. When you went to purchase your vegetables at the green grocers on the main street or took a beer in the local tavern, you might well be dealing with your landlord. But for most of the ward’s 778 households listed in the 1825 census, home ownership was no longer an option. Thus, the bucolic image conveyed in John Adams’ ordinance survey is profoundly misleading. This was not a ward where most families had their own home, let alone owned it.

Debating Rights to Property Access to and control over property was a fundamental aspect of differentiation within the popular classes throughout British North America. Property empowered people politically, while lack of property constrained them socially. When we think about property, we generally think of a thing, be it a piece of urban land, a farm, or a cod trap. Property is, however, not



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so much a thing as a bundle of rights to something.53 What is included or not in a particular bundle matters a great deal. Thus, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century in Lower Canada, debates over property were debates about the type of society people envisaged for themselves and their communities. The specifics of the debates dealt with socially defined rights to property and the nature of the property regime itself. The basic question, however, was at once more fundamental and simpler. Should we have a moral or a liberal economy? In a moral economy, economics are subordinate to particular sets of social, political, and ethical values. In a liberal economy, economics are autonomous. Values and virtues may be supportive of a liberal economy, for liberalism is neither value-free nor virtue-less.54 In a moral economy, values govern economics, while in a liberal economy, economics govern values. Living in an advanced capitalist country in the twenty-first century, it is extremely difficult for us to understand how revolutionary this inversion was. Until only two centuries ago, no society in the history of the world had ever allowed economics to be considered autonomous. Economics had always been subordinated to the existing social order, and for good reason. Unbridled economic freedom is extraordinarily destructive of any existing social, political, or ethical hierarchy, as it simultaneously creates new, historically unprecedented, economic inequalities. The people debating property rights in Lower Canada could not have foreseen the world we have wrought. They could not have conceived of a world that creates such wealth as ours; nor could they have conceived of a social order that was so iniquitous in the distribution of that wealth. They could, however, very clearly see the immediate implications of a liberal economic order, for it meant dismantling a complex series of social and ethical safeguards that had for centuries structured the familial and the political orders. Social rights to property are rights that people enjoy because of who they are or what they do. The two most important bundles of social rights under debate in 1830s and early 1840s concerned the rights of wage earners and the rights of married women. In Lower Canada, people who were paid wages had a legal claim on the property of their master for any unpaid wages. Their labour had created something of value; it now belonged to the master, but was subject to his or her payment for that labour. This was a privileged claim. It took precedence over all other claims on the property of a master, save for those of the Crown itself. Married women also enjoyed

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a privileged claim, but to the property of their husband. The right of dower, as it was known, was the opposite of a dowry. It was what a wife or widow could take away from a marriage. The Custom of Paris considered the dower rights of a wife to be one-half the value of the estate. This privileged lien on the property of her husband was owing to her, not in her own right, but because she was conceived as a vessel of transmission to the legitimate issue of the marriage. Liberal critics of these rights called them secret encumbrances, and in a certain sense they were right. In neither case could one establish with any certainty what the potential value of either of these social rights to property was, prior to it being asserted. As long as production remained on a small scale, the potential value of any claim for unpaid wages would in all likelihood not be particularly considerable. However, once manufactories reached the size of the shipyards of the colonial-builts, the biweekly wage bill reached into the hundreds of pounds current. This was more than enough to leave those who had lent money to the master, on the assurance of a hypothecated lien on his property, holding an empty bag. Contractors for the large public work projects of the period posed similar risks. Calculating for dower was, if anything, even more complicated, for the amount owed the wife depended on the scale of her husband’s estate. Then, in 1835, a liberal ruling by the Court of King’s Bench in Montreal further complicated the situation. The Court confirmed that dower was an alienable right. It could be bought and sold like any other instrument of credit, and then it would quite literally take on a life of its own. A commission of inquiry into secret encumbrances established by the Legislative Council in 1836 outlined the problem but thought the better of forcing the issue.55 It was, however, raised at the highest levels of the Colonial Office.56 Following the suppression of the Rebellions of 1837–38, the Special Council, a small group of men meeting behind the heavily guarded doors of the Château de Ramezay on Notre-Dame Street in Montreal, moved with remarkable alacrity to secure the interests of creditors and eliminate secret encumbrances. The Master and Servant Act was modified to do away with privileged claims for unpaid wages, save for the construction trades where the waged employees could lay claim to the built property. Any claim for unpaid wages was to be registered; it was then dealt with in the order of registration, and so unpaid wages would be honoured only after all the earlier claims by creditors had been settled. Dower continued to exist, but



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only as a limited claim on specific properties and again only from the date of registration. It was no longer to be alienable.57 These changes were part of a much larger restructuring of the legal, political, and economic order enacted under martial law by the Special Council. Habeas corpus and democracy had both been suspended. Reform newspapers were banned. The colony’s democratically elected leadership was in exile, transported, imprisoned, or already hanged. Appointed magistrates had replaced the elected town council. An ethnically charged militia roamed the countryside, while a new police force imposed order in town. Under such circumstances, genuine debate was simply not possible.58 It is extremely unlikely that these changes could have been instituted under normal conditions; nevertheless, when a limited form of democracy was reinstated, these foundational principles of a new liberal order were not reversed.59 A watershed in Canadian history had been crossed. This has serious implications for our understanding of the transition in Lower Canada. The effective elimination of the privileged claim to unpaid wages is indicative of a weakening of support among masters within the craft communities for the values of a moral economy and its key concept of a just price for a just wage. Similarly, the significant restrictions placed on dower point to changing attitudes about the role of the state in protecting the rights of married women. What had long been considered a public responsibility to ensure the stability of the family was increasingly being seen by men as their personal responsibility as the head of their own household. What was driving these complementary changes was not yet clear to me, but that they had significant implications for both social and gender relations was obvious. Contemporary debates over property were not limited to social rights, but went to the very essence of the property regime itself. Proposals for the conversion of the seigneurial regime to free and common soccage, the fullest form of property ownership under English common law, had been debated in the colony since at least 1790, when the Legislative Council proposed the first major plan. In 1825, upon the advice of Edward ‘Bear’ Ellice, seigneur of Beauharnois, the British House of Commons debated a plan that found little support in the colony. In 1834, the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada proposed yet another plan, but it was rejected by the Executive Council. In 1838, by the Declaration of Independence of Lower Canada, the radical wing of the Patriotes abolished the regime “as if it had never existed.” As this might suggest, since the Conquest the question had

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never really been whether or not to keep this feudal property system, but rather what compensation, if any, should be offered the lords for their loss of feudal privilege. Not surprisingly, it was the Special Council that cut this Gordian knot when they enacted an ordinance for the optional commutation of land on the three seigneuries owned by the Sulpicians, the Catholic male order that owned the island of Montreal. This experiment was linked to the granting of a corporate charter to the Sulpicians in recognition of their strong support for the Crown during the rebellions.60 These new rules governing commutation ensured that the Sulpicians would be amply compensated for their loss of feudal privilege. Compensation was calculated on a sliding scale: the more the land was worth, the lower the percentage one had to pay. Since the Special Council wanted to encourage commutation, the rates increased as time passed. Although not quite the opération blanche, or whitewash, described by Albert Soboul for the Kingdom of Naples, compensation was based on the market value of the entire property. Thus, when a censitaire opted out of the regime, he or she had to compensate the Sulpicians for not just the value of the land, but also for any improvements they had made, as well as a percentage of the value of all buildings on the property. Understandably, this was not a popular feature of the legislation, and when in 1854 commutation was extended to the rest of the seigneurial lands, it was the state that assumed the bulk of the initial cost, with the censitaires paying a quit rent.61 They would not be abolished until the early 1970s. These more generous terms were extended to the Sulpician lands in 1860. Each commutation on Sulpician land generated a notarial deed. Brian Young made extensive use of the mbhp’s summary tables of these deeds in his prize-winning analysis of the Sulpicians as a business institution. Commutations generated the Sulpicians’ principal source of revenue from 1840 until the early 1880s. Young argued that because any improvement to a property would raise the cost of compensation, the commutations could be used to identify major property developers in the city. He noted that these men, for they were all men, had been the driving force behind the new liberal order and its concomitant elimination of the seigneurial regime. Most of the major property owners identified in this analysis were of British origin, and so his analysis lent support to an ethnic interpretation of the politics of commutation and beyond that to the liberal project itself. Almost a decade later, working once again with Grace Laing Hogg, I returned to the commutations with the idea of using the information in these



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deeds to locate people in town. One of the most difficult aspects of studying pre-industrial towns is establishing with any certainty where people actually lived and worked. This information is important if you want to examine social or occupational segregation, something the European literature said was largely a product of industrialization. It is also important if you want to examine sociability – that is, how people interact on a dayto-day basis – which by the early 1990s was a growing research field. When a single property was commuted, the deed described its location by noting what was to be found in front, in back, and on both sides. The front was generally a street, while the side and the back descriptions often identified who lived there. Thus, an analysis of the commutations would, I hoped, allow us to place with some certainty enough people on the ground that we could then decode the addresses provided annually by the city directories from the early 1840s onwards. Hogg examined each of the 1,309 commutation deeds signed between 1840 and 1854, when the more generous conditions elsewhere brought commutations almost to a halt on the island of Montreal. Detailed descriptions of the 927 individually commuted properties within the city allowed us to plot them on copies of the maps that the Sulpicians had developed to track subdivisions within their seigneury. It soon became clear that there were very large property developers who had chosen not to commute their property prior to creating a new subdi­ vision.62 The most widely used technique involved a tirage aux sorts, whereby a large lot would be divided into a number of building lots and people would literally draw for lots. Those who purchased their lots would then assume the costs of commutation, which usually preceded their having anything built. Drawing by lot ensured development over the entire property and thereby hastened the sale of lots that had not been selected. This method of creating a subdivision also had the advantage of making it easier to divide the non-selected properties up among members of the developer’s family, and thus these drawings were often linked to the execution of an estate. As this might suggest, these large-property developers were often Canadiens whose family had owned the property for generations, but not always. Very little of the property in the St-Antoine ward, however, which in the 1840s and early 1850s was fast becoming an exclusive English Protestant suburb, was developed in this manner. There, developers tended to commute their properties before subdividing them.63 Usage rights under the seigneurial regime were subject to a number of dues and banal rights, so called because they were everywhere. Some of

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these were symbolic, while others were really quite substantive. In a society where lines of status, and increasingly ethnicity and religion, were firmly drawn, symbolic payments mattered. By mid-century, for many a Protestant property owner in Montreal, the idea of paying fealty to a Catholic religious order every St Michaelmas Day would probably have weighed heavily in their calculations of whether or not it made sense to commute their property. Sales of property generated the most substantive feudal dues, the lods et ventes. In Lower Canada, these dues were calculated at 12 per cent of the total sale price. Property transmitted within the family was exempt from these dues. The choice whether or not to commute your property depended on how you intended to use that property in the future. If you expected to pass it down within the family, then any advantages of commutation had to be weighed against the not inconsiderable cost of compensating the lords – compensation that included paying the lords for all the improvements your family had done to the property down through the generations. Here, too, the symbolic nature of things mattered. To compensate the lord’s loss of feudal privilege required a mutually agreed upon evaluation of the property. Unlike the assessments of a municipal tax roll, these prices were established between the parties each time a deed was made. To invoke Rice’s distinction, the prices these deeds contain constitute phenomenal evidence in contrast to the epiphenomenal evaluations of a tax roll. Thus, not only do these deeds permit a remarkably accurate tracking of land values in the city, but they tell us how people valued property. These deeds reveal a profound change in how people related to urban property. In the 1840s, Montreal experienced its first full-scale property boom. That such an unprecedented event in the city’s history should follow immediately upon the effective elimination of socially defined rights to property was no mere coincidence. The wild swings in prices, in what we might now call a deregulated environment, were most visible in the market for undeveloped urban land. The price per square foot for lots in the Berthelet subdivision in western St-Laurent ward more than doubled between the fall of 1840 and the spring of 1844 and then increased up to threefold over the next two years. In 1846, a small lot on St Catherine Street was evaluated at 1100 per cent above the prevailing rate of 1841. Prices then collapsed, not quite to pre-boom levels but well below the maniacal heights of 1845 and 1846.



Agency and Constraint 141

Regulatory change is, of course, insufficient to explain this remarkable change in how people valued property. This boom was a long time in the making. We conservatively estimated that the value of urban property in Montreal by the early 1840s had increased by 250 per cent over what Viger had indicated for 1825. Nevertheless, a great deal of money was made and lost in this first property boom during the 1840s. As people reduced urban land to a commodity, they changed their relationship to nature. They also changed their relationships with their fellow citizens, for capital gains spelt tenants’ losses. It was not yet clear to me how these surprisingly rapid transformations, of first the values that had maintained the urban environment and then the environment itself, related to the broader questions of gender and class in the transition that had sparked our inquiry. What was clear to me was what the victory of a liberal economy over a moral economy meant for most working people in the city. If access to property for most families was at best limited in the 1820s, property had become prohibitively expensive by the 1840s. A small wooden house on a crowded street in the St-Jacques ward cost at least five times the annual income of a craft-producing family and ten times that of an unskilled family. This was, we argued, the major reason why the tens of thousands of British and Irish immigrants who came to the city every year in this decade kept on going. Although they may not have read their Adam Smith, these immigrant families would not have wanted to settle for an economy characterized by low wages and high land prices. This unequal relationship was, after all, why so many had left the old country in the first place.

Understanding the Past How we think about the past depends very much on how we view the present. This is inescapably political. Any claim to a scientific knowledge of the past must consciously discipline our particular presents, so that we might constructively engage with our many and varied pasts. Such an engagement is not a linear process, but a self-reflective, critical conversation with the sources themselves. Our resultant knowledge is conditional, contestable, and always partial, but potentially cumulative and scientific, for it is certainly refutable. By the mid-1990s, I had come to consider omniscient, supra-human explanations of causality to be beyond the ken of historians. As I questioned the self-sufficiency and certainty of my own

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structuralism, I realized that my best ethical guide through this thicket lay in fully recognizing the dialectic of agency and constraint. Agency and constraint exist in a creative tension. The choices people make can both modify existing constraints and reinforce or create constraints, most often for others. Constraints can lead to particular choices that may in turn generate both new opportunities and new constraints. This process of change is how history happens. It should therefore be visible in, indeed constitutive of, every historical source. To recognize this requires a historical theory and method that treats sources with the respect that they merit. I had long been quite dismissive of routinely generated nominal series – the sources most often used in social history. If I was correct in drawing the conclusion that every source has important things to tell us about how people’s choices made history, then it was time that I addressed seriously the city directories, census returns, and tax rolls that my colleagues had so long privileged.

Chapter Six

“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!”

This was how Jacques Viger confessed his frustration to the bishop of Montreal.1 It may have been the earliest recognition of how much work is involved in making sense of a census, but it most certainly would not be the last. Viger was a pioneering social scientist. A journalist, he had married well to the propertied widow of a British Army officer. A veteran of the War of 1812 and for twenty-five years an active militia officer, Viger was the appointed colonial official in charge of the roads for the parish of Montréal. In 1826, 1827, and 1828, he spent thousands of hours analysing the returns he had compiled in connection with the first state-mandated census in sixty years. His work may well be the first sociological study of any town in the Americas. In this chapter, I explore the attempts in the 1820s by three men, John Adams, Thomas Doige, and Jacques Viger, to make sense of a rapidly changing Montreal. As we have just seen, my preliminary work with their material revealed how different their visions were of Ste-Marie ward. Hoping to build on these insights, I devoted most of my 1995–96 sabbatical year to computerizing their main works. As I became more familiar with them, I realized that all three men should be seen as part of the much larger enlightenment project that is modernity. I was not alone; modernity and its relationship to the European enlightenment was a ‘hot’ topic in the mid1990s. The implosion of the Soviet Union and the rise of post-modernism had combined to challenge the legitimacy of core enlightenment concepts in Western culture, particularly within the humanities. As an alienated petty-bourgeois intellectual who still thought of himself as a historical materialist, I recognized that much of my own worldview was both derivative of this particular European moment and under attack.

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Two quite unrelated research activities affected how I approached these questions. After more than twenty years of research, I had finally produced historical syntheses of the Québécois and English-Canadian capital markets.2 Although these markets are remarkably different, I concluded that they were both fundamentally shaped by their respective petty bourgeoisies: a social group that I felt had not received the critical historical attention that it merited. Adams, Doige, and Viger were, of course, petty-bourgeois intellectuals, and I was interested in assessing the impact of their conceptual work on the making of modernity in Montreal. The second activity came in the form of an invitation from Gilles Lauzon to participate in a working group on how to interpret ‘Vieux Montréal.’3 Through this work, I began to appreciate how important the built environment is as a historical source. Belatedly then, I began to read the urban landscapes that I had been studying for so long. A third contextual influence was the rapid progress in graphics software. By the mid-1990s, I had been using computers for more than a decade in all of my work, but it was only with the development of Harvard Graphics and Micrografix Designer that I discovered the tools necessary for a graphically based mode of historical analysis. I became fascinated with the possibilities opened up by the visual representation of complex data sets. Graphics were not something to illustrate what I already knew, but analytical tools to discover new patterns and relationships. The graphic techniques of colouring and layering helped me to explore these complexities, but given the finances of academic publishing, neither lends itself easily to reproduction in book form. An annotated collection of my graphics from this period is available on the MAP website (www.mun.ca/mapr). Here, I present only limited extracts from the collection while discussing what the larger collection helped me to discover in the written text.

Analysing Adams When the Corps of Military Surveyors and Draftsmen was established in the Tower of London in 1805, John Adams was one of this Ordnance Corps’ first recruits.4 He worked on a variety of defence projects until the end of the Napoleonic Wars.5 His half inch to the mile survey of Quebec and its environs of 1822 shows a flexible mastery of the various techniques long associated with the corps’ major peacetime activity: the ordnance survey of southern England and Wales.6 It is, however, his exceptionally detailed map

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Figure 6.1  •  John Adams, Map of the City and Suburbs of Montreal, 1825. This map was an early attempt to create an accurate digital facsimile to explore the internal logic of Adams’ vision. One can clearly see how the main suburbs developed organically along the main roads linking town and country. Source: Digitally drawn by the author from an original in McGill Rare Books.



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 145

of Montreal that best illustrates the extension to Lower Canada “of Britain’s calm felicity and power.”7 Adams’ map reflected an imperial vision. Designed to be used by colonial and military officials, it offers a sweeping strategic assessment of the town and adjacent canal in a single glance. John Adams drew a highly detailed map of a town that appears to have been shaped by nature. The town centre lay between the St Lawrence River and the only partially canalized St Martin’s Creek. Pointe-à-Callière lay on the opposite side of the slightly larger St-Pierre River. To the east, St Martin’s Creek marked the effective northern boundary of both St-Louis and Ste-Marie suburb, while, to the west, St-Joseph suburb lay largely between the St Martin’s and the St-Pierre. To the north, along the base of an escarpment, ran a series of streams, effectively marking the limits to urban expansion. In only the largest of the popular-class suburbs, St-Laurent, had any of these streams been harnessed to feed a rudimentary water supply. In the town centre, a privately owned water company enjoyed a state-granted monopoly, pumping water from just beyond the shallows in the river to feed a 250,000-gallon reservoir on Notre-Dame Street. Its gravity-fed distribution system, complete with six hydrants, is visible on the map and was restricted to the main streets of the town centre. Along the waterfront, there were only the most rudimentary of docking facilities, primarily in Pointe-à-Callière, the only place where the harbour was deep enough to accommodate ocean-going vessels. Sailing vessels’ access to the harbour remained difficult. One had to sail up a narrow channel against the current past Île Ste-Hélène, then tack hard to starboard, into the prevailing winds, before luffing past Market Island at the mouth of the St-Pierre. But these were natural constraints that could now be surmounted. In 1809, only a year after the first steamboat ran on the Hudson, the Accommodation, powered by a Watt steam engine, was plying the route between Montreal and Quebec City. In the summer Adams drew his map. Four different steam ferries offered scheduled crossings to the south shore, while six steamboats plied the lucrative run to Quebec City, including the mighty Hercules, which could tow up to Montreal three ocean-going vessels at a time. These steamboats were all propelled by engines manufactured in Montreal and fuelled by tens of thousands of cords of local red spruce. The island of Montreal was home to 2,600 peasant households in 1825. They grew much of the food consumed in the city, while many of the craft services they required were to be found along the main streets of the principal suburbs. Town–country relations were essential, and on the map we

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can see how the St-Laurent, Ste-Marie, and St-Joseph suburbs each developed along a major artery that linked the town to this fully settled and prosperous countryside. The map conveys an almost organic image of these popular-class neighbourhoods where the majority of the town’s 22,500 inhabitants lived. Nine out of ten of the developed lots had a dwelling and two-thirds to three-quarters an outbuilding as well. Most of these modest lots appear to have been a family’s home. St-Antoine, to the northwest, had yet to develop much beyond being the main street leading to the mountain, although the size of many of its dwellings and dependencies suggest the relative wealth of this suburb. Ste-Anne, to the west of Pointe-à-Callière, broke with the look of the other suburbs. Large lots, appropriate for the numerous manufactories visible on the map, and the grid street plan spoke to the novelty of the place, as did the types of buildings present. Here the pattern of the other suburbs was inverted. Less than two-thirds of developed properties had a dwelling, but there were more outbuildings than lots. Ste-Anne had been developed in anticipation of the Lachine Canal, which Adams’ map had at least in part been drawn to celebrate. His unusual perspective, which did not respect the town’s boundaries, highlighted this major public work. The newly completed canal split the commons of Montreal in two; a more symbolic statement of the contemporary ‘spirit of improvements’ would be difficult to find. So in myriad ways, Ste-Anne already embodied the transformation of natural limits that the canal symbolized and that Adams’ map ordained. Adams’ map highlighted a recent qualitative transformation of the town centre. From the Hay Market in the west, through Place Royale, Place d’Armes, the Champ de Mars, and the New Market in the centre of the town, to Dalhousie Square in the east and back along the broad boulevard of the new waterfront Commissioners Street, the town centre boasted numerous, substantial public spaces. These were the result of a major urban redevelopment associated with the demolition of the town walls. Largely completed by 1817, improvements to the city’s principal thoroughfares continued to consume two-thirds of the city’s tax revenues until the early 1830s. These new squares, promenades, and market places, along with the macadamized streets of the town centre, redefined the city. Simply by being public spaces, they constituted a dramatic break with the largely institutional but always private gardens of the formerly walled town, several of which were still visible on Adams’ map. More importantly, these civic



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 147

improvements represented a complex, albeit contradictory, vision of a new public order. This vision drew on both Enlightenment values and more organic forms of conservative thought. It was a transforming vision. Its purpose was to form a limited, yet democratic, bourgeois citizenry. This was to be achieved through public interaction, so it required the creation of a new public sphere. This encompassed the press, voluntary societies, political parties, circulating libraries, indeed the whole panoply of bourgeois culture.8 It also required reconstructing urban space into public space, so as to better promote these bourgeois values. This vision promoted ideas that redefined people’s relationship with the rest of nature in order to change the nature of people. Inspired by the democratic ideal that people become citizens through orderly public intercourse, Montrealers completely rebuilt their town. The demolition of the city walls effectively doubled the size of the town centre. The commissioners appointed to oversee the work, aided first by surveyor Louis Charland and then by the parish roads commissioner Jacques Viger, developed an ambitious plan that called for the razing of the thirty-metre-high Citadel Hill, nine new streets, extensions to four others, two new public squares, a doubling of the size of Place d’Armes, a parade ground, three canals, two artificial lakes, and 200 new building lots. The plan was authorized in 1801, work started in 1804, and although demolition was for the most part completed by 1810, improvements and land sales continued for a decade more. The entire plan was not realized, but by 1825 enclosed spaces were now open. Natural limits were now what was to be limited. On Adams’ map, broad commercial streets ran where fortifications had once stood, while parts of both the St-Pierre River and St Martin’s Creek were canalized. New streets and public squares greatly facilitated traffic flows both through the town and between the town and its suburbs. Behind the large residential lots of Craig and Greater St-James streets ran Fortification Lane, Montreal’s first alleyway. At each end of the town centre, one can see on Adams’ map areas that were still being redeveloped in 1825: the former Récollets property in the west and Citadel Hill in the east. These were conceptually related projects. The colonial authorities sold the Récollets property to Lord Grant in exchange for Île Ste-Hélène, which became the site of the principal army garrison. Only a limited military presence in the town centre was now

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considered necessary. Citadel Hill was levelled, and the earth and stone used to partially fill in the swamp behind St-Louis suburb. Subsequent attempts to develop this property privately failed, and in the 1840s it would become one of the city’s first parks. For the area linking the new town barracks to the eastern suburbs, Viger designed a large new public square and named it in honour of Governor Dalhousie, who had accepted his plans over the objections of city magistrates. A fire in 1803 had opened up for redevelopment a broad swath of land from the site of the proposed parade ground down to St-Paul Street. City magistrates used some of the land for a new public market, supplementing the existing one on Place Royale. Plans to build a stone market were not, however, fulfilled, and for three decades, butchers and green grocers leased the forty ‘temporary’ wooden stalls of the New Market. Colonial authorities used another part for a small imperial complex of a courthouse, common gaol, and guardhouse. Work then commenced on the Champ de Mars, or parade ground. By 1813, a large artificial terrace rose above the newly created Craig Street. The Champ de Mars was the first in a series of new landscaped public spaces within the old town. In the evening and on Sunday afternoons, taking the air while enjoying the view from this raised promenade became the fashionable thing to do. This public function of the Champ de Mars depended on its being a highly ordered and gendered social space; the new civil society as envisaged by both Tory and Patriote required broadly shared bourgeois sensibilities, which could not be successfully cultivated in elite salons. More than just clothes were being fashioned by the Montrealers promenading on the Champ de Mars. The many descriptive possibilities offered up by Adams’ map belie the problematic nature of the exercise in which he was engaged, for this incredibly detailed map is without specificity. Officers of the British Army were doing precisely the same thing to Calcutta, Sydney, and Cape Town, and would very shortly to Bombay and Singapore. This imperial exercise of authority and mastery imposed a singular cultural understanding of spatial and social relations upon diverse colonial landscapes. Adams’ map was also very much the product of the commercial values of post-Napoleonic Britain, where empirically verified knowledge of the world was a commodity. The only military threat to Montreal came, of course, from the United States, which had twice invaded the colony within living memory. The last war had ended only a decade before, and Adams’



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 149

colleagues in the engineering corps were already at work designing the Rideau Canal to provide a safe means of communication from Montreal to the Great Lakes in case of another conflict. And yet, within months of the canal’s completion, James Stout of New York City had published this British military map of a leading town in British North America. Drawn at a scale of 200 feet to the inch, Adams’ map appears to leave little to the imagination. Along 114 named streets and 83 lanes, Adams exhibited distinctly 459 vacant lots and 2,485 lots upon which were built 26 “Public Buildings,” 2,393 “Dwelling Houses” and 2,409 “Warehouses, Stables, Barns, Sheds and every description of out Building.” I say “appears,” for it is the very precision of Adams’ hierarchical spatial order that is imaginary. This imagined order operates on two distinct levels. First, there is the promise of “exhibiting distinctly every property public and private,” against which we must set the reality that a survey of this type can only identify those properties that were visually distinct. Adams’ presentation of StJoseph suburb in figure 6.2 illustrates the problem well. In this densely occupied popular-class ward, sixteen properties accounted for 45 per cent of all of the land. These properties shared a number of characteristics. On the map, they appear undeveloped; they had only limited frontage, if any, onto a road; and they abutted onto one of the streams that ran through the neighbourhood. Developed properties had clearly distinguishable features; land lying fallow rarely did; and so, quite understandably, the natural break of a brook or stream became for Adams a property marker. By the same measure, fences, hedges, and other agricultural improvements within the gardens, orchards, and farmlands of the city’s outskirts might well have been mistaken for property boundaries. The second level at which this imagined order operates within Adams’ map concerns his distinction between public buildings, dwellings, and outbuildings. In Adams’ presentation of the built environment, it is not just the choice of buildings that is problematic, but how the buildings themselves are represented, which ranges from identifying only two of the city’s fifty-six schools to representing only eight possible outhouses. These choices tell us as much about Adams as they do about the city itself. Adams’ classification system presumed that a meaningful distinction could be drawn between dwellings and other buildings. In 1825, it was understandable for an English army officer to consider home and work to be separate spheres,9 yet this would have been a singularly premature characterization

Figure 6.2  •  John Adams, detail of St-Joseph suburb, 1825. As one can see with the streams, what constituted a lot boundary was in many cases necessarily a judgment call. Source: mrb .



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 151

of a thriving centre of craft production like Montreal. Along the town’s main commercial streets of St-Paul and Notre-Dame, buildings with mixed work and residential functions would dominate for another generation. In the majority of crafts and in petty commerce, marriage and mastery were so closely intertwined that for most households the distinction Adams was so careful to draw would have been meaningless. How are we to understand this imagined order, and more importantly, what are we to do about it? To think of it as a bias in the source, would – I think – be quite wrong. It is not as if the map inaccurately represents a known reality and, like some inappropriate screen resolution, has simply distorted that reality. John Adams ordered the map in a manner consistent with his imperial vision. He was trying to make sense of the world he saw by drawing it as he had been trained to see it. Thus, the map’s ‘faults’ are intrinsic to its historical logic. They are very much a product of its time and place. We need to listen to what Adams is saying in this map, faults and all. Only then will we know how and where the evidence it contains can enter into a discourse of proof. Listening carefully to Adams requires us to distinguish between problems of technique, like his handling of property lines, and problems of conceptualization, like his classification of buildings. We need to do this precisely because we are engaged in a historical conversation with this source. In a conversation, we listen carefully because we do not believe everything we hear. Clearly, substantial descriptive information is readily apparent when we carefully and respectfully view the map, but a proper understanding of the significance of these imaginary levels requires a more critical analysis of what it is we are seeing when we look at this map. Analysing Adams requires quite specific controls precisely because his imperial routine, so lacking in specificity, generated a potentially misleading conformity. In the quest to understand this map’s historical logic, however, we should not lose sight of the other pole of historical distance. How does our being in history affect our reading of the map? How does the software we use to analyse the map shape our understanding? This is not just a question of the illusionary precision of the software magnifying Adams’ imaginary; the quintessential technology of advanced capitalism imposes on any computer-assisted historical analysis a hierarchy consistent with our society’s dominant values.

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Variations in the urban landscape are readily evident on the map, and so they featured prominently in the description of the town I have given over the past number of pages. To establish the significance of these variations, however, requires a radical and quite literal deconstruction of Adams’ map. My computerized representation of Adams in figure 6.1 is, in fact, a multi-layered image; I assigned differing types of information on the map to one of thirteen layers.10 In the mid-1990s, I did not yet use mapping software; instead I created this map with Micrografix Designer, an early vector-based drawing package. This program allowed me to create the illusion of an accurate facsimile of Adams’ map. When the historical geographer Sherry Olson first saw what I had wrought,11 she chastised me for “fetishizing my sources.” There was, however, method to my madness, for the layered approach permits an analytical clarity that is not possible with the original map. It allows for a comparative analysis by ward of each of the component parts of the map: dwellings, outbuildings, public buildings, and lots. Much of the detailed description I was able to provide earlier came not from the map itself, but from my radical deconstruction of it. Here, I illustrate the process using the example of lot sizes. As we have seen, this was one of the major technical problems posed by Adams. In the town centre, there was little doubt about property lines, but in the suburbs the situation required a careful assessment of what constituted a developed property. Clearly, vacant lots were not developed, but was each property to be considered developed simply because it had a building erected upon it? Adams delineated 2,944 distinct properties, of which 2,282 fell within one of the six suburban wards. Before I analysed the relative size of lots in each ward, I assessed how developed each built lot was. I thereby eliminated from consideration 141 suburban lots prior to beginning my detailed analysis of the size of developed properties in each suburb. Figure 6.3 illustrates schematically the preliminary results of this analysis. In each ward, there was a significant range in the size of properties, but there was also an important clustering around each ward’s median. The two outliers were St-Louis, where only 40 per cent of properties were close to its median, and St-Antoine, with 45 per cent, but in the four other wards, this clustering accounted for 55 per cent in Ste-Anne and as high as 59 per cent in Ste-Marie. What makes this patterning especially noteworthy is the range in the size of ward medians. The seventeen smallest lots in SteAnne ward would have ranked in the top third in neighbouring St-Joseph ward. Thus, the distinctive character of each ward becomes clearly visible



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 153 St Lawrence median = 3664

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Figure 6.3  •  Number and relative size of developed lots in each suburb. There is a considerable range in lot sizes, but an internal coherency around a widely varying median size in each suburb. Source: Author’s digital edition of Adams’ map.

not by looking at Adams’ map, but rather by critically analysing distinct components from the map I had extracted and then reconfigured. This method allows us to see the same information in different and I think revealing ways. If, as we have just seen, the size of a developed lot is a relative question, then we should entertain differing perspectives. If we use local, wardbased criteria as shown at the top of figure 6.4, the image that emerges is of a neighbourhood with considerable variation as the residents of St-Joseph developed beyond the ward’s late eighteenth-century core. Whereas, when viewed in light of the scale of all developed suburban lots, the number of very small lots in St-Joseph quadruples and it is the internal coherency of the ward as a whole that is most apparent. In short, this remapping suggests the differing perspectives of this ward offered by internal and external viewpoints.

Using the ward median of 2,396 square feet

Using the weighted median of all developed suburban lots of 4,098 square feet

< half the median close to the median > half again the median double the median four times the median

Figure 6.4  •  Size of developed lots in St-Joseph ward in 1825. Most of the large lots in St-Joseph are relatively small compared to those in neighbouring wards. Source: Author’s digital edition of Adams’ map.



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 155

Both perspectives are, of course, true, but to create this knowledge I abstracted and then analysed the size of selected lots representing the built environment independent of the very buildings that made them built lots. The powerful technology that allowed me to do this necessarily imposed its own logic in lieu of the historical logic of the source itself. My method treated as separate and distinct that which could not have been separated, nor considered distinct, at the time. The size of a lot in St-Joseph probably owed more to a combination of existing street patterns, themselves products of the local hydrology and topography, and the varied usages people made of the ward’s 307 ‘dwellings’ and 276 ‘outbuildings’ than to any logic understandable solely in terms of the lots themselves. This spatial analysis generated a detailed knowledge of the past that was unknown and, in a profound sense, unknowable to anyone living in Montreal in 1825. For social scientists testing models whose explanatory power relies on supra-human processes, such a contemporary reprocessing of historical data poses few problems. But for any historian interested in understanding the motivations of people in the past, this conceptual historical break constitutes a very serious problem indeed. It underscores the significance of Rice’s epistemological distinction between phenomenal and epiphenomenal evidence. The detail of Adams’ map allows us not only to describe in considerable richness the town, it permits a much greater understanding of the town’s spatial character, which is highly suggestive of underlying spatial dynamics. It does not, however, allow us to test an explanation of causality. My insistence on the importance of historical reflexivity – how our own being in history affects what we see in the past – was qualitatively different from the post-modern thinking that was then all the rage in the humanities. Post-modernism in history holds that the past is only knowable in and by its many representations. By stressing the limits of every source, I am not arguing that we cannot understand the past writ large. Our many and varied pasts existed, and in a circumscribed but meaningful sense continue to exist, in each and every source we examine. To hear what they have to say we must not confuse these voices with those generated by our own time. With this self-awareness and through understanding those limits contextually, we can construct a historically grounded discourse of proof. By the mid-1990s, I conceived of this cumulative and reiterative process as akin to the drawing of a cubist portrait. The many and varied

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

sightings provided by differing sources could be used to create a complex, contradictory, yet, all things considered, holistic explanation of the past for our present.

Dissecting Doige In undertaking to procure a correct list of the Merchants, Traders, and Housekeepers of Montreal, the compiler was well aware of the existing difficulties; he did not, however, conceive, or anticipate, any other, than those publicly known, would intentionally have been thrown in his way. Such unfortunately, has been the case and but for the greatest perseverance, and a determination to effect the object so anxiously enquired after, in the best manner it was susceptible of, this work must still have continued in embryo. Thomas Doige, October 20, 1819 The Editor of the Montreal Directory has been advised, by many Gentlemen, to venture on publishing a second edition, which the unprecedented number of removals this year has made particularly necessary. The reception his first attempt met with, from the enlightened part of the community, has flattered him into a belief that when the utility of this work becomes more generally known its patronage will expand, so as to make it worth while to publish it. This hope operates as an inducement to a second attempt, which the sales of the first edition, entirely failed to effect. Thomas Doige, May 1820

You can almost hear the surprise in the preface that Thomas Doige wrote to the first city directory in British North America. Why would people obstruct a commercial venture of such an obvious good to the public? Did they not know that city directories had been published in Britain since the mid-eighteenth century and that any British commercial town worthy of its name now had one? The disappointment is palpable in his preface to the second edition, produced only nine months later. Despite the great need, opposition from the unenlightened meant that the directory had failed to achieve commercial success; nor would the “unprecedented number of removals” save the day. The second edition was also a commercial failure, and Montreal would remain without an annual city directory until the 1840s. As this might suggest, the creation of the oldest surviving



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 157

“routinely generated nominal series” of nineteenth-century Montreal was hardly a routine matter. The title page reads: “Printed by James Lane at his office at 29 St Paul, An Alphabetical List of the Merchants, Traders, and Housekeepers, residing in Montreal. To which is prefixed, a descriptive sketch of the town, by Thomas Doige, was to be had of the proprietor, 5 St Jean Baptiste Street, for five shillings.” The 166 people or firms identified in the first edition as subscribers represented a fairly broad sampling of English-speaking commercial Montreal. In a town that was at least two-thirds Canadien, only 14 French-speaking people or firms subscribed. Support came primarily from the mercantile community, with 78 subscribers, 34 from the crafts, 23 professionals, 15 active in petty commerce, 13 officers of the state, and 3 “housekeepers.” The directory was a unilingual English publication with an extensive introductory section12 and an alphabetical list of 2,447 entries for people and firms with addresses and occupations. A total of 214 different occupations were included in the 1819 directory and they combined to make 335 distinct occupational titles. This strongly suggests that Doige respected the titles people gave him, limiting his standardization to translation and spelling. The gendered language of the day was most certainly respected. Not a single woman merited the occupational title of ‘merchant,’ but a quarter of the town’s ‘traders’ were women. If a person did not provide Doige with their occupation, he assigned them the title of “Hk” for housekeeper. The directory lists 718 people as “housekeepers.” Street addresses posed a further problem for Doige because they only existed in the town centre, the St-Joseph or Récollect suburb, and the length of St-Antoine Street. Doige partially solved the problem by extending the existing numbering system into each of the city’s wards, save for the sparsely populated Ste-Anne. Suburban streets that crossed ward boundaries were left without numbers. Doige assigned a street number to every building whether their residents were included in the directory or not. He then invited every resident to “place the number on his house, and make it accord with the Directory, which, in that particular, will not mislead him.” This rather quaint invitation provides the key to understanding the historical logic of this source, but initially I failed to recognize it, having seriously misunderstood his numbering system. Instead, I had at first developed two differing but complementary approaches. The first involved the creation of schematic spatial representa-

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tions of the directories.13 His directories were the only nominal series with street addresses prior to the early 1840s, and I was particularly interested in using these to explore the question of spatial segregation in pre-industrial Montreal. Since Frederick Engels in the mid-nineteenth century, the European literature has argued that urban segregation was largely a product of industrialization. I wanted to test this proposition. The second approach involved the creation of pedagogical databases of the contents of both the 1819 and 1820 directories.14 I conceived of the directories primarily as listings of goods and services available in the formal economy, and as such they offered perspectives on Montreal that could be usefully contrasted with those offered by a variety of other sources that I was also computerizing for use in teaching. When Doige described Montreal in 1819 as “the Capital of the Canadas,” he was clearly thinking of the town centre.15 It was home to five out of six mercantile entries for the entire city, half those of Church and State, and better than two thirds of all the professionals. The craft communities were much more spatially diversified. One in four artisans listed were in the town centre. Merchant tailors, printers, dress and mantua makers, watchmakers, silversmiths, furriers, and apothecaries accounted for more than half. In St-Laurent, with a third of the artisans, the construction trades, baking and confectionary, the leather trades, and dressmaking were the leading crafts. In Ste-Marie, with just under a fifth of the artisans, construction, butchering, and leather and wood trades were the most impor­ tant. Only in St-Antoine were artisans relatively unimportant, with 29 of the 150 entries. In the 1819 directory, fifty-five day labourers were listed as living alongside a skilled artisan. Is this a lot? Well, that depends very much on how you ask the question. If you ask what the likelihood is of a labourer living alongside an artisan, you would get a quite different answer than if you ask when it is that labourers and artisans are neighbours. The first question assumes, as does contemporary capitalism, that the individual precedes, indeed explains, the social. Computerized databases, such as the ones I was constructing for use in teaching, accord priority to the individual record for each entry, and so their binary logic reinforces this cultural bias. In contrast, the second, by recognizing the significance of context, starts with the social. The potentially distorting effects of an either/or logic can be seen in the contradictory results of an observed by expected test of significance. In the



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 159

1819 directory, both the street and the street number were given for 2,051 entries; 612 of these entries were for artisans and 170 for labourers. Therefore, with the odds being one in forty, one should “expect” 51 instances of a labourer being an artisan’s neighbour16 – close enough to the 55 we observed that one can safely assert that this directory provides no evidence of social segregation within the popular classes. In a celebrated and highly influential study of class in nineteenth-century England, John Foster used just such logic to analyse housing.17 Taking the order of each household in a census return as a surrogate for its actual physical location in space, he compared the occupation of the head of the household to that of the preceding household head in four samples drawn from three towns. In all four samples, the “observed” results were remarkably close to his “expected.”18 They were closest, however, in the most politically active town, so he concluded that there a unified working-class culture had been created.19 Most people listed in the directory, however, just like most people in Foster’s census returns, would have had more than one neighbour. Indeed, after we account for addresses with multiple listings, their immediate neighbours, and corner addresses, these 2,051 people and firms shared 7,580 opportunities to live alongside someone with a different occupation.20 Thus, it never was an either/or question. Furthermore, with a new “expected” number of 188, this directory demonstrates that the popular classes were highly segregated. The real problem here is the inversion of elementary historical principles that results from according explanatory power to the individual entry. The social is not an aggregate of individuals. The individual only exists in the social. Historically, the social precedes, creates, informs, empowers, and constrains the individual. Where a labourer’s family chose to live was based on a large number of primarily social factors, including the cost and availability of land, where other family members lived, the styles of vernacular architecture, the availability and location of work, the salubrity of a particular neighbourhood, family size, where members of the family were in their life cycle, and the prevailing wage rates for the various family members. To even begin to understand the individual, we must start with the social. In the directory of 1819, the patterns created by artisans and labourers were remarkably different (see figure 6.5). Artisans were to be found throughout the city. They appeared on all the major streets and on all but

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

Labourer Artisan

Figure 6.5  •  Distribution of 606 artisans and 170 labourers listed in the 1819 directory. While artisans were to be found everywhere, labourers were concentrated in eastern St-Louis and along the side streets of Ste-Marie. Source: Thomas Doige, An Alphabetical List, 1819.

five of the minor ones. Nor was this pattern attributable to the isolated presence of an occasional craft family. Seven out of ten artisans lived beside another artisan. By contrast, in the town centre, John Gregg, who shared a St-Jean Street address with the mantua-maker Mary Ann Griffin, was the sole labourer listed. Similarly, St-Joseph counted only one labourer and St-Antoine none at all. While present in Ste-Anne21 and St-Louis, labourers were most in evidence in St-Laurent and Ste-Marie, where, unlike the artisans, they tended to be concentrated in particular areas. More than half of all the labourers listed in the directory lived within a few minutes’ walk of each other, in the northeastern corner of St-Laurent. Another fifth lived almost a mile to the east, along the smaller side streets of Ste-Marie. The tendency towards grouping was even more pronounced among the labourers than it had been with the artisans. Better than three out of four labourers lived beside another labourer.



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 161

So what crafts did those who chose to live alongside labourers practise? Members of the construction trades, who would have worked alongside labourers, accounted for just under half of these artisans. Other frequently cited trades were shoemakers, saddlers, bakers, butchers, and, in SteMarie, blacksmiths. Wood-workers, the needle trades, tinsmiths, and founders in metalworking and the luxury trades were all conspicuous by their absence. If social segregation within the popular classes was as significant as this suggests, then the remarkably different editions of this directory would show that. One would not expect there to have been much change between October 1819 and May 1820. After all, few immigrants would be arriving that late in the season; nevertheless, there were remarkable differences in the numbers recorded in the two editions of the directory. The number of entries for artisans increased by 281, while that for the unskilled increased by 94. A decline by 115 in the number of “housekeepers” was almost matched by the increase in the number of ‘missing’ addresses, that is, addresses without a corresponding entry in Doige. Changes were modest in the other categories, but then one would expect that the first edition would have had good coverage of mercantile, professional, and state-related occupations. It quickly became evident, however, that it was the people, not just the numbers, that were changing. There were more entries in 1820, 14 per cent more, but the changes were much more significant than this suggests. More than a fifth of the entries in 1819 were not to be found in the 1820 directory, and almost a third of the entries for 1820 were appearing for the first time. Overall, only 56 per cent of the 3,347 people, firms, and institutions identified by these two directories appeared in both. Despite these remarkable changes, the overall patterns displayed by my schematic maps for 1819 and 1820 were broadly the same, while many of the differences spoke to the importance of craft. All this was strongly suggestive of a social basis to spatial segregation in the city. The spatial patterns of 1819 proved remarkably resilient, despite the large number of new entries in 1820. Half of the 297 new entrants without street numbers and four out of ten of the 603 with street numbers were artisans. This turnover involved a reproductive mechanism that I could describe, if not yet adequately explain. In 1819, 1,471 people were listed with both a complete address and an occupation. One in six was not listed in 1820. For one in seven, somebody

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

else was listed at the address. This large-scale movement – 309 people replacing 208 at 183 distinct addresses – was not random. A third of the time at least one of the new occupants declared the same occupation as the former resident. Certainly, part of this continuity in turnover can be explained by the physical requirements of particular trades. A tavern-keeper or a blacksmith was likely to be replaced by another tavern-keeper or blacksmith. However, in many of the instances there was no such obvious capital investment. There were also many small-scale adjustments, with 104 people and firms moving to a new address on the same street. As my colleague Stuart Pierson commented, the dynamics were more like a move in a game of go than a Brownian motion.22 My tentative explanation for both the large number of new entries and the apparent reproduc­ tive capacities of this turnover was that buildings had multiple occupants. As Doige walked the town’s streets, he met and therefore recorded information about differing household heads on his two enumerations. However, if this were the case, then the urban problems long associated with occupational segregation would already be compounded by a social crisis in housing prior to the mass immigration of the 1820s. Thus, the problems I had earlier identified in Ste-Marie for 1825 were neither new nor restricted to that ward. It is ironic that my analysis of the spatial dynamics of Doige’s directories should have highlighted social phenomenon, for his focus was not the social, but the individual. Doige organized the nominal listings of both directories alphabetically. So, for example, the Lady Grant, Baroness of Longueuil, appeared sandwiched between a Mrs Graham, trader, and two other people with the surname of Grant, an attorney at law and a cooper. As this suggests, day labourers were interspersed throughout the directory in a way that, as we have seen, they never were in the daily life of this highly segregated town. Not only was social rank not respected, but Doige’s decision to call anyone without a specified occupation a housekeeper meant that if you did not work for a living, and bourgeois gentlemen and ladies rarely did, how were you to be distinguished from a domestic servant?23 Significantly, not a single entry for bourgeois, gentleman, esquire, or rentier appears in either directory. Alphabetical listings impose a potentially democratic order based on individual equality rather than on social position, wealth, or merit. We may think it normal, even natural, but a number of elements suggest that



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 163

this way of ordering information was novel and deeply offensive to many in positions of power in pre-industrial Montreal. Particularly revealing was the social geography and subsequent history of the 331 addresses known to be missing from the 1819 directory. Those absent from both editions were heavily concentrated on the main streets in the western suburbs of the city and on the more affluent streets in the town centre.24 Fully a third of the “housekeepers” in St-Antoine in 1819 were not to be found in 1820. Listening to these silences in the sources, we can begin to hear a debate about fundamental values. Doige did seem to be aware of the problem, or at least he was attempting to ensure a better reception for the second edition than the unenlightened had reserved for the first. The introductory sections were completely reworked for the 1820 edition. Clearly written by a newcomer for a newcomer, the idiosyncratic introductory ‘sketch’ from 1819 was dropped. The introduction now included a proper listing25 of all the offices in the courthouse and a vastly expanded Civil List. Where a mere 38 names without their proper titles had been thought to suffice in 1819, the 1820 civil list included 174 officers, complete with all of their honorific titles. Doige did not extend this particular civility to the alphabetical listing, but he was now clearly aware that such titles existed. There were also detailed listings for officers of the British Army and the chartered banks, the Montreal Agricultural Society, the Montreal Horticultural Society, and the Ladies Benevolent Society. Finally, he included for the first time separate listings of advocates, notaries, physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries. When Thomas Doige invited people to place their address on the front of their homes, he was inviting them to share in his vision for the world. Through his directories, Doige was attempting to make sense out of the apparent disorder of this colonial town. His guidelines, however, were not those of the existing social order. Rather he too was inspired by the commercial world of Great Britain, from whence he had come only two years before. His were the values of the new liberal order. People were important for what they did in life, not for who they were socially. As the reception of his directories was to prove, individual equality in the marketplace was still a revolutionary idea in the Montreal of 1819. Although he may not have fully realized the problems it posed, he nevertheless believed this worldview to be for the public good. With the commercial failure of the second edition, Doige almost disappears from the historical record. My last sighting of him

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

was in the McCord Museum archives, where, reduced to working as a clerk for the Bagg & Waite syndicate, he was posting the wages of the crews that were building the Lachine Canal in the spring and summer of 1823.

Reconstructing Viger’s Intentions In August 1825, under a colonial government commission, Jacques Viger and Louis Guy, a Montreal notary, conducted a rudimentary census. It identified by name the head of each household on the island of Montreal and the number and marital status of the men, women, and children living in the household. Age categories were broad and differed between men and women. These categories facilitated the identification of men who were eligible for militia duty and women who were nubile. Both were legitimate state concerns in a colony of settlement that had been invaded twice in fifty years. These were not, however, the concerns of Jacques Viger, and although his concerns were understandable, indeed laudable, one can hardly describe the results as a routinely generated nominal series. With two assistants, Viger and Guy compiled detailed descriptions of each household. The exact age of all the residents, their occupation, and their relationship to the other members of the household were all noted. Then Viger literally enumerated each household, so that he could analyse the number of households per building. The name of the proprietor, the number of storeys to the building and whether the building was built of wood or stone were all noted. These four pioneering census makers first noted the details in rough form, and then Viger copied the information over into notebooks using a standardized format, as shown in figure 6.6. Unfortunately, not all of the notebooks have survived, but we do have the compilations made from them. First, Viger compiled a series of tables for each rural parish on the island.26 Next he copied from the city of Montreal’s 1825 tax roll the values of properties owned in each ward by proprietor. Combining this information with that of his notebooks, he produced tables for several of the town’s suburban wards, similar to those for the rural parishes but with details of the number and value of properties. Finally, he produced a cumulative table of occupations that accounted for 57 per cent of all the people living in town who were over the age of 13.27 Viger then compiled the twelve tables that were to establish his reputation as a leading



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 165

S[tone] H[ouse] 139 2 [stories] Mr Pickel Sr. Prop[rietor]

Rich.[ard] Johnson, bachelor, Merch[ant Grocer, [age] 26 Duncan McDonald, officer on half pay 30 His wife 26 2 girls [ages] 4 [and] 2

Figure 6.6  •  Example with translation from one of Viger’s notebooks. Neither the familial relationships, ages, and occupational details nor any of the information relating to the property were asked for in the government census. The abbreviations in the original were in French, so “M.P.” stands for Maison en Pierre, a stone house. Source: Fonds Viger, Société historique de Montréal (s hm ).

statistician. Figure 6.7 reproduces his eighth table, which addressed the problem of overcrowding. These complex tables28 highlight Viger’s principal concerns: family formation, militia, religion, origin, property and the built environment, overcrowding, education, and health. The absence of any analysis of occupations, given the extensive work he had already done, is also revealing. In trying to make sense of his world, Viger did not consider changes in either occupation or work to be significant. Instead, he focused on how his town and environs were changing in the face of an annual migration through the community that in almost every year equalled, and in some years surpassed, the town’s total resident population. In this context, it was access to and control over property that merited his closest scrutiny with three of the twelve tables. Again, this is understandable: Lower Canada had a propertybased franchise. As Viger began his work on property, the Legislative Assembly was informed of the Legislative Council’s plan to introduce a form of elected municipal government to both Montreal and Quebec City. It is clear from the manner in which he structured his worksheets that Viger was aware of these plans from the outset and very concerned with what the property

Figure 6.7  •  Jacques Viger, “Rapports de la Population avec les Maisons habités,” 1827. For each parish on the island and for each part of the parish of Montréal, this table states first the population, number of inhabited buildings, and the average number of people per building, and then the same information but by head of household instead of building. Note the marked discrepancy between the number of inhabited buildings and the number of household heads for the parish of Montréal, at line 10, and for many of the wards of the city in the lower part of the table. This is the evidence of overcrowding that so concerned Viger. Source: Fonds Viger-Verreau, asq .



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 167

qualifications would be. He had two separate concerns. First, should everyone who paid municipal taxes have the right to vote? If this were the case, many more small Canadien property owners would enjoy the franchise and thus the likelihood of a reform council being elected would be increased considerably. Second, how high should the property qualification be for election to council? The higher it was set, the less representative the resultant council would be, not just in terms of class, but in terms of origin, language, and religion. Both of his conclusions stemmed from how he analysed the tax roll, rather than from the roll’s actual contents. Municipal elections were to be by ward, so Viger organized his analysis of the values of property holdings for each of his three categories of Canadien, Anglo-Canadien, and Anglais et étrangers by ward. This method allowed him to establish easily the number of small properties held by each group, but not the number of small proprietors. As a result, he seriously overestimated the number of small Canadien proprietors. As we have already seen for Ste-Marie, most small properties were owned by landlords. Eligibility for election to council would depend on the value of one’s property holdings throughout the city. To address this problem, Viger compiled a separate list of large property owners, which included everyone who held over £400 worth of property in a ward.29 These were clearly large property owners, for in 1825 the income of most craft families was only £50 to £60 a year. The problem was that a property owner could have numerous properties in various wards but fail to meet Viger’s cut-off in any single ward. Therefore, his method meant that he could neither establish who all the large landlords in town were nor ascertain the actual value of their portfolios. Although Viger’s method underestimated the number of large proprietors, his analysis of those he thought might be eligible to serve on City Council was nonetheless highly revealing. Accounting for 70 per cent of the assessed value of property in the city and 35 per cent of all properties, only 222 people, estates, and institutions owned sufficient property to meet the qualifications the Legislative Council was proposing for those who were to serve on City Council. The remarkable aspect of Viger’s occupational classification of those who sat atop the hierarchy, as he saw it in 1825, was how much it resembled what one might have expected in a mid-nineteenth-century European town. Like the protagonists in a Balzac novel, the 53 men and 27 women he classified as people living off their rents, or rentiers, constituted by far the largest category. They owned 45

168

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize? In Montreal West landlords own 264 of the 320 properties.

In St-Joseph landlords own 183 of the 295 properties. 60 40

40

20

20

£100 200 300 500 1000 2000 4000 £150 250 400 750 1500 3000

Assessed value Owned by a landlord

£100 200 300 500 1000 2000 4000 7500 £150 250 400 750 1500 3000 5000

Assessed value Owned by a single proprietor

Figure 6.8  •  Number and value of built properties owned by landlords versus single proprietors in two adjacent wards. In the popular-class ward of St-Joseph, many of the lower-value properties were owned by single proprietors, but not the majority. However, in the western part of the town centre, home to numerous master craftsmen, individual proprietors were only prominent as owners of mid-range properties. Source: Fonds Viger-Verreau, a sq .

per cent by value of the property held by potential city councillors. Next in importance were the 48 merchants, who owned 22 per cent, followed by 23 estates with 11 per cent, 6 manufacturers and 13 craft producers with 9 per cent, 11 institutions of church and state with 8 per cent, 22 professional males, 12 men in petty commerce, and 5 yeomen. Viger considered that women could not serve on councils “à cause de leur sexe,”30 nor, of course, could either institutions or estates. Given the number of people who were ineligible because they already held public office, Viger feared that within six to seven years everyone eligible would have already served. In short, the plan was unworkable, and in part thanks to Viger’s critique, it would not be adopted. When an elected council was finally created in 1833, the property qualifications for men to serve were considerably reduced. Again acting on Viger’s advice, the colonial government banned women from both voting and serving; they would not all secure the right to vote in city elections until 1961. St-Joseph ward was separated from the western half of the town centre by the ninety-foot-wide McGill Street created through the demolition of the old city walls. This short distance belied the social and economic gulf that separated the town centre from its suburban wards. Fully two-thirds of all built properties in St-Joseph were worth £300 or less, whereas in Montreal West three-quarters of the properties were worth at least £750



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 169

and most very considerably more. Despite the difference in values, in both neighbourhoods and at all levels of the scale, landlords predominated. This held true across the city: from a low of 56 per cent of all built properties in Ste-Anne to a high of 81 per cent in Pointe-à-Callière, landlords owned Montreal. There was, however, an important distinction visible in Viger’s listings. In Ste-Anne, St-Joseph, and Ste-Marie, most landlords were local. They only owned property in a single ward. Elsewhere, multiward property owners were the most common, and in St-Laurent and StLouis these large landlords owned the majority of all built properties. Only in Ste-Anne were large landlords in a distinct minority. Here, in this developing centre of manufacturing along the Lachine Canal, was the highest proportion of buildings owned by their occupier and the lowest presence of multi-ward landlords in the city. Once again, these statistics lend support to the idea that many manufacturers in the city were independent. By contrast, St-Antoine, with its disproportionate number of more expensive properties, was already home to many of the city’s multi-ward landlords. The social geography of property ownership was linked to the city’s complex demography. The family was not a census category in 1825. As we have seen, Viger did, for his own purposes, record familial relationships in his notebooks, but these have survived for only parts of the city. The official census returns did not identify families, nor did they record kin relationships. The census identified by name only the head of household, but it did indicate the marital status of all adults – hence the rather cumbersome categories on figure 6.9, which classify households on the basis of the number of married people present and whether or not young people lived in the same household. Montreal was a city of young people. Four out of ten people were under the age of 18. Yet, marriage was the norm only for those in their mid- to late twenties and older. Half the men under 40 and five out of twelve women under the age of 44 were single. Most households were small, with a mode of three and a median of four people per household. Despite these numbers, four out of ten people lived in relatively large households of seven or more people. The importance of craft explains this apparent paradox. A clear majority of adolescents, single men under 40, and single women under 45 lived in these larger households. Apprentices and domestic servants frequently lived with their masters from early in their adolescence, and for most this had meant moving away from home, thereby contributing to the plurality of small households. Many of the larger households with

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize? 800

Number of households

600

400

200

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14 >14

Number of people in the household No married person present Married male and female present

One married person present Married male and female with children

At least three married people present

Figure 6.9  •  Size and marital status of all households in the 1825 census. A combination of late marriage and early work opportunities for young people outside the home meant that most households were remarkably small. Source: Fonds Viger, s hm .

children in figure 6.9 had younger children, but the adolescents frequently bore no kin relationship to the married couple of the household. Journeymen and unmarried domestic servants in their twenties often lived in the masters’ households. Their late marriages delayed household formation and thus also contributed to the plurality of small households. As newlyweds, they would form small nuclear households, but only after a decade or more spent in large, complex households. This social and demographic diversity across the landscape of the city bore witness to the importance of the craft world in Montreal. Larger, often complex households were more common in the town centre, St-Antoine and Ste-Anne. Single young men were most common in these wards, but for differing reasons. In Ste-Anne, the importance of metalworking trades

40

280

St-Antoine

20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 >14

Number of households

Number of people 120 100

St-Joseph

80 60 40

220 200 180 160 140 120

40

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 >14

100 80 60 40 20 0

60

40

40

20

0

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 >14

0

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 >14

Number of people 10 10 0

St-Louis 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 >14

Number of people

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 >14

Number of people

20

Ste-Marie

Number of people

20

Ste-Anne

20 0

120

80

Number of people 60

140

100

20 0

St-Laurent

240

Number of households

0

160

260

Pointe-à-Callière 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 >14

Number of people

Number of households

60

“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 171

Number of households



140

Town Centre

120 100 80 60 40 20 0

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 >14

Number of people

No married person present One married person present

Married male and female present Married male and female with children

At least three married persons present

Figure 6.10  •  Size and marital status of all households by ward in the 1825 census. There was a marked contrast between the suburbs and the town centre and to a lesser degree between the more affluent St-Antoine and the other suburbs. Source: Fonds Viger, s hm .

and manufactories meant work in the ward for these young men, while in the more affluent town centre and St-Antoine young men would not have been leaving home to learn a trade. They continued to live with their parents while they learned a profession or clerked with merchant firms. The larger proportion of single women in these areas, but not Ste-Anne, also speaks to the relative affluence, for a goodly number of these women would have been domestic servants. In St-Laurent, the most populous suburb, large

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

households were almost exceptional, with proportionately fewer households of six or seven people than in Ste-Marie and St-Joseph. All three of these popular-class wards had quite similar demographic distributions. It is likely, therefore, that in St-Joseph and Ste-Marie, with their higher proportion of local landlords, the larger households were more often older, well-established families.

Viger’s Intentions Revealed It was a bleak industrial landscape in the north end of Montreal, and as I scurried through the empty streets in the fading light of a cool spring evening in 1999, I asked myself how was I ever going to get out of there? No taxi was going to want drive these streets late at night. My reason for being there added to my apprehensions. Earlier in the week, the staff at the Archives nationales du Québec had contacted me. An auctioneer was advertising a Viger manuscript of the 1825 census and the archives wanted to know if it was genuine. Decades earlier, some of the Viger papers held by the Société historique de Montréal had gone missing, including his detailed notebooks. Was this what had now resurfaced? The high-ceilinged storage room was not that large and rather poorly lit. Tables stacked with stuff surrounded a cluster of folding chairs in the middle of the room. Near the entrance, on a cluttered table, sat a large-format, inch-thick, black folio. This was no notebook, but there was no mistaking the handwriting. Viger’s careful compilations filled more than a hundred pages. We were looking at his personal copy of the complete census returns for the island. He had numbered each household and every building, and this was how he had been able to compile his statistical tables. Interspersed through the government forms were detailed tables for all the villages, parishes, and town wards. So yes, this was genuine, and most certainly the archives had to buy it! “Calm down,” one of the archivists told me, “we have a limited budget and, in any case, showing interest will merely drive up the price.” After the quickest of consultations, we went our separate ways to await the start of the auction – as if anyone watching us would have believed we didn’t know each other and were not excited. The bidding started off in desultory fashion, and I thought, great, we have a chance, but no, telephone bidders weighed in, and within minutes our meagre budget allocation was surpassed. The final bid was more than triple what we had been authorized to pay. Crushed, I was offered a ride to the nearest metro.



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 173

One of the most important documents for the social history of preindustrial Montreal had been privately appropriated and in all likelihood would soon be sitting untouched and never to be examined in the personal library of a wealthy anonymous collector in Europe. The staff at the Montreal dépôt of the Archives nationales took up the challenge. Never before had a written document been classified as a historic monument, but they convinced the Ministère de la culture in Quebec City of the urgency of the situation, and within days the decision was made to classify Viger’s folio. Now the document could not legally leave the province. After months of secret negotiations between the archives, the auctioneers, and the purchaser, Power Corporation of Canada, it was agreed that it would be deposited in the newly renovated facilities of the Archives nationales du Québec on Viger Square. In order to correlate his information on housing with demographic data in the census, Viger had coded this manuscript copy of the returns. His numbering system allows a reconstitution of the number of people and households in each occupied building throughout the city. The results show why he was so concerned with questions of immigration and overcrowding. Half of the people in the city, accounting for almost six out of ten households, shared their building with another household. Given what is known of the dimensions of the city’s housing stock, there can be little doubt that families who shared a building with three or more other families would have been living in extremely cramped quarters. There was a clear polarity that was related to the life cycle. Two-thirds of the smaller households, those with four or fewer people, lived in a shared building, whereas a slightly higher proportion of the larger households of seven or more did not. Thus, in the town centre, with its greater proportion of large households, shared dwellings were more the exception than the rule. They were much more common in the suburbs, although only occasionally were they concentrated along particular streets. By contrast, in Pointe-à-Callière, where most immigrants disembarked, one in four people lived in a building containing six or more households. Clearly, the tens of thousands of immigrants who passed through the town every year faced the most difficult housing conditions. Viger’s tables confirmed that access, not just to property, but to adequate housing contributed to their decision to move on to Upper Canada in such large numbers. The complexity of this situation can only really be appreciated at the ward or indeed the street level. In the mature, popular-class suburb of

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

Number of households

250 200 150 100 50 0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14 >14

Number of people in the household Five or more households per building Four households per building Three households per building Two households per building One household per building

Figure 6.11  •  Household size according to the number of households in the building. Two or more households sharing a building had become the norm for smaller households by 1825. Source: Fonds Viger, s hm .

St-Joseph, 2,884 people living in 589 households occupied 351 buildings. I could not establish whether the buildings numbered sequentially by Jacques Viger were in fact side by side, but given his systematic approach throughout all of his work in the 1820s and early 1830s, it is reasonable to assume that his numbering system reflected the city’s actual spatial organization. Thus, the clusters of densely occupied properties in figure 6.12 are indicative of real-life patterns. A detailed graphic analysis of the demographics in each building for the entire city proved too difficult to reproduce here. In St-Joseph ward, two out of seven buildings had no young people over the age of 13 living there, while one in seven had five or more. This relative absence of single young men and women and their concentration in certain households reflected the primacy of crafts in Montreal, as most young people 13 and older no longer lived with their parents. An examination of the city as a whole reveals that overcrowding was endemic. It was to be found in every neighbourhood, save St Antoine, and on most streets. Aside from the institutional buildings in Pointe-à-Callière and the town centre, it was the housing of single men and women, rather



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 175 28

25

28 27

46 32

20

15

10

5

0

50

100

150

Number of households in the building

200

250

300

351

Number of people in the building

Figure 6.12  •  Distribution of the 2,764 people in 589 households in the 351 inhabited buildings of St-Joseph suburb. Viger proceeded street by street in his enumeration, so the clustering of exceptionally large numbers of people in single buildings did reflect an urban reality, even if I am not yet able to link these findings to particular lots. Source: Fonds Viger, s hm .

than of large families, that seems to have posed the most serious problems. They were a significant presence in almost all the suburban buildings with ten or more occupants. Given the craft nature of production, with its dependence on apprentices, journeymen, and domestic servants, this strongly suggests that many craft-producing households, particularly in the suburbs, may have had to share their buildings with other households. The use of urban space would have been affected by such densities; the taverns, streets, and public spaces of this city would have been crowded places indeed.31 Viger’s compilation was conducted in August of the same summer Adams drew his map. The numbers of built properties Viger analysed was reassuringly close to the number of built lots Adams drew; the same cannot be said for dwellings. Where Adams identified 2,393 dwellings, Viger’s much more systematic compilation identified 2,907 buildings where people lived. Clearly, thousands of Montrealers were living in buildings that did not look like homes.

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

Assessing Social Segregation In 1832, in preparation for the upcoming municipal election, Jacques Viger once more compiled lists of property owners in the city by ward. Lists for two wards, St-Antoine and St-Joseph, have not survived, that is, if they ever existed.32 The structure of these lists is qualitatively different than his earlier analysis of the 1825 tax roll. Gone are any ethno-linguistic categories. Instead, these lists are organized spatially. In each ward, Viger walked up and down the streets and noted the owner and value of each property as he came to it. If he came to an owner who already had been listed in the ward, he went back to that entry and added an abbreviated street name and value to the initial entry. In the town centre, he started with the major commercial streets of St-Paul and Notre-Dame, which meant that the exact location of other properties in the same ward belonging to these frequently prominent owners could not be established with any degree of accuracy. Nonetheless, for the town centre one can plot a reasonable map, with only a limited number of gaps. In figure 6.13, I have drawn the size of each property to reflect the value assessed by Viger; church buildings were not taxed, hence the gaps in the centre of the map. Clearly, location mattered. Buildings on St-Paul had the highest values, particularly those backing onto the waterfront, followed by properties facing the markets in Place Royale or the New Market. In the centre of the West ward were clustered the minority of workshops and homes valued at less than a £1,000. The scale of property values was remarkable. Two-thirds of the properties in the town centre were assessed at more than twenty times the annual income of a craft household. It is not possible to reconstruct the location of suburban properties on the basis of Viger’s work with anything like the same accuracy; however, I have plotted the values by street for the three largest wards, and the resultant schematic image does suggest how varied suburban streetscapes were becoming. If one walked the main street of St-Laurent in 1832, there would not have been a lot to suggest how different St-Laurent lying to the west was from St Louis lying to the east. This was already a major commercial street whose only suburban rival was the main street of Ste-Marie ward. However, to the west lay only one in seven of the poorest homes, while St-Louis was home to twice that number. Ste-Marie had the lion’s share; indeed, on Grant, Wolfe, Brock, de la Visitation, Panet, Papineau, Gain, and Fullum streets, they constituted the majority of homes. St-Laurent was home to three-quarters of the suburban properties worth more than

Craig St-Jacques

St-Louis Place d'Armes

Notre Dame

Hôtel Dieu St-Paul

New market

Le Séminaire

Notre Dame

St-Paul McGill

Pointe-àCallière

The property is worth: 2 assessed at £100 12 from £101 to £300 82 from £301 to £500 84 from £501 to £1,000

241 from £1,001 to £2,500 102 from £2,501 to £5,000 29 from £5,001 to £10,000 5 at more than £10,000 The 86 properties whose exact location on the street cannot be determined the same owner

Figure 6.13  •  Assessed value of the 565 town centre properties in 1832. In this schematic mapping, the size of the rectangle indicates the assessed value of each property. Use value predominates, with properties backing onto the harbour and those adjacent to the two public markets having the highest assessed values. Source: Fonds Viger-Verreau, asq .

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

£2,500 and half of those worth more than £1,000. Life on St-Urbain, Sherbrooke, Lagauchetière, and Craig was already distant in a way only money could measure. In the seven years since Viger’s previous analysis of property in the city, there had been a significant growth in home ownership in St Laurent and St Louis and a clear divestiture by large landlords of properties in those two wards. Elsewhere the general patterns had not changed significantly, but everywhere the value of properties had increased substantially. Overall, the increase in assessed property values was 30 per cent. Nor was this just a paper gain. The turnover in property ownership was remarkable. Only 57 per cent of the proprietors in 1825 still owned property in 1832. If we compare the two rolls for those wards for which we have information in both years, we see that half of the people and firms had become property owners since 1825. Furthermore, persistence did not mean lack of change. A portfolio analysis of the 594 proprietors present in both 1825 and 1832 revealed that they had sold four out of ten properties they had owned in 1825. There were no strongly demarcated patterns by ethno-linguistic category, although somewhat counterintuitively native-born English-speaking proprietors were the least persistent and had disposed of more of their properties, while immigrants were the most persistent and had kept the highest proportion of their properties. Understandably, sales were most frequent in the town centre, where the prices were highest. In 1832, landlords continued to own the city, from a low of 58 per cent of built properties in Ste-Marie to a high of 71 per cent in the eastern half of the town centre. In both St-Laurent and St-Louis, however, the proportion of properties held by single proprietors had doubled since 1825. This growth resulted principally from purchasing properties formerly owned by the large landlords who had held properties in multiple wards of the city. Now, it was only in the town centre that large landlords owned most of the built properties. In the largely popular-class wards in the east end, shown on figure 6.14, single property owners were in a minority in every single price category, save for £100 properties in Ste-Marie, where single property owners owned just over half of the properties assessed. The landlords in these two wards were mirror images of each other. In St-Louis, more than two-thirds of the landlords owned properties in other wards of the city, while in SteMarie a slightly larger proportion only owned properties in that ward. In St-Louis, change was largely the result of changes in property ownership,



“C’est un travail dont je n’avais pas d’idée!” 179

In St-Louis landlords own 301 of 480 properties.

180 160 140

120

120

100 80

100 80

60

60

40

40

20

20

In Ste-Marie landlords own 296 of 508 properties.

£100 200 300 500 1000 2000 4000 £100 200 300 500 1000 2000 40005000 £150 250 400 750 1500 3000 £150 250 400 750 1500 3000

Assessed value

Owned by a landlord

Assessed value

Owned by a single proprietor

Figure 6.14  •  Number and value of built properties owned by landlords versus single proprietors in the eastern suburbs in 1832. With the exception of properties assessed at only £100 in Ste-Marie, landlords now dominate all price ranges. Access to property ownership within the popular classes continues to decline. Source: Fonds Viger-Verreau, a sq .

as Viger noted only six new properties since 1825. In Ste-Marie, however, there were 103 new properties, with three-fifths of them evaluated at only £100. Viger’s remarkable attempts to make sense of the unprecedented changes to his world clearly have a great deal to tell us about Montreal in the 1820s and early 1830s. His decision to take advantage of the opportunity presented by the state-mandated census to conduct his own investigation generated a truly exceptional body of richly descriptive material. His continued interest in these issues raised the curtain on a significant form of capital accumulation in Montreal. Substantial revenues were being realized in real estate. The numbers of people involved meant that this was not restricted to the leading merchants and propertied families. Immigrants, as well as native-born, bought property. Probably hundreds of master craftsmen, grocers, tavern keepers, and traders earned more from real estate than from their principal occupations. Undoubtedly, many popularclass immigrants by the mid-1830s had done very well for themselves in this colonial town. When the economic difficulties of 1836–37 and the

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

political crisis of 1837–38 threatened their new-found wealth, many would rally to support the Crown. Property was, however, a double-edged sword. Agency for a few meant greater constraints for many. The improved status and wealth of hundreds of popular-class households went hand in hand with increased costs and reduced opportunities for thousands of popular-class families. In particular, young couples found it much more difficult to achieve independence as craft-producing households or in petty commerce. The high cost of urban land contributed to a process of differentiation within the popular classes of Montreal that was the urban counterpart to the social crisis of reproduction in the countryside.

Understanding the Challenge All three men studied in this chapter, John Adams, Thomas Doige, and Jacques Viger, were trying to make sense of Montreal. Between 1819 and 1832, they sought to understand and to bring order to this rapidly changing part of the world. Each imposed his idea of order in differing ways. The results were not routinely generated sources; they were attempts to reveal the underlying social logic of change. Through this search for order, they hoped to equip particular people and institutions with the knowledge necessary not only to anticipate, but to control change. The quite extraordinary sources these men created share two common features. First, each one is the product of how its author imagined how he would like the world to be. Second, the world these men imagined in large measure came to pass, and because it did, these sources appear normal to us, perhaps for some even routinely generated. The novelty and creativity involved in their imaginative reconstructions of their world are thus not readily apparent. Worse yet, we so easily mistake these representations for the past itself. Each of these sources lends itself extremely well to computer-assisted analysis. Little of what I was able to say about them would have been possible without this quintessential technology of advanced capitalist society. Unfortunately, we almost never ask ourselves why it is that certain sources are so computer-friendly. Is it their structured ordering of reality that makes them appear so modern and thus to us routinely generated? What does this retroactive validation of the present in the past hide us from seeing? It was with these questions learnt from Adams, Doige, and Viger that I returned to sources I thought I already knew.

Chapter Seven

Towards a Cubist Portrait

A century ago, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso developed cubism, and in so doing they consciously broke with perspective, the defining characteristic of West­ern art since the Renaissance. In its place, they presented together multiple facets of the same object in a manner that was both realistic and impossible. By consciously chal­lenging the limits of a two-dimensional tableau, they highlighted not just the complexity, but the impossibility of any attempt to accurately represent reality. It was a defining moment in the history of modern art, one whose literary parallel is Joyce’s Ulysses. As I worked my way through a variety of sources created in early nineteenth-century Montreal, I realized that cubism is an apt metaphor for what we need to do in history. Narrative plays the role in history that perspective does in art. Coherency and credibility are closely entwined in a narrative. Although we may have to suspend certain of our critical faculties for a narrative to be coherent, we do not expect, nor easily accept as credible, a contradictory narrative. Like the two-dimensional work that ‘accurately’ represents a three-dimensional world, we expect our histories to account for a more complex whole. In both cases, the point of view is external: spatially with paintings and temporally with history. This externality accords to the image or narrative its finite character. However, in history this externality also means that when we critically assess how complete or adequate a particular narrative is, we do so on the basis of our own norma­tive values and beliefs in the present. A narrative about another time and place appears to us to be logical because it conforms to our way of seeing the world, and we see the world in this way because it confirms our way of conceptualizing what is logical. Such circular reasoning makes any historically informed questioning of our values and beliefs very difficult, but this is precisely what we must consistently

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

do if we are to learn from the past to see our present anew and envisage a qualitatively different future.1 I realized the importance of breaking with narrative as I worked through some of the implications of my computerizing historical sources for use in teaching.2 The ordered presen­tation of information is the most important way a text conveys and constructs meaning, but in a computerized text this order not only need not, it effectively cannot, be respected. While this radical restructuring applies to any digitized text, it has par­ticular significance for historians because of its epistemological implications. This quali­tative transformation eliminates the historical distance between a source from the past and the historian in the present. It renders a source so malleable that its historical logic becomes almost invisible, while simultaneously freeing the historian from any textual constraints. We literally enter the cut and paste world that Collingwood found so dis­tasteful, with source mining and instancing in the service of competing, but always pre­sent-minded, narratives in a ‘marketplace of ideas’ that really does signify the end of history. An alternative historical theory and method is possible; indeed, it is inherent in the fundamentally democratic character of a digitized text. We have no historical sources that were created in a past Nirvana free from oppression and inequality. Hence, the structure of any historical text is in part the product of the hierarchical and unequal society that created it. The freedom we now have, to literally do as we will with a text, is in historical contradiction with the conditions that governed the text’s initial creation. If we build into our analytical procedures recognition of this historic contradiction, we can go some way to restoring the distance between a source from the past and the historian in the present. We should, however, realize that our present freedom is itself limited by bourgeois right: that is, by the illusion that we can all be equal as individuals when there continues to exist fundamental socio-economic, racial, and gender inequalities. Such a self-reflective critical stance is necessarily in opposition to any historical meta-narrative, for it recog­nizes the importance to our understanding of the present of a multiplicity of voices from the past. In this chapter, I critically re-evaluate the historical logic of two sources that have al­ready appeared as important in the narrative structure of this book. My earlier analysis of monetary protests and apprenticeship contracts suggested a coherent craft world in Montreal (see chapter 3). Subsequent examination of other sources showed that world to be much more



Towards a Cubist Portrait 183

incoherent and fraught with tensions than my work in the 1980s had suggested. Increasingly aware of the importance of a self-reflective critical stance, I returned to these sources in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. It was a good thing that I did, for this re-examination revealed serious conceptual flaws in my earlier work. Serendipity plays a greater role in scientific research than most academics would care to admit. A key piece of the puzzle of why we chose to industrialize turned up in early fire insurance records that I discovered quite by chance in the notarial archives. I begin by discussing this source, and the light it throws on property relations in Montreal, as an example of how a single source might contribute to a cubist portrait. From the specific to the general was one of my guiding principles in these years,3 and so I follow that specific case study with a general reassessment of the nature of the colonial relationship itself. I conclude the chapter with an exploration of how we might use a combination of differing sources to draw a cubist portrait of a privi­leged craft. Contradictory images collide in this composition, and I do not resolve all the problems they raise. The complex processes of continuous movement they re­veal forced me to re-evaluate widely accepted historical practices while highlighting the social and gender basis of a particularly important construction of male privilege.

Protesting History Each monetary protest consisted of two parts, the protest itself and a certified copy of the note or bill. The protest was a printed page with blanks to identify the parties implicated and space to record the responses of those who were notified. The certified copy ap­peared on the reverse side of the protest, and it included not only the body of the note, but also all the endorsements to the note in the order they were given. It is thus possible to examine how the note or bill circulated before it was presented to the bank for discounting. In the 1980s, when I examined the monetary protests lodged by the banks as described in chapter 3, I used them to assess both the state of the local economy and the degree of access to bank credit that certain trades enjoyed. In that analysis, I focused on the occupation of the drawer and then drew a direct connection to the bank that had eventually discounted and protested the note. In so doing, I largely ignored the discrete histories of each credit transaction recorded in the copies of the notes and bills. The

184

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

Bank of Montreal 266 Drawers 189

Bank of Canada 255 Endorsers

37

160 203 Drawers

20 20

38 117

195 Discounters

561 protests worth £98,510 involving 632 people or firms

133

141 Endorsers

23 23

24 90

80 14 161 Discounters

378 protests worth £63,114 involving 434 people or firms

Figure 7.1  •  Bank protests in Montreal from January 1820 to May 1824. The three actions of drawing the note, endorsing it, and discounting it at the bank were considerably more segregated at the Bank of Montreal, which also required a considerably larger number of endorsers as security. Source: Deeds of Henry Griffin and Nicholas B. Doucet, ba nq -m .

myriad transactions that took place between the initial drawing of the note and the final issuance of a notarized protest should have been analysed, for there was a routine to how one obtained bank credit which I had largely ignored. How much I missed is illustrated by the Venn diagram in figure 7.1. For two-thirds of the people involved in a monetary protest by the Bank of Montreal, and for six out of ten by the Bank of Canada, there is no evidence of their ever having even entered a bank. Four-fifths of the drawers and three-quarters of the endorsers never appeared in the series as a discounter, while most of the people and firms for whom we do have clear evidence that they dealt directly with a bank (60 per cent of the discounters at the Bank of Montreal and 56 per cent at the Bank of Canada) never appeared as a either the drawer or the endorser of a protested note. The routine of bank credit was thus a highly selective and hierarchical one. As we saw in chapter 3, the chartered banks in Montreal in the early 1820s appear to have had quite differing policies towards extending credit to craft producers. While only one in twenty drawers whose paper the Bank of Canada subsequently protested was in production, at the Bank of Montreal the proportion was between one in four and one in five drawers. In



Towards a Cubist Portrait 185

my earlier analysis, I mistakenly ac­corded considerable importance to this bank financing of production. This error stemmed from my failing to respect the historical logic of monetary protests. The Bank of Canada actually had a less re­strictive credit policy than did the Bank of Montreal.4 Its protests involved proportion­ately more discounters and significantly more drawers than the Bank of Montreal, where a clearer distinction between drawer, endorser, and discounter was made and where more endorsers for paper discounted by the bank were required than at the Bank of Canada. Since more endorsers lowered the risk involved in discounting a note, this may help explain why the Bank of Montreal discounted more notes from craft producers. The more restrictive credit policy at the Bank of Montreal did not, however, reduce its exposure to risk, for the bank engaged in far more concentrated discounting practices than did the Bank of Canada. As shown on figure 7.2, at the Bank of Montreal a fifth of the funds requiring protest were drawn by only four firms, while better than two out of five notes requiring protest had been discounted by only twelve firms. There were large defaults at the Bank of Canada too, but their discounts were far less concentrated than at the Bank of Montreal. All but one of the Montreal firms that discounted large numbers of notes requiring protest at the Bank of Montreal were among the city’s leading mercantile houses, and partners of these firms sat on the board of the bank: Horatio Gates & Co., Irvine, Leslie & Company, Cuvillier & Cartier, Robertson & Masson. The exception was the auctioneering and brokerage firm of Spragg & Hutchison, whose failure sparked the credit crunch over the summer of 1825. Other prominent discounters of protested paper included the agents for the bank in Kingston, Quebec City, and New York. The principal beneficiaries of the currency shipments to Connecticut, John & Daniel Hinsdale, and one of the leading forwarders in Kingston, Thomas S. Whitaker, were the most prominent drawers of bills requiring protest.5 In short, these protests reveal that when the Bank of Montreal faced competi­ tion, it extended extensive credit primarily to a relatively small circle of prominent and affiliated firms. Once the Bank of Montreal no longer faced direct competition, there was even less reason to change this cozy arrangement. Changes in the prevailing economic conditions, however, did have an impact on its discounting practices. The bank faced widely varying business conditions in the mid-1820s, and it adopted different discounting prac­tices for each. While

186

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

Bank of Canada’s 378 protests by May 5, 1824 worth £63,144 By the 203 drawers

By the 163 discounters Number 99 had 1 25 had 2 12 had 3 6 had 4 3 had 5 6 had 6 5 had 7 2 had 8 5 had 9 + 250 200 150 100 50 0

'000 £

10

20

30

40

Number

'000 £

124 had 1 53 had 2 8 had 3 7 had 4 4 had 5 2 had 6 1 had 7 2 had 8 3 had 9+ 250 200 150 100 50 0

10

20

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40

Bank of Montreal’s 561 protests by May 5, 1824 worth £98,510 By the 195 discounters Number 109 had 1 33 had 2 21 had 3 10 had 4 5 had 5 1 had 6 1 had 7 3 had 8 12 had 9 + 250 200 150 100 50 0

By the 266 drawers

'000 £

10

20

30

40

Number 166 had 1 42 had 2 22 had 3 9 had 4 10 had 5 6 had 6 4 had 7 3 had 8 4 had 9 + 250 200 150 100 50 0

'000 £

10

20

30

40

Figure 7.2  •  Contrasting credit practices in Montreal, 1820–1824. The more exclusive practices of the Bank of Montreal seen earlier (figure 7.1) did not result in greater security for its shareholders, as it concentrated so much of the discounting on a limited number of firms, which generated heavy losses. Source: Deeds of Henry Griffin and Nicholas B. Doucet, ba nq -m .

access to bank credit did vary, in all three periods the bank maintained its policy of favouring a restricted number of clients. As figure 7.3 illustrates, fewer than one in eight drawers in the first two periods, rising to one in six during the depression, ever discounted a note requiring protest by the bank, while in the first two periods, five out of six discounters, dropping to four out of five during the depression, never had any of their own notes protested. During the boom months from January 1824 until May 1825, the Bank of Montreal extended credit to include a larger number of drawers and endorsers, but it maintained a tight control over who dis­counted at the bank.



Towards a Cubist Portrait 187

163 Drawers

147 Endorsers 24

121 7

87

11

Unprecedented growth: May 1, 1824 to June 23, 1825 380 people or firms 298 protests worth £26,939

25 70

125 Drawers

113 Discounters

75

A serious local crisis: June 24, 1825 to March 13, 1826 287 people or firms 294 protests worth £62,278

24 55

6

10

26 61

181 Drawers 131

20 14

115

175 Endorsers

101 Endorsers

103 Discounters

16 24 89

143 Discounters

General depression: March 14, 1826 to August 31, 1827 446 people or firms 373 protests worth £52,232

Figure 7.3  •  Roles of people and firms in Bank of Montreal protests during three distinct periods. The circumscribed and local nature of the first crisis was recognized by the bank, as it restricted the numbers of firms whose paper it accepted but did not require more endorsers. Source: Deeds of Henry Griffin and Nicholas B. Doucet, ba nq -m .

During the local crisis, initiated by the as yet unexplained failures of several dry-goods firms in May and June of 1825, the bank restricted whose paper it ac­cepted and was particularly vigilant on who endorsed the paper it discounted, but it did not reduce significantly the number of people and firms for whom it offered discounting facilities.

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

Boom: 298 protests from January 1824 to June 23, 1825 worth £26,939. Number

By the 113 discounters. '000 £

63 had 1 22 had 2 10 had 3 5 had 4 13 had 5 + 200 150 100

50

0

10

20

30

Number

104 had 1 35 had 2 16 had 3 1 had 4 7 had 5 + 200 150 100 40

By the 163 drawers.

50

0

10

20

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30

40

Local crisis: 294 protests by March 13, 1826 worth £62,278 Number

By the 103 discounters. '000 £

55 had 1 22 had 2 6 had 3 9 had 4 11 had 5 + 200 150 100

50

0

10

20

30

85 had 1 17 had 2 6 had 3 6 had 4 11 had 5 +

40

Number

200 150 100

By the 125 drawers.

50

0

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20

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30

40

Depression: 373 protests by August 31, 1827 worth £52,232 Number

By the 143 discounters.

78 had 1 25 had 2 10 had 3 7 had 4 23 had 5 + 200 150 100

50

0

10

20

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30

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Figure 7.4  •  Profiles of discounters and drawers protested by the Bank of Montreal during three distinct periods. The remarkable imbalance caused by a heavy reliance on a limited number of firms was evident in all three periods, but the severity of the second crisis is evident in the ballooning of the number of both drawers and discounters involved in five or more protests. Source: Deeds of Henry Griffin and Nicholas B. Doucet, ba nq -m .

After the depression became more general, the bank sig­nificantly increased the number of required endorsers. Yet all three periods shared a common feature, as shown in figure 7.4. A small number of discounters and drawers accounted for a quite disproportionate number and value of the protests. The problem was more pronounced among the discounters than the drawers. During the period of general depression at the bank, a sixth of the dis­counters were responsible for over half the bad paper. Thus, the pattern that had distinguished the Bank of Montreal from the Bank of Canada was maintained right through all three periods. Access to bank credit was restricted and the directors of the Bank of Mont­real consistently

40



Towards a Cubist Portrait 189

favoured a limited number of well-connected firms, at the potential cost of quite serious losses to the bank itself. What does this mean for an under­standing of who financed the transition? If the bank extended credit to a relatively limited num­ber of firms, in both good times and bad, and as a producer you needed credit, then it meant culti­vating good relations with those firms well connected to the bank. Hence, I was seriously mistaken to consider the identity and occupation of the drawer of the note to be what was most important in understanding bank credit, for the bank never, or almost never, dealt with master craftsmen, even though many of the promissory notes it protested had been initially drawn by craftsmen. The issue was how distant were craft producers from those firms that could deal directly with the bank, since each endorse­ment of a note acted as an informal discounting and so raised the cost of credit. One wonders how much of the £25 face value that Ludger Duvernay, the printer of the Patriotes’ newspaper La Minerve, actually received from René Kimber, given that the note was subsequently discounted by Eustache Frechette, Stuart Calcoff & Co., Robert Froste & Co., and finally by the bank over the spring of 1827.6 Or, when David Dickie, cabinet­maker and upholster, ran up a string of protested notes for values ranging from £14 to £34 over the course of eighteen months, including several notes of accommodation from the attorney F.X. Bender, what sort of discount did he face when first negotiating for £75 credit with bank director Austin Cuvillier in July 1824 and then renegotiating for £123 after that had been protested in October? The series does not answer this type of ques­tion, at least not directly. Dickie’s last appearance in a protest was as the employee who answers the door at the cabinetmaking shop of Charles Try in January 1826. Beyond the anecdotal, what is at stake here is who benefited from the creation of these new consolidated clearing houses for merchant capital that were the banks? Unques­tionably, the development of chartered banks greatly facilitated the expansion of trade within the Canadas, between colonies, and with both the United States and Britain. This in turn allowed a more diversified mercantile community to develop, even if the new credit facilities most privileged the limited number of firms that dominated imports. Chartered banks also financed the establishment of large-scale manufacturing activity within the colony, most notably in shipbuilding and timber production, both of which were heavily depend­ent on imperial markets. Indirectly, then, the banks’ activities encouraged the expansion

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

of a waged labour market. Those at the top of increasingly differentiated craft communi­ties could take greatest advantage of this expansion, as they did of the growing number of immigrants coming over in lieu of ballast on the timber ships. In short, the image of the impact of banking that emerges from this re-evaluation of its credit practices suggests that banking consolidated emerging hierarchies within both the craft and the mercantile communi­ties. Inasmuch as the revolutionary path of independent craft production was the democ­ratic way, banks undermined colonial democracy by fuelling inequality. Little wonder that the Patriote members of the Legislative Assembly were so critical.

Youthful Agency Thomas Watson, sawyer of Montreal, for the benefit of William Watson, his son age 15 years, hath voluntarily bound him, William consenting, as an apprentice iron and brass founder from May 10, 1822 until William reaches the age of 21 to Guy Warwick & Co., iron and brass founders of Montreal. Watson promises his son will faithfully and diligently serve Guy Warwick & Co., according to the best and utmost of his power, skill and knowledge, exercise and employ in performance of all such services and business whatsoever relating to an iron and brass foundry {trade and business}, obey the lawful commands of Guy Warwick, his partner and of all other person or persons representing them or any of them, he shall keep their secrets relating to the said business and not absent himself from their service without leave. Watson must provide boarding, lodging and wearing apparel suitable to the employment of his son during the first 12 months in consideration of which Guy Warwick & Co., will pay Thomas Watson £-/8s/6d per week during the time William will be at work during the said 12 months. Warwick promises to provide boarding, lodging and wearing apparel after the said 12 months, with the liberty also to board, lodge and provide with wearing apparel said William Watson during the said 12 months or any part thereof in doing which Guy Warwick & Co. will be discharged from paying Thomas Watson the weekly payments. Thomas Watson shall furnish his son with 2 suits of decent clothes, which clothes will be given from this date til the 10th day of May 1823 {provided Guy Warwick & Co. does not board William Watson before the said day, in which case Thomas Watson will be obliged to give the said clothes to his son on demand.} Guy Warwick promises to instruct and teach William Watson in the art and trade of an iron and brass founder.7



Towards a Cubist Portrait 191

The problem facing Guy and Joseph Warwick, partners in the Phoenix foundry on Water Street in Ste-Anne suburb, was understandable. In medium- and large-sized manufactories, it was not always possible for the masters to house all of their apprentices all of the time. The firm was willing to assume the considerable cost of £22.19s.4d. to cover the expenses of this adolescent’s first year, but clearly thought it best to provide for the option of having William move in should an opening come available. In August 1824, the firm hired another apprentice, Henry O’Neill, promising “to provide boarding, lodging, and wearing apparel suitable to his employment and to cause him to be taught sufficiently in the reading writing and arithmetic.”8 Then, in July 1825, the firm hired William’s younger brother Thomas Jr, age 13 as a live-in apprentice.9 The next month, with still at least two years to go in William’s apprenticeship, Jacques Viger enumerated 14 people in the household of Joseph Warwick in Ste-Anne: four boys and one girl under the age of 14, one male and one female adolescent under the age of 18, two single males under the age of 25 and one under the age of 40, one married male over 40, two unmarried females over the age of 18, and one married women under the age of 45. This was the fourth-largest household in the suburb. The question of wages is at the heart of the historiographical debates over how people’s relationships with one another changed as they chose to industrialize. A classic statement by E.P. Thompson has largely framed the discussion: a qualitative shift from payment for a task to payment for an allotted period of time characterized the new industrial order.10 The acceptance of this new relationship to time and work-discipline defined working-class culture and struggles. In 1992, our understanding of these processes was significantly enriched by a remarkable social history of London based on whom they hanged in the eighteenth century.11 Peter Linebaugh argued that much that was considered crime in London was a struggle over the rights that working people had to customary payments created through their labour. The monetary component of the wage – be it for task or for time – was a central issue around which major struggles took place, but increasingly the customary element lost out to the monetary component. Since customary payment was much more clearly related to the specific nature of the task than was payment in cash, Linebaugh’s much more detailed work largely supported Thompson’s earlier analysis that we were dealing with a shift from task to time. Moreover, closer to home, in their work on Quebec City, Hardy and Ruddel had considered the presence

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

of a monetary component in apprenticeship contracts as further proof of precocious proletarianization. They argued that the introduction of a cash relationship where custom had once ruled was yet one more indication of the decline in the craft world early in the nineteenth century.12 The case of William Watson does, however, raise some problems with this presumption of a shift from task to time and its associated language of commodification and alienation to discuss the changing nature of relations between people. The Warwicks clearly would have preferred to have had a ‘customary’ relationship, for the cost of adding one more person to the household would have been considerably less than 8s./6d. a week. As we have seen, such complex households did require waged domestic labour in addition to the unpaid work of the mistress of the household, but the wages paid young women in domestic service were less than half the compensation the Warwicks had accepted to pay.13 In Montreal during the 1820s, there was a notable strengthening of a cash-based nexus in the relationships between masters and their apprentices, but it is difficult to see this as a transformation of the craft world from above. At the beginning of the decade, fewer than half of all apprenticeships involved any form of cash payment, but by the mid-1820s more than three-quarters did. Unlike the payments offered Thomas Watson Sr, these were solely to cover clothing. The apprentices received board, lodging, and, generally, the washing and mending of their clothes, but rather than being provided clothes, they enjoyed a clothing allowance. The value of the payments varied greatly. Approximately a third were denominated in the former currency of account of New France, the livre Tournois, which would suggest this type of payment was a long-established custom. Payments in this currency ranged from a low of 50# to 180# per annum, with the mode being 72# or the equivalent of one Spanish dollar or five shillings current a month. Payments lower than this, in either dollars or pounds current, were infrequent, and $12 a year or £3 current were the modes in the early years of the decade for these currencies as well. However, increasingly the contracts specified a changing rate of pay as the apprentice advanced in years. Although never a clear majority, these contracts often involved a near doubling of the value of the clothing allowance over the course of the apprenticeship. In July 1825, the plasterer James Anderson renegotiated the terms of the proposed apprenticeship that his son John was to undertake with the carpenter John Thompson, reaching the agreement that over the course of



Towards a Cubist Portrait 193

four and a half years, young John would have £28.10s. to spend on clothes.14 Unquestionably, this type of relationship was not the customary one that the widow Marie Amable Prévost, seeking “the means of gaining an honest livelihood by acquiring a trade” for her 13-year-old son Amable Leblanc, had entered into in 1822: William Galt, shoemaker of Montreal, promises he shall use the utmost of his endeavour to teach and instruct Amable Leblanc or cause to him to be taught and instructed in the art and trade of a shoemaker he now followeth and all of its various branches, to board, lodge, wash, mend and maintain with decent and sufficient wearing apparel and to attend him in sickness. Also at the end of the said term [of eight years] two new suits of clothes to Leblanc, that is to say one for workdays and one for Sundays in case those he should have at the end of term should have worn out and be considered as old clothes and to give Leblanc a bench with its tools necessary and sufficient to work as a journeyman shoemaker.15 Attitudes towards consumption were clearly changing. The parents of many apprentices, perhaps under pressure from their sons, ensured that these young men had the opportunity to purchase the many new textiles arriving every spring in increasing quantities and varieties from Britain and the empire. What constituted clothing “suitable to his condition” was no longer a stable concept. If what was suitable for a 15-year-old was now being seen as unsuitable for a 19-year-old, what does this say about sociability among young people? Furthermore, this change in custom was highly gendered. Young women entering into apprenticeships in the needle trades did not receive such generous clothing allowances. Indeed, many, like Isabella Rollo, received no guarantee of clothing at all and had to pay her mistress “for all the trouble she may have in the future teaching her the art, trade and mystery of a milliner and dress maker the sum of £6 cur.”16 The deeds are silent on where the young men’s clothes were to be made up. Given the large number of dry-goods merchants in town and the complex gendered structure of many craft households, it is most likely that the young women with whom these young men lived made up these imported textiles into finished clothing. I think we are seeing an emerging youth culture, but even if that is not the case, these choices had potentially significant ramifications on several

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

different levels. First, the dichotomy between payment for time and payment for task does not adequately explain this change. Second, these new customary payments were tied to a cash economy and so were different from the customary payments analysed by Linebaugh, which were exchanged within an informal economy. Indeed, the monetary value of a differential clothing allowance was its only defining element, as the choice of clothes to be purchased was left to the discretion of the apprentice’s family. Third, while redefining what constituted a just wage for young men, this new custom increased the gendered division of labour between young men and young women and introduced new gendered social distinctions. Fourth, commodification and alienation were both present in this new social expression, but it is difficult to see these as losses for the young men. For them, it was an appropriation, perhaps celebration, of the advances in production that their labour now allowed them to consume. Such marked differences as one progressed towards achieving the status of a skilled craftsman gave a qualitatively new social and masculine dimension to the old adage that the clothes make the man. On a quite different level, this qualitatively new practice may finally explain why established dry-goods houses in Montreal encountered difficulty in the late spring of 1825, for this change in consumption patterns was unlikely to be restricted to adolescent males. It must have been part of a general increase in clothing consumption among craftsmen. Not just apprentices, but journeymen would now be purchasing increasing quantities of textiles. These would be price-conscious consumers, well aware that each new shipping season brought both greater variety and lower prices to town. This change in the constitution of the market for textiles placed established dry-goods houses with over-priced inventories from the previous year in a difficult position. These firms were caught unable to move last year’s inventory, just as the imperial economy reached the peak of its cycle and British firms began to dump cotton goods on colonial markets.

Questioning the Coherency of Craft One need not be a Beau Brummell, to realize that men’s clothing was an indicator of social differentiation. If the situation on the shop floor was in such flux, what was happening to the masters? I was able to link three-quarters of the masters who were training apprentices and fourfifths of those who had hired journeymen to either the census return or

Number of households



Towards a Cubist Portrait 195 60

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Figure 7.5  •  Size of masters’ households linked to the 1825 census compared with all other census households. These completely different profiles underscore the continued significance of both apprentice and female domestic labour to craft production, but they also suggest the longer-term dilemma facing increasing numbers of masters in a city where overcrowding was a growing problem. Source: mbhp Hiring Contracts File and the Viger census.

the tax roll of 1825.17 This remarkably high level of linkage between notarized hiring contracts and the census returns is itself significant. It signals the close relationship between mastery and the nature of craft production, since only heads of household were nomi­nally identified in the census. Figure 7.5 contrasts the patterns of household size of masters known to have hired skilled labour at some point over the decade with the patterns of all the other households. These patterns underscore the significance of craft in resolving the apparent paradox of a town made up of mostly quite small households but where four out ten people lived in large ones. We are observing people at differing points in their craft-related life cycle.

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

The households of census-linked masters were notably younger than the overall population. Not only were there fewer men over the age of 25 and women over the age of 45 in their households, but they had proportionately more young children and slightly fewer children between the ages of 6 and 13. The proportions of adolescents were notably larger – young male apprentices to be sure but also a significant number of young females as well. The almost complete absence of any married men under the age of 25 in the masters’ households reminds us of the importance of late marriage for successful mastery of a trade. Four out of five apprentices hired before notary by local masters lived in these linked households. It was rare indeed for these young people, overwhelmingly male, to learn their trade in a household where no working-age female lived.18 Thus, this formal reproduction of skilled labour built on unpaid familial labour. It was, however, frequently not enough. Fully seven out of ten apprentices learnt their trade in a household that had two or more working-age women in 1825. Taken as whole, there were slightly more than two working-age women for every three men involved in household craft production. This ratio held true for the households of masters who hired journeymen as well. As we have already noted, these large and complex households were playing an increas­ingly important role in the formal reproduction of craft labour. The growing problem of overcrowded housing combined with these larger gendered and more specialized craft households to make it all the more difficult for newlywed couples to establish their own craft businesses. Nor would their most recent life experiences have prepared them for these challenges, as most had left home at an early age to live and work in large households. The difficulties they faced were compounded by the rapidly changing nature of property relations in the city. As recently as 1796, twothirds of all households had owned enough real property to be taxpayers.19 By 1825, close to three-quarters of all house­holds in the city were tenants. Ownership of all but the most modest structures was already beyond the reach of the overwhelming majority of households. A third of the local masters who had hired skilled labour owned property in the city in 1825. Given the dramatic changes in access to property in the city over the previous genera­tion, this might appear high. However, the value of their holdings suggests that we are seeing the result of a differentiated craft community wherein it was increasingly difficult for



Towards a Cubist Portrait 197

skilled people to attain a competence – that is, to have sufficient assets to ensure that they would not be a burden to their family in old age. Eightyeight masters owned a single property whose average value was £483 current. This was twelve to fourteen times the annual wage of a journeyman. In this rapidly expanding city, property was a good investment and a further sixty-five masters were landlords. Thirty-two were local landlords, owning an average of three properties worth £860 in the ward they lived in, while thirty-three masters were larger land­lords, owning an average of five properties in multiple wards of the city. Their portfolios were worth on average £3,415. All this suggests that our work in the 1980s seriously overstated the coherency of craft communities in Montreal.20 Although I was finding no evidence to support precocious proletarianization, there was considerable evidence of a growing differentiation within craft communities. Master craftsmen who could no longer house and provide for their apprentices would necessarily have a more distant relationship with them. Indepen­ dent craftsmen who gained more from rents than from the sale of their own produce had little reason to support a moral economy and perhaps began to see how they could benefit from a liberal one. Young men who spent so much of their income on clothing would have at best only modest savings when it came time to marry. And lurking in the background, only as yet partially visible, was the significance of the change in gender relations. A remarkable find in the archives would soon throw into sharp relief this key aspect of the reproduction and coherency of the craft world.

Insuring the Value of Property I really could not believe my good fortune. It was my first day back in the notarial archives in several years and that morning I had found an assignment of a merchant serving the seigneury of Deux-Montagnes, with numerous references to members of the Mohawk community, and now this: the details of the first takeover of a financial intermediary in Canadian his­ tory. On October 21, 1820, by deed of transfer notarized by N.B. Doucet, the Quebec Fire Assurance Company purchased the assets of the Montreal Fire Insurance Company. The deed contained two appendices that had been prepared for a directors’ meeting on October 3rd. The first listed summary information describing policies sold by company agents in Trois-Rivières

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

The west end of the Main Street of St Mary Suburb on John Adams’ map of 1825, dwelling houses are darker. The first listed property is at the lower right and then the properties Pickel insured went up the left side of St Nicholas Street and conclude with the two properties on the Main Street. The King’s Wood Yard separates these properties from the town centre. The St Lawrence River is at the bottom. £300 On a Dwelling House on Water Street £1,500 On the building of another dwelling house & a Bake House on St Nicholas On the building of a tobacco manufactory on St Nicolas Street £500 £1,500 On the tobacco therein contained £1,500 On machinery and utensils in the said Tobacco Manufactory £2,000 On the building of another dwelling house occupied by himself on the Main Street of Quebec Suburb £1,000 On household furniture, Bed & Table linen, plate, printed Books, China, Glassware & wearing apparel contained therein. £2,500 On the building of another dwelling house adjacent to the stone dwelling occupied by said assured on the Main Street of Quebec Suburb Figure 7.6  •  Ste-Marie properties insured by John Pickel Jr. To make sense of these insured values, it might help to recall that the annual median income of a craft household was £50 in Montreal at the time. Source: Deeds of N.B. Doucet, banq-m.

and Upper Canada and covered 70 assets held by 48 clients. The second was a fifty-one-page list of policies covering 664 insured assets held by 274 clients, which had been sold by the Montreal office. The detail was amazing, not just for prominent people, but for a number of more obscure manufacturers, merchants, and traders. John Pickel Jr was a name I knew. He had been involved in some of the rather shady financial dealings of Frederick Gunnermann, a Montreal grocer, and Jacob Pozer, a Quebec City property developer in the early 1820s, and his father was a prominent property owner in 1825.21 Nothing, however, had prepared me for the scale of his operations as a tobacco manufacturer in Ste-Marie ward. John Molson’s brewery was one of the largest manufactories in the city, and so it was not surprising to see that he had insured his extensive

The east end of the Main Street of St Mary on John Adams’ map of 1825, showing the properties insured by John Molson. In the middle of the Brewery is the dwelling house of John’s second son, Thomas. The home John Molson Sr. had insured is just to the west on the Main Street. He no longer lived there when this map was drawn, having moved to a mansion on Sherbrooke Street. The St Lawrence River is at the bottom of this image £6,000 On a Distillery & Brew House, the building is divided by a strong stone wall, in the attic story is a large reservoir containing about 11,000 gallons and is generally full of water On a building comprising an office & Store, cellars adjoining the £700 aforesaid premises On hops lodged therein £600 £250 On empty bottles in the said store cellars £1,250 On the building of a Dwelling house belonging to the proprietor and occupied by Mr T. Molson between the store cellar and Malting of the above described premises £1,000 On a stone building being a Malt house £600 On three Malt kilns, two of Iron and one of Kiln tiles under the same roof of the Malt house, above described, that is to say £200 on each kiln On Barley in said Malt house £625 On Malt stored in said Malt house £625 On a stone building being a store house, joined on one side by store £750 house at present occupied by Mr M.’s servants On Corpus materials in said Store, such as Staves, Casks and Models £250 £500 On the building of a dwelling house joined on one side by the store house that contains the Corpus materials and in front by the avenue road in the rear by the proprietors garden On the building of a dwelling house £750 £350 On household furniture, wearing apparel, plate & printed books contained in s’d House On the building of a dwelling house fronting on Voltigeurs Street £150 Figure 7.7  •  Ste-Marie properties insured by John Molson Sr. The scale of the capital investments in this brewery in relation to the inventory costs contrasts sharply with those of Pickel’s tobacco manufactory. Source: Deeds of N.B. Doucet, banq-m.

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

holdings in Ste-Marie for £14,800. The detailed description of his insured assets revealed the relative importance of fixed and variable capital, which is an issue historians generally just speculate about, as reliable information for pre-industrial times is rare indeed. In both of these policies, the household furnishings of the policyholders were insured for considerable sums: £350 in the case of John Molson Sr and £1,000 in the case of John Pickel Jr. They were not alone. JacquesAntoine Cartier, the father of a 5-year-old named George-Étienne, was a prosperous Richelieu Valley merchant when he insured the contents of the two rooms he kept in town at Joseph Perrault’s stone dwelling on St-Vincent Street. His policy does not describe the rooms, but in what I assume were a sitting room and a bedroom he had “household furniture, printed Books and wearing apparel” insured for £200. That was four times the annual income of a skilled craft family. The average insured value of the 101 clauses specifically covering only household furnishings in Montreal was an astounding £430. Now, things used to be worth a lot more. In seventeenth-century England, the gendered inheritance regime, which saw movables go to the daughters and immovables to the sons, was based on a rough equity in the value of these two types of property.22 In New France and early Lower Canada, popular-class women brought to their marriage 40 per cent by value of the community of property.23 I had assumed, as was the case in England,24 that movables had lost their relative value in the late eigh­ teenth century, or at the very latest during the inflation associated with the Napoleonic Wars. Here, however, was remarkable evidence that things had maintained their value in Montreal until at least 1820. This put into quite a different light the results of the Montreal Business History Project’s work on marriage contracts. Our analysis of these contracts from the 1830s and 1840s had shown that on average the wife brought to the community only 10 per cent of the value of the community of property.25 What we had not realized was how recent this relative impoverishment of women was. The collapse in the value of property gendered female (bed linen, cotton goods, flatware, tinware, and cooking utensils), which constituted the trousseau of so many young working women, probably took place in Montreal in the 1820s and early 1830s. These goods were these women’s savings accounts, and the collapse in their value had the effect of a major currency devaluation. In the short term, it meant that the value a bride could bring to a marriage was dramatically reduced; over the



Towards a Cubist Portrait 201

longer term, consistent with the principles of a moral economy, it justified declining wages for single women. Merchants, manufacturers, and larger traders often took out policies to cover their stock-in-trade; the records showed 102 policies for sixty-eight firms. Surprisingly, half of the firms who did so had no property insured. They had substantial movable property, for their stock-in-trade was worth on average £1,177, but it does not appear that they owned the buildings within which their stock was stored. Similarly, forty-eight people took out policies to cover their household furnishings, at an average of £355, but did not insure their dwellings. Clearly, in Montreal, not all affluent residents owned where it was they worked or lived. The highly concentrated nature of ownership in the local property market meant that when a rentier took out insurance on several of his or her properties, the insurance company was frequently exposed to considerably greater risk than a strict assessment of the buildings themselves might suggest, because of the close proximity to other insured assets. Indeed, the conflicting interests of rentiers active in the Montreal Fire Insurance Company and those without real property generated irreconcilable differences of opinion among directors as to how the company should be managed and led to its takeover. The Montreal Fire, like Doige’s directories, presupposed a modernity in this local economy that it did not yet possess. Here, the market was not the paradigmatic force of liberal theory, but like pre-industrial markets everywhere, it was severely socially constrained.26 The deed of transfer revealed complex relationships between property, class, and gender in Montreal, one that puts not just the concerns of Thomas Doige, but those of Jacques Viger and John Adams as well, into a new perspective. These insurance records show Montreal to have been on the cusp of historic transformations relating to social understandings of the individual, the family, and the household. Historically, in Europe and their colonies of settlement, marriage, household formation, and property ownership were closely related. Taken together, they had defined the principal political subject of the early modern world: the male head of a property-owning household. In the Lower Canadian countryside, marriage no longer meant access to property for many young peasants, while, in Montreal, property had already become the preserve of a minority. Thus, new understandings of what constituted the public and the private, the political and the social, were being formed. If the value of women’s movables was declining rapidly, then not only would most young families never be

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

able to afford real property, but this changed political economy of marriage meant a quite different type of mastery in the household, as many more craftsmen would continue to work for wages long after marriage. Furthermore, if relatively prominent people in trade and the crafts no longer held property, then how legitimate was a property-based franchise? These fractures within the social body politic would only be resolved by new, socially sanctioned gender roles that both transcended and redefined class. Although my description of this developing crisis might sound almost suprahuman – indeed verging on the meta-narrative – in fact, it was the result of many quite ordinary decisions people made when faced with these novel opportunities and constraints.

Adopting a Post-Colonial Perspective I sensed rather than saw it coming. A car swerved to the curb, engine left running, a door flung open, and the sound of racing feet. Perhaps I saw a shadow thrown forward by the streetlights, honestly I can’t say. It all happened so quickly. Instinctively, I moved to protect myself and it was that reflex that saved me. The bottle full of excrement glanced off the side of my head and smashed to the sidewalk. My assailant jumped back into the car and roared off. Welcome to Le Havre! the unesco -designated world heri­ tage centre of modernity. The attack two days later was far more civilized. Jean-Paul Barbiche, conference organizer, noted historian, and literary critique of what the French call “l’outre-mer,” as if being overseas from the presumed centre of world culture was the most important attribute of any former colony, laid into the “notoirement composite” West Indian population to ridicule Marcus Garvey as the unstable leader of a doomed movement, prefiguring the failure of the British West Indies Federation. Rootless reforms because not born of the Enlightenment.27 This time I was prepared and more importantly I was not alone: Victorien Zoungbo Lavou and Moktar Ben Barka28 came eloquently to my aid. At its core, imperialism is the idea that a particular culture or society is superior. This presumption of superiority justifies controlling other cultures and societies, just as, in varying forms from Hispaniola to Iraq, what French imperial­ists called “la mission civilisatrice” has legitimized colonialism. Eurocentrism is the belief that for at least the last several hundred years the peoples, cultures, and societies of European origin, or more frequently a rather idiosyncratic subset, are more important than those of



Towards a Cubist Portrait 203

the rest of the world. This belief is imperialist. The modern university may well be the most important forum for the propagation and perpetuation of eurocentrism. An alternative intellectual theory and practice emerged from within the academy in the 1980s and 1990s. It considers no culture or society to be innately superior; it eschews rank ordering in favour of respecting diversity. Although unquestionably part of the post-modern turn, we call this conscientious political engagement “adopting a postcolonial perspective.” This is extremely difficult to do and it remains a risky proposition, for it in­volves the continuous questioning of the established canon in every intellectual discipline.29 Nonetheless, by the late 1990s, I considered this perspective vital to any proper understanding of Canadian history. After a decade of reflection, I had come to the conclusion that the best way to overcome the ahistorical perceptions of an internal/external dichotomy lay in recognizing the cosmopolitan nature of colonial society. It is, of course, the imperial centre that we have always been taught to think of as cosmopolitan, in contrast to colonies on the periphery, so there was a poetic justice that I came to see the error of this characterization through an analysis of the impact of British trade policy on nationalism in Lower Canada. Three successive commercial crises 1825–26, 1836–37, 1847–49 rocked the colony. They had all originated in Britain, and a combination of imperial trade policy and deliber­ate dumping of exports had compounded all three. Yet, despite these structural similarities, the radically different po­ litical and cultural responses demonstrated the increasingly cosmopolitan character of the colony. In 1825, the crisis consolidated an anti-Canadien political lobby in the form of the Montreal Board of Trade, whose attitudes the Montreal Gazette came to articulate with unprecedented vehemence. In 1836, the crisis seriously aggravated the debate between the Patriotes and the Crown and led to trade itself be­coming a major terrain of struggle. In 1848, the crisis resulted in a dramatic series of violent confrontations that were led by Tories calling for the annexation of the colony by the United States and that ended in their torching Parliament like some misguided Guy Fawkes. Ironically in light of what happened, I had come to Le Havre to present the results of this post-colonial re-evaluation of agency and constraint in the Canadas.30 The strong sup­port I received there, as well as the near simultaneous publication of important reassessments arguing for the

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

cosmopolitan nature of mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century Can­ ada,31 indicates that what I had experienced as a solitary intellectual journey was part of a larger intellectual and cultural transformation within the humanities.

A Cosmopolitan Struggle Viewing the evolution of the colonial/imperial nexus from a post-colonial perspective that recognizes the cosmopolitan nature of colonial life allows us not only to better understand the contradictory cultural and political claims that came to a head in the Rebellions of 1837–38, but to identify the key turning point in the history of the national question itself. The most evident imperial presence in Montreal was the judicial complex of a courthouse, gaol, and guardhouse, erected early in the nineteenth century adjacent to the new parade ground. These pub­lic buildings were complemented by a commemorative monument to Nelson, erected by public subscription on a prominent site at the top of the new market facing the courthouse. Literally linking law and order with the market, Nelson’s monument stood as an apt metaphor for the Brit­ish armed forces. Both the site and the neo-classical style chosen for this small imperial complex have things to tell us. Adjacent to the Château de Ramezay, the gover­nor’s residence and gardens – for his private enjoyment – when he (there was neither a female governor general nor a female lieutenant governor until the last quarter of the twentieth century) was in town, both the courthouse and the gaol were set well back from Notre-Dame Street, and their balanced order impressed many an early nineteenth-century tourist. These buildings, however, also oper­ated on quite a different scale. They were clearly visible from anywhere in St-Laurent, the town’s largest popular-class suburb, and from the deck of any vessel entering the harbour. This disciplinary vista was enhanced by the broad raised expanse of the Champ de Mars, a grand military stage designed for show. Visible from as far away as Sherbrooke Street, this was a theatre of power. Here stood the gallows. The crass brutality of a public hanging contrasts sharply with the elegant symmetry of landscaped temples to law and order. This too was intentional, for it celebrated that most terrifying achievement of eighteenth-century British society: a criminal code with more than two hundred capital offences in the very society that ensconced the rule of law. Most offences for



Towards a Cubist Portrait 205

which you could be hanged were against property, not people. The rule of law defended property rights. Therein lay its grandeur, order, and popular appeal. Property rights in pre-industrial Montreal were many, varied, and overlapping. As we have seen, they could be socially defined. People often had property rights because of who they were or what they did. Property had not yet been reduced to a narrowly conceived economic right enjoyed by a privileged mi­nority. For every person hanged, hundreds of people from the popular classes brought suit to defend their socially defined rights to property. For these users of the court sys­tem, the formality of these classical public buildings evoked enduring principles of equity and justice. These too informed the multiple understandings of the public good. The modest guardhouse, directly opposite Nelson’s monument, served to maintain order. Unquestionably, most of the disorder came from the taverns and inns lining the market square, but this was not the only reason for placing a guardhouse here. The rudimentary, open-walled wooden stalls of the market belied its highly regulated nature. A third of Montreal’s police regulations dealt exclusively with markets because markets were potentially explosive places. Markets brought town and country together. Popular distur­bances most often occurred on market days. Pre-indus­trial markets were what factories would later become: the public site of society’s greatest tensions. Yet, when guards helped to enforce regulations, it was not the imposition of an alien order. It was a matter of conflicting ethical visions and so a political debate. On the one hand, markets were highly regulated because most people expected stable prices for staple products. Popular conceptions of fairness demanded a just relationship between prices and wages. Viewed from this perspective, strict control of market forces was how one advanced the public good. On the other hand, merchants and liberal pro­fessionals increasingly saw market regulations as an infringement on individual freedoms. In 1824, Jacques Viger objected to new regulations restricting the activities of the many small resellers who plied their trade both in and around the mar­kets because “La loi permet ce qu’elle ne défend pas, et le règlement de police qui défend ce que la loi ne défend pas, doit être contraire à cette loi.”32 This viewpoint considered the freedom of individuals in the market place to be the pri­mary defence against arbitrary authority. In the early 1820s, craftsmen working for master masons Thomas McKay and John Redpath built an elegant structure in Pointe-à-Callière. Known as the Youville Stables, it was actually built to store potash. Made by leaching

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

Figure 7.8  •  Youville Stables

wood cinders, potash was a by-product of land clearance. The clean classical lines of these buildings show just how valuable this first cash crop of many a peasant family was. They also remind us of the integrated nature of the early nineteenth-century economy. Potash produced by pioneering peasants on the forested fringes of settlement in Lower Canada, weighed and warehoused here in Pointe-à-Callière, was shipped to the spinning mills of Great Britain, where it was the principal bleaching agent applied to the raw cotton grown by the slaves of the southern United States. The resul­tant cotton goods were then sold around the world, including to auctioneers and dry-goods merchants in Montreal, where they would be made up into finished clothes in the tailoring and dressmaking shops of the town centre and by women in thousands of homes throughout the city. New economic relations were made possible by new ways of thinking about the world. In 1819, the directors of the recently created Bank of Montreal commissioned Coade of London to convey to Montrealers a particularly powerful version of their worldview. The directors adorned the exterior of their new bank on Place d’Armes with Coade’s remarkable set of bas-reliefs. Four sensuously reclining classical beauties contemplate the bountiful powers of the four pillars of economic life: a plough represents agriculture, from which comes the staff of life; a spinning wheel represents handicrafts, from which come scientific un­derstand­ing; stacked bales rep-



Towards a Cubist Portrait 207

Figure 7.9  •  Coade’s bas reliefs commissioned by the Bank of Montreal, 1819. This public lesson in political economy adorned the front of the bank on Place d’Armes for thirty years.

resent commerce, from which come modern communications; and finally a mast and anchor represent shipping, from which comes mastery of the world through cartographic knowledge. Nary a straining muscle is to be seen, so labour can play no part in these mysterious, yet so productive, transformations. Instead, cherubs suggest divinely inspired processes. This was powerful art, resonate with the classical pretensions of empire. A by-election in May of 183233 showed how the global and local interacted. All month long, in a modest structure housing a fire pump on the north side of Place d’Armes, people had been voting to elect a new member for Montreal West. Elections were very public affairs. The secret ballot did not yet exist, running totals of the votes for each candidate were posted for all to see, and the poll itself stayed open for as many days as the returning offi­cer considered necessary. The choice could not have been clearer. Like one in five Montrealers, the Patriote candidate Daniel Tracey had immigrated to Lower Canada since 1825. Editor and publisher of the Irish Vindicator, Tracey supported reform in Lower Canada because he saw it as part of the struggle to free Ireland. He had just finished serving six weeks in jail for saying in print that the non-elected Legislative Council was a nuisance that

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

should be done away with. The Tory candidate is well known to you: Stanley Bagg, trader, firewood merchant, contractor for the Lachine Canal, and the son-in-law of a re­cently deceased property-owning butcher. This was not a man born to privilege; American by birth, Bagg chose the Crown by conviction. Many English-speaking trades­men and low- to mid-ranking merchants in Montreal echoed his conscious choice of a British identity. It was their colonial experience that taught these immigrants to be British. After an initial surge in favour of Bagg, Tracey maintained the slimmest of leads for three long weeks. On the afternoon of May 21st, a company of the 15th Regiment of Foot took up a position under the portico of NotreDame Church. Then a group of Tories attacked the polling station. Their plan was to capture it long enough to take back the lead and have Hypolite St George Dupré, the returning officer, declare the election over. Stiff resistance by Patriote supporters foiled the plan and the riot act was read. The troops then moved in, forcing the Patriotes back along St-James Street to the corner of St-Pierre, where, from the steps of his house, magistrate Dr Robinson urged the troops to open fire. Three Canadiens, a journeyman printer and two elderly labourers, died on the spot. Ironically, these men had defended with their lives a right to vote they did not possess. None of the dead had voted, as they could not meet the property qualifications. In the shocked aftermath, the election was declared over and Tracey the winner. Colonial authorities showed no remorse. They suspended the local magistrates who charged the army officers with murder and had the commanding officer knighted. Meanwhile, the election result itself was quickly overtaken by events. On June 10th, cholera arrived from Europe aboard the Voyageur. The parish records of Notre-Dame provide the sad toll. Over the next three months, 1,857 people died, including 568 children under the age of 7. The Sulpician Joseph-Vincent Quiblier noted that the majority were Canadiens. Among the dead was Daniel Tracey. In an attempt to understand what had happened, Jacques Viger carried out a detailed analysis of the poll book.34 His results suggest an almost equally divided community. To be sure, those in mercantile pursuits voted five to one for Bagg, while the unskilled voted three to one and those in petty commerce two to one in favour of Tracey. Nevertheless, the largest single occupational category, the 502 skilled artisans, split almost right down the middle, as did both the 160 bourgeois and the 203 women voters. However, Viger noted a marked difference in when Patriote and Tory women voted. Reform-minded women came to the polls regularly throughout the



Towards a Cubist Portrait 209

campaign. Women who supported Bagg did not begin to vote in any serious numbers until the polls had been open for days. Viger concluded that these women were encouraged to vote because the Tory cause looked lost without their support. He recommended that in future the franchise be restricted to male property owners. The Montreal municipal election of 1833 would be the first male-only election in the colony’s history. Women would not be fully enfranchised, either provincially or municipally, until the midtwentieth century.35 Viger saw the challenge as social. He did not attempt any ethnic analysis of the voting patterns. Occupation and gender mattered, while immigrant or native-born no longer did. His rejection of an imperial versus colonial dichotomy as a way to understand this event speaks to the complexity that shaped the context within which people made, sometimes unknowingly, their life and death decisions. The colonial reformer was motivated by im­ perial concerns, just as the Tory was by colonial interests. The political and cultural identities being fashioned reflected the particular opportunities and constraints in these people’s lives, and their lived experience was cosmopolitan in nature. I do not mean to suggest that ethnicity and nationalism were unimportant, rather that they were being con­structed through the myriad and conflicting choices people made. Over the next several years, relations between the Governor in Council and the Legisla­tive Assembly continued to deteriorate. On March 6, 1837, the British government proposed a series of coercive measures. News of these Russell Resolutions reached Montreal by the end of April. In response to the British government’s stance, the Patriotes called for the public to boycott all British manufactured goods. Led by Mesdames Lafontaine and Peltier, Sunday promenades on the Champ de Mars now featured rough homespun woollens confronting smooth silks and high-count cottons. On June 26th, a great patriotic banquet was held at the recently opened Nelson Hotel in the New Mar­ket. Three days later, at the annual militia muster in public squares throughout the old town, those officers, like Jacques Viger, who followed their orders and read out Governor Gosford’s announcement of a loyalty test for both officers and men, were treated to deri­sive whistling and shouts. On the Champ de Mars, all but two officers and two enlisted men broke ranks and left in protest. After a summer of mass rallies in the countryside, on September 25th a meeting was held in the Nelson Hotel to found a patriotic militia, Les Fils de la liberté, to counter the loy­alist forces known as the Doric Club. Over the

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Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?

next month, Les Fils organized and drilled companies in each of the city’s neighbourhoods. On November 6th, they held their first general muster in the courtyard at the back of Bonacina’s tavern on Notre-Dame. As they emerged, members of the Doric club pelted them with stones. For several hours the two forces clashed in street fights throughout the west end of the town centre. In the early evening, a large contingent of Tories converged on the Papineau House on Bonsecour Street, threatening to pull it down. Only the intervention of the British Army saved the home of the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly. The crowd’s ire then turned to the offices of the Vindicator. Here, the army refused to help until it was too late: the presses and stock were all destroyed. Later that evening, Thomas Starrow Brown, the Patriote leader who would later command their forces in the battle of St-Charles, was viciously attacked in the very shadow of Notre-Dame as he made his way home along St-François-Xavier Street. These violent confrontations, which largely saw Tories attacking Patriotes, were the principal justification given by the colonial authorities for their declaration of martial law on November 17th. The Rebellions of 1837–38 had begun.36 Montreal was saved the ravages of war. During the rebellions, it served as the loyalist military headquarters and, after a semblance of peace had been imposed, as the home of the dictatorship of the Special Legislative Council. Between 1838 and 1841, this council met behind the heavily guarded doors of the Château de Ramezay to rewrite the statutes of Lower Canada. Here, they imposed new laws governing property, bankruptcy, banking, marriage, labour, and policing. It was a utilitarian transformation from the top down that limited, whenever it could not eliminate outright, socially defined rights to property. In keeping with the precepts of the new political economy, the council accorded an almost absolute autonomy to economic matters. It was the triumph of a particular, narrowly defined public good. Nowhere was this rejection of an inclusive, democratic ideal clearer than in the council’s fateful decision of November 14, 1839, to endorse a forced union of Upper and Lower Canada. Union meant that the public good would in future be defined by the Governor in Council aided by a consultative legislative assembly, elected through a male-only, property-based franchise. It was to be an assembly in which the use of the French language was banned and where, despite the much larger Lower Canadian population, the two former colonies were to have equal representation. These measures were explicitly de­signed to ensure that those of the English-speaking minority who thought of themselves as British enjoyed majority status.



Towards a Cubist Portrait 211

Canadiens were to be assimilated as quickly as possi­ble. Isolated behind the thick stone walls of the Château, these powerful men had chosen to redefine the public good in Canada as a fundamentally imperialist venture. This wilful denial of the cosmopolitan nature of colonial society would be hotly contested, but it marked a significant turning point. It nar­rowed democratic options and strengthened ethnic, religious, national, and gen­ der divisions.

A Cubist Study in Class Formation Physicians and surgeons, like architects, engineers, and dentists, were craftsmen who succeeded in transforming their trades into professions over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A profession enjoys a legal monopoly over a particular area of knowl­edge and controls who can share in that monopoly. In Canada, the first modern professions to join the clergy in the legal exercise of such a monopoly were notaries and lawyers. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that other groups joined them.37 Colonial authorities had issued licences for the practice of medicine in Lower Canada from the late eighteenth century, and doctors were recognized by the state for examination pur­poses. However, many physicians and surgeons practised without a licence, and there was no legal recognition of a body of practitioners until the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Lower Canada was created in 1847. The medical profession – as physicians and surgeons succeeded in becoming by the end of the nineteenth century – has largely written its own history. The following modest survey of the difficulties in establishing who was and who was not a doctor in the second quarter of the nineteenth century in Montreal is offered as an example of what a cubist portrait might look like. Multiple sightings of our object of inquiry, each based on a single source, allow a composite, complex, and contradictory provisional image to appear, one that fundamentally challenges approved professional narratives. Determining who practised as a doctor in Montreal prior to the establishment of the College of Physicians and Surgeons is not a simple task.38 There was a remarkable turnover of doctors in the 1820s. Of the 47 doctors identified from period sources (see table 7.1), only 6 (in bold) are known to have been there for the entire decade, while a further 11 (in italics) were there for at least six years.

Table 7.1  • Doctors in Montreal in the 1820s Name (year licensed) Abbott, Jonas Arnoldi, Daniel (1795) Bender, François Xavier Blackwood, John Caldwell, William (1817) Fay, Cyrus Franklin, K. Grasset, Henry Hérigault, J.B. Hooper, George Kenelley, Dr D.T. Kimber, René J. (1811) Lee, M.C. Loedel, Henry (1788) Munro, Henry (1795) Nelson, Robert (1814) Paine, Martyn Robertson,William (1815) Selby, George Selby, William Sheldon, Robert Smyth, Andrew

Doige Doige Apprentices Census Tax Roll Assignments Protests Census 1819 1820 1825 1825 1831

√ √ √ 1824–29 Name* √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ Name √ √ 1822–32 √ √ √ 1821–25 √ √ √ √ Name √ √ √ √ √ Estate √ √ 1825–29 Name Name √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ Name √ √ √ √ 1826–30 √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ 1820–27 √ √ √ √ √ √ Name √ √ √ √ √ √ √ Name Name Name √ √

Trask, Benjamin √ √ Christie, Dr √ Name √ Farudeau, Joseph √ Holmes, Andrew F. (1816) √ 1824–29 √ √ Rice, Abner (1804) √ √ Sleigh, William Wilcocks √ Berthelet, Benjamin 1824–28 √ Name √ Brown, David 1825–29 Gosselin, Barnabé 1827–31 Name √ Lusignan, Alexandre (1819) 1827–30 Name Name √ Rae, John 1825–29 Stephenson, John (1821) 1822–32 Name √ Vallée, Guillaume J. (1824) 1826–30 Name √ Ferris, J.H. (1804) √ Lebourdais, J.B. (1811) √ √ Marshall, Dr Name √ Spink, William √ Valois, Michel F. (1826) Name √ Walker, Dr John (1825) √ Andrews, Michel √ √ √ Caldwell, John √ √ Keegan, Dr Thos. G. (1828) √ Pardey, William (1817) √ √ Quesnelle, Dr √ Spooner, Dr John R. (1828) √ * These entries provided a name but not a confirming occupational title. Sources: Thomas Doige, An Alphabetical List, 1819 and 1820; Manuscript census returns, 1825, Fonds Viger, s hm ; and Monetary Protest File, mbhp .

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Fourteen different doctors hired a total of 39 apprentices over the decade; 31 were local lads from the island of Montreal.39 Apprenticeships could cost up to £25 and were generally for three to four years. Only half of the masters appear in either edition of Doige. Of the 9 masters with 21 apprentices working for them in 1825, only 5 appear in the nominal census, while Viger’s detailed table of occupations notes the existence of only 10 apprentices.40 Two of the 39 apprentices from the 1820s, William Bélin and Jean-Guillaume Vallée, appear in the 1831 census, and 7 of the 23 doc­ tors listed in that census had not appeared in any of the sources from the 1820s. In short, only half of the doctors known to be practising in Montreal are confirmed by period sources to have been there at any one moment. If anything, the 1830s seems to have been an even more turbulent period for doctors than the 1820s. Only 7 from the 1831 census appear among the 39 doctors listed in the 1842 census. None of the apprentices from the 1820s appear in 1842, and only three of their masters do. Now the 1830s saw doctors take prominent political stands. It was as a magistrate that Dr William Robertson called on the troops to fire on the Patriote crowd in the 1832 Montreal West by-election. In 1834, Drs Alexandre Lusignan and Robert Nelson led the struggle of the first elected town council to have the port quarantined after the city was hit by its second cholera epidemic in three years. The council failed and 913 people died. Dr Wolfred Nelson led the Patriote forces to victory at St-Denis in November 1837 and upon capture spent seven months in the newly erected prison on the outskirts of Montreal, where Dr Daniel Arnoldi would give a clean bill of health to Patriote prisoners before they were hanged by the neck until dead. Dr Robert Nelson wrote and proclaimed in February 1838 the Declaration of Independence of Lower Canada and commanded the unsuccessful invasion of November 1838. Undoubtedly the problematic nature of the 1842 census41 added to the movement caused by politics, but MacKay’s, a new city directory that first started to appear annually that year, confirms rather than clarifies the scale of the turnover (see table 7.2). MacKay’s lists 42 physicians, surgeons, and dentists in 1842–43, 52 in 1843–44, and 53 in 1844–45, for a total of 61 doctors representing 34 of the 39 enumerated in the census. At least 24 of the 27 doctors who appear in MacKay’s but not in the census were not mentioned in any previous source. Of the doctors already identified, only William Robertson and Benjamin Berthelet reappear, while Francis Badgley

Table 7.2  •  Physicians (P), surgeons (S), and dentists (D) practising in Montreal according to the MacKay Directories, 1842–1845

42–43 43–44 44–45

42–43 43–44 44–45

Arnoldi, D. PS PS PS Meilleur, J.B. PS PS PS Arnoldi, F.T.C. PS* PS* PS* Minshall, John PS Berthelet, B. PS PS PS Mount, E.H. PS PS PS Badgley, F. PS Munro, P. Jr. PS PS PS PS PS PS* Nelson, H. PS Beaubien, Pierre D D Nelson, Wolfred PS PS PS Bernard, Dr Bibaud, G. PS PS PS Nichols, J.B. D PS PS PS Bowie, James PS PS O’Doherty, D. Bruneau, O.T. PS* PS* PS* Payn, C.H. PSD Br(o)usseau, D.P. PS PS PS Parsons, S.C. D Campbell, C.A. PS PS PS Perrault, J.A. PS PS PS Campbell, G. W. PS PS PS* Picault, P.E. PS PS PS PS PS PS Prosch, G.W. D Carter, C. Charlebois, B. PS PS PS* Richelieu, J. PS PS PS PS PS PS Robertson, W. PS* PS* Cushing, F. Dockrey, R. PS Robinson, S. PS PS PS Drolet, Dr PS Rose, George D Fisher, Arthur PS PS PS Rosenstein, J.G. PS Fraser, W. PS PS PS Rowand, Dr PS PS Scripture, G. D D D Gauthier, L. Godfrey, R. PS Scott, A. PS PS Guerin, H. PS PS Sewell, S.C. PS* PS* PS* Hall, Archibald PS* PS* PS* Smith, W.P. PS PS PS Holmes, Andrew F. PS* PS* PS* Spooner, W. PSD PSD PSD PS PS Sutherland, Dr PS PS Kimber, R.J. Lebourdais, J.B. PS PS PS* Tavernier, L.F. PS PS PS Logan, D. D PSD PS Thorn, W. D McCulloch, Michael PS PS PS* Trestler, J.B.C. PS* PS* PS* PS PS PS Waller, S. PS PS PS McGale, B. McNider, William PS PS PS * Identified as a member of the Montreal District Medical Examination Board. Source: MacKay City Directories 1842–45.

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replaces Bélin and Vallée as the only apprentice from the 1820s to have his shingle out on a Montreal street. Immigration was a factor. In 1831, one Montrealer in six had immigrated from the British Isles over the previous six years, but only two of the doctors identified themselves as recent immigrants: Drs Martin and Ryan. Fourteen of the 23 households in this census contained no recent immigrants, while in the 7 other cases it would appear that the recent immigrant was a domestic servant. In 1842, 3 of the 39 households were completely composed of immigrants, those headed by Drs Waller, Logan, and Spooner, the latter from the United States. Three households were exclusively Canadien, those headed by Drs Charlebois, Perrault, and Trestler. The remaining households were a complex mix of immigrant and nativeborn, with the majority having at least three ethnicities present. Nine of these 31 households had a majority of immigrants. Two-thirds of the households had both Catholics and Protestants living together, and up to four different forms of Christianity were practised in certain households. The three available census returns furnish 82 demographic portraits of 69 doctors’ households between 1825 and 1842. The evolving patterns in figure 7.10 may take a few minutes to comprehend. This graphic is not simply displaying something that is already in the text, it is an analytical tool that needs to be read carefully. Each line represents a single household ordered by size. The jagged nature of these pyramids is the result of the differing gender compositions of the households, but overall there is a much greater presence of women in these households. Each line of the graph is to be read from the centre out, with the youngest members of the household clustered around the central line; as your eye moves along the line, the household ages, with the oldest household members on the periphery. These households are remarkably young. In only 6 of the 82 households is there any male over 60, although the majority of these apparently young households are not necessarily, or even likely, to be young families. Almost all of the households are much larger than the norm, but this is not due to the doctors having had particularly large families. These households contain a disproportionate number of adolescent and single adult women. The patterns differ between households in the town centre and those in the suburbs, with the former being considerably larger. There is, however, some convergence over time. The degree of continuity between 1825 and 1842 is all the more remarkable because only three doctors appear

280

< 129 < 184 < 282 < 436 > 437

< 50 < 70 < 96 < 145 < 146

< 74 < 115 < 175 < 321 > 322

Sources: John Lovell, Directory of the City of Montreal, 1880–81; and map ’s geo-referenced edition of Goad, 1880.

This rough indication reveals significant spatial patterns of density, which are made all the more important through the gendered analysis in table 9.1. The large properties owned by female religious orders, which generated proportionally few individual entries in Lovell’s, clearly account for the disproportionate size of the female-only lots. This contrasts sharply with the lots that were mixed according to Lovell’s. Fully two-thirds of all mixed spaces had density levels higher than the densest quintile of female-only spaces. For women who ran their own small businesses, such as dressmakers and milliners, space was at a premium.16 Exclusively male spaces, on the other hand, showed a much more equitable distribution that was nevertheless spatially concentrated. The high densities in northern St-Jacques ward, in eastern St-Laurent, and below the escarpment running out from the old St-Joseph ward (see figure 9.9) are suggestive of the close proximity between workshops, manufactories, and home, for none of these areas were noted for their factories. The highest concentration levels were, however, to be found in the city centre. By 1880, male sociability was structuring the city centre far more effectively than my earlier analysis of ownership by institutions and firms had indicated. The manner in which St-James Street, the emerging financial centre of the new dominion, stands out in this urban landscape speaks to the long-term significance of this novel gendering of space. Although there were important mixed lots as well, most notably the Bonsecours and Ste-Anne markets, the numbers of women in most were quite derisory. A densely occupied mixed lot on St-Gabriel, for example, was home to the

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Canada Hotel with 41 male occupants and only 1 female occupant, the proprietress. As this suggests male sociability extended to long-term residency by men in hotels and clubs. The Ottawa Hotel on St-James Street was home to 24 men; 27 stayed in the Richelieu on St-Vincent; 45 men and 2 women resided at St Lawrence Hall adjacent to Place d’Armes; and 52 men and 2 married women lived at the Windsor Hotel on Dominion Square in the west end. Understandably, it was the commercial and administrative buildings that showed where the power lay. Lovell’s listed 26 men as operating their businesses out of the City and District Savings Bank building on St-James, pictured in figure 9.11. The Merchant Exchange had 25; Barron’s Block 29; the Corn Exchange 33; the Harbour Commissioners Building 38; the courthouse 53; and the City Hall 57. These densely occupied office buildings gave employment to hundreds more people than the office-holders, proprietors, and partners listed in the city directory, but unlike the hotels, these were exclusively male sites. As the city centre was regendered male, new commercial areas developed at the centre of both bourgeois enclaves. These shopping districts, along Ste-Catherine in the west and adjacent to Laval University’s Montreal campus in the St-Denis/St-Hubert corridor, were among the few areas in the city, aside from churches, where young, single bourgeois women were allowed to go without a chaperon. Property ownership was central to this gendering of urban space because citizenship was directly linked to property. If an independence of means guaranteed an independence of thought, then an explicit gendering of the franchise as male denied any legitimacy to the independent thought of women. This was part of a much larger cultural conservatism that mobilized both religion and ethnicity in a concerted attack on both Enlightenment and democratic values. I think this cultural turn is only understandable in light of the increasingly unequal relations in marriage, but an important aspect of the relationship between property ownership and the gendering of urban space needs to be made explicit. First, men restricted the thoughts and actions of women, and then they effectively restricted their access to urban space. By 1880, the city centre had been successfully transformed into a highly segregated male space. This transformation was related to, but not directly caused by, changes in access to real property. Nor was it simply the result of the socio-economic changes of industrialization. Rather, this process was part of a much larger restructuring of both gender relations and our



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Figure 9.11  •  Montreal City and District Savings Bank building, 1870. Source: Canadian Illustrated News, October 1870, lac c -050388.

conception of the natural, which often preceded, certainly permitted, and in turn structured the changes in social relations so often associated with industrialization. Once established, these new forms of male sociability prepared the way for a corporate dominance of the city centre.

Constraining Agency This descriptive exploration of an early industrial city has stressed the ways in which differing forms of inequality and discrimination worked to reinforce one another. Each of the four principal sources used revealed

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differing aspects of these complex processes. If the analytical emphasis has been on the constraints rather than the options available, it is because so many of the constraints were new, and they worked to effectively limit options for young people, women, and many men of the popular classes. As a result, Montreal of the 1880s was a dramatically less free society than it had been in the 1820s. Religion, ethnicity, gender, and class were, as E.P. Thompson once put it, “the lines of force” redefining in an ever-narrowing manner how people related to each other, to things, and to nature. Yet, this descriptive survey has shown there to be substantial middling forces. They were, to be sure, almost without exception composed overwhelmingly of men. Nonetheless, this was not a polarized society where the majority of wage-earning households struggled to survive. It was, however, a society where the unprecedented inequalities of the formal economy reinforced and indeed exaggerated those earlier inequalities within the family that had given rise to the possibility of a new industrial order in the first place. These new gender and social dynamics shaped the constraints and choices people made, as they encouraged people to conceive of their relationships to nature in new ways. Between 1825 and 1880, urban density in Montreal increased eightfold, from 1,650 people to 12,850 people per square kilometre. It appears to have been such a different world than the one we now inhabit, where low-density suburban forms dominate the urban landscape. In North American historiography, since the 1960s, we have tended to explain this growth in suburbia as technologically driven. First railways, then streetcars, and finally automobiles explain why we have suburbs. This explanation begs the question why we would ever have wanted to have suburbs at all. I think the dynamics of density in nineteenth-century Montreal reveal the cultural and social basis for the subsequent creation of suburbia. It lay not in a technical ability to transform the world, but in a novel, greatly restricted, and qualitatively different vision of that world. Despite the remarkable increase in density levels, most families actually enjoyed more space, in many cases considerably more space, by the 1880s than their counterparts had in the 1820s or 1840s. To understand the historical significance of this change, we need to think of the dynamics of density qualitatively, rather than quantitatively. How did people conceptualize their lived environment and how did this in turn affect the environment? In 1825, streams, swamps, and hills shaped the boundaries of the various wards of the pre-industrial town. These natural features sanctioned



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a socially and demographically segregated townscape. Rentiers owned, by value, 60 per cent of the built environment, and fewer than one in four households owned their own home. The town centre was home to most of the leading families, while craft households and the unskilled were concentrated along differing suburban streets. Most adolescents lived with their masters rather than their parents, so the understandings of private and public space did not correspond to those of the nuclear family. By 1846, canals, conduits, dredging, harbour construction, and land subdivisions heralded the fundamentally altered relationship people were beginning to establish with their environment. These late pre-industrial physical transformations coincided with the social shift to earlier marriages, as the viability of independent status for young couples from the popular classes declined precipitously. The problems of residential overcrowding increased apace. And yet, by the 1880s, the ecological degradation that characterized early industrialization had not created exclusively working-class neighbourhoods. Instead, complex mixed neighbourhoods replaced the earlier patterns of social and demographic segregation. Youth now lived at home for much longer periods, while most owners of manufacturing and industrial facilities chose to live near their work and in all the popular-class neighbourhoods local landlords predominated. Adjacent to McGill, an elite garden suburb had developed; it was, however, the exception that proved the rule. Overwhelmingly Protestant, with most heads of households in select commercial, financial, or professional occupations (and hence working in a city centre that had been reconfigured as an almost exclusively male space), the residents of this neighbourhood were at odds with the dreams, aspirations, and lived experiences of the majority of bourgeois in the city, let alone of Montreal’s developing working class. The severing of the characteristic pre-industrial relationship between home and work redefined people’s life patterns and their family’s life cycles. Thus, it fundamentally altered people’s relationship to and their demands upon the environment. These changes led to substantially more complex, patriarchal, nuclear families and to a much greater public need to service these newly privatized spaces. The highly gendered dichotomy between home and work facilitated claims that all this was natural. Thus, this discursive appropriation of nature had an expanding material basis in the new urban spatial order. However, the systemic inequalities of gender, age, ethnicity, and class upon which this new order was constructed

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meant that the very real problems it posed for the environment could not be recognized. Indeed, in this allegedly natural order of individualized, bread-winning, male heads of household, there was less and less space for any recognition of the social at all. As the public options for the vast majority of people living in this city narrowed, they increasingly defined their world in terms of the private world of the family. In so doing, they began to conceptualize their family as the only world that mattered, because for most it had become the only area of their lives over which they could exercise any real control. This redefinition of the family as the only environment that counted has been historiographically most visible in the rise of the male breadwinner ideology within the popular classes and in the creation of new suburban vistas for certain of the middling and upper classes. In Montreal of the 1880s, however, it was most visible in the massive expansion of duplexes and triplexes below the escarpment and up the St Laurent corridor. Moving your family to a new four- or five-and-a half-room flat, complete with running water, your own balcony, or perhaps a backyard, was what constituted success for most working-class men. Within these new expanded spaces, diverse non-wage–based strategies of the married women and their daughters created more and better options for themselves and their families. Ironically, this primacy of the family was also visible in the decision of so many husbands and fathers in control of production and petty commerce, who could well afford to do otherwise, to choose to raise their families in these new industrial neighbourhoods. These men could affect their immediate world. They still had the power to act locally in redefining the nature of the public life of the neighbourhoods where they worked, lived, and invested. Neither their patriarchal role, nor their understanding of themselves as men, was limited to their family. It was, however, intimately tied to their new roles within the family and their dramatically narrowed visions of gender, social relations, and understandings of nature.

Conclusion

As this journey of discovery comes to an end, several different types of concluding remarks seem in order. First, I summarize my major findings before – in “the now of knowability” – engaging the recent historiography on liberalism. I conclude with the central question of this work: Why did we choose to industrialize? This is not a question about Montreal or Lower Canada or even Canada. It is a question that now concerns all of humanity. Making sense of such a complex phenomenon does require a clarity of purpose and of language that is often found wanting in the existing literature. In “Mr Green, with the lead pipe, in the library …,” I invoke the metaphor of a board game ‘who-done-it’ to clarify whom and what I am not discussing. This elimination of the ‘usual suspects’ sets the stage for brief discussions of what, where, and when we first industrialized before I conclude with my explanation of why we did choose to industrialize.

What Have We Seen? I started with a simple enough question. What social and economic changes permitted the industrial revolution? Simple but wrong, for this framing of the question granted both an autonomy to socio-economic changes and an agency to supra-human processes that I would eventually learn were mistakes. Nonetheless, in conceptualizing possible answers to this question I learnt from Jean Chesneaux and John Berger the importance of respecting the historical distance between ourselves and the objects of our enquiry. To better achieve this self-reflexive awareness of how different our time is from that which we study, I accorded primacy to sources rather than to evidence. This meant consciously grappling with the historical logic of my sources, and in dealing with the evidence they contained, I found Richard Rice’s distinction between phenomenal and epiphenomenal evidence particularly useful.

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I also benefited from Raphael Samuel’s reconceptualization of the Industrial Revolution as a process of combined and uneven development. Industrialization was not characterized by the progressive mechanization of production in larger and larger units. Instead, it involved the combined use of hand and machine tools in an expanding number of workshops and manufactories, called into being by the resolution of bottlenecks in production achieved by the early factories. In “Colonial States,” we saw how the staple theory privileged imperial forces in the understanding of colonies of settlement. This presumed hierarchy of spatial relations prefigured temporal and historical forces, and thus, by questioning the former, one necessarily re-evaluates the latter. Almost from its inception, my revisionism was facilitated by my being able to work with notarial archives, that is, with sources created by people doing things. The advantages of this differing emphasis were immediate: the long-established Laurentian thesis was shown to be fundamentally flawed. There was no “Empire of the St Lawrence.” Nor were exports the key to mercantile dominance. Most merchants served the vibrant urban craft-based economies or a rural world of diverse peasant households. The control of imports and transhipments to Upper Canada, rather than staple exports, explained the economic and political importance in the colony of select British mercantile houses. Exploring the colony’s “Internal Dynamics” raised the problem of essentialist reasoning, which in turn encouraged me to look to the transition debate for guidance. I soon realized, however, that the terms of this debate needed to be reconfigured to recognize the essentially political character of the ‘revolutionary’ path to capitalism. My theoretical privileging of the political significance of petty-commodity production went hand in hand with an understanding of banking capital as the cutting edge of liberal political economy. Highlighting the diversity of relations between craft production and merchant capital, my analysis indicated that most crafts were following an independent and hence democratic or ‘revolutionary’ path to capitalism. This historical reassessment was confirmed by a close analysis of the crisis of 1825. Montreal experienced not one, but two crises: the first in the late spring of 1825 and the second in the spring and summer of 1826. The first involved the failure of several dry-goods firms and a related auctioneering and brokerage firm, resulting in heavy losses for the Bank of Montreal. To recover, the bank restricted its lending by focusing on the more es-



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tablished firms, several of which were entering into shipbuilding for the British market. This new business meant that these firms, and their bank, faced very serious problems when news of the severity of the crisis of December 1825 in Britain reached the colony in March of 1826, signalling the onset of a global crisis. While this the first worldwide crisis of capitalism undoubtedly caused considerable hardship in Montreal, my analysis of its impact showed no widespread losses among the producing classes. An assessment of bank lending to craft producers established that most sectors were conspicuous by their absence. Bank credit appeared to be important for only a minority of crafts. The idea that craft producers enjoyed a relative independence was further reinforced by a qualitatively different reading of the hiring contracts of journeymen. A third of these contracts supported a ‘precocious proletarianization’ argument, but because these notarial deeds were created to chronicle the exceptional situations in particular trades, rather than the norm, I concluded that most trades faced no such existential problems. Through the metaphor of ‘Cuvier’s feather,’ I was able to critique the ahistorical denials of peasant agency implicit in the dominant interpretive frameworks used to understand rural society. A case study of firewood revealed significant social differentiation within the peasantry and balanced, roughly equitable, terms of trade between town and country. This study also, and perhaps more importantly, revealed that in this colony of settlement the hallowed distinction between internal and external factors, with its corresponding privileging of one over the other, was largely a fiction. It would take me a decade to develop a satisfactory alternative theory. My initial, provisional answer proved to be my last unalloyed structuralist analysis. In it, I redefined town/country relations as a synthesis of the relative weight of the differing paths in town and the degree of social differentiation within the peasantry. This privileging of social relations nonetheless contained my first recognition of the potential primacy of gender over class. I theorized that the greater retention of value by male skilled workers in the capital-goods sector was fundamentally a gendered process. Thus began a reassessment of the ‘things you know for sure.’ Through an exploration of the dynamics of agency and constraint, I developed an enhanced appreciation of the need for new ways of knowing and doing history. In essence, what we know is intimately linked to what we do and why we do it. My analysis revealed that the limitations of bourgeois scholarship, so evident in the dominant Anglo-American school of

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pragmatic empiricism that also shaped the Braudelian Annales school, were not transcended by progressive historiographical reflections within the socialist humanist tradition. The key to breaking free of these limitations lies, I argue, in recognizing that all historical sources were the product of unequal and unjust societies. A transformative historical theory and method must privilege precisely those elements and silences within each source that demonstrate this inequality in order to challenge injustice both then and now. This is fundamentally an ethical stance with important implications for historical praxis. By anchoring our analysis in the historical logic of each source, we eschew ahistorical abstractions of the evidence and reject supra-human explanations of causality. These insights were then applied to a case study of accounting records in the Newfoundland inshore fishery. These records revealed how credit served to obscure the scale and significance of the informal economy. As a result, we have allowed a highly gendered reification of the market to hide the key fact that in petty-commodity production women consume to produce, while men produce to consume. The increasingly patriarchal public face of community life, the ability of merchant capital to appropriate value from within the myriad transactions of the informal economy, the resultant geographic mobility of youth and its associated costs for the host communities, and the spread of waged labour all led to increased differentiation within the rural world. These multiple processes impacted the nature of town/country relations and on the political level undermined the democratic potential of the transition to capitalism. If, in the present, these insights help us to re-envisage the constitutional crisis in Lower Canada of the 1830s as primarily having been a debate between a moral and a liberal economy, this should not blind us to the historical costs of the processes involved, not the least of which saw ‘the liberal’ culturally reconfigured as thoroughly modern, while reducing complex societies to folk caricatures that fed the ethnically essentialist reasoning so characteristic of late nineteenth-century Canada. These profound changes in how the rural world was envisaged had their counterpart in the city, as illustrated by evolving tenant/landlord relations and the frontal assault on socially defined rights to property. This exploration of ways of knowing and doing history highlighted the primacy of self-reflective and critical engagements with historical sources. Such conversations across time and space require an ethical guide, and for



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our troubled present, the best I have found is to fully recognize the dialectic of agency and constraint. This process of change is how history happens. In “C’est du travail …,” I applied these lessons to four differing sources from the 1820s: an ordnance survey, city directories, census returns, and tax rolls. Each of the sources proved to be an eloquent statement by its author about how he envisaged the future. Each of these conflicting images attempted to make sense of the social logic of the change that was transforming Montreal. These attempts meant grappling with how order emerges from continuous change. Essentially political initiatives, they equipped select people and groups with the knowledge thought necessary not only to anticipate, but to control change. What then did these sources reveal? Pre-industrial Montreal was a highly segregated urban space. The distance between diverse social groups was not just spatial; it was political, cultural, and perceptual. Mobility was a favoured response to the inequalities of opportunity and outcome. Diversity of activity was characteristic of a society in which the lines of class, ethnicity, language, and religion were so fluid. What this hid from view was the increasing rigidity of gender divisions and roles. The bourgeois project of citizenship refashioned the urban landscape. Adams’ map presumed a clear demarcation between work and home that proved premature, but we should not think of this as either an error or a ‘bias’ in the source. His presumption was constitutive of the source’s historical logic. Understanding these inherent characteristics is what permits a historically informed conversation across centuries, one that surpasses superficial, post-modern understandings of representation. Doige’s commercial failure is historically eloquent testimony to the strength of the social forces arrayed against a liberal project promoting individualism, just as the truly remarkable changes that he recorded within such a short span of time speak to the scale of individual choices and the structural limits to these choices. The primacy he accorded the individual entry belies the fundamentally social nature of these processes. His vision of a self-regulating system of free individuals interacting in urban space proved to be both premature and, in the end, unworkable. We would be in error, however, were we to deny its widespread humanist, indeed revolutionary, appeal. The pioneering sociologist Jacques Viger would end his days in a religiously inspired, profoundly conservative antiquarianism. This personal rejection of the viability of an earlier liberal rationality was shared by many

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men of his class and social background. It speaks to the monumental political and conceptual defeat of 1837–38 and the profoundly anti-democratic nature of the subsequent top-down transformation of Canadian society. All this was, of course, still in the future when in August 1825 Viger embarked on his remarkable quest to understand his rapidly changing city. The analytical primacy Viger accorded to property was well placed. Here was both a bulwark of the old order and a powerful solvent that would dissolve millennial-old relationships between people, as well as longestablished understandings of nature. His concerns were more mundane and immediate, for overcrowding was a social problem that threatened the viability of the existing social order. Viger, like so many Patriote intellectuals, wanted liberal reform, not radical restructuring. Little did he know that liberal political economy would so transform his world that only a retreat into a mythical past would in the end offer him the solace he sought. The fundamental reason why the product of these empirically driven investigations of the past are thought to be routinely generated is that their authors were engaged in a thoroughly modern quest to understand the social. Their work parallels what so many of us, as academics, do now. We would so like to think that our work informs debates in an objective and unbiased manner that we are loath to admit the self-serving, fictional nature of their, and by extension our own, constructions. The alternative is, I argue, cubism, which offers a break from metanarrative. Why might it be useful? First, cubism forces us to recognize the partial nature of any historical construction. Second, it facilitates recognition of the multiple conflicting possibilities inherent in any historical situation. Third, it renders the retroactive self-validation of the present in the past more difficult to achieve, and this is an unqualified good. Fourth, it allows for the construction of complex multi-voiced and non-linear perspectives on the past. Finally, it allows for a democratic historical practice that is consistent with the potentially liberating character of digitally based history by ensuring that the limitations of any conversation with the past are transparent. Cubism thus allows for a refutable, complex, contextualized, and potentially cumulative understanding of the past. I demonstrated this new approach to sources by applying it to several sources we had already seen in earlier chapters. Recognition of the historical logic of monetary protests revealed a qualitatively more nuanced role for bank credit in pre-industrial Montreal. Extremely few craftsmen and no craftswomen appeared to have been allowed direct access to bank cap-



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ital. Their access was always mediated by a limited number of mercantile houses whose appropriation of value through discounting paralleled the credit system in the Newfoundland inshore fishery. In both cases, merchant capital consolidated emerging hierarchies among petty-commodity producers and formalized relations between those actively exchanging goods. It short, it undermined democracy by promoting inequality through an increasingly gendered and limiting conception of the economy. The assumed historical transition from payment for a task to payment for time, which has underpinned so much of the progressive scholarship on the making of the working class, was fundamentally challenged by the nature of the clothing provisions for apprentices hired by notarized deed in the 1820s. These cash payments were a gendered and age-based partial appropriation of value that fuelled differentiation within the popular classes. They also reflected how the choices people made could create a market of a completely different type. These changed conditions help us better understand the dynamics that led to the precocious crisis over the spring and summer of 1825, when the dependence on evolving craft communities by substantial parts of the mercantile community inverted the oft-assumed order of their relative importance and, indeed, of historical causality. It allows us to glimpse the scale of the potential challenge to the old order that the transformation of craft communities represented. The complexity and size of craft households that trained apprentices underscored the differentiation with craft communities and the significance of female labour: two working-age females for every three males active in production. In the 1820s, these women and men began to experience the dramatic change in the relative value of gendered property that would so transform the political economy of marriage. Understanding the scale and significance of this historic transformation requires, I argue, a profound reassessment of the relationship between the local and the global. Adopting a post-colonial perspective facilitates this paradigmatic shift by recognizing the cosmopolitan nature of settler colonialism. The dynamic interplay between imperial and colonial perspectives is highlighted by the 1832 by-election, which saw social and gender relations trump ethnic and nationalist concerns. This underscores the significance of the imposition of a consciously imperialist and masculine resolution to the political crisis of 1837. This denial of the democratic promise inherent in the liberal project can perhaps be best understood as the triumph of individual over collective

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rights. Ironically, the establishment of one of the most characteristically collective conceptualizations of capitalist culture – the corporatism of the liberal professions – illustrates how patterns for individual strategic advancement created the social and gendered basis for this eclipse of the social by the individual. Here, professional competency was effectively a by-product of the mastery of a gendered and propertied household. How did this new political economy of gendered property relations transform our relationship to nature? This remains the most important terrain for future research that I discovered on my journey. Here, I offer only a preliminary survey, one that raises more questions than it answers. The “Imaginary Lines” of property relations are revealed to have structured both understandings and representations of the past. My positing of the potential significance of inequality to the actual construction of historical sources is confirmed by this radical re-envisioning of reality that constructed a profoundly anti-democratic foundation for the new political and social order of Montreal in the 1840s. Illustrative of the apparent ideological and gendered coherency and social incoherency of this process was the emergence of a market in real estate. Key to understanding this contradiction is a reconceptualization of that most basic concept of historical materialism: a mode of production. What is at stake here is how we are to understand capitalism. What makes it different? What causal processes should we privilege? Rejecting the linear narrative of changes to production, reproduction, and our relationship to nature is but the first step in rethinking historical materialism. The ethical necessity of this critical self-examination and self-criticism must be foregrounded. The millions of victims of our theoretically erroneous and fundamentally flawed experiments in the engineering of socialism in the twentieth century demand no less. Humbly, step by step, without a radiant beacon guiding the way, as Jean Ferrat so long ago observed, we must once again take up the struggle before it is too late. The nature of this “Industrial City,” while differing in its particularities, illustrates in its broad outlines how wrong we have been. The presumption of a polarized segregation of industrial urban space – a staple since Engels’ pioneering sociological work on Manchester in the 1840s – is wrong on two fronts. It underestimates the extent of segregation characteristic of pre-industrial towns, and it fails to see the complexity of locally based relations in the new industrial neighbourhoods, which we have mistakenly understood to be working class.



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The multiple and subtle gradations of status and power within the emerg­ing classes were a fundamentally gendered process. Our privileging of class over the varied and complex gendered relations between people and between people and things blinded us to elementary patterns that reflected the dynamic nature of the choices people made. In many ways, this dual theoretical failure – the presumption of linearity and the related privileging of the social – is why we have so singularly misunderstood the relationships of intellectual and cultural processes to socio-economic change. The result has been a profoundly misleading presumption of a coherency that implied a necessary correspondence between production and the cultivation of hegemony. Denial of the necessarily incoherent and contradictory character of both political and cultural processes is what allowed us to posit causality in such a way as to deny agency. The myriad choices people made in industrializing societies were never predetermined, but they were increasingly circumscribed by the constraints imposed by and through the unleashing of unrestrained value creation. Labour was the sole basis of value in all hitherto existing modes of production. It no longer was in capitalism. The reconfiguration and relatively rapid rupture of use and exchange values created unprece­dented opportunities for capital accumulation that were highly disruptive, where not simply destructive, of long-established human values. Principal among the new constraints was our changed relationship to nature. An instrumentalist and alienated conceptualization of nature is fundamental to capitalism as a mode of production. A rule-based and abstract understanding of nature was a highly ideological and powerful new constraint. It underwrote the resurgence of fundamentalist forms of religion and ethnic essentialism, just as much as it justified the new laws of political economy. This profound reconceptualization of our species’ most basic place and relationship to the rest of reality transformed the very nature of our understanding of what it is to be human. Whole worlds of perception and understanding, so well illustrated by that Stó:lõ elder’s dreams, were denied only to reappear as disembodied Freudian urges or timeless Jungian archetypes in the industrial age. Overwhelmingly, environmental history has normalized rather than analysed this historic rethinking of our relationship to nature. As a result, a false dichotomy has camouflaged and effectively denied the very personal nature of this alienating process and, more importantly, our own responsibilities in the current crisis.

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The personal and familial nature of the challenge posed to those who first experienced this new mode of production is, I think, one of the important discoveries on my journey, for it underscores what for me is the most important lesson to draw from almost forty years of research. Suprahuman explanations of causality are not only fundamentally misleading, they effectively deny the only way forward to a more humane and sustainable future, indeed any future at all.

The Now of Knowability To mark the millennium, the editors of the Canadian Historical Review opened a forum for leading members of our profession to reflect on issues that they considered likely to be of defining importance in the coming years. Unquestionably, the most influential contribution was “The Liberal Order Framework” by Ian McKay. It has been at the centre of an animated debate ever since. McKay proposed that for historians “the category of ‘Canada’ should henceforth denote a historically specific project of rule … to wit liberalism.”1 He followed up this provocative suggestion with a stimulating discussion in Rebels, Reds, and Radicals of the theory and method needed to understand those who opposed this liberal project.2 Reasoning Otherwise,3 his Macdonald Prize–winning book, is the first of a projected threevolume history of how the left has taken on this project and thereby partially transformed Canada. In the interim, a 2006 conference at the Centre for Canadian Studies at McGill resulted in a wide-ranging and largely critical collection of essays to which McKay responded with a profound restatement of the framework.4 Eclipsed first by social history and then by the cultural turn, political and intellectual history have seen a marked renewal in both Quebec5 and elsewhere. While the Canadian debate over liberalism is unquestionably an integral part of this larger renaissance of what had once been the mainstay of historiography, it also speaks to the contemporary significance of neo-liberalism. Long associated with the political economy of Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, and the Washington consensus forged in the 1970s by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, neo-liberalism is not just, nor even primarily, a set of macro-economic policies. It is a worldview that holds that an idealized set of market relations is the appropriate framework to guide, not just fiscal policy, but all



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human relations. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval have encapsulated this particularly clearly in their succinct definition of neo-liberalism as governing by competition.6 This radically reductionist approach to the complexity of human affairs has been particularly successful in advanced capitalist countries. In contrast to the Global South, where the destruction wrought is far greater,7 in the privileged North all of the basic terms of reference in any political, social, or cultural exchange have been subtly, but effectively, turned inside out. Over the past thirty-five years, neo-liberalism has qualitatively transformed perceptions of citizenship, identity, social and gender relations, and, to a remarkable degree, personal, indeed intimate, relations, while justifying the most concerted attack on the environment in the history of our species. Remarkably, and this is I think key to its success, almost none of my students have ever heard of neo-liberalism. It is the silently killing mantra of our times. Despite offering refuge to a limited number of critics, the academy has been a key strategic target for the realization of this massively transformative project. This is not just the displacement of collegial forms of governance by centralized corporate managerial strategies, nor is it the development of professional schools at the expense of core programs in the arts and sciences – those are but the outward signs of a much more far-reaching process. Who attends university, at what cost, who the teachers are, what it is we research, and where, how, and for whom we write have all changed. The rise to hegemonic status of neo-liberalism within the academy, as the common sense of our time, has made the unacceptable not only acceptable, but for most unquestionable.8 The impact of neo-liberalism’s success on the debate about liberalism has been complex, for it has affected its “now of knowability” in two quite contradictory ways. On the one hand, the widespread acceptance that there is no alternative to the market encourages an uncritical acceptance of economics. Instead of it being a terrain of engagement and struggle, it is something taken for granted. This frees scholars to focus on intellectual and political processes as if they operated on a self-contained plane, unsullied by considerations of self-interest, value creation, and appropriation, or social relations more generally. As a result, the primary task these scholars set for themselves is to trace the lineage of particular modes of thought. On the other hand, for the distinct minority who still cling to the belief that another world is possible, years of largely defensive struggle

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against neo-liberal advances have made us acutely aware of how allencompassing the liberal worldview really is and how damaging the systematic privileging of the individual over the social inevitably is. As this might suggest, there is a temporal, often generational, dimension to any refusal to accept as legitimate the neo-liberal claim to autonomy for economics. Thus, McKay’s attempt to develop a critical imaginary in order to help transform the world is for many of his younger critics simply an outmoded ideal, not worthy of serious engagement. It was left to his almost exact contemporaries, Ruth Sandwell, Bruce Curtis, and the late Jean-Marie Fecteau, to recognize and in varying ways endorse the essentially political character of his subversive project.9 Sadly, Jean-Marie’s telling critique, the one that most fully grasped the link between politics and economics, remained unfinished at the time of his death. Viewed from the perspective of this study, McKay’s framework is both too broad and too narrow and as a result we run the risk of seriously misunderstanding not only nineteenth-century Canadian society, but also the basis of contemporary neo-liberalism. McKay defined the values of liberalism as liberty, equality, and property based on the “epistemological and ontological primacy of the category of the individual [… conceived as a] human being who is the ‘proprietor’ of him- or herself.”10 This confounds liberalism with possessive individualism, the new perception that C.B. Macpherson argued had come to characterize English political thought in the seventeenth century.11 Liberalism was a product of the early nineteenth, not the seventeenth century. To be sure, liberals and some commentators have traced the ancestry back to an earlier time, but this required, as McKay himself recognized, “an aggressive rereading and recontextualization” of all of the earlier thinkers, for none of them had elevated the market to a high-level abstraction “that stripped it of its relationship to other activities, and reimagined it as a special realm of natural, autonomous and automatically self-regulating processes.”12 And yet it was this “central principle of our economic and social order” that constituted the decisive epistemological break in and of the nineteenth century. None of the many critics of McKay took him to task for so forcefully identifying the problem and then refusing to integrate it into his defi­ nition, because if anything they tended to assign an even greater primacy and autonomy to political thought than McKay did. Michel Ducharme’s Macdonald Prize–winning book on liberalism in Lower Canada illustrates



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this tendency exceptionally well.13 Ducharme posits two forms of liberalism: a constitutional liberalism that dates from John Locke in the late seventeenth century and a revolutionary liberalism that dates from JeanJacques Rousseau in the mid-eighteenth century. Neither has any connection at all to the core liberal belief in the autonomy of economics, for both significantly predate even the earliest works in classical economics by James Steuart and Adam Smith and are generations removed from the first full articulations of liberal thought by David Ricardo, John Mill, and Jeremy Bentham. Ducharme argues that until 1810 constitutional liberalism dominated in Lower Canada, but then revolutionary liberalism gained the upper hand and there resulted a “sterile” thirty-year debate that only ended with the defeat of the Patriotes in 1837. By denying any economic dimension to the political debates of the early nineteenth century, Ducharme undercuts McKay’s work in two ways. First, he argues that liberalism is not new and the form of it that triumphed in the mid-nineteenth century was but a renewal of the early Patriote leader Stanislas Bédard’s more reasonable variant of liberalism. Second, the imperialist nature of the liberal project to remake the myriad societies then occupying the northern half of North America is simply lost from view in Ducharme’s analysis. Here is a Macdonald Prize–winning book that would have made Sir John A. proud. By failing to integrate as a defining characteristic of liberalism the radically new principle that economics is a natural, autonomous selfregulating set of processes, McKay’s framework is not only conceptually too broad, but ironically historically too narrow. Indeed, at one point he described that key moment in the establishment of liberal rule, Confederation, as involving “not many more, when all is said and done, than a few dozen white men.”14 In a less rhetorical flourish, he would analyse the thirty-year process that culminated in Confederation as a fundamentally top-down “passive revolution” initiated by lords Durham and Sydenham.15 Unquestionably, the military dictatorship of the Special Council from 1838 to 1841 imposed a new political order on Lower Canada. Furthermore, as I have argued, the forced union of the Canadas marked a watershed, for when a limited democracy was restored, there was no serious attempt to undo the damage. Already by the 1840s, many Montrealers, mostly men, but mainly from the popular classes, found this new liberal order to their liking. In 1849, thousands defended their positions despite danger to life and limb in the streets of Montreal. Almost twenty years

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later, by Confederation, support for this worldview would have been widespread indeed. In light of this broad appeal, to conceptualize the complex processes whereby a moral economy was displaced by a liberal one as essentially an external elitist imposition16 was to fail to understand how and why this new order resonated so broadly and, more importantly, to hide inadvertently from view those who would pay the greatest costs. I think there is a lesson here for our troubled times. I very much doubt that the neo-liberal and highly gendered remaking of Canada since 1976 can be properly understood, and I know it cannot be combatted if we fail to understand how and why it resonates with such large swaths of both the working and middle classes. I strongly suspect the same could be said for all advanced capitalist countries. No one can, I think, read McKay’s robust defence and restatement of his framework without being struck by the immense erudition and the extensive knowledge of contemporary theoretical reflection upon which it is based. In terms of a respect for historical distance that my own method privileges, however, it is also equally clear that this emphasis upon current debates reduces the ontological and epistemological significance of those nineteenth-century sources that continue to bear witness to the changing nature of that society. Put simply, Gramscian concepts as currently understood are offered as supra-human processes to conceptually organize a new meta-narrative. Nowhere is this clearer than in the inability of the framework to come to grips with the most important cultural transformations that accompanied and, in unique but important ways, constituted the new order. In British North America, the triumph of a liberal order was indissociable from a dramatic transformation in both the practice of established Christian faiths and the exercise of ethnic essentialism. A moral economy was replaced by moralizing ones that each presented itself as representing a divinely sanctioned natural order. This was as true of Protestant, English-speaking British North America as it ever was of French-Canadian or Irish Catholic communities.17 This was a fundamentally gendered and gendering process. What it meant to be a woman or a man changed in such a way as to open up novel cultural and political spaces for organized religion and ethnic identities that had profound implications for how people understood their relationship to nature. The two most important contributions to the history of Montreal since Louise Dechêne’s Habitants et marchands illustrate the complexity of this



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multi-faceted transformation in differing ways. Bettina Bradbury’s Groulx and Clio prize–winning Wife to Widow18 compares the experience of widowhood for a group of women married in the 1820s with a similar-sized group married in the 1840s. The differences in their life experiences were remarkable. I have already discussed how their planning for marriage and eventual widowhood reflected the rapidity with which highly gendered liberal understandings of socially defined rights to property progressed. Here, I would like to underscore how many of these women in the context of post-rebellion Lower Canada looked to and created new forms of Christian engagement as their way of bringing order to a world of continuous and unprecedented change. The idea that novel and temporally limited logics of modernity underpinned the restructuring of ethnic communities is also at the heart of Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton’s extraordinarily rich examination of the ethnic and cultural diversity of demographic regimes in late nineteenthcentury Montreal.19 Rather than a homogenizing modernity that normalized family patterns, they found continued and indeed in certain respects increasing diversity as the families they followed navigated the everchanging world of Montreal between 1840 and 1900. The remarkable patterns of intergenerational social mobility they found for Irish Catholics and the quite differing conclusions they drew, from either Bradbury’s or my own work, on the opportunities for change underscore the importance of periodization in history, as much as they do our differing theoretical starting points.20 The profound rethinking of our species’ relationship to nature is the most important legacy of our asking why we chose to industrialize. In redefining the very nature of nature, nineteenth-century Montrealers, like city dwellers throughout the North Atlantic world, changed their conception of the environment. This urban transformation preceded and defined what most historians in Canada, following an American model, have mistaken for environmental history. The last decade has seen a plethora of studies on angling, hunting, national parks, conservationism, and the wilderness – all reconfigured as nature. The most astute of these openly recognize the limits of their investigations,21 but as a field we are far from any seriously critical engagement with the profoundly personal and masculinist appropriation of the family as the only environment that really counts. These diverse historiographical strands involving politics, religion, gender, cultural identities, demography, and the environment are, from

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the perspective of now, knowable in new ways. Their interconnectedness can no longer be easily dismissed. It is the seriousness of the planetary crisis that we as a species have created that forces us to recognize linkages that were always there but whose importance we had ignored, in part because our conceptual tools presumed a fictional order and rationality to capitalism. Analysing the complexity of this mode of production and its fundamental incoherencies and contradictions will require new conceptual tools. Of necessity, those tools will be fundamentally political, for these are questions of power. In this struggle, historians have a particular responsibility. Neo-liberalism denies the importance of both time and place. As we have repeatedly seen in this study, both time and place matter. They were vital to how people conceived of a different future, just as they are essential to imagining viable alternatives for humanity now. How we as historians can best challenge neo-liberalism is a subject upon which there can, of course, be substantial debate. But let us not allow those differences to stop us from taking up this urgent task.

Mr Green, with the lead pipe, in the library … History rarely, if ever, affords the certainty of a board game, but there is some merit in reviewing who, what, and where before I discuss why we chose to industrialize. So you may imagine yourself comfortably ensconced in the sitting room of a large English country home, drinks have been served to a disparate collection of characters, and I, looking very professorial, stand in front of a roaring fireplace. As Lucien Febvre long ago observed, the language of an age is an essential element of its outillage mental, or mental toolkit. Understanding a historical period means understanding the meaning of the terms and the mental references of an age. People can give new meanings to words, and this choice to use an older word in a new way, rather than developing a new word appropriate to the changed circumstance and meaning, is almost never innocent, for the power of the older meaning often sanctions or legitimates, when not simply hiding, the novelty of the new. And so it is with two of our story’s key institutions and their related players: ‘markets’ and ‘property.’ Markets are very old and they have existed in many differing types of societies. Markets are no more capitalist than is farming or craft production. They are simply a socially sanctioned, and generally highly regulated,



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means of exchanging goods. They arise from the existence of surpluses, and so where they exist, they encourage the development of specialized labour. Academics often juxtapose production for the market to subsistence production, but in all European colonies of settlement of the early modern world, markets existed before production. Like property regimes and their related legal systems, particular and historically grounded understandings of markets accompanied the settlers as they appropriated other peoples’ land as their own. Trade goods then helped define the character of each colony of settlement. Thus, markets were both an integral part of colonial life and a defining element of the relationship between a colony of settlement and the rest of the world. These markets were historically rooted human institutions and therefore were qualitatively different from the abstract, ahistorical concept of ‘the market’ one encounters in bourgeois economic theory. They were also historically distinct from the markets typical of industrial capitalism. Pre-industrial markets were socially constrained; they were both limited and limiting. Whether it was the local agricultural markets of Place Royale and the New Market or the distant market for timber in Liverpool, these were all highly regulated places of exchange. Only markets in luxury goods were at all ‘free,’ and they frequently illustrated the dangers inherent in unregulated exchange. Market regulations reflected the social values of pre-industrial societies and were designed to ensure that markets fulfilled social needs, whether it was the need for firewood in Montreal or the need for a secure supply of timber for naval construction in Britain. To be sure, people tried to manipulate these markets, to ‘corner’ the market so to speak, but that was why markets were so closely regulated. These were not places where exchange value was systemically allowed to trump use value. Historians have paid relatively little attention to markets, preferring instead to focus on merchants, who all too often were simply assumed to be the principal agents in markets. In fact, merchants had little or no role to play in most pre-industrial markets, since merchants evolved to serve long-distance trade or, as in the case of country merchants, to act as intermediaries between distinct regions. Like markets, merchants and merchant capital are very old and have existed in many different types of societies. Merchants no more signal the presence of capitalism than does the presence of markets. Merchants accumulate their capital by buying cheap and selling dear, and so they have a particular relationship to time and space. Goods in

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abundance at one time of the year may be scarce at another. Goods in abundance in one place may be scarce in another. Merchants accumulate capital by profiting from these temporal and spatial differences. The exchange of trade goods that helped define the character of each colony of settlement was under the control of merchants. Thus, from their inception, merchants and merchant capital played an integral part in the relationships between colonies of settlement and the rest of the world. However, merchants were not necessarily essential to the internal markets of these colonies. Over time, merchants did insert themselves into the myriad exchanges within colonies. This could involve establishing control over production in a manner that compromised the independence of petty-commodity producers. In neither firewood nor codfish did this prove to be the case, but certainly merchant influence and sometimes control was in evidence in pre-industrial Montreal, where control was by no means limited to the exceptional case of the shipyards and their colonial-builts. Nonetheless, in most cases examined here, merchants serviced rather than controlled production. In all cases, however, merchant capital formalized economic exchanges by expressing them in terms of a monetary equivalent. In European law, the distinction between movable and immovable property goes back to antiquity. For the better part of the last millennium, these two types of property provided the legal basis for the primary unit of production in Europe, and therefore in its colonies of settlement, the family-based household. As we have seen, this was a gendered but roughly equitable distinction. With the dramatic change in the relative value of movable and immovable property, both conceptually and practically the meaning of property changed qualitatively. When Mr Clements told his son, Mark Twain, “to invest in land, they’re not making any more of it,” he was wrong. In the mid-nineteenth century, property was being created on an unprecedented scale. It was, however, a new type of property, stripped of social constraints and carrying with it a greatly expanded bundle of rights for the individual property owner. Rentier capital was not the product of this new type of property and its related property market, for, like merchant capital, rentier capital long predates capitalism. The capital accumulation characteristic of rentiers consolidates, rather than creates, social inequality. Since capitalism is so remarkably good at creating inequality, capitalist towns and cities offer fertile ground for the further development of rentier capital, and as we have



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seen, Montreal was no exception. But this symbiotic relationship hides a basic contradiction between capitalism and this earlier form of accumulation. While capitalism tends to collapse time and space, rentier capital grows through a disciplined use of time to better control space. Indeed, the rapid turnover of property for immediate capital gain characteristic of capitalist property markets is an anathema to rentiers, for it undermines their long-term strategic plans. Thus, as was the case with merchant capital but for differing reasons, rentier capital was over the long-term weakened by the development of capitalism and its particular forms of property relations. The historical limits placed on older forms of capital accumulation by capitalism were evident to the critics of this new social order by the midnineteenth century, most notably in the work of Karl Marx. These increasingly apparent limitations did not mean, however, that these older forms did not contribute significantly to the changes that permitted industrialization; it just meant that one should not mistake their contribution for the more fundamental processes and agents at work.

What Is Industrialization? Having eliminated two of the more reprobate characters, we may now turn our attention to what. How are we to conceive of the means used? First, however, a further point of clarification is necessary. Even the most casual reader of this book will no doubt have noticed my frequent recourse to binary opposites. I naturally prefer to think of them as dialectical relationships, but be that as it may, I have introduced an inordinate number of such tension-filled relationships: qualitative evidence vs quantitative evidence, phenomenal evidence vs epiphenomenal evidence, men vs women, popular classes vs dominant classes, pre-industrial society vs industrial society, revolutionary path vs non-revolutionary path, internal economy vs external economy, moral economy vs liberal economy, informal economy vs formal economy, cubism vs perspective, analytical vs narrative, invisible lines of property vs visible lines of segregation, and, underpinning the entire work, bourgeois history vs historical materialism. The question animating this book requires an explicit engagement with the dialectical relationship between past and present. I am trying to explain why something happened in a particular past from the perspective

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of a quite specific but qualitatively different present. Appearances to the contrary, my repeated use of dialectical relationships to help explain aspects of this past is not an endorsement of a clear-cut, either/or world. These relationships are heuristic devices: means of better understanding a complex subject. They do, however, underscore that we are not dealing with an academic abstract question, but rather with a question of struggle. Opposing ideals, values, interests, and dreams have been at work here, as they were and are in every human society. However, the stakes were higher here, for industrialization has transformed the world more than any other human initiative has, but as I have repeatedly stressed, the participants would not have known this to be the case. Their motivations should not be confused with our need to understand this fundamental turning point in human history. For more than a century, investigators have been more concerned with means than with motives. Following the lead of Arnold Toynbee, they have thought of the means as a series of practical measures: enclosures, protec­ tive tariffs, canals, technical improvements, efficient internal markets, all supported by an effective merchant marine and navy. If mentioned at all, the broader intellectual climate was considered only in a supporting role: it was an “age of improvement.” As we have seen, this analytical approach favoured a locally based explanation whereby England became the model. Ironically, as a result, the significance of the local was elsewhere denied, for a model necessarily implies it is applicable in other times and places, where local conditions differ. Furthermore, this pragmatic explanation assumes a fixed human nature: faced with similar options, people will react in a similar manner. This approach was the precursor of rational choice theory, currently the hegemonic intellectual framework in bourgeois economics. Two specific points seem to follow from this critique. First, the local should be considered as important but always in relation to the larger world, for these were not separate entities. The cosmopolitan nature of colonial life meant that the global worked through the local. Second, rather than assume a fixed human nature, historians need to explain why people reacted in a similar manner even though their local conditions differed. A more general, concluding, observation about means also seems in order. The means used were of sufficient import that they dramatically transformed the world without engendering a mass revolt. Thus, we are dealing



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with most unusual means: they are endowed with extraordinary powers to transform and yet they must have seemed, if not natural, at least acceptable. Indeed, they were quite possibly conceived as legitimate.

Where Did It Happen? Prior to 1850 the list is a short one: England, Scotland, Belgium, the northeastern United States, the Canadas, and France. It did not happen earlier in either of the historical European centres of merchant capital: Holland and the Italian city-states. Nor did it happen in the historically richest European empires of Spain and Portugal or in any of their numerous colonies or former possessions. It did not happen in any slave colony. Nor did it happen in any non-European society. I think any historical explanation of why we chose to industrialize must account for this extremely limited initial geography. Max Weber, in a 1904 essay cited most often by people who have not read it, suggested a historical relationship between extremist sects of Protes­ tantism in the Reformation and the ‘spirit’ of capitalism. I see no reason to go back that far, to an intellectual tradition shared by so few. The countries that were the first to industrialize all shared in the values of the Enlightenment, with its critique of absolutism, its privileging of the individual, and its belief that the world was knowable. In all of these countries, intellectuals, overwhelmingly men, debated the merits of the emerging economic and political project that was liberalism. These ideas were antithetical to ancien régime values, and as we have seen, they opposed the moral economy that governed pre-industrial economic life. These were not ideas that could find wide acceptance among the slave-owning classes in the non-settler European colonies. These ideals, values, interests, and dreams for the future did not constitute a plan. In their most articulated form, in the work of Benthamite utilitarians, they did constitute a coherent alternative project for the state, which in the exceptional conditions of post-rebellion Lower Canada could be imposed by the Special Council. Although this was a unique case, all of the countries that first industrialized experienced some form of dramatic reconstruction of their state coincident with industrialization. All of them emerged from the travails of industrialization as recognizably democratic states whose version of popular sovereignty privileged a form of male suffrage as the norm

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for citizenship. In each of these countries, the incredibly long and difficult struggle to achieve even formal political equality for women underscores how central this regendering of the state was to the new economic order.

Why Did We Choose to Industrialize? The root cause was the systematic use of unfree labour for the production of basic commodities in the early modern world. Prices for commodities produced by unfree labour were less resilient to cyclical price changes than prices for commodities produced by free labour. In economic structures dependent on slaves, serfs, or indentured labour, price declines resulted in a further turning of the screw on that unfree labour by their masters, rather than in a change in the type of commodity being produced. By contrast, independent commodity producers could redirect their efforts into other pursuits in the face of price declines for a particular commodity. Thus, over time, commodities produced by unfree labour became, in formal economic terms, cheaper and cheaper. This undermined the historically stable relationship between the values accorded movable and immovable property. This process took centuries, but from its inception its impact went well beyond the trade in those specific commodities created by unfree labour, for these trades generated two qualitatively new constraints: the price revolution brought on by the massive importation of silver from New Spain and the new mercantilist state policies, best exemplified by the Corn Laws, in response to the unfair trade in eastern European wheat. The first destabilized long-established understandings of value, privileging over the long term immovable over movable property. The second encouraged novel and unsustainable exploitation of natural resources from the felling of England’s forests to the migratory fishery of the Grand Banks. By the mid-seventeenth century, defence of the sustainable practices enshrined in the forestry charter had already become associated with qualitatively new ways of articulating the rights of producers and the commonweal alike.22 Historically, the values accorded to movable and immovable property had been roughly equitable, gendered, and the basis for the household economy in much of Europe and its colonies of settlement. In these societies, both agriculture and the crafts were dependent on a familial model of the household economy, in which relatively late marriages permitted the earlier savings of both wife and husband to contribute to the independence of their household. The rupture in the rough parity in value between their



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respective contributions was further exacerbated by a qualitative change in the value and social role of real property, which had long been gendered male. The result of these contradictory tendencies was a fundamental reconfiguration of the political economy of the family. A refocusing of marriage, centring on the husband at the expense of the wife’s relationships with other male members of her extended family, was one of the results of this qualitative transformation. The new unequal role assumed by husbands went hand in hand with a significant loss of social status for most married men of the popular classes. In pre-industrial society, working for wages was a stage in the life cycle. Most young men and young women worked for wages from their early teen years until marriage in their late twenties, when their combined savings financed the launching of an independent family-based household. As the value of the wife’s contribution declined dramatically, the possibility of establishing such a household was greatly reduced and so men continued to work for wages long after their marriage. For men, wages came to define not a stage in a life cycle, but a life sentence. It was this massive increase in the availability of waged labour that provided the workforce for the combined and uneven development of the new industrial order. John Lovell chronicled the result. The desperate search for social prestige by working-class men was revealed in the quite extraordinary explosion in the way men chose to describe their work. Never to be master of a trade, these gradations mattered all the more. Denied mastery of a trade, mastery of their household came to matter most. The change in opportunities for young people was another telling indicator of the new political economy of the family. Household size in Montreal grew substantially over the course of the nineteenth century despite exceptionally high infant and child mortality rates. The growth was due to the dramatic decrease in options for young people, who no longer left their family in their early teens to learn a trade or work in domestic service and now remained at home, frequently until marriage in their early twenties. In the 1820s, as many as half of the adolescent males in the town learnt a skilled trade. The 1,076 apprentices in the 1881 census accounted for only one in twenty adolescent males. These dramatic changes in the political economy of the family changed the nature of both public and private life. Women no longer played an important role in the management of craft-producing households, and as we

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have seen, gender became one of the most important lines of urban segregation. When most young people leave home at an early age because they are able to engage in fruitful employment, the nature of public interaction between generations, on the street and in the various public venues of the city, is qualitatively different than it would be in a town or city where most young people remain at home, under the control of their fathers, and the options for employment are limited and highly gendered. Precedent could not justify this new domestic order. It required a qualitatively new way of thinking of how people should relate to each other. Throughout the industrializing world, there was a massive expansion in religious proselytizing through highly gendered activities, which led to dramatically increased church attendance. In Montreal, this was most visible in the rise of the cult of Mary and the celebration of papal infallibility within the Church of Rome, but when Mark Twain complained about public life in Montreal, saying, “You could not throw a rock in any direction without hitting a church window,” he was referring to the plethora of Protestant not Catholic churches. This new religiosity was supported by the greatly enhanced attention of both state and society to ethnicity. These cultural changes mobilized both highly conservative readings of Christianity and essentialist interpretations of ethnicity and race to sanction the new economic order. These changes facilitated the appropriation of the metaphor of natural for both the ‘laws’ of political economy and the enhanced role for men as heads of household. Just as mastery was to be exercised over nature, it became a man’s job to discipline his household. In this new context, the unequalled power of the male head of household meant not only much higher rates of domestic violence against both wives and youth, but an appropriation of domestic violence as an almost exclusively male prerogative. The regendering of the public sphere as exclusively male, the effective exclusion of women from the city centre, the far greater restrictions placed on young people, the new highly visible forms of segregation along lines of language, ethnicity, and religion all served to reinforce the class structure within each new industrial neighbourhood. This was why it was important for local bourgeois, who could well afford to do otherwise, to live in these industrial neighbourhoods. The legitimacy of class power could not be disassociated from the new masculinity of head of a ‘non-productive’ household. The distinction between formal and informal economies had been



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integrated into how both bourgeois and working-class men thought of themselves and their worlds. Workingmen well understood these changed gender roles, and this is why the male-breadwinner ideology proved not just to be popular among workingmen, but to be a highly effective basis for compromises across class lines. Conceiving these new hierarchical family structures as being outside the world of work led to new perceptions of how urban life was to be lived. As Montreal industrialized, there was a massive expansion in the number of duplexes and triplexes in the city. Compared to popular-class housing in the pre-industrial world of Adams and Viger, and even more so in the late pre-industrial world depicted by Cane, these new housing forms constituted a significant improvement at the family level while leading to rapidly deteriorating conditions at the community level. Moving up to a triplex with running water, 600 square feet of space, and no more than two people per room was how a working-class husband and father could demonstrate success. The unsustainable stresses that this density of land use placed on the local environment was most evident in the city’s extraordinary infant and child mortality rates; this was deeply ironic, as the cultural re-centring on the hierarchical family and away from the social reflected the primacy now accorded to the family as the only environment that counted. By 1880, in certain of the suburban municipalities and the more affluent wards of the city itself, one could already see how this would be resolved, for it was there that the conspicuous consumption and the cultural logic of contemporary suburban dystopia were already visible. It was not Mr Green, with the lead pipe, in the library after all. We chose to industrialize because of the way that new forms of inequality undermined long-standing forms of equality and thereby created new forms of inequality. This highly divisive and destructive process changed how people thought of themselves and of their world. It changed how people interacted in their households, on the street, where they worked, and in public life. It changed how people thought of the things around them, and it changed how they understood nature. In the beginning, racism harnessed to imperialism justified unfree labour, which led to new forms of sexism and caused qualitative changes in class structure, which called into being much greater religious and ethnic discrimination. Through this process, we began to conceive our relationship to nature in new and highly destructive ways.

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The choices that led to increasingly limited options for the people of one small town in a minor colony of a once great empire are now those that face the majority of humanity. I hope we show greater wisdom, for our time is running out. As we make these difficult decisions, there is perhaps a lesson to be drawn from the experience of those who went before. People first conceived of a new world before they created it. The making of another world will require a great deal of serious, innovative, and critical thought. It is time we all set to work.

Notes introduction 1 World systems theory is a school within historical sociology that developed from Wallerstein, The Modern World-System. Its principal venue for publication is the Review of the Fernand Braudel Center. The Atlantic World approach developed out of graduate seminars at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, but it is now its own sub-field within history. A useful introduction is Armitage and Braddick, eds, The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800.  2 This is the enduring lesson of Georges Lefebvre’s foundational work in social history, La Grande Peur de 1789 (Paris: Éditions Félix Alcan, 1932). 3 For a discussion of how this affected history in Quebec, see my “L’étrange retraite, vers une histoire de notre abdication professionnelle.” 4 For a penetrating and highly disturbing discussion of the impact of neoliberalism more generally, see Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine. For an update, see Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. 5 Illustrative of this approach is Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution. In his magnum opus, de Vries marshals a selective array of macro-economic indicators, abstracted from a variety of historical sources by cliometricians in Western Europe and North America over the past thirty years, to construct a ‘historical’ narrative for Gary Becker’s ahistorical model of the household economy. In the face of such apparent erudition, it is almost churlish to observe that we never meet a single household or householder. This exemplary exercise in neo-liberal historical economics succeeds in naturalizing capitalism through an implicit denial of class and an explicit denial of the patriarchal nature of households. For a devastating critique of this approach from within mainstream historiography, see Francesco Boldizzoni, The Poverty of Clio. 6 For the first, although generally associated with E.P. Thompson’s 1963 The Making of the English Working Class, the standard bearer is normally cited as Eric Hobsbawm’s “From Social History to the History of Society.” For the second, the hands-down winner in any citation index contest is Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” 7 Indeed, the careers of the leading lights of the movement in the United States are instructive: Eugene Genovese, with graduate degrees from Columbia,

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Notes to pages 10–11

taught at Brooklyn’s Polytechnic Institute, then at Rutgers, New Jersey’s state university, and Rochester, before in the mid-1980s moving to Emory; Herb Gutman, with a master’s from Columbia and a doctorate from WisconsinMadison, taught at New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University, then at suny-Buffalo, Rochester, and finally cuny; David Montgomery, with a doctorate from Minnesota, had taught at Pittsburgh for fifteen years and had already published two of his three major works before he was offered a position at Yale in the 1980s; and Alan Dawley, whose Bancroft Prize–winning Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn remains the most Thompsonian work in American history, spent his entire career at Trenton State College in New Jersey. Nor have the careers of the second generation been all that different: Peter Linebaugh, Thompson’s most innovative student, bopped around for almost two decades before getting his first tenured position at the University of Toledo, in Ohio; Marcus Rediger taught at Georgetown and Pittsburgh; and Doug Hay, co-author with Thompson and Linebaugh of Albion’s Fatal Tree, taught at Memorial and York, both public and poorly endowed universities in Canada. 8 E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, the founder of cultural studies, both worked in adult education programs, as did Raphael Samuel of History Workshop. 9 Compare the impact of Eugene D. Genovese’s Roll, Jordon, Roll: The World the Slaves Made and Hebert G. Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 with either Genovese’s In Red and Black, Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History or his joint work with Elizabeth FoxGenovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital, and Gutman’s Work Culture and Society in Industrializing America. 10 Key texts would include Charles Tilly, The Vendée: A Sociological Analysis of the Counter-revolution of 1793; Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, and Richard H. Tilly, The Rebellious Century: 1830–1930; Joan W. Scott and Louise A. Tilly, Women, Work and Family; Charles Tilly and Louise A. Tilly, eds, Class Conflict and Collective Action; and Charles Tilly, As Sociology Meets History. Louise A. Tilly’s presidential address to the aha in the wake of E.P. Thompson’s death is also noteworthy: “Connections,” American Historical Review 99, no. 1 (February 1994): 1–17. 11 Interestingly, Sewell’s Structure and Mobility: The Men and Women of Marseille, 1820–1870 and Scott’s The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth Century City were considered by Geoff Eley and Keith Nield the “emblematic” works of this school, which they misrepresent as the American version of engaged social history in The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social?



Notes to pages 11–13 339

12 A prediction of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie perhaps best conveys the implicit threat it posed: “L’historien de demain sera programmeur ou il ne sera plus.” Le territoire de l’historien (Paris, 1973), 14. He apparently first expressed this thought in 1967 as a reaction to quantitative social history at the University of Michigan; see Rabb, “The Development of Quantification in Historical Research.” 13 Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City. 14 Hershberg, Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century; Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West; and Katz, Doucet, and Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism. 15 Robert Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History; Douglass C. North and Lance Davis, Institutional Change and American Economic Growth; and Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. 16 Ironically, given their profound disagreements, Fernand Ouellet and Louise Dechêne were both considered to be students of the Annales by Alfred Dubuc; see Dubuc, “L’influence de l’école des Annales au Québec.” Ouellet’s nemesis, Jean-Pierre Wallot, was profoundly influenced by Robert Palmer’s Atlantic Revolution theory. 17 Gregory S. Kealey edited the journal for a quarter of century, before his cofounder Bryan D. Palmer took over. The longevity of their reign is unique in Canadian academic publishing. It is in no small part due to their ability to academically reproduce, for both were remarkably successful in placing their graduate students in tenure-track positions during the very difficult job markets of the 1980s and 1990s. Their success speaks to both the innovative nature of their work and its broad appeal. 18 Particularly revealing of this historiographical evolution is William Sewell’s autobiographical reflection, “The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History, or, the confessions of a former quantitative historian,” in his Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, 22–80. 19 In his characteristically generous manner, Eric Hobsbawm discussed these political limitations in a video interview on “Charles Tilly’s contribution to European History,” available on the Social Science History Association’s website. 20 Although the term was used earlier in architecture, it only came into more general use as a description of the dominant culture with Jean-François Lyotard’s La condition post-moderne (Éditions de minuit, 1979), which was based on his discussion paper Les problèmes de savoir dans les sociétés industrielles les plus développées, prepared earlier that year for Quebec’s Conseil des universités. The English translation appeared in 1984.

340

Notes to pages 13–17

21 I borrow the concept from Henri Bergson, whose epistemological critique of history is discussed in some detail in chapter 5. 22 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American History Review 91, no. 5 (December, 1986): 1053–75. 23 Joy Parr, The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880–1950; and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. 24 Both Thierry Nootens’ critique of identities (“Un individu ‘éclaté’ à la dérive sur une mer de ‘sens’? Une critique du concept d’identité,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 62, no. 1 [Summer 2008]: 35–67) and Martin Petitclerc’s call for an engaged social history (“Notre maître le passé? Le projet critique de l’histoire sociale et l’émergence d’une nouvelle sensibilité historiographique,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 63, no. 1 [2009]: 83–113) base themselves almost exclusively on two of the most prolific of the historiographers, Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, that I have been critiquing. As a result, no critical analysis of the specific conditions within Quebec historiography that contributed to either the triumph of identity politics or the crisis in social history were even considered necessary. To cite but two of the many contextual elements that merit serious critical reflection if we are to understand Quebec historiography of the 1970s and 1980s: regulation theory, the most important French theoretical import into Quebec history; and the debilitating effect that sectarian politics had on both the tone and the content of debates. 25 Jordanova, History in Practice. 26 Benjamin, Illuminations, 263.

chapter one 1 Founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, the Annales has arguably been the most influential journal in the historical profession. For a critical analysis of the theory and method during both its formative period and its most influential one, under the editorship of Fernand Braudel, see my “Time and Human Agency.” 2 Vilar, Une histoire en construction. 3 Jean Chesneaux, best known for his classic study Le mouvement ouvrier chinois de 1919 à 1927, wrote three major reflections on historical method: Du passé faisons table rase: à propos de l’histoire et des historiens; Habiter le temps: passé, présent, futur: esquisse d’un dialogue politique; and L’engagement des intellectuels, 1944–2004: itinéraire d’un historien franc-tireur. 4 A Booker Prize–winning public intellectual, John Berger has published more than thirty books. His works that most influenced my thinking in this period were Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing; Ways of Seeing; and Pig Earth.



Notes to pages 21–33 341

5 Sweeny, “Describing Labour Markets on the Frontier.” 6 My understanding of this theoretical breakthrough came mainly from our many conversations, but one can see it at work in Rice, “Sailortown; and Rice, “Lower Canadian Shipbuilding.” 7 The most influential edition was produced after the war, with a more revealing title: Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century: An Outline of the Beginnings of the Modern Factory System in England. 8 The primacy of the market animated the many labour history publications of John R. Commons and associates, but the clearest ideological statement, published in 1928 in response to the 1926 General Strike in Britain, is in Perlman, A Theory of the Labour Movement. 9 Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century; Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism; Tawney, The Radical Tradition. 10 Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution; The Coal Industry of the Eighteenth Century; An Eighteenth-Century Industrialist:  Peter Stubs of Warrington, 1756– 1806; and The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830. 11 Von Hayek, Capitalism and the Historians. 12 Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth. 13 James, A History of Negro Revolt; and James, The Future in the Present. Williams’ thesis was entitled “The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the British West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery” but was published as Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). 14 Hudson, “Preface,” xiv. 15 Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution. 16 McKay, “Capital and Labour in the Halifax Baking and Confectionery Industry”; McKay, “Class Struggle and Mercantile Capitalism”; McKay, “The Realm of Uncertainty”; and McKay, “‘By Wisdom, Wile or War.’” 17 At the 1997 Canadian Historical Association meeting, I presented an epistemological paper on the use of computers in the classroom. Responding to the pedagogical importance I had laid on listening to sources, Chad Gaffield, then the principal investigator in Canada’s largest social science history project and subsequently the president of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, asked if I often heard voices.

chapter two 1 The French text of the treaty names twenty-five distinct peoples, but my numbering here respects the analysis of the signatures to the treaty in Bohaker, “Nindoodemag.” 2 Creighton, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 1760–1850; and Naylor, The History of Canadian Business, 1867–1914.

342

Notes to page 33

3 Innis studied at the University of Chicago, where he analysed the Canadian Pacific, Canada’s first transcontinental railway, for his thesis. He taught po­ litical economy at the University of Toronto for his entire academic career. His major works include The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History; Problems of Staple Production in Canada; and, with A.R.M. Lower, Select Documents in Canadian Economic History 1773–1885; Settlement and the Mining Frontier; The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy; and Empire and Communications. Two collections of Innis’ essays exist: Essays in Canadian Economic History; and Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change: Selected Essays. 4 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 373. 5 William A. Mackintosh, at Queen’s, was an early supporter of Innis’, and his highly influential study The Economic Background of Dominion-Provincial Relations: Appendix III of the Royal Commission Report on Dominion-Provincial Relations, integrated the staple thesis into the structural history of Confederation. Donald Creighton was the best-known historian of his generation in English Canada, and his Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence linked the world of commerce with that of politics, giving a human dimension to the narrative structure of the staple theory that Innis’ work lacked. Working with Mackintosh, he wrote the historical survey for the Royal Commission on Dominion Provincial Relations. A.R.M. Lower worked with Innis as a master’s student in the 1930s before completing his doctorate at Harvard. A modified version of his master’s thesis, written with Innis, appeared as Settlement and the Forest Frontier, while his doctoral thesis came out two years later as The North American Assault on the Canadian Forest: A History of the Lumber Trade between Canada and the United States. Lower also wrote two very popular general histories that went through numerous editions: Colony to Nation: A History of Canada; and Canadians in the Making: A Social History of Canada. Staples remained a lifelong interest of Lower’s, evident in his Great Britain’s Woodyard: British America and the Timber Trade, 1763–1867, published in 1973. 6 To a remarkable degree, this consensus also marked the work of the leading economic historians in Quebec. Although their work often highlighted differences between French and English Canada, Albert Faucher, Fernand Ouellet, Jean Hamelin, and Jean-Pierre Wallot all accepted the logic of the staple theory. 7 J.M.S. Careless, long-time head of the History Department of the University of Toronto, expanded on the historical differences between the United States and Canada in his seminal article “Frontierism and Metropolitanism in Canadian History” of 1954. A retrospective vision of his work is available in Careless, Frontier and Metropolis.



Notes to pages 34–6 343

8 Watkins, “A Staple Theory of Economic Growth.” Mel Watkins was then a junior member of the Political Economy Department of the University of Toronto. He would go on to author the highly influential Watkins Report on American direct investment in Canada, as well as important studies on the Dene of the Northwest Territories. 9 McCallum, Unequal Beginnings. McCallum became McGill’s youngest dean of arts before serving as vice-president and chief economist of the Royal Bank of Canada. In 2000, he entered federal politics as Liberal mp for the Toronto riding of Markham. He was a prominent cabinet minister in the Chrétien government, rising to be deputy prime minister under Paul Martin. He left public life to head the lobby group the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. 10 Ryerson, Unequal Union. Stanley B. Ryerson, an upper-class Torontonian, joined the Communist Party of Canada upon his return from university studies in France in the mid-1930s and quickly rose to become party secretary, a position he held until his resignation in 1968 in the wake of the Warsaw Pact’s crushing of the Czechoslovak experiment in ‘socialism with a human face.’ 11 Ryerson, Capitalisme et Confédération, translated by André d’Allemagne. D’Allemagne was the founder of the Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale (rin ), the most important progressive force within Québécois nationalism of the 1960s. 12 Annual reports of their research were published as grsm , Rapports et travaux, 1972–75. 13 The thesis circulated widely in mimeographed form for twenty years, before being published as H. Clare Pentland, Labour and Capital in Canada, 1650– 1860, edited by and with an introduction by Paul Phillips (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1981). 14 Clare Pentland was an underground member of the Communist Party, and S.B. Ryerson was his political direction. They communicated by pre-arranged calls made from public telephone booths, so as not to risk compromising his status as a student in Cold War Toronto. The language of paternalism was thus code for feudalism, a term that would not then have been acceptable at the University of Toronto, but it was not generally understood in this manner by Pentland’s many acolytes in English Canada. Personal communication with S.B. Ryerson, 1981. 15 Russell Hahn was instrumental in the early years, developing Hogtown Press as an alternative to academic presses. Gregory S. Kealey’s major work is Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 1867–1892. A collection of his essays, including many from this formative period, was published in Workers and Canadian History. Bryan D. Palmer’s major work is  A Culture in Conflict: Skilled Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Hamilton, Ontario, 1860–1914.

344

Notes to pages 36–45

Kealey and Palmer then collaborated on Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880–1900. An edition of this work came out with Hogtown in 1987. When, in 1997, Kealey resigned his twenty-two-year editorship of Labour/Le Travail, Palmer, who had been the book review editor, took over. 16 Heap and Burgess, “Les marchands montréalais dans le commerce d’exportation du Bas-Canada, 1818–1835.” 17 Sweeny, Guide pour l’étude d’entreprises montréalaises et de leurs archives avant 1947. 18 Several of the reports by Jane Greenlaw, Peter Orr, and myself were subsequently published without due credit in Lynda Price, ed., Introduction to the Social History of Scots in Québec. 19 The Custom, one of many local customary codes in pre-revolutionary France, was imposed on New France along with a northern French seigneurial (or manorial) property-holding regime in the 1660s. After the Conquest in 1763, the Custom was replaced by English common law, but that proved a disaster because one cannot have good governance where there are conflicting property and legal regimes. The Quebec Act of 1774 reinstated the Custom in perhaps the most “intolerable” of the acts that led to the American Revolution, for it accorded civil liberties to Catholics. 20 Both of these types of deed directly affected the inheritance rights of the legitimate offspring of a marriage, each of whom, regardless of gender, had under the Custom a right to his or her fair share, or légitime, of the community of property of the parents. 21 Vogler, Les actes notariés. Much later our French colleagues would be exploring much the same terrain as we had twenty-five years before: BeauvaletBoutouyrie, Gourdon, and Ruggiu, Liens sociaux et actes notariés dans le monde urbain en France et en Europe (XVI e–XVIII e siècles). 22 Mathias, The Brewing Industry in England, 1700–1830. 23 The fight for control over the Civil List, which established the salaries of the colonial state’s patronage appointments, has long been considered the central political issue leading to the Rebellions of 1837–38. The classic analysis of state patronage is Paquet and Wallot, Patronage et pouvoir dans le Bas-Canada, 1794–1812. 24 After suppressing the first wave of rebellion in 1837, the British colonial authorities imposed a military dictatorship on Lower Canada, and between 1838 and 1841, its Special Council made numerous wide-ranging changes, which I discuss more fully in chapter 8. 25 A promissory note is a promise to pay a certain amount of money on a certain day to a person or firm. Drafts are rather like a cheque; they involve the drawing down of a positive balance held by a second party and to be paid to a third party, usually after a set period of thirty, sixty, or ninety days. Bills are simi-



Notes to pages 46–52 345

lar to drafts, however, since they are generally used to finance long-distance trade; they are drawn not on a known balance held by a second party, but on the presumed sale value of a commodity that had been shipped to that second party. Thus, both drafts and bills require that the second party, who is to pay the amount, ‘accept’ that they do have the funds on account and that they are willing to pay the amount of the draft or bill when due. A bill comes due a set number of days after it is accepted, rather than after it is drawn. 26 The firm’s creditors drew up the assignment. It assigned to trustees for the creditors the assets of the firm and generally set out a payment schedule for the creditors. By signing the deed, the creditors agreed to act as a group, so not only would they not take further action individually against the firm, but they would oppose individual or collective attempts by other creditors, who had not signed the agreement, to modify the payment schedule or to seize assets of the firm. 27 The two important exceptions were ceramics and glassware. Local artisans produced both closer to their natural sources of supply: St-Jean de Dorchester on the Richelieu River for ceramics and Côte-St-Charles/Rigaud on the south shore of the lower Ottawa Valley for glassware. 28 Stewart, “Structural Change and the Construction Trades in Montreal”; and Lauzon, “Pierre sur pierre.” 29 Robert C.H. Sweeny, “Colonie et crise: Montréal et la première crise du capitalisme,” Société historique du Canada, University of British Columbia, 1983. 30 Robert C.H. Sweeny, “Beyond the Staples: Firms and Functions of Lower Canadian International Trade,” in Sweeny, Protesting History, 88–100. 31 Calculated from the customs returns for 1825 in the Journal and Appendices of the Assembly of Lower Canada, 1826. 32 Rice, “Shipbuilding in British America, 1787–1890.” 33 mbhp , Registry of Lower Canadian Shipping.

chapter three 1 John George Lambton, first Earl of Durham, was charged by the Colonial Office to investigate the causes of the 1837 Rebellion. Lambton, Report on the Affairs of British North America from the Earl of Durham, 6. 2 This despite the immediate and eloquent refutation by Louis-Joseph Papineau in his Histoire de l’insurrection du Canada en réfutation du rapport de Lord Durham and the four-volume rebuttal to Durham’s racist assertion that the Canadiens were a people without culture and without history by FrançoisXavier Garneau, Histoire du Canada depuis sa découverte jusqu’à nos jours.

346

Notes to pages 52–8

3 For example, a century ago, the Bonne Entente school argued that the twentieth century belonged to Canada because of the unique respective characteristics of its founding ‘races’: the French and the English. 4 I borrow the term from Louise Dechêne (“La rente du faubourg Saint-Roch à Québec – 1750–1850,” 596), who coined it to describe the work of Fernand Ouellet, discussed in the next chapter, but it applies equally well to the work of the leading English Canadian historians of the Montreal business community, from Adam Shortt at the turn of the century to Gerald Tulchinsky and Ronald Rudin in the 1970s and 1980s. 5 Sweezy et al., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism; and Dobb and Sweezy, Du féodalisme au capitalisme. 6 Mendels, “Proto-industrialization”; and Hans Medick, “The Proto-industrial Family Economy.” 7 K. Takahashi, “Reflections on …,” in Sweezy et al., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, 69–97. 8 Karl Marx, “Historical Notes on Merchant Capital,” Capital, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1959). As appears in the Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org. 9 From the peaceful transition in Chile and the promise of Euro-communism in Italy, to the military victories in Vietnam, the winning of independence by former Portuguese colonies in Africa, and the guerrilla movements in Central America, most notably Nicaragua. 10 Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism; and Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State. 11 Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development”; and Brenner et al., “Symposium.” 12 Krantz and Hohenberg, Failed Transitions to Modern Industrial Society. 13 Post, “The American Road to Capitalism” (1982); and, much later, Post, “The Agrarian Origins of U.S. Capitalism” (1995). Both are now available in an expanded treatment of the question: Post, The American Road to Capitalism (2011). 14 Soboul, “Du féodalisme au capitalisme: La Révolution française et la pro­ blématique des voies de passage.” 15 Bois, Crise de féodalisme. An English translation was published by Cambridge University Press in 1984. Personally, I found the breadth of historical insight in Bois’ La mutation de l’an mil even more breathtaking. 16 Dechêne, “L’évolution du régime seigneurial au Canada”; Dechêne, Habitants et marchands de Montréal au dix-septième siècle; and Dechêne, “La rente du faubourg Saint-Roch à Québec – 1750–1850.” 17 Robert C.H. Sweeny et al., “La problématique de la transition,” in Sweeny, Protesting History, 1–7.



Notes to pages 59–61 347

18 Sweeny, “Financing the Transition in a Colonial City: Montreal 1820–1828,” in Sweeny, Protesting History, 54–5. 19 In 1975, E.P. Thompson had published Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, which built on a collaboration with his graduate students, Albion’s Fatal Tree, to show how culture and agency shaped the law, which in turn structured so much of society. The following year he published “The Poverty of Theory,” a blistering attack on Louis Althusser, then the leading light of French structural philosophy. Althusser’s life work was a theoretical refutation of the legitimacy of socialist humanism. Against the idea of a knowing subject who creates herself or himself through interacting with the world, Althusser argued that it was the interplay of differing structured levels within a social formation – but most notably the “ideological structural apparatus” – that creates the human subject. 20 The opening salvo and response were in History Workshop Journal 6 (Autumn 1978): Richard Johnson, “Edward Thompson, Eugene Genovese, and SocialistHumanist History,” 79–100; and Editorial Collective, “History and Theory,” 1–6. The debate widened the following issue with: Tony Judt, “A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians,” 66–94; Keith McClelland, “Some Comments on Richard Johnson, ‘Edward Thompson, Eugene Genovese, and Socialist-Humanist History,’” 101–15; Gavin Williams, “In Defense of History,” 116–24; Tim Putnam, “Structuralism and Humanism,” 220–3; and Tim Mason, “The Making of the English Working Class,” 224–5. It almost came to a conclusion in number 8 with Simon Clarke, “Socialist Humanism and the Critique of Economism,” 138–56; Gregor McClennan, “Richard Johnson and His Critics: Towards a Constructive Debate,” 158–66; Sally Alexander, Anna Davin, and Eve Hossettler, “‘Labouring Women’: A Reply to Eric Hobsbawm,” 174–82; Richard Johnson, “Socialist History,” 196–8; and Gareth Stedman Jones, “History and Theory,” 198–202. However, it got personal in number 9 with David Selbourne, “On the Methods of the History Workshop,” 150–61, prompting a historical response from Raphael Samuel that was longer than the critique itself: “On the Methods of the History Workshop: A Reply,” 162–76. 21 Wallot, Un Québec qui bougeait; and Hare, Le développement des parties politiques. 22 Like Lower Canada itself, the Patriotes were primarily Canadiens, and thus French-speaking Catholics. However, predominantly English-speaking Protestant ridings also elected Patriotes, and a number of the party’s leading members were English-speaking. 23 The name came from the Patriotes’ defence of the Constitutional Act of 1791, which had divided Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada. 24 Dever, “Economic Development and the Lower Canadian Assembly, 1828–1840.”

348

Notes to pages 61–73

25 The Bank of Montreal was chartered in 1817, the Bank of Quebec in 1818, and the Bank of Canada in 1820. 26 In the concluding chapter of Genres of the Credit Economy, Mary Poovey has analysed how long it took in Britain for this fiction to be accepted. 27 Schumpeter, Business Cycles. 28 Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade. 29 Floud’s An Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Historians was for decades the standard reference book in the profession. Hudson’s History by Numbers: An Introduction to Quantitative Approaches has since replaced it. 30 Greffe of Henry Griffin, #5814, 23 June 1825, ba nq -Montréal. 31 Monetary protests always provide the dates on which a note was drawn, accepted, and protested, but in most cases we do not know the date of discount, nor do we generally know when people endorsed a note. 32 An analysis detailing each firm’s failure is available in my “Colony and Crisis,” in Sweeny, Protesting History, 8–52. 33 To place these sums in perspective, a craft family in Montreal could reasonably expect to earn £50 in a year. 34 Registry Office Records, vol. 184–7, lac . 35 Greffe of Henry Griffen, #6398, 14 April 1826, ba nq-m . 36 John Richardson of Forsyth & Richardson was the father-in-law of George Auldjo of Maitland, Garden & Auldjo. Details of the bank loan are to be found in Greffe of Griffin #5875, 9 July 1825, while the Richardson loan and the information on vessels still being built are detailed in the firm’s assignment before Griffin on 29 July 1826. 37 Greffe of Thomas Arnoldi, #4820, 9 May 1836, ba nq-m . 38 A further sixteen assignments would be recorded before notary in Montreal by the end of 1829. None is known to have been directly linked to the firms that failed, as shown on figure 3.4, but we have complete debit and credit accounts in only seven of these sixteen assignments. A detailed discussion of these individuals and firms is available in my Protesting History, 44–8. 39 The caveat “for which we know the occupation of the drawer” is an important one: for the Bank of Canada, the occupational titles of the drawers are known for 284 of the 399 notes protested, while for the Bank of Montreal, we know the occupational titles for 302 of the 648 notes protested prior to April 1824 and 508 of the 905 notes protested after that date. 40 These were not millineries or haberdasheries, but hat manufactories that transformed beaver skins into hats by a complex productive process involving the use of mercury in two of the six steps. This exposure to mercury caused Minamata disease, and so many of the workers were “mad as hatters” by their early thirties. For an analysis of the division of labour in Abner Bagg’s hat manufactory, see Paré, “Trésors d’archives.”



Notes to pages 76–80 349

41 Greffe of Henry Griffen, #6824, 22 February 1827, ba nq-m . 42 Greffe of Henry Griffin, #4541, #4638, #4816, ba nq-m . 43 John Wragg & Co., the city’s foremost importer of metal goods, accepted Whittemore’s note for £65 in late June, and the following winter, quite exceptionally for a craft producer, Whittemore presented a £37 note of Wm Forbes’ for discount at the bank. 44 Certainly this is the impression left by a comparative reading of Burgess, Work, Family and Community, and the studies of the construction trades by Alan Stewart and Gilles Lauzon cited in chapter 2, note 28. Stewart, “Structural Change and the Construction Trades in Montreal”; and Lauzon, “Pierre sur Pierre.” 45 Greffe of Jobin, #2494, 21 December 1821, ba nq-m . 46 “Blanchard promises to treat kindly and humanely and to only employ him in tasks proportionate to his strength and capacities, that would be normally done by an apprentice of this type and under the condition that he will not be required to do more than the ordinary work for Blanchard, other than the tasks in the shop, to show and teach him the craft in order that he shall be capable of serving as a journeyman, to house, bed, heat and feed him appropriately according to the custom of the country.” Greffe of Cadieux, #350, 4 July 1820, ba nq-m . 47 Greffe of N.B. Doucet, #9505, 25 February 1822, ba nq-m . 48 “N.B. I informed Mr Toussaint Champeau that the present contract is null, seeing that the woman therein mentioned is not the tutrice [court-appointed guardian] of her minor children.” Greffe de P. Ritchot, #90, 17 August 1821, banq-m. 49 Greffe of Henry Griffin, #3723, 3 May 1821, ba nq-m . 50 This occurred much more frequently with contracts for male apprentices; female apprentices absconded less frequently. The disciplinary clauses related to females would suggest that the principal problem facing mistresses in mantua-making and dressmaking shops was the young women’s refusal to “rat out” their fellow seamstresses. See Poutanen, For the Benefit of the Master. 51 “to lodge and feed [the son] from his pot the regular fare,” Greffe de J-M Jobin, #1772, 28 January 1820, ba nq-m . 52 The town had 4,455 households according to the 1825 census, and 467 local masters hired at least one apprentice or journeyman over the decade. 53 Since we recorded all apprenticeships from 1820 to 1829 and they generally ran three to four years, it is only from 1824 onwards that we have firm figures for the number of apprentices under contract in the city: they ranged from 260 to 290 in any given year, and the 1825 census recorded 984 boys between the ages of 14 and 18.

350

Notes to pages 80–8

54 By 1824, it was unlikely that anyone hired as an apprentice prior to 1820 would still have been under contract, and since I was comparing known skilled labour in the shop, this was a major methodological constraint. 55 It was important to do this analysis in a trade-specific manner because what constituted a large boot- and shoemaking shop would have been a relatively small printer and simply could not be compared to the town’s largest shipyards at the height of the boom in colonial-builts. 56 As Jane Greenlaw has demonstrated, this dynamic held true for immigrant communities as well. Greenlaw, “Choix pratiques et choix des pratiques.” 57 Strictly speaking, Campbell was his own master; Maitland, Garden & Auldjo did not own the yard. Although they called the tune, as Campbell himself admitted when a £600 ninety-day note he had drawn payable to Maitland, Garden & Auldjo was protested on April 8, 1826: “Campbell said he had never received value, having signed it only by way of accommodation & therefore could not pay.” Greffe of Henry Griffin, #6380, 8 April 1826, ba nq-m . 58 The phrase is Nahum Mower’s in his editorial of April 12, 1826, in the Canadian Spectator and Montreal Advertiser. 59 Jean Pierre Wallot, often working with Gilles Paquet, oversaw much of this research, as it fell within the ambit of his work on Quebec in the Atlantic Revolution, a Congress of Cultural Freedom–funded initiative ostensibly to explore the ideas of Robert Palmer’s influential Atlantic Revolution. Paquet and Wallot, “Aperçu sur le commerce international”; Ruddel, Apprenticeship in Early Nineteenth Century Quebec, 1793–181; Paquet and Wallot, “International Circumstances of Lower Canada, 1786–1810”; Hardy and Ruddel, Les apprentis artisans à Québec, 1660–1815; Hardy, Ruddel, and Wallot, “Material Conditions and Society in Lower Canada, 1792–1835”; Wallot, “Frontière ou fragment du système atlantique”; Paquet and Wallot, “Sur quelques discontinuities dans l’experience socio-économique du Québec”; and Ruddel, Québec, 1765–1832.

chapter four 1 Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. 2 Known as l’École de Montréal because of the influence of chanoine Lionel Groulx, founding director of the History Department at the Université de Montréal, this approach has profoundly influenced Québécois historiography. Maurice Séguin, author of an unpublished but highly influential thesis, “La nation canadienne et l’agriculture,” at the Université de Montréal in 1947, shaped both the conceptual and methodological approaches of nationalist historians who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. (See Wallot, “À la recherche de la nation”; and Comeau, Maurice Séguin, historien du pays québécois). Guy Frégault, meanwhile, who authored numerous general his­



Notes to pages 88–9 351

tories promoting this interpretation and did more than anyone else to invent the ‘Golden Age of New France,’ would culminate his career by becoming the first deputy minister of culture during the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s. The Golden Age mythology was the historical basis for a certain form of Québécois nationalism that conceived of ‘la nation’ as having had its ‘normal’ progress stymied by external factors. Strongly criticized by progressive nationalists, most famously in Raymond Levesque’s Bozo les Cullottes, this idea resonated in the notorious “l’argent et le vote ethnique” remark of Premier Parizeau after the loss of the 1995 referendum on sovereignty. 3 Durocher and Linteau, Le “retard” du Québec; Faucher, Cinquante ans de sciences sociales à l’Université Laval; and Dumont, Récit d’une emigration, mémoires. 4 Faucher, “Pouvoir politiques et pouvoir économiques”; Dumont, “Idéologies au Canada Français (1850–1900)”; Hamelin and Roby, Histoire économique du Québec, 1851–1896; and Faucher, Québec en Amérique au dix-neuvième siècle. 5 Ouellet, Éléments d’histoire sociale du Bas-Canada; Ouellet, “Propriété seigneuriale et groupes sociaux”; and Ouellet, “Libre ou exploité.” 6 Ouellet, Histoire économique et sociale du Québec, 1760–1850; and Ouellet, Le Bas-Canada, 1791–1840. 7 The term comes from the poem by Michèle Lalonde “Speak White,” which was first read at “Chants et poèmes de la résistance,” a fundraiser for imprisoned members of the Front de libération du Québec on May 27, 1968. 8 Serge Gagnon, a historian of religion, led the attack, his most detailed critique of Ouellet’s work appearing, significantly, in English as part of Quebec and Its Historians: The Twentieth Century. As late as 1987, A.I. Silver, a historian of French Canada at the University of Toronto, could write breathlessly in defence of Ouellet that he “bestrides the narrow world of Canadian history like a colossus.” Silver, “Review of Quebec and Its Historians,” 243. 9 Upon his death, this wealth might well return to the Church, but with testamentary freedom there was no guarantee of this happening. As Christian Dessureault explained it to me, this wealth financed the many large presbyteries built in the second quarter of the nineteenth century that dominate the villages of Quebec’s heartland. 10 S. Gagnon, Quand le Québec manquait de prêtres. 11 In the diocese of Montreal, which was overwhelmingly rural, the bishop estimated that in the early 1830s only three in ten Catholics ‘faisaient leur Pâques’ – that is, confessed and took communion during Holy Week. These were the minimum actions required by the Church to be considered a practising Catholic. 12 Paquet and Wallot, “Crise agricole et tensions socio-ethniques dans le BasCanada, 1802–1812”; and Paquet and Wallot, “The Agricultural Crisis in Lower Canada, 1802–12.”

352

Notes to pages 90–1

13 Wallot published much of this work with his long-time colleague Gilles Paquet, the dean of the Business School at the Université d’Ottawa: “Les inventaires après décès à Montréal au tournant du XIX e siècle”; “Structures sociales et niveaux de richesse.” 14 Lewis and McInnis, “The Efficiency of the French-Canadian Farmer in the Nineteenth Century.” 15 The first volume of the Atlas historique du Québec contains a corrected series of the 1831, 1851, and 1871 census returns. Courville, Robert, and Séguin, Le pays laurentien au XIX e siècle. 16 Greer, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant, 26. 17 Ibid., 37. 18 Ibid., 20, 26. Greer calculated that on some of the best farmland in the colony, feudal appropriations amounted to 45 per cent of available surpluses in wheat (ibid., 122–39). No one else has come anywhere near such a figure, before or since. This is understandable, for feudal appropriations on this scale would have meant that peasant families working the much poorer lands of the central and northeastern St Lawrence Valley regularly would have faced starvation. 19 Ibid., 47. 20 Ibid., 40, 46. 21 Ibid., 45. Greer treated inventories as if they were complete, in the sense of describing everything physically located on the property, rather than only the goods belonging to the community of husband and wife. Legally, the propre of a woman (i.e., property held by the woman outside of the community of property) was to be defined by the notarial deed signed prior to the marriage celebration. Kitchen utensils, furniture, and bedding were often treated as propre. Amable Ménard and Théophile Allaire chose not to incur the expense of such a notarized deed before they married. This does not mean, however, that an agreement binding on Allaire was not reached later. Far more agreements in the pre-industrial world were reached by the shake of calloused hands than by a notary’s pen. How many more were sealed by a tender kiss on the forehead of a dying spouse? If this were the case, then the basic household furnishings would have been present but owned by the daughters of the first marriage as their direct inheritance from their mother. Allaire’s actions in relation to his woodlot were perplexing for Greer because he did not consider when they took place. Allaire cut down all his wood after the Seven Years War. With peace came the possibility of rebuilding both the devastated capital at Quebec City and the Côte de Sud, where in the summer of 1759 the scorched-earth policy of the British general Wolfe had been particularly brutal. Because Greer assumed Allaire to be engaged in subsistence farming, it never occurred to him that Allaire might have clear-



22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29

Notes to pages 92–3 353

cut his largely virgin woodlot in response to this unprecedented demand for construction wood in the colony. Situated right on the Richelieu, only a short distance upstream from the St Lawrence and a few days’ rafting from Quebec City itself, Allaire was in a perfect position to respond to this demand. Ibid., 193. Ibid., 184–8. Ibid., xv. Greer did subsequently write a history of the 1837 rebellion, which assumed a changeless peasantry still very much based on Théophile Allaire’s experiences even though he had been dead for seventy years. In the Patriotes and the People, Greer argued that a fundamental divide separated the middleclass politicians from the peasantry. Exceptionally, during the crisis of the 1830s, they could find common cause, but it was not because they shared a common democratic vision. No, what they shared was a misogyny that found paying homage to the teenage Queen Victoria repulsive. Greer, The Patriots and the People. Then the rural historian at McGill and the author of a fine study on prairie agriculture, The Harvests of War: The Prairie West, 1914–1918. Voisey, Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community. Ironically, Greer’s analysis of the 1765 census returns showed ample evidence of this differentiation, with some families owning four oxen and others none, while some had large flocks of sheep and others not. Greer, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant, 42. These dynamic processes were well illustrated by another example Greer cited. In 1791, Joseph Blanchard and Marie Daigle retired, leaving their farm to one of their sons in return for an annual pension entirely composed of goods that could be produced locally. No cash was involved at all. Since the couple appeared to have been self-sufficient, Greer used their food consumption to estimate what the needs of all the other peasant families would have been. The results indicated that most families would have lived very close to the edge, generating little in the way of a surplus. However, among the goods their son provided was twenty-five cords of firewood, or 1,880 cubic feet, an amount far in excess of the needs of an elderly couple. A considerable amount of the wood would have been sold to buy other goods not provided for in the pension. Thus, since Blanchard and Daigle were not cut off from the market, the food items listed in the pension cannot be used to calculate their consumption patterns, nor the needs of other families, let alone to demonstrate the absence of peasant surpluses. Ibid., 35–6. Courville, “Esquisse du développement villageois au Québec”; and Courville, “Villages and Agriculture in the Seigneuries of Lower Canada.” Dessureault, “Les fondements de la hiérarchie sociale au sein de la paysannerie”; Lalancette, “Description et analyse du rapport pêche/seigneurie”; Dépatie, Lalancette, and Dessureault, Contributions à l’étude du régime

354

Notes to pages 93–9

seigneurial canadien; Dépatie, “L’évolution d’une société rurale”; and Wien, “Peasant Accumulation in a Context of Colonization.” 30 Thus, Cole Harris erred in concluding that the seigneurial regime was historically insignificant because there was no evidence on period maps of seigneurial boundaries having affected settlement patterns. Harris had simply mapped the location of peasant households, without asking who they were or how they were related to others in the region. Harris, The Seigneurial System in Early Canada. 31 This occurred at varying times over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the St Lawrence Valley. By the 1780s, all the good arable land on the north shore near Quebec City and on Île d’Orléans was fully occupied. On seigneurial land close to Montreal and in the Lower Richelieu Valley, seen in figure 4.1, this limit was being reached in the 1810s. Seigneuries in the Ottawa, Yamaska, St-Maurice, and Chaudière valleys and in the Upper Richelieu would not become fully settled until the late 1820s. 32 Hypothecation of land establishes a lien on the property for the benefit of the creditor; it differs from a mortgage in that title is not transferred to the creditor. 33 Dechêne, “Plate 51.” 34 Michel, “Un marchand rural en Nouvelle-France.” 35 Michel, “Le livre de compte (1784–1792) de Gaspard Massue”; St-George, “Commerce, crédit et transactions foncières”; and Pronovost and St-George, “L’identification des marchands ruraux.” 36 Greffe de N.B. Doucet, #7884, 2 September 1820, ba nq-m . The two that were unlikely to be for export involved twelve pieces of pine squared on only two sides and 3,000 planks of pine: Cadieux #488, 1 November 1823, and #490, 4 November 1823. 37 Sweeny, Les relations ville/campagne. 38 Later, Joy Parr would make this point much more eloquently in her critique of Keynesian economics: Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral and the Economic in the Postwar Years. 39 In an 1814 recommendation, the Grand Jury described this “speculation” as “very dangerous” for the “poor people” of the town. Journal of the Quarterly Sessions, Montreal District, vols 1814–1817, 45, ba nq-m . 40 Although the deputy commissary general in Montreal and his assistants at each fort did purchase some wood directly for use by the army, the bulk of supplies for the string of forts and garrisons in the Montreal region were put out for public tender each year. Unfortunately for us, as a cost-saving measure, notarized deeds for army contracts in British North America were suspended in 1828.



Notes to pages 99–105 355

41 Shanties were camps located in forested areas that were worked in the winter; people lived in the camps for months at a time. Given the requirement for both food and equipment, the cost and complexity of operating a shanty distinguished the endeavour from simply harvesting one’s own ‘back forty.’ 42 Antoine Bouthillier and his son Michel, farmers of Godmanchester, who had been supplying the Bagg & Waite syndicate since at least the spring of 1825, by late 1827 not only had to deliver 100 cords of wood to pay off their £41 debt to the syndicate, but were forced to concede to the syndicate the right to cut wood from their farms to make 100 cord–capacity rafts. Greffe of N.B. Doucet, #14849, 10 October 1827, ba nq-m . 43 Although two men were known to have cut five cords in a single day at a local competition, such a level of productivity could not be sustained for long. Sellar, The History of the County of Huntingdon and of the Seigniories of Chateaugay and Beauharnois. Much later, and in Newfoundland where the wood being cut was spruce and birch, an experienced forestry worker could produce between 1.1 and 1.25 cords a day. Neary, “The Bradley Report on Logging Operations in Newfoundland,” 207. 44 Two farmers paid for the purchase of timepieces – three clocks and a silver watch – with firewood, while Charles Leblanc obtained a red sleigh in the Quebec style, which would have allowed him to visit neighbours in fine fashion during the long winter months. 45 Most of the wood came from the Chateauguay and western St Lawrence River valleys, the last of the good farmland in the colony to be cleared by European settlers. Only half a dozen non-Canadien family names appear among the suppliers; interestingly, all operated in partnership with a Canadien supplier. 46 This most dangerous part of the trip often involved hiring Mohawks from Kahnawake and sometimes involved “squaws” as well; see the Montreal Gazette, 5 June 1826. 47 James Black, negociant of Chambly, offered as his security the local seigneur, Samuel Hatt, and a British Army general, Wiltshire Wilson, while Edouard Demers, merchant of Chambly, offered the security of Joseph Demers, his brother and local notary, and E.M. Leprohon, a local magistrate. 48 A laboureur was a farmer who was sufficiently well off that he could rent out his oxen to plough other farmers’ lands. 49 Early on, prices for pelts were established in terms of trade goods rather than currency; as the production costs of these goods in Europe declined, the transfer of value from indigenous communities to the merchant houses controlling the trade steadily increased. 50 Several generation–long periods of growth in the rural world saw price increases for goods produced in the countryside relative to those for goods produced in town. During the shorter and sharper periods of economic

356

Notes to pages 105–16

downturn, this pattern was reversed. Known as price scissors, this phenomenon is well known in the literature; the debate, as always, is, why? Despite Guy Bois’ argument in “Against the Neo-Malthusian Orthodoxy,” the demographic model remains the most widely accepted explanation. 51 Mercantilism was based on the idea that there was a fixed amount of wealth in the world and therefore government policy should aim at maximizing the capture of that existing wealth through restrictions on shipping (e.g., Cromwell’s Navigation Act) or by tying colonial production to the imperial economy. 52 This formulation is to be found in the mbhp ’s “Problématique de la transition,” in my doctoral thesis, and in Brian Young’s In Their Corporate Capacity. 53 Sweeny, “Paysan et ouvrier.” 54 E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” 55 Rice, “Le process du travail”; Ferland, “Syndicalisme parcellaire et syndicalisme collectif”; Ferland, “Business History”; and Ferland, “In Search of the Unbound Prometheia.” 56 Representative works from each approach would be Lapointe, Les Québécois de la bonne entente; Coates, The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec. 57 Bliss, “Privatizing the Mind”; Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein, Petrified Campus; and Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? 58 Palmer, Descent into Discourse.

chapter five

1 2 3 4

Vincent, “Sources masculines et sources féminines.” Lévesque, “La parole des femmes naskapies sur l’histoire.” Lévesque and Desmarais, La famille naskapie à l’époque de Fort McKenzie.  For a path-breaking critique of these timeless categories, see Sider, Lumbee Indian Histories. Ethnographers are not alone; for example, every Canadian history textbook opens with a short review of the varying indigenous cultures at the time of first contact with Europeans. What happened over the previous ten thousand years of human inhabitancy of this part of the world is simply not considered to be part of our history. 5 This task is made all the more difficult when leading historical epistemologists, such as Hayden White, reject out of hand the possibility of non-literate peoples having a history. See his remarks on oral history on H-Net History and Theory, November and December 2000, www.h-net.msu.edu. 6 Sweeny, “The Staples as the Significant Past.” 7 This is why almost every doctoral thesis, academic book, or article starts with a historiographical review and then generally returns to the author’s historiographical contribution in the conclusion.



Notes to pages 116–18 357

8 Double-blind means that the author does not know who is evaluating her or his work, while those doing the reviewing are not to know who the author is. Confidentiality is presumed to ensure honesty. 9 Bergson was a highly influential philosopher in the early part of the twentieth century who won the Nobel Prize for literature and debated with Einstein on the nature of time. He was one of the first victims of the Holocaust in France. His collected works are available in Bergson, Oeuvres. 10 “In its immediacy, as an actual experience of his own, Plato’s argument must undoubtedly have grown up out of a discussion of some sort, though I do not know what it was, and been closely connected to such a discussion. Yet if I not only read his argument but understand it, follow it in my own mind reenacting it with and for myself, the process of argument which I go through is not a process resembling Plato’s, it is actually Plato’s so far as I understand him correctly.” Collingwood, The Idea of History, 301. For a critique and a defence of this position respectively, see Dray, History as Re-enactment; and D’Oro, “Collingwood on Re-enactment and the Identity of Thought.” 11 Sweeny, “Time and Human Agency.” 12 Longue durée simply means long duration, but we never translate the term. 13 Braudel, On History, 10. 14 Ibid., 42, 48. 15 Dubuc, “L’influence de l’école des Annales au Québec.” 16 Excluding the war years, Annales had devoted more than half of its pages to recent, post-1815 historical issues. After 1949, contemporary history rarely accounted for more than a quarter of the review. Under Braudel’s editorship, contemporary history was prominent in only four years: 1952, 1958, 1964, and 1966. Wesseling, “The Annales School,” 186. 17 For Bergson, the only fixed, unchangeable aspect of reality is movement through time; thus, the only constant is change itself and therefore reality is not predetermined. This indeterminacy is not absolute, because the movement of reality is through time. Reality does have a direction, but it is temporal, not spatial, and so time is heterogeneous in two ways. Not only is the past different from the present and the present different from the future, but the continuous and indeterminate nature of temporal movement means that the idea of a singular present is illusory, for if the continuous and heterogeneous past were to culminate in a single moment of the present, it would necessarily imply a determinacy to that past. Finally, time is indivisible, since any dividing line between past and present would be an artificial, unreal device outside time. 18 Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire. 19 He went on to say: “For the historian, ideas and institutions are never data coming from the Eternal; they are historical manifestations of the human

358

Notes to pages 119–21

genius at a certain period under the pressure of circumstances, which can never recur.” Febvre, A New Kind of History, 19–20. 20 Carr, who had been a diplomat before becoming a historian, was the leading Western historian of the Soviet Union. His articulation of “History as Progress” was imbued with the transformative optimism of Cold War liberalism. In “Time and Human Agency,” I explored the impact of the Cold War on the Annales school. 21 E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, 38. 22 Thompson’s seventh of his eight points could not have been clearer: “Historical materialism differs from other interpretive orderings of historical evidence, not (or not necessarily) in any epistemological premises, but in its categories, its characteristic hypotheses and attendant procedures, and in the avowed conceptual kinship between these and the concepts elaborated by Marxist practitioners in other disciplines” (ibid., 44). 23 Early on, there is an explicit acknowledgment of Bloch (ibid., 40); Thompson later argues that every historical moment “is not only a moment of being, but also a moment of becoming” (47) and concludes by addressing Bergson’s problem of the retroactive validation of the present in the past. Knowing how things turned out is “a powerful aid to understanding not why they had to turn out in this way, but why in fact they did” (49). 24 In his fifth point, Thompson argues that the human past is a totality whose rationality should be understood “as historical process: that is, practices ordered and structured in rational ways” (40). Emphasis in the original. 25 While distancing himself from those who would impute progress “as an attribute to the past,” Thompson considers that progress “can only acquire a meaning from a particular position in the present, a position of value in search of its own genealogy” (42). 26 A. Wilson, “Foundations of an Integrated Historiography.” Hermeneutics are the methodological principals for interpreting the Christian Bible, but since Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960), a critique of Heidigger, the term has come to mean in literary and some historical circles the approach one uses to understand a text. 27 E.P. Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 39. 28 Rice, “Sailortown.” 29 While it might be argued that the History Workshop conferences of the 1980s constituted just such an important breakthrough in historical practice, they did not result in any new epistemological approach. This failure might help explain their short-lived success. 30 Neis, “Fishers’ Ecological Knowledge”; and Finlayson, Fishing for Truth. 31 Sweeny, “The Costs of Modernityward.”



Notes to pages 122–7 359

32 The paper was subsequently published as Bill Wicken, “26 August 1726: A Case Study in Mi’kmaq – New England Relations in the Early 18th Century.” 33 Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 158–9. 34 Wicken, Mi’kmaq Treaties on Trial. 35 In what is a very large literature, key texts in chronological order would include: Innis, The Cod Fisheries; D.G. Alexander, “Newfoundland’s Traditional Economy”; Munro, A Promise of Abundance; Sinclair, From Traps to Draggers; Sider, Culture and Class in Anthropology and History; Ommer, Merchant Credit and Labour Strategies; Pocius, A Place to Belong; Storey, The Newfoundland Groundfish Fisheries; and Cadigan, Hope and Deception in Conception Bay. The interdisciplinary nature of the consensus is indicated by the fact that two political economists, two historians, two historical geographers, a sociologist, an anthropologist, and a folklorist produced these titles. 36 Robert C.H. Sweeny, “Reality Is Like an Onion and other lessons learned from non-routinely generated sources,” Conference on the Writing of History, University of Ottawa, 1995. 37 Sweeny, “Movement, Options & Costs.” 38 Sweeny, “Accounting for Change.” 39 Cod traps are large boxes of netting from twelve to eighteen fathoms square, with a long lead net that directs fish into the box. They are fixed gear and are used at the height of the inshore fishing season, from mid-June to early August. They supplement the hook-and-line fishery, in which people jig for cod. Although they have the undoubted merits of increasing productivity and being relatively easy to maintain and repair by their operators, in the late nineteenth century, a trap cost the equivalent of most fishing families’ annual income. 40 Mancke, “At the Counter of the General Store”; and Craig and Turcotte, “The Homespun Paradox”; and Craig, “Solder les comptes.” 41 Sweeny, “The Social Trap.” 42 Hong, “Pandora’s Box.” 43 In “The Social Trap,” I analysed interviews conducted by Anita Best, Jeannie Howse, and Mark Ferguson in 1991–93 with fifty-two experienced and respected trap skippers on the Southern Shore, in and around St John’s and in parts of Conception, Trinity, and Bonavista bays. All were in agreement: cod traps had been used in their communities for generations. None of those interviewed, however, could trace their own families’ use of cod traps back more than a generation. While traps had been used in their communities since the 1880s, it was primarily in the 1920s and 1930s that their families acquired this technology. The earliest reported community ‘drawing for berths’ was in Flat Rock, in 1919. These community draws spread quickly around the island because they ensured that no one monopolized the best fishing grounds.

360

Notes to pages 127–37

44 Porter, “‘She Was Skipper of the Shore-Crew.’” 45 Keough, The Slender Thread. 46 Indeed, this historical subordination would be carried on into the post-Confederation period. Wives who worked in the shore crew were long denied any unemployment insurance, while their husbands received it as fishermen. Neis, “From ‘Shipped Girls’ to ‘Brides of the State.’” 47 An observation made in one of the most important studies of rural Canada: Bitterman, “Farm Households and Wage Labour in the Northeastern Maritimes in the early 19th Century.” 48 Jean Ferrat, Le Bilan (Paris, 1980). My thanks to Joseph Caron, who introduced me to this song. My singularly non-poetical translation is: “It is another future we have to reinvent, / without idols or models, humbly step by step, / without a known truth, or days that sing / of having definitively invented happiness / … / In the name of the ideal for which we fought / and that today encourages us to continue the struggle.” 49 With perhaps the final word going to Bradbury, Wife to Widow. 50 Linteau and Robert, “Propriété et société à Montréal.” 51 Sweeny, “Un placement privilégié: le marché immobilier à Montréal à la veille de la révolution industrielle,” ihaf convention, Université de Montréal, 1992. The database was subsequently published in Sweeny, A Reconstituted Tax Roll of Montréal, 1825, and is available from the map ( Montréal, l’avenir du passé) website (www.mun.ca/mapm). 52 Sweeny, “Il était un fois dans l’est: le faubourg Ste-Marie en 1825,” ihaf convention, Université du Québec à Trois Rivières, 1993. 53 A useful introduction to an enormous literature is Macpherson, Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions. 54 McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues. 55 Journals of the Legislative Council of the province of Lower Canada, being the third session of the fifteenth provincial Parliament; and Kolish, “Le Conseil legislative et les bureaux d’enregistrement (1836).” 56 See Sir Charles Grey’s minute of 1836 as cited in the Reports of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Grievances Complained of in Lower Canada. 57 Ordinances made and passed by the administrator of the government and Special Council for the affairs of the province of Lower Canada. The debate in November of 1840 over dower is recorded in Journals of the Special Council of the province of Lower-Canada from the 5th of November, 1840 to the 9th of February, 1841. 58 Nor should one ignore the influence of British colonial officials, most notably Lord Durham, his secretary Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and his successor as governor general Lord Sydenham. Greer and Radforth, Colonial Leviathan; G. Martin, The Durham Report and British Policy; Ryerson, Unequal Union; and Faucher, “La condition nord-américaine des provinces britanniques.”



Notes to pages 137–47 361

59 Lafontaine, Analyse de l’ordonnance du Conseil spécial sur les bureaux d’hy­ pothèques: suivie du texte anglais et français de l’ordonnance, des lois relatives à la création des ci-devant bureaux de comtés, et de la Loi des lettres de ratification; and Anon., “Registration,” Revue de législation et de jurisprudence. 60 Thomson, Copy of a despatch from the Right Honourable Charle Poulett Thomson to Lord John Russell, dated Montreal, 13th March 1840, transmitting memorials from various parties respecting the estates of St. Sulpice; and Young, In Its Corporate Capacity. 61 Lelièvre and Angers, Seigniorial questions:  a compilation containing the Seig­ niorial Act of 1854, the amendment to the Seigniorial Act of 1854, the questions submitted by the attorney general for Lower Canada, the counter-questions submitted by divers seigniors the proceedings and decisions of the special court constituted under the authority of the Seigniorial Act of 1854, the pleadings and memoirs of the advocates, and the observations of the judges, &c., &c.; Wallot, “Le regime seigneurial et son abolition au Canada.” 62 Sweeny, “Land and People.” 63 In essence, Brian Young’s identification of prominent developers as having been largely English-speaking Protestants was a consequence of his having mistaken this part for the whole.

chapter six 1 “I had no idea of the work involved,” letter to Monseigneur J.J. Lartigue, 31 December 1827, p 32/62/195, Fonds Viger-Verreau, Archives du séminaire du Québec (a sq ). 2 Sweeny, “Aperçu d’un effort collectif québécois”; and Sweeny, “Banking as Class Action.” 3 Lauzon, Robert, and Sweeny, Vieux-Montréal. 4 French, Tooley’s Dictionary of Mapmakers, vol. 1, rev. edn, 8. 5 By 1807, he was drawing the plans for the Ordnance depot in Ballincollig, Cork. From 1808 to 1810, he signed numerous copies of naval defence drawings for both the Newfoundland and West Indian stations. After working on the plans for coastal defences from Wicklow to Dublin in 1810, he is known to have worked on plans for Cork, Jersey, Falmouth, and Plymouth in 1811, Plymouth and Portsmouth in 1812, Exeter Barracks and Eastern Hoe in 1813, and Chatham in 1815. Maps and Plans in the Public Record Office, vols 1–2. 6 For discussion of these methods and the instructions surveyors received, see Seymour et al., A History of the Ordnance Survey, 57–63, 363–5. 7 This description of the Ordnance Survey is from Wordsworth’s View from the top of Black’s Comb. 8 For a pioneering study of these processes, see Morris, Class, Sect and Party.

362

Notes to pages 149–59

9 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes. 10 The layers that constitute figure 6.1 are from the bottom up: land and water; wards; blocks; property lines and fences; streams, commons, and gardens; residences; workshops; public buildings; bridges and culverts; waterworks; text; street names; titles and legends. 11 Sweeny, “Analysing Adams: Dimensions of Pre-industrial Montréal,” Geography Department Seminar, McGill University, 2000. 12 It consisted of a 5,400 word ‘sketch’ of Montreal; a civil list of thirty-eight individuals; the dates of the courts; a description of mail services, stage coaches, steamboats, and team boats servicing the town; the names of the directors of banks and the “La Chine Canal Company” and the offices of the Montreal Water Works, fire insurance companies, the North West Company, and the Hudson’s Bay Company; addresses of five different offices of the British Army; the location of five fire engine houses and where their keys were kept; and details of two Masonic lodges. 13 These maps are considerably more schematic than I had intended. They place each entry in numeric order. In fact, Doige’s system started along one side of the street and then came down the other, so 120 St-Laurent was not at the top of the street but opposite number 1. 14 Sweeny, The 1819 City Directory of Thomas Doige. 15 He prefaced the claim with “in terms of trade and population it may be justly termed.” He was wrong on both points. Quebec City had more people than Montreal until the late 1820s, and it remained a more important port until the late 1840s, when the dredging of the St Lawrence at Lac St-Pierre allowed ocean-going vessels to reach Montreal much more easily. 16 The equation is (612/2051) × (170/2051) = .02473. 17 Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, 125–31, 263–4. 18 Not surprisingly, as the systematic pairing of adjacent entries in a random sample simply enlarges the existing sample without creating a new one. 19 The greater disparities in what he considered to be the least politically advanced town, Shields, also stemmed from his method. Foster eliminated from consideration all female heads of household, replacing them with the eldest working male relative. By standardizing on men, he introduced a new anomaly of pairing different generations. Being a port, Shields had more female heads of household, so the “observed” result in this town was different because with more exceptional pairings it was not as fully random a subset. 20 There were 424 addresses with more than one person or firm listed: 338 had two listed, 64 had three, 13 had four, and 8 had five, while an address on StCharles Borrommée in St-Laurent ward had eight different people listed. These 948 people and firms had 488 immediate neighbours living at singleentry addresses. There were another 912 single-entry addresses with two neighbours each and 95 corner addresses with a single neighbour each.



Notes to pages 160–5 363

21 Doige provided no street numbers for any of the residents in this sparsely settled neighbourhood, but for 29 of the 51 people and firms listed, there is at least a street name. These streets were all in the eastern part of the ward, adjacent to Pointe-à-Callière. Thus, for the other 22 people, including 9 of the 10 listed labourers, their Ste-Anne suburb address may have meant just that, but more likely it meant that they lived on one of the seven newly opened streets to the west. 22 In the Asian game of go, you place markers on grid points to encircle an area of the board. Each move is made in light of all the existing markers. The Brownian motion refers to the random movement of particles suspended in a fluid. 23 A housekeeper was the senior female servant in a household – the female counterpart to a butler. She was responsible for both the maids and the kitchen staff. 24 Out of the total 214 that were ‘missing’ in both years, Craig Street in StLaurent ward accounted for 30, the main street of St-Joseph 31, and the main street of St-Antoine 39, while Notre-Dame in the town centre had 21 and McGill 12. 25 In the first edition, Doige accorded James Monk, the chief justice of the Court of King’s Bench for the Montreal District, the lofty title of President and Administrator in Chief of the Province of Lower Canada. 26 These included summary tables by côte, or range road, of the categories drawn from the census, plus the number of occupied and unoccupied homes, homes under construction, and stores or workshops. Viger also identified the following for each parish: how many heads of households were Canadiens or not; how many there were of each religious denomination; where the inhabitants were born; how many men were eligible by each category of service for the militia; how many people there were 60 years and older by age, sex, and origin; and how many unmarried women over 14 and unmarried men over 18 there were. Finally, he produced a cumulative table of occupations distinguishing between those who lived in villages and those who lived in the countryside. 27 Bernard, Linteau, and Robert, “La structure professionelle de Montréal en 1825,” 383–415. 28 Translated titles with a brief description of the new contents of each of Jacques Viger’s twelve statistical tables: (1) Returns of the County according to the form required by the provincial statute of 5 Geo. IV Chap. VII . (2) Population of the County: identifies the number of girls between 14 and 18 and thereby renders comparable the data on youth and calculates the imbalance between males and females. (3) Single people: identifies the nubile population and distinguishes between the rural and urban parts of the island. (4) Military returns for the Militia of the County: notes the disparity between eligible males and the number enrolled. (5) Religious returns: provides

364

Notes to pages 167–82

detailed breakdown for the parish of Montréal. (6) The birthplace of every inhabitant of the County: identifies thirty-five different places with details by parish and suburb and introduces racial distinctions: white, black, and mulatto. (7) Buildings used by the population, excluding Public buildings, unless they are inhabited: identifies inhabited houses and workshops, those abandoned or under construction, as well as “Workshops, factories, stores, counters, manufactories, etc.,” and classifies buildings by type of building materials used. (8) The relationship between population, inhabited houses, and heads of families: contrasts number of inhabitants per building with the number per household and distinguishes between countryside, villages and city. (9) Public Education: very detailed statistics by age, sex, residency, number of teachers, including itinerants, and the type of school. (10) Longevity Tables: the relationships between the elderly and the whole population. (11) Proprietors of taxable property in the City of Montreal: numbers of properties, number of proprietors, and ranking by value (seventeen categories) of annual income for tax purposes by ward and then for the city as a whole with the ethnicity of the proprietor (Canadien, Anglo-Canadien, Anglais et étranger) noted. (12) Value of the taxable properties in the City: tax by property, annual revenue (calculated at 6 per cent) and the capital value by ward and by electoral riding. 29 Strictly speaking, what he did was select every property owner in each ward that had £25 in taxable revenue. Revenue was calculated at 6 per cent of the assessed capital value of a property, and so, to be a large property owner by this method, one had to own £416.3s.4d. worth of real estate in that ward. He then added up the large property owners to create a citywide list. Linteau and Robert’s analysis of Viger’s work on property (“Propriété et société à Montréal”) is based primarily on this city-wide compilation. 30 Letter to Hugh Heney, 9 December 1828, p 32/62/19, Fonds Viger-Verreau, asq. 31 Sweeny, “Ségrégation et utilisation de l’espace urbain: deux perspectives d’une ville pré-industrielle, le cas montréalais,” annual reunion of the Société historique du Canada, Université Laval, 2001. 32 There is the very real possibility that Viger did not complete the exercise once it became clear that the Tories were not going to make a contest of this election. p 32/69 Fonds Viger-Verreau, a sq .

chapter seven 1 I analysed our failure to do this in Quebec in “L’étrange retraite, vers une histoire de notre abdication professionnelle.” 2 Sweeny, “The Past in the Present,” Part I and Part II .



Notes to pages 183–200 365

3 Robert C.H. Sweeny, “From the Specific to the General: What Pre-industrial Montreal Has to Tell Us about Capitalism,” McGill University, 2001. 4 Robert C.H. Sweeny, “Banking on Empire: Credit Strategies and the Crash of 1825 in Montreal, Lower Canada,” Economic History Society, University of Leeds, 1998. 5 Forwarding involves the shipping of goods to another destination after their initial delivery to a port. In this case, forwarders trans-shipped goods from Montreal to Upper Canada and many were located in Kingston at the mouth of Lake Ontario. 6 Greffe of Henry Griffin, #7252, 26 May 1827, ba nq-m . 7 Greffe of André Jobin, #2691, 10 May 1822, ba nq-m . Text between {…} was inserted as an addition to the deed when it was read aloud. 8 Greffe of André Jobin, #3494, 2 April 1824, ba nq-m . 9 Greffe of André Jobin, #3697, 2 May 1825, ba nq-m . 10 Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” 11 Linebaugh, The London Hanged. 12 Hardy and Ruddel, Les apprentis artisans à Québec, 1660–1815. 13 Grace Laing Hogg, “The Legal Rights of Masters, Mistresses and Domestic Servants.” 14 Greffe of Pierre Ritchot, #1172, 14 July 1825, ba nq-m . 15 Greffe of Pierre Ritchot, #593, 22 September 1823, ba nq-m . 16 Interestingly, Alex Rollo, Isabella’s father, did not sign the deed, but instead wrote a note stating, “I have no objections that Isabella Rollo binds herself as she thinks proper.” Greffe of Pierre Ritchot, #287, 19 July 1822, ba nq-m . 17 Sweeny, “Artisans and Gender.” 18 Only 17 of the 724 apprentices had a master linked to the census whose household did not in­clude a working-age woman. A further twenty-six households, with 75 apprentices, had no married women present, so in eight out of nine households where we know apprentices to have trained, a married woman was present. 19 Role Général Des Cinq Divisions de la Ville & Paroisse de Montréal tel que Chaque Sous-Inspecteur me l’a Livré N’ayant pû y faire aucunne Correction ne Connaissant pas le Local, 1796, p 32/46/5, Fonds Viger-Verreau, a sq . 20 My use of the first person plural here refers to the work of the mbhp , but I also would extend it to include the remarkable dissertation by Joanne Burgess, “Work, Family and Community: Mont-Real Leather Craftsmen: 1790–1831.” 21 Sweeny, Monetary Protests of the Bank of Montreal; and Sweeny, A reconstituted tax roll of Montréal, 1825. 22 Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England. 23 Langlois, Familles de charpentiers et de menuisiers à Montréal au XVIII e siècle; and Roy, “Les familles de tisserands de la plaine de Montréal au XVIII e siècle.”

366

Notes to pages 200–11

24 Or at least for the middle class in Leeds: Morris, Men, Women, and Property. 25 Bradbury et al., “Property and Marriage.” This much-reduced figure was for those who still signed a contract; most urban popular-class women no longer had sufficient property of their own at the time of marriage to justify the cost of a notarized deed. 26 Sweeny, “Risky Spaces.” 27 With the bulk of the offensive formulations excised, the paper appeared as Jean-Paul Barbiche, “La Fédération des Antilles Britanniques: Un échec exemplaire,” in Barbiche, Des Amériques: Impressions et expressions, 137–42. The “notoriously composite” remark did, however, survive (137). 28 Then maîtres de conférences at, respectively, the Université de Perpignan and the Université de Lille. 29 Despite its illustrious pedigree, de omnibus dubitandum (“to doubt everything” was a maxim of René Descartes and a motto of Karl Marx) is rarely considered collegial behaviour. 30 Sweeny, “Industry and Nation in a Colonial Space.” 31 Stanley, “Why I Killed Canadian History”; Perry, “Hardy Backwoodsmen, Wholesome Women, and Steady Families”; and Hoerder, Creating Societies. 32 “The law permits that which it does not prohibit and the police regulation that prohibits what the law does not, must be contrary to the law.” Observations sur les Réglements concernant les Regrattiers, Fonds Viger-Verreau, box 63, bundle 8, no. 19, a sq . 33 Galarneau, “L’élection partielle du quartier-ouest de Montréal en 1832.” 34 Jacques Viger, “Liste alphabéthique des personnes qui se sont présentées au Poll du Q.O. de Montréal pour voter, en 1832,” Fonds Viger-Verreau, no. 45, a sq. 35 Single and widowed women who owned property gained the right to vote municipally in the 1890s, but this right was not extended to property-owning married women until the 1930s. The first fully democratic municipal election was not held until 1962. Provincially, property-owning women were formally banned from voting in 1849 and women would not gain the franchise until 1940. 36 A quite different assessment of the rebellions, which presents them as a coup d’état organized by the more extreme Tories behind the Montreal Herald newspaper, has been proposed in Deschamps, Le radicalisme Tory à travers le prisme du Montreal Herald. 37 Gidney and Millar, Professional Gentlemen. 38 Robert C.H. Sweeny, “Pour le bien-être de la famille: les activités écono­ miques des médecins montréalais, 1819–1845,” ihaf convention, 1998; and “Structure out of Change: Doctors in Montréal, 1819–1845,” Canadian Society for the History of Medicine, Dalhousie University, 2003.



Notes to pages 214–32 367

39 mbhp, Répertoire des engagements. 40 Bernard, Linteau, and Robert. “Les effectifs des professions à Montréal en 1825”; and Robert and Théoret. “Le recensement de 1825.” 41 The unification of the Canadas delayed the decennial census of 1841, and when it took place in 1842, the results were immediately questioned. In some parts of the new colony, whole districts had to be re-enumerated; this resulted in a delay of publication until 1844. In Montreal, certain wards were also redone. I discuss certain of the resultant problems in chapter 8.

chapter eight 1 The title means “Montreal, the Future of the Past.” We described our gis in Sweeny and Olson, “map : Montréal, l’avenir du passé.” For additional information on this ongoing project to develop a research infrastructure for the city, consult our website: www.mun.ca/mapm. 2 Vector graphics use algebraic formulae to define the boundaries of an image and object-orienting programming to specify its properties. They are compact and can be resized without loss of detail. Raster images assign a value to each pixel of a digital image, so not only are these images frequently very large and prone to breaking up if you zoom in too much, but they are not objects for the computer and so cannot be assigned particular properties. 3 The complete title is “A Topographical and Pictorial Map of the City of Montreal. Surveyed and drawn by James Cane, Civil Engineer. Lithographed by Matthews & McLee’s. The views drawn by J. Duncan. Published by Robt W. S. MacKay. Montreal: 1846.” On behalf of map , I rectified a digitalized copy in four parts prepared by the Rare Books Collection of McGill University, with additional information for damaged areas coming from the copy in the collection of the then Bibliothéque national du Québec. 4 It was either Cane or his publisher, Robert MacKay (who also produced the town’s trade directory), who chose to present the census returns for 1842 as dating from 1844, the year they were published, thereby conveying the impression that the city was really booming, since their estimate of a current population of 50,000 in 1846 meant a population increase of 15 per cent in just two years. The 1842 census, carried out at different times in different wards over the summer and fall of that year, indicated a population of 44,093, compared to 22,500 in 1825. A more reasonable estimate of the population by 1846 would place it at 47,500. 5 Smaller structures behind the principal building on the lot would have been frequently missed. In the older parts of town, where buildings were flush to the street and private cartways were the only points of entry into the interior of a block, Cane’s ability to distinguish between properties and even to draw

368

Notes to pages 233–50

the outlines of the buildings accurately was greatly reduced. The archives of the engineering department of the Ville de Montréal contain a number of preliminary maps and surveys by Cane that showed how he attempted to address these problems. 6 Sweeny, with Grace Laing Hogg, “Land and People.” 7 Robert C.H. Sweeny, “Spatial and Social Dynamics of Rentier Capital in an Industrializing Town: The Case of 19th Century Montreal.” Economic History Association, Austin, 2007. 8 In Ste-Anne, St-Antoine, St-Laurent, and the West and East wards, the marked prominence of this value, when compared with those worth £400, suggests the normative nature of the evaluation. 9 We do not have comparable information in the earlier Viger rolls, but we can link the 1825 roll to Viger’s notebooks for parts of the 1825 census. In SteMarie, of 144 small proprietors, only 25 males did not appear as the head of a household in the census returns for that ward. A number of these properties would have been commercial and so not the object of a census return, while a limited number of older men, like the 11 property-owning widows who did not appear as heads of households, probably lived with one of their children. 10 These people were part of the black columns on figure 8.12. If we take the city as whole, they owned as revenue-producing properties half of all the units worth £100 belonging to single proprietors, more than a third (36 per cent) of those worth up to £300, and more than half of all those that were worth more. 11 Although many of these rentier families did more than just hold their own, large landlords who had been active for more than fifteen years in the city had portfolios almost twice the size of those of the more recent investors. Large landlords were the only ones who exhibited any qualitative differences over time. Owners of single properties in 1848 linked to an earlier roll had slightly smaller ‘incomes’ and local landlords slightly larger ones than those who were not linked. By contrast, large landlords who were linked across rolls had incomes averaging £480 compared to £222 for those not appearing in an earlier roll. 12 A streetscape is a relatively coherent part of a larger urban landscape. It is a much better analytical tool than city blocks because by taking in both sides of a street, it recognizes the socio-economic importance and cultural distinc­ tiveness of particular streets in the urban fabric. Hanna and Olson, “Métiers, loyers et bouts de rues.” 13 The university was itself a major player in this development, as it subdivided the lower half of the original campus for commercial and residential development during the 1840s. 14 The published census refers to the synthesis that first appeared in 1844 and upon which Cane had based his calculations. The manuscript census refers to



15

16

17

18 19 20

21

22

Notes to pages 256–61 369

all the printed forms that were compiled, by hand, by the census enumerators and that, in Canada, only became publicly available ninety to a hundred years later. Here, I must acknowledge the enormous debt I owe to Gerald Sider. A decade ago, he encouraged me to write what was for me a major theoretical, as well as historiographical, paper for an international conference on class. Then, during a walk through the foothills of Montana, he devastatingly critiqued the paper in order to force me to take the issue of incoherency seriously. The result was not only a much better paper, but a qualitative leap forward in my understanding. The paper was later published as “What Difference Does a Mode Make? A Comparison of Two Seventeenth Century Colonies: Canada and Newfoundland,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 63, no. 2 (April 2006): 281–304. Sweeny, “Recenser la modernité,” a review of Courville, Robert, and Séguin, Atlas historique du Québec: Le pays laurentien au XIX e siècle: les morphologies de base. Among Québécois intellectuals, the perception of Quebec as normal was the most widely shared thesis during the last decades of the twentieth century. Its earliest articulation (Linteau, Durocher, and Robert, Histoire du Québec contemporain, vol. 1: De la Confédération à la crise) quickly displaced Ryerson’s Capitalisme et Confédération as the textbook of choice in Quebec’s francophone colleges and universities. Its influence was evident long before a collection (Bouchard, La Construction d’une culture) and then a major monograph (Bouchard, Quelques arpents d’Amérique) raised this idea to hegemonic status. Waywell, “Farm Leases and Agriculture.” Sweeny, “Paysans et propriétés.” Wallot, “Le regime seigneurial et son abolition au Canada.” Using the average income of a skilled worker as a yardstick, this sum would be approximately $1.7 billion in current dollars. Robert C.H. Sweeny, “Urban Ecology, Social Segregation and Industrialization in a Nineteenth Century Town,” 20th International Congress of Historical Sciences, Sydney, Australia, 2005. The lord had the right to block a sale and to repossess the lot in question upon payment of the sale price to the former censitaire. In the eighteenth century, the Sulpicians made extensive use of this right and thereby profited from the increased values around the town market in Place Royale. Lalancette and Stewart, “De la ville comptoir à la ville fortifiée.” Perhaps because of their uncertain legal situation after the Conquest, they chose not to exercise this right in the nineteenth century. Its mere existence, however, did impede arranged sale prices that were decidedly below prevailing market conditions, for one ran the risk of losing the property.

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Notes to pages 261–74

23 By the 1830s, this policy had become a problem for creditors repossessing properties, because a solicitor for the Sulpicians would often demand all unpaid dues plus interest out of the proceeds of the sheriff’s sale, leaving the aggrieved creditor, after the costs of the sale, with little for his or her pains. 24 From 1860 onwards, she and her lover, George-Étienne Cartier, lived in a suite of rooms at Rasco’s Hotel in the town centre, while Lady Cartier and her children occupied the house in the East ward that a century later Parks Canada would transform into a museum celebrating the conservative bourgeois lifestyle of this premier of the United Canadas and father of Confederation. After Cartier’s death, Luce Cuvillier sold her property to the Montreal Board of Trade, and until the late 1960s, the board’s headquarters were located there. 25 I have had to take the year prior to the start of commutations, 1840, rather than the year of the tax roll, 1848, because commuted properties disappeared from the terrier. 26 Although the ownership of property by women in the town centre was not infrequently related to inheritance or the settling of an estate and so was often held in co-proprietorship, women owned more than four-fifths of these properties outright. In 1825, 13 properties had co-proprietors, 21 in 1832, and 20 in 1840. 27 Perry, Novel Relations. 28 Bettina Bradbury, “Companionate Patriarchy: Money Matters and Marriage,” in Bradbury, Wife to Widow, 61–86. 29 This is an important proviso, as the proportion of people choosing to sign a contract declined precipitously among the popular classes. I assume there was little perceived advantage in paying for a contract to spell out future property rights when the couple could realistically envisage none. 30 Meszaros, Beyond Capital. 31 McKay, Rebels, Reds. 32 Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, 123. 33 See note 20 in chapter 3 for a partial bibliography of the controversy. 34 For a particularly rich analysis of how structures of feeling evolved within our changing relationships to nature, see Williams, The Country and the City. 35 I know, for example, that I would not have anywhere near the historical understanding of my sources that I enjoy if I had left the grunt work to someone else. 36 E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, 60. 37 Dostaler, Valeur et prix: histoire d’un débat. 38 Warin, Counting for Nothing. 39 Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, 52–5. 40 The language here is important: speculative bubbles. Bourgeois economic history tends to treat maniacal markets as follies, without ever admitting



Notes to pages 275–87 371

their centrality to how capitalism works. This is the principal way capitalism creates and destroys value. It is only in the wake of a great crisis, like 1929 or 2008, that this aspect of the emperor’s wardrobe is, for a short while, commented upon at all. Progressive political economy does no better with its contrast between a ‘real’ economy and a ‘paper’ economy. The fictions of finance capitalism are real. They are why billions of people are hungry and tens of millions of people die prematurely every year. 41 MacKay, “Preface,” in MacKay, The Montreal Directory. I am grateful to Alan M. Stewart for first bringing this passage to my attention. 42 Under responsible government, the executive arm of government, the Cabinet, is responsible to the elected assembly for its actions. Question Period is the daily realization of this right. 43 Burgess, “L’industrie de la chaussure à Montréal 1840–1870.”

chapter nine 1 Sweeny, “Urban Ecology of Social Segregation in an Industrializing Town.” 2 Sweeny, Lovell’s 1880–81 Alphabetical Listing of Montréal. 3 Craven and Traves, “Dimensions of Paternalism.” 4 Heap, “La grève des charretiers à Montréal, 1864.” 5 So, for example, male gilders who merely decorated the cover of books were paid four times more than female bookbinders. 6 Richard Rice’s pioneering analysis of the industrial census for 1871 revealed that the rate of exploitation, calculated as wages divided by surplus value per capita, in the manufacture of machine goods rarely surpassed 100 per cent, while in consumer goods it ranged from 150 to 275 per cent. Rice, “Le process de travail.” 7 I included in the highest social rank ordained clergy, members of the legal and medical professions, university professors, manufacturers, bankers, elected political officials, and stockbrokers. Merchants and commerçants were the largest single group in the second rank, and undoubtedly this group includes some who were both socially and financially of the first rank. Civil and mechanical engineers, dentists, architects, auctioneers, civil servants, brokers, insurance agents, and veterinarians were the other principal occupations in this rank. Those involved in petty commerce, who were most likely to own their own businesses (grocers, hotel and tavern keepers, and small shopkeepers), and clerks were the two largest groups in the third rank. I also included here a variety of white-collar jobs, such as agents and bookkeepers, along with those skilled trades for which an independent craft existence was still the norm. The latter undoubtedly swelled the numbers of this rank because it meant that journeymen who were only aspiring to a position

372

Notes to pages 287–93

as master were included. Contractors and builders were also ranked in this group, as well as select waged workers who enjoyed high social status within the working class and exercised managerial responsibilities, such as train engineers and conductors. The largest single rank was the skilled trades, and this despite my demoting to semi-skilled all shoemakers and tobacconists owing to the importance of factory work in these two trades. All apprentices, in both independent and skilled trades, were included in this category, as were boarding-house keepers. There was undoubtedly a hierarchy within domestic service, but I considered this not to be particularly relevant to this spatial analysis, as all from scullery maid to housekeeper or butler would have lived under the same roof. The semi-skilled group was undoubtedly the most eclectic of the ranks; it included skilled trades dominated by factory production, factory workers, firemen on the railways, and a wide variety of occupations in petty commerce, from bartenders to peddlers. The overwhelming majority of the unskilled were day labourers; all laundry workers and messengers were also included in this category. 8 Robert C.H. Sweeny, “Promoting the Faith: Religion and landlord-tenant relations in late-nineteenth century Montréal.” Social Science History Association, Chicago, 2013. 9 For a critique of this concept, see my review of Robert Kristofferson, Craft Capitalism: Craftworkers and Early Industrialization in Hamilton, Ontario, 1840– 1872, in Enterprise & Society 11, no. 4: 862–4. 10 Research on the burials was conducted by students in a seminar of Brian Young at McGill University. Research on school attendance was conducted by Roderick Macleod and Mary Anne Poutenan. I am grateful for their willingness to collaborate with map . 11 The Lovell’s for 1880–81 contains 32,341 distinct entries for people, firms, and institutions in the city. From these entries, I was able to create 32,706 linkages to 9,781 city lots. There are a number of reasons why some properties were not linked to the directory, the most important being the following: undeveloped properties generated no linkages; city-owned properties were often not listed in the directory; parts of the popular-class areas to the southwest and the northeast were not as well covered by Lovell as elsewhere in the city; and firms that owned multiple properties were generally only listed for their main addresses (for example, a firm with extensive property holdings would normally only appear once, for its head office). What is important for present purposes is that I have no reason to believe that these linkage problems are particularly biased against women; if anything, they tend towards an under-representation of men. 12 Of the 32,341 entries for people, 29,053 were for men. Indeed, 7,136 of the 9,781 linked lots consisted exclusively of male entries. The 309 exclusively



Notes to pages 295–321 373

female lots accounted for only 368 of the women listed. The overwhelming majority of female entries, 3,285 women, were on mixed, predominately male, lots. 13 It was not uncommon, for example, for people to provide a work address and a summer residence. Unlike the census returns analysed earlier, we are dealing here with a self-selected group. 14 Doctors continued to work and live at the same address, but by 1880 they had left the city centre and were disproportionately concentrated in the Beaver Hall Hill section of St-Antoine ward. 15 Trigger, “The Role of the Parish in Fostering Irish-Catholic Identity”; and Trigger, God’s Mobile Mansions. The latter literally compares which pews people sat on each Sunday with where they lived and worked the rest of the week. For a fine case study of a popular-class French-Canadian parish, see Ferretti, Entre voisins. 16 I was able to link the 408 female milliners and dressmakers in Lovell’s to 366 different lots, only 21 of which were exclusively female. These women worked alongside 216 other women and 1,319 men.

conclusion 1 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework.” 2 McKay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals. 3 McKay, Reasoning Otherwise. 4 McKay, “Canada as a Long Liberal Revolution.” 5 As the remarkable success of Robert Comeau’s Bulletin d’histoire politique and Mens, a younger generation’s journal of intellectual and cultural history, eloquently bears witness. 6 Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, “L’ensemble des discours, des pratiques, des dispositifs qui déterminent un nouveau mode de gouvernement des hommes [sic] selon le principe universel de la concurrence,” in La nouvelle raison du monde: Essai sur la société néolibérale (Paris: La Découverte, 2009), 6 (as cited in Hébert, La gouvernance en santé au Québec). 7 For an overview of its impact on the billion plus people of contemporary India, see Shrivastava and Kothari, Churning the Earth. For a blow-by-blow account of the struggle, see the five volumes of A. Roy, Collected Essays and Interviews, 1998–2012. 8 The reaction by both the academy and the media to the exceptional struggle of college and university students in Quebec during “Le printemps d’érable” in 2012 was particularly revealing in this regard. A hundred and seventy-five thousand students collectively challenged the neo-liberal order in the academy by asking publicly, Who do universities serve? What is a higher education

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Notes to pages 322–5

for? What type of society do we want to live in? What role can universities play in creating a sustainable future? In the face of this extraordinary political movement, the media, broadly supported by the tenured professoriate, in both official languages, consciously depicted the strikers as spoilt brats who needed to grow up and face reality. Sadly, it was only when the provincial government suspended fundamental liberties that a broad popular movement spontaneously rose up in solidarity. The intelligentsia of Quebec and English Canada were conspicuous by their absence. For a primer on the issues involved, see Nadeau-Dubois, Tenir tête. 9 R.W. Sandwell, “Missing Canadians: Reclaiming the A-Liberal Past,” and Bruce Curtis, “After ‘Canada’: Liberalisms, Social Theory, and Historical Analysis,” in Constant and Ducharme, Liberalism and Hegemony, 246–73, 176– 200; and Fecteau, “Towards a Theory of Possible History? Ian McKay’s Idea of a ‘Liberal Order.’” 10 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 623. 11 Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. In making this conflation, McKay repeated the error of Fernande Roy (Progrès, harmonie, liberté). See my review in Historical Studies in Education 3, no. 1 (Spring 1991), 128–32. 12 McKay, “Canada as a Long Liberal Revolution,” 423, 416. This powerful description of the market is McKay citing Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 78. 13 Ducharme, Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions atlantiques (1776–1838) (2010). An English edition by McGill-Queen’s University Press, translated by Peter Feldstein, appeared in 2014. 14 McKay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals, 54. 15 McKay, “Canada as a Long Liberal Revolution,” 358, 372–6. 16 Ibid., 361: “In the Liberal Era, an elite, initially quite small, dispersed, and divided within itself on religious, economic, and social grounds, transcended its immediate narrow interests and, with considerable assistance from Westminster and a cadre of British intellectuals, developed a cohesive economic, social and political program that it gradually projected into the far reaches of a massive subcontinent.” 17 M. Gauvreau and Hubert, The Churches and Social Order. 18 Bradbury, Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal. See the section “Regendering Property Relations” in chapter 8 for my earlier discussion of this work. 19 Olson and Thornton, Peopling the North American City. This work received an honourable mention in the Macdonald competition.



Notes to pages 325–32 375

20 They argued that by the end of the nineteenth century the possibilities for advancement were considerably greater than they had been in the 1840s. This optimistic reading is a hallmark of the whole of Olson’s fifty-year-long contribution to historical geography, as I discussed in “L’historicité de son trajèt.” It also, however, highlights the extraordinary difficulties that so many Irish Catholics, largely recent immigrants, faced in the 1840s and 1850s. As both Bradbury and I started twenty years earlier, with the 1820s, our perspectives on the nature of long-term change were correspondingly different. 21 Loo, States of Nature. 22 Rollison, “The Specter of the Commonality”; Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto; and A. Wood, The Memory of the People.

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index Aboriginal epistemologies, 112–15 absconding, 349n50 Acheson, Archibald, 209 Adams, John, 134, 143–56, 180, 201, 225–7, 232, 277, 283, 294, 315, 361n5 agency, 3, 40, 59–60, 81, 141–2, 180, 224, 256, 273, 281, 307–10, 315 Alger, Jonathan, 79 Allaire, Théophile, 90–2, 352n21 Althusser, Louis, 119, 347n19 Anderson, Benedict, 82 Anderson, James, 193 Annales, 11, 17, 117–19, 339n16, 340n1, 357n16 Annapolis Royal, 122 apprenticeship, 46–7, 76–86, 190–7, 316, 333, 349nn53–4 appropriations: capitalist, 126–7, 249–60, 269–74, 371n6; feudal, 54, 256–8, 352n18, 369n20, 369n22 Archives nationales du Québec, 172–3 Arnoldi, Dr Daniel, 214, 220 Arpin family, 93–4 Ashton, T.S., 25–6, 28 assignments. See credit Atlantic world, 4 Bagg, Abner, 103, 348n40 Bagg, Stanley, 103, 207–9 Bagg & Waite, 103, 164 Baldwin, Robert, 275 Balliol College, 24 Balzac, Honoré, 167

Bank of Canada, protests, 71–6, 183–6, 348n39 Bank of Montreal, 239; artwork, 206–7, 273; protests 66–76, 183–90, 348n39 banks, 45, 60–76, 183–90, 313. See also credit Barbiche, Jean-Paul, 202 Barron’s Block, 306 Bartlett, W.H., 98 Baumgarten, Alfred, 37 Beaubien, Dr Pierre, 221–2 Beauchamps, Joseph, 103 Becker, Gary, 337n5 Bedard, Pierre-Stanislas, 60 Bélin, Dr William, 214 Ben Barka, Moktar, 202 Bender, F.X., 189 Benjamin, Walter, 15, 271 Bentham, Jeremy, 323, 331 Berger, John, 17–19, 311, 340n3 Bergson, Henri, 116, 357n9, 357n17 Berthelet, Dr Benjamin, 214 Best, Anita, 359n43 bills of exchange. See credit: instruments Birks, Henry & Co., 279 Bittermann, Rusty, 128 Blais, Joachim, 103 Blanchard, Godfroy, 78 Bloch, Marc, 117–18, 124 Bois, Guy, 57, 92, 356n50 Boldizzoni, Francesco, 337n5

426

Index

Bombay, 148 Bonavista, 122–8 Bonsecours Market, 237–8, 293 Bousquet family, 93–4 Bradbury, Bettina, 266, 268, 325, 360n49 Bradley, David, 123 Braque, Georges, 181 Braudel, Fernand, 117–19 British Empire, 60, 148, 203, 234–41 British North America Act, 300 British West Indies Federation, 202 Bro dit Pomminville, Germain père, 100 Brown, Thomas Starrow, 210 Brown & Childs, 276 Bruce, James, 275 Brummell, Beau, 194 Burgess, Joanne, 36–7, 48–9, 85, 349n44, 365n20 Burke, Edmund, 27 Burton, Valerie, 270 Calcoff, Stuart & Co., 189 Calcutta, 148 Cambridge University, 54 Canada Shipbuilding Company, 70 Canadian Historical Association, 12, 81, 114, 121–2 Canadien, Le, 60 Cane, James, 225, 227–34, 245, 277, 283 Cape Town, 148 capital markets, 144; punishment, 204 Careless, J.M.S., 33–4, 342n7 Caribbean, 48, 105 Carlson, Keith, 113–14, 116 Caron, Joseph, 360n48 Carr, E.H., 115–17, 358n20 Carré St-Louis, 282 Cartier, George Étienne, 200, 370n24

Cartier, Jacques-Antoine, 200 Catholics, 60, 77, 88, 140, 232, 290–1, 334 Caty, François, 103 census returns, interpreting, 23; 1825, 164–77, 212–13, 216–18, 363n26; 1831, 93–4, 107; 1842, 250–3, 367n41, 367n4, 368n14; 1881, 282, 286–90, 371n7 Champoux, Toussaint, 79 Champs de Mars, 148, 204, 209 Charland, Louis, 147 Charlebois, Dr B., 216 Château de Ramezay, 136, 204 Chesneaux, Jean, 17–18, 31, 311, 340n3 Chicago School, 320 cholera, 208 Citadel Hill, 147 City Council, 167, 242 city directories: Doige, 156–64, 292, 294, 362n12; McKay’s, 214–15, 294; Lovell’s, 279, 281, 292–7, 304–7, 372nn11–12 City Hall, 306 Civil List, 163, 344n23 Civil War, American, 56; English, 55 Coade of London, 206–7 Cobb & Emerson, 69 cod traps, 125–6, 359n39, 359n43 College of Physicians and Surgeons, 211, 224 Collingwood, R.G., 116–17, 119, 357n10 colonial builts, 49, 66–71 Colonial Office, 136 Columbus, Christopher, 129 combined and uneven development, 28, 286–92 Commons, John R., 25 Communist Party of Canada, 34 Communist Party of Great Britain History Group, 27



Index 427

community of property, 200–2, 302 commutations, 45, 93, 134–41, 221, 239–40, 256–8, 370n25 computers in history, 158–9, 180, 182, 226–7, 316 Concordia University, 111 Connecticut, 185 construction trades, 75, 83–4, 161, 300 Corn Laws, 240, 332 cosmopolitanism, 203, 204–11 Côte St-Antoine, 282 Court of King’s Bench, 136 Courville, Serge, 90 craft, 46–7, 71–6, 158–9, 170–1, 286–9, 372n9; masters, 194–7; voting patterns, 208–9. See also apprenticeship; journeymen; paths to capitalism Craig, Sir James Henry, 60 Crash of 1825, 66–71, 185–9, 203, 312–13 credit: advances, 101, 355n42; assignments, 46, 345n26, 348n38; deeds, 42–6; discounting, 62, 66–76, 183–90; instruments, 42, 45, 62–4, 344n25, 348n31; land, 100, 370n23 Creighton, Donald, 342n5 crimes against humanity, 269, 271 cubism, 155, 181–3, 211–24, 316 cultural turn, 10, 13 currency, 61–2 Curtis, Bruce, 322 Custom of Paris, 39, 93, 136, 263, 344n19 Cutter & Whittemore, 76 Cuvier, George, 87 Cuvillier, Austin, 189, 265 Cuvillier, Luce, 370n24, 265 Cuvillier & Cartier, 185 Dalhousie, Lord. See Ramsay, George

Damon, Matt, 21 Dardot, Pierre, 321 Dawley, Alan, 337n7 Dechêne, Louise, 57–8, 92, 118, 121, 324, 339n16 Declaration of Independence of Lower Canada, 137, 214 democracy, 317; from below and above, 55, 57, 109; Lower Canada, 60, 108–9, 206–11, 250–2, 275–7, 306; revolutions in Eastern Europe, 13, 111 demography, 20, 169–71, 195, 217 demolition of city walls, 146–7 Depuis, Antoine and Louis, 103 Dessureault, Christian, 351n9 Deux-Montagnes seigneury, 197 de Vries, Jan, 337n5 Dickens, Charles, 231; doctors, professionalization, 211–24; residency, 218–19, 373n14 Dickie, David, 189 Dobb, Maurice, 54–6 Doige, Thomas, 143, 156–63, 180, 201, 254, 256, 277, 315, 362n12, 363n21 domestic servants, 252–4, 286–9 Dominican Republic, 129 Doric Club, 209–10 Doucet, N.B., 197 Dubé, Joseph, 79 Dubuc, Alfred, 38, 117 Ducharme, Michel, 322–3 Duncan, Robert, 228–30 duplexes, 285, 335 durée réelle, 118 Durham, Lord. See Lampton, John George Duvernay, Ludger, 189 Eastern Townships, 89 École de Montréal, 88, 350n2

428

Index

Economic History Review, 268 Elgin, Lord. See Bruce, James Ellice, Edward ‘Bear,’ 137 emigrant sheds, 256 Engels, Frederick, 158, 290, 318 Enlightenment values, 143, 147, 202, 306, 331 environmental history, 279, 319, 325 epiphenomenal evidence, 22–3, 30, 140, 155, 256, 281–5, 311, 329 escarpment, 255–6, 294–7 essentialism, 52, 88, 274, 313, 346n4 ethnic determinism, 52, 81, 88–90, 274, 346n3, 366n27 ethnography, 113 eurocentrism, 202–3 European Social Science History Conference, 12 evaluation rolls: 1825, 166–9, 364n29, 368n9; 1832, 176–80, 364n32; 1848, 241–9, 368n8; 1881, 297–304 Executive Council, 137 famine, 26, 241 fascism, 55, 88 Faucher, Albert, 342n6 Febvre, Lucien, 117–18, 326, 357n19 Fecteau, Jean-Marie, 322 female religious orders, 264 Ferguson, Mark, 359n43 Ferland, Jacques, 109 Ferrat, Jean, 129, 318, 360n48 Fils de liberté, 209–10 fire insurance, 197–202, 281–6 fire of 1852, 259–60, 285 firewood, 96–105, 106, 313, 354n39, 354n43 Fishermen’s Protective Union, 127 Floud, Roderick, 65 Fonds pour la Formation de chercheurs et l’aide à la recherche (fcar ), 40, 46

Forbes, Wm & Jn, 76 forwarding merchants, 365n5 Foster, John, 159, 362nn18–19 Foucault, Michel, 12, 21 France, 118 franchise, 60, 165–8, 208, 249–52 Fraser Valley, 113 Frechette, Eustache, 189 Frégault, Guy, 350n2 Friedman, Milton, 320 Froste, Robert & Co., 189 Gaffield, Chad, 341n17 Gagnon, Serge, 351n8 Galt, William, 193 Garden & Auldjo, 70 Garvey, Marcus, 202 gas lighting, 238 Gates, Horatio & Co., 76, 186 gender analysis, 13–14, 112–13, 127–8, 268–74, 313 gendered: institutions, 301; labour, 79–80, 95, 122–8, 193–6, 216–19, 268, 286, 316; language, 157; property, 200–2, 247–8, 260–8, 284, 294, 301–4; space, 304–7, 334–5; violence, 334; voting, 168, 208–9, 331–2 Genovese, Eugene D., 10, 337n7 German Ideology, 270 Gillespie Exchange, 236–7 Gillespie, Moffat & Co., 66 Glass, A & L, 69–71 Goad, Charles E. & Co., 225, 281–6 Golden Square Mile, 299 Good Will Hunting, 21 Gosford, Earl of. See Acheson, Archibald Gramsci, Antonio, 271, 324 Grand Trunk Railway, 286, 293 Grant, Hugh, 147 graphics, 144



Index 429

Great Britain, 24–8, 48, 62–4 Great War, 300 Greenlaw, Jane, 47, 350n56 Greer, Allan, 91–4, 107, 352n18, 352n21, 353n24, 353n27 Gregg, John, 160 Grey Nuns, 276, 303 Griffin, Henry N.P., 66 Griffin, Mary Ann, 160 Griffintown, 290 Groulx, Lionel, 350n2 Groupe de recherché sur la société montréalaise au 19e siècle (grsm ), 35, 37, 82, 130 Gunnermann, Frederick, 198 Gutman, Herbert G., 10, 337n7 Guy, Étienne, 41 Guy, Louis, 164 Gzowksi, Peter, 98 Hahn, Russell, 36, 343n15 Hamelin, Jean, 342n6 Handyside Bros & Co., 75 Hanna, David, 249 Harbour Commissioners Building, 306 Hardy, Jean-Pierre, 191 Harris, R. Cole, 354n30 Harvard University, 11, 26, 28, 54 Harvey, David, 272 Hays, Douglas, 338n7 Heap, Margaret, 36–7, 49 hermeneutics, 19, 358n26 High School of Montreal, 291–2 Hinsdale, John & Daniel, 185 Hispaniola, 202 histoire totale, 118–19 historical causality, 17, 24–8, 34, 60, 65–6, 91, 110, 223, 268–74, 280, 332–6 historical epistemology, 18, 21–4, 29–31, 85–6, 110–11, 112–22, 141–2, 211–13, 224, 314, 324

historical gis , 225–7, 279–81, 294–305 historical logic of a source, 30, 40–4, 66, 85–6, 99–100, 104, 120–1, 128, 149–51, 162–3, 176–7, 224, 234–5, 283–6, 314 historical materialism, 15, 105–11, 224, 268–74, 319, 358n22 historical methodology, 20–1, 40–4, 85–7, 118–21, 123–5, 155, 158–60, 211–24, 226–7, 249–50, 304–5 historicity, 17, 118–19, 155 History Workshop Journal, 10, 28, 59, 347n20, 358n29 Hobsbawm, Eric, 82, 337n6 Hochelaga, 282 Hogg, Grace Laing, 96–105, 138–41 Holland, 56 Hong, Bob, 123 Hôtel Dieu, 303 households: craft, 190–7, 365n18; goods, 197–201 House of Assembly, 60–6 Howse, Jeannie, 359n43 Hudson, Pat, 26, 268 Hungary, 27 hypothèques, 100, 354n32 immigration, 81, 282. See also overcrowding imperialism, 26, 48–50, 60, 105, 202–4, 210–11, 236, 240–1 India, 373n7 Industrial Revolution, 44, 270, 280–1, 312, 329–31; historiography, 24–9 informal economy, 122–8 inheritance, 93–5, 245–6, 344n20, 352n21, 370n26 Innis, Harold, 33–4, 342n3 Institut Canadien, 301 Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française, 36, 109, 112

430

Index

intelligentsia, neo-liberal, 9, 14, 111, 337n5, 343n9; Newfoundland, 122–4, 359n35; Quebec, 14, 110, 257, 350n2, 356n56, 369n17, 373n8 internal/external dichotomy, 97, 108, 202–4 International Congress of the Historical Sciences, 279 International Monetary Fund, 20, 320 inventories after death. See notarial deeds Iraq, 202 Irish Vindicator, 207, 210 Irvine, Leslie & Co., 185 Italy, 56 James, C.L.R., 26 Japan, 55 Jevons, William Stanley, 283 journeymen, 80–6 Joyce, James, 181 Kahnawake, 355n46 Kealey, Gregory S., 36, 59, 82, 339n17, 343n15 Keough, Willeen, 127 Kimber, René, 189 Kingston, 185 labourers, 158–61, 253–5 labour theory of value, 256–8, 273–4, 371n5 Lachine, 32, 41, 47, 102 Lachine Canal, 103, 146, 283 Lafontaine, Adèle, 209 Lafontaine, Louis Hypolite, 275 Lambert (née Bronfman), Phyllis, 37 Lambton, John George, 52, 323, 360n58 Lamouche, Joseph, 78 Lamoureux family, 93–4 Landes, David, 28

landlord/tenant relations, 41, 130–4, 166–71, 178–80, 298–301 land settlement, 354nn30–1 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 34 Laurin, Joseph, 79 Laurin, Marie-Louise, 78 Lauzon, Gilles, 81, 144, 349n44 Laval, Christian, 321 Laval University, 88, 282, 306 Lavou, Vitorien Zoungbo, 202 Lebeau dit Caza, Jean-Baptiste, 103 Leblanc, Amable, 193 Lefebvre, George, 56 Legislative Assembly, 60–6, 209 Legislative Council, 61, 136–7, 207 Le Havre, 202–4 Lemaire, Linda, 47 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 339n12 Lévesque, Carole, 112 Lewis, Frank, 90 liberal economy, 134–41, 196–7, 205, 314, 366n32 liberalism, 15, 163, 205, 267–8, 320–6 Linebaugh, Peter, 337n7 Linteau, Paul-André, 130 Liverpool, 327 Loedel, Dr, 220 Logan, Dr D., 216 London School of Economics, 25 longue durée, 118, 357n12 Lovell, John, 333 Lovell’s. See city directories Lower, A.R.M., 342n5 Lower Canada, 48–50, 60 Lusignan, Dr Alexandre, 214 Luxemburg, Rosa, 271 McCallum, John, 34, 343n9 Macdonald, Sir John A., 34 McGill University, 37, 40, 92, 225, 249, 301, 320, 368n13 McInnis, Marvin, 90



Index 431

McKay, Ian, 28–9, 270, 320–6 MacKay, Robert, 230, 245, 275, 277. See also city directories McKay, Thomas, 205 McKenzie, Bethune & Co., 69–71 Mackintosh, William A., 342n5 McLean, Alexander, 79 Macleod, Roderick, 372n10 MacNider & Scott, 71 McTavish street reservoir, 259 Mailloux, George Edouard, 77 Maitland, Garden & Auldjo, 69–72 Maitland, William, 70 Malthus, Rev’d Thomas, 25 Manchester, 318 Mancke, Elizabeth, 359n40 Mantoux, Paul, 25, 28 Mariategui, José Carlos, 271 markets, 201, 205, 237–8, 326–8; property, 241–9, 299–301 marriage, 306, 333; contracts, 23, 39, 200, 266–8, 370n29; cross-cultural, 95; dower, 268, 360n57; widows, 266, 303. See also community of property Marshall, Donald, 122 Marx, Karl, 54–9, 82, 268–74, 329 Master and Servant Act, 136 Mathias, Peter, 44 Mechanics Institute, xv, 301 medical profession. See doctors Meiji Restoration, 55 Memorial University of Newfoundland, 121–2 mercantilism, 36, 48–50, 236–7, 240–1, 275–6, 356n51 merchant capital, 55–9, 66–76, 96, 103, 122–4, 183–90, 235, 240–1, 326–8 Merchants’ Exchange, 306 Meszaros, Istvan, 269 metal trades, 50, 83–5

meta-narrative, 14, 51, 181–2, 202 Mi’kmaq, 121 militia, 209–10 Mill, John, 323 milliners and dressmakers, 373n16 Minamata disease, 348n40 Minerve, La, 189 Mittleberger, Elizabeth the Widow Platt, 262 mobility, 161–2, 219–20, 315 modes of production, 55–8, 108, 269–74, 319 Mohawks, 197, 355n46 Molson, John Sr, 199–201 Molson, Thomas, 199 Molson brewery, 134, 198–9 Monastère de Bon Pasteur, 240–1 monetary protests, 66–76, 183–90, 316 Monk, James, 61 Montagnais, 112 Montgomery, David, 337n8 Montreal: capital, 250; changes in taxation, 243; description, 4–5, 32, 145–6, 158, 229, 232–3; lot size, 152–4; mercantile structure, 48–51; port, 36–7; redrawing ward boundaries, 242; ship building, 66–71 Montréal, l’avenir du passé (map ), 225, 273, 279–81 Montreal Board of Trade, 203 Montreal Business History Project, 32, 37–51, 56–8, 96–8, 108, 130, 200, 269, 273 Montreal City and District Savings Bank, 306–7 Montreal Fire Insurance Company, 197–202 Montreal Gazette, 203, 276 Montreal Hunt Club, 283 Montreal Stock Exchange, 294 Montreal West by-election, 207–9, 316

432

Index

moral economy, 99, 104, 106, 134–41, 193–4, 196–7, 204–6, 314, 327, 354n39 Morningside, 98 Morris, R.J., 82–3, 361n8 Mount Royal, 232, 283 Museum of Man, 38, 40 Nairobi, 20 Napoleonic Wars, 110, 144 Naskapi, 112–13 National Policy, 34 national question, 34–5, 82, 88, 210–11, 314 nature. See relations to nature Navigation Acts, 241, 356n51 Neis, Barbara, 360n46 Nelson, Horatio, 204 Nelson, Dr Robert, 214 Nelson, Dr Wolfred, 214, 223 neo-liberalism, 9, 320–6, 337n4, 373n6 New Brunswick, 126 Newfoundland, fishery, 114, 121, 122–9, 314, 332 new labour history, 35–6 New York City, 149, 185 Nootens, Thierry, 340n24 normalization of Quebec, 369n17 notarial deeds, 38–47, 66–76, 96–105, 195, 344n25, 345n26, 348n31, 352n21, 354n40 Notre-Dame, Church, 47, 208, 226, 234–5 Notre Dame, convent, 303 Notre Dame de Grace, 280, 282 Nova Scotia, 122, 126 ‘observed by expected,’ 82–6, 158–60 occupational classifications, 157, 167–8, 247–8, 292–7, 371n7

Olmstead, Frederick Law, 282 Olson, Sherry, 152, 225, 249, 279, 325, 375n20 O’Neill, Henry, 191 Ontario, 36 ordnance survey, 144–5, 361nn6–7 Orr, Peter, 47 Ostell, John, 239 Ouellet, Fernand, 88–90, 109–10, 339n16, 342n6, 346n4, 351n8 overcrowding, 166, 173–7, 195–7, 223, 307–10, 335 Palmer, Bryan D., 36, 339n17, 343n15 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 210 Papineau Square, renaming of, 242 Paquet, Gilles, 352n13 Paquette, Martin, 79 Paré, Hélène, 40–4, 47, 90 Parr, Joy, 354n38 Past & Present, 27 paths to capitalism, 54–5, 58–9, 71, 106–8, 313 Patriotes, 60, 64, 137–8, 148, 189, 203, 207–12, 316, 347n22 paupers, 291–2 peasantry: differentiation, 92–6, 104–7, 128; Europe, 54–7; Japan, 55; Lower Canada, 88–105, 256–8; Montreal, 145–6 Péloquin family, 93–4 Peltier, Émilie, 209 Pentland, H. Clare, 35, 343n13 Perrault, Dr J.A., 216 Perreault, Joseph, 200, 265 Perreault, Marie-Claire, 265 Perry, Ruth, 266 Petitclerc, Martin, 340n24 phenomenal evidence, 22–3, 30–2, 140, 155, 256, 268, 311, 329 Picasso, Pablo, 181



Index 433

Pickel, John Jr, 198 Pickel, John Sr, 198 Pierson, Stuart, 162 Pinchbeck, Ivy, 25 Pirenne, Henri, 54 Plateau Mont Royal, 282 Point St-Charles, 286, 294 Porteous & Nesbitt, 60–71 Porter, Marilyn, 127 post-colonial perspectives, 202–4, 366n31 post-modern, 110, 143, 339n20 potash, 206 Poutanen, Mary Anne, 372n10 Power Corporation of Canada, 173 Pozer, Jacob, 198 pragmatic empiricism, 115–17, 314 precocious proletarianization, 85–6, 191–2 present-mindedness, 17, 45 Prévost, Marie Amable, 193 price scissors, 355n50 Primeau dit Quarante Sous, Paul, 100 printemps d’érable, Le, 373n8 promissory notes. See credit: instruments property, 249, 328–9; access, 239–40, 248–9, 260–8, 277; commodification, 231–2, 276; doctors, 217–21; homeowners, 245–6; market in, 241–9, 264–8, 299–304, 318; master craftsmen, 196–7; moveable, 200–2, 278, 328, 332; by occupation, 248–9; relations, 130–4; social rights to, 134–41, 204–8, 234, 268; transfers, 245; values, 233, 254–6, 267, 297–9. See also commutations Protestants, 77, 89, 139–41, 232, 249– 50, 294; discrimination against Catholics, 300–1; schooling, 290–2

quantitative methods, 11, 19, 65–6 Quebec City, 36, 49, 70, 85, 105, 107, 145, 185, 191, 362n15 Quebec Commercial List, 36, 48–50, 106 Quebec Fire Insurance Company, 197 Queen’s University, 121 Queen vs Donald Marshall, 122 Quiblier, Joseph-Vincent, 209 Quiet Revolution, 13 Quintin dit Dubois, Jean-Baptiste, 103 railroads, 34 Ramsay, George, 148 rational choice theory, 9, 18 Rebellion Losses Bill, 275–7 Rebellions of 1837–38, 92, 107, 136, 204–11, 353n24, 366n38 Récollets, faubourg des, 79 record linkage, 190–7, 211–24, 363n22, 372nn11–12, 373n16 Rediger, Marcus, 337n7 Redpath, John, 205 relations to nature, 146–8, 277–8, 306–10, 318–19, 325–6, 335–6 religiosity, 4, 89, 216, 226–8, 234–41, 274, 306, 324, 351n11, 373n15 rentiers, 201, 220–4, 234–41, 248, 328–9, 369n11 responsible government, 371n42 Ricardo, David, 25, 273, 283, 323 Rice, Richard, 22–3, 30, 37–8, 96, 109, 120, 140, 311, 341n6, 371n6 Richardson, John, 70 Richelieu Valley, 91–2, 200 Ricoeur, Paul, 21 Rideau Canal, 47 Rimouski, 36 Ritchot, Pierre N.P., 78–9 Robert, Jean-Claude, 81–2, 130

434

Index

Robertson, Dr William, 208, 214, 220, 223 Robertson & Masson, 185 Roddick Gates, 279–80 Rollo, Isabelle, 193 Rostow, Walter, 26 Roy, Arundhati, 373n7 Roy, Marie-Josephte, 78 Ruddel, Thiery, 191 Rudé, Doreen, 111 Rudé, George, 10–11, 27, 60, 111 Rudin, Ronald, 346n6 Ruskin College, 28 Ryan, James, 123–8 Ryerson, Stanley Bréhaut, 34–5, 343n10 Ste-Anne ward, 146 St-Antoine ward, 78–9, 146 St-Charles, battle, 210 St-Cunégonde, 282 St-Denis seigneury, 90–5 St-François Xavier Street, 294 St Gabriel, 282 St Gabriel’s farm, 233 St George Dupré, Hypolite, 208 St-Henri, 282 St-Hyacinthe de Yamaska, 78 St-Jacques ward, 141, 146 St-Jean-Baptiste, village, 282 St-Joachim, 100 St-Joseph ward, 149–51, 154, 174–5 Ste-Justine hospital, 225 St-Laurent ward, 146 St-Louis de Mile End, 282 St Louis Square, 259, 282 St-Louis ward, 152 Ste-Marie ward, 132–4, 143, 146, 198–200 St Michaelmas Day, 140 St-Ours seigneury, 90–5

St-Timothée, 100 St-Vincent Street, 294 Samuel, Raphael, 28, 311, 338n8, 347n20 Sandwell, Ruth, 322 schooling, 290–1, 301 Scott, Joan, 11, 13, 337n6 segregation, 158, 176–81, 242, 251–6, 258–60, 262, 286–91, 300–1, 315, 318 Séguin, Maurice, 350n2 Selby, Dr George, 220 Service d’urbanisme de la Ville de Montréal, 226 Sewell, Jonathan, 61 Sewell, William H. Jr, 11 ship building, 49, 66–70, 83, 350n57 shoemakers strike, 276–7 Shortt, Adam, 346n4 Sider, Gerald, 356n4, 369n15 Silver, A.I., 351n8 Singapore, 148 Sir George Williams University, 10 Sisters of St-Joseph, 303 slave trade, 26, 105 Smith, Adam, 25, 46, 130 Soboul, Albert, 56–7, 93, 107–8 sociabilité, 361n8, 362n20, 363n24, 371n7 socialist humanism, 9–10, 338n7, 339n17, 347n20 social relations of production, 101–2, 286–91, 300–1 social science history, 11 Social Science History Association, 12 social status, 286–8, 319, 371n7 Société historique de Montréal, 172 Sorel seigneury, 90–5 Soviet Union implosion, 111, 143 Special Council, 45, 136–8, 210–11, 242, 268, 323, 331



Spooner, Dr W., 216 Spragg, John, 66, 69 Spragg & Hutchinson, 66, 69–71, 185 standard of living debate, 26 staple houses, 49 staple theory, 33–7, 51, 73, 122–3, 312, 342n3, 342nn5–7, 343n8 steamboats, 145 Stewart, Alan M., 349n44, 371n41 stock in trade, 201 Stó:lõ, 113–14, 319 Stout, James, 149 street addresses, 157–8, 362n13, 363n21 streetscape, 249–55, 368n12 structuralism, 59, 272–3, 313 subsistence agriculture, 91, 352n21, 353n27 suburbia, 308–10 Sulpicians, 45, 138–41, 231, 234, 260–1; head office, 239–40, manorial farm, 233 supply contracts: British Army, 44, 103, 354n40; deeds, 44–5, 96–105 supra-human, 110, 117, 155, 273, 280, 311, 324; explanations of causality, 141, 269–72, 314 Supreme Court of Canada, 124 surplus value, 58, 272–4, 371n6. See also appropriations Sweeny, Thomas G., xv, 279–80 Sweezy, Paul, 54–6, 274 Sydenham, Lord. See Thomson, Charles Poulett Sydney, 148, 279 Takahashi, Kohachiro, 55, 57 Tavernier, Marie Anne, 265 Tawney, R.H., 25 taxes, 242, 300 tax rolls. See evaluation rolls

Index 435

Templeman, Philip, 123–8 terms of trade, 47–50, 104–6, 355n49 terrier, 260–9 textiles, 50 Thernstrom, Stephan, 11 Thompson, Abel, 77 Thompson, E.P., 11, 27, 35, 59, 109, 119–21, 191, 273, 338n8, 347n19, 358nn22–5 Thompson, Gratton, 279 Thompson, John, 192 Thompson, John Herd, 92 Thomson, Charles Poulett, 323, 360n58 Thornton, Patricia, 325 Tienanmen Square, 13 Tilly, Charles, 11 timber trade, 48–50, 63 tinsmithing. See metal trades Tokugawa Shogunate, 55 Toronto, 98 Tories, 148, 208, 275–7 town/country relations, 44, 96–105, 205, 293, 313 Toynbee, Arnold, 24, 330 Tracey, Daniel, 207–9 trade cycles, 63–6, 203, 230, 241–3 Trade Unions Congress, 28 transition debate, 53–60, 71–6, 93, 105–10, 312 Trent University, 58–9 Trestler, Dr J.B.C., 216 triplexes, 285, 335 Trois-Rivières, 197 truck, 123–5 Try, Charles, 189 Tulchinsky, Gerald, 346n4 Twain, Mark, 328, 334 typhus, 241 Ulysses, 181

436

un Conference on Women, 20 unesco, 202 unfree labour, 3, 105, 110, 274, 332, 336 United Canadas, 250 United States of America, 92, 148 Université du Québec à Montréal, 34, 38 University of Manchester, 25 University of Saskatchewan, 113 University of Sheffield, 25 University of Toronto, 35 University of Warwick, 28 Upper Canada, 48–50, 89, 109–10 urban density, 308 Vallée, Jean-Guillaume, 214 value creation, 93–6, 273–4, 332, 370n40. See also appropriations vector graphics, 367n2 Vickers, Daniel, 21 Vieux Montréal, 144 Viger, Denis Benjamin, 236 Viger, Jacques, 143–4, 165, 201, 249, 277, 315–16; by-election of, 1832, 207–9; census, 164–76, 363n26, 363n28; evaluation rolls, 130–4, 176–80, 260–5, 364n29 Vilar, Pierre, 17 Vincent, Sylvie, 112–13 Voisey, Paul, 92 von Hayek, F.A., 26, 320 Wabanaki Confederacy, 122 Waite, Oliver, 103 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 360n58 Waller, Dr S., 216

Index

Wallot, Jean-Pierre, 89–90, 96, 342n6, 350n59, 352n13 Walsh, Joan Howden, xv, 15 Ware, Norman, 25 Ware & Gibb, 69 Waring, Marilyn, 274 Warwick, Guy & Co., 190–2 Warwick, Joseph, 191 Washington consensus, 320 Water Street merchants, 127 water supply, 145, 238, 259–60 Watkins, M.H., 34, 343n8 Watson, Thomas, 190–2 Watson, Thomas Jr, 191 Watson, William, 190 Weber, Max, 331 West Indies, 48 Westmount, 282 Whitaker, Thomas S., 185 White, Andrew, 103 White, Hayden, 21, 356n5 Wicken, Bill, 121–2 Wien, Thomas, 109–10 Williams, Eric, 26 Williams, Raymond, 271, 338n8, 370n34 Wilson, Adrian, 119 women’s suffrage, 366n35 Workers Educational Association, 10 World Bank, 20, 320 world systems theory, 4 Wragg, Benjamin, 78 Wragg, William, 78 Young, Brian, 37–8, 45, 361n63, 372n10 Young, William, 70