Lay of the Land: Four New Books in Canadian Rural History, The

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2008 by Murton, James

James Murton

Rural Protest on Prince Edward Island: From British Colonization to the Escheat Movement. By Rusty Bittermann. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. xii, 372 pp., maps, tables. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-802-00439-1. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 0-802-07229-1.

The Other Quebec: Microhistorical Essays on Nineteenth-Century Religion and Society. By J.I. Little. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. xii, 278 pp., maps, illus. $70.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-802-09100-8. $35.00 (paper). ISBN 0-802-09397-3.

Diaspora in the Countryside: Two Mennonite Communities and Mid-Twentieth-Century Rural Disjuncture. By Royden Loewen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. xxiv, 331 pp., maps, illus. $70.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-802-09144-X. $32.95 (paper). ISBN 0-80209418-X.

Contesting Rural Space: Land Policy and Practices of Resettlement on Saltspring Island, 1859-1891. By R.W. Sandwell. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. xxii, 324 pp., maps, illus., figures, tables. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-173-52859-8. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-773-52952-6.

The trouble with writing a review essay on Canadian rural history is that the field does not exist. Rural history is challenged by the vastness of its reach. The books reviewed here cover a range of communities united chiefly by not being urban. They span a period in which rural people went from being the majority of Canadian society to a small minority. They have much to say about farming but consider also other economic activities of rural people. They might be classed, variously, as social, political, religious, and environmental history.

Yet to emphasize heterogeneity and diversity is to miss the common issues that rural historians have grappled with since the field shifted, under the aegis of the 1970s social history revolution, from the economic history of agriculture to broader questions of what it meant to be rural in Canada. How do we explain the shift, over the last several hundred years, from agriculture as a "way of life" to farming as a "business"? (Thompson 1990, 111). Given this shift (and not all historians accept that it has happened, or at least not this simply), what is the relationship between rural society and economy, and the forces of market capitalism headquartered in the city? As capitalism and modernization chipped away at rural economic independence, did rural society remain a unique phenomenon, and in what ways and for how long? Finally, who controlled the land, and how did that control contribute to, or impede, rural independence?

I pose these as four separate questions, but answering one inevitably leads to another. In Rural Protest in Prince Edward Island (2006), for instance, Rusty Bittermann argues both for the critical importance of debates over the control of land and for a close and mutually constitutive relationship between city and country. He does so in the context of the Escheat Movement of the 183Os and 184Os. The Escheat Movement was an attempt to bring to an end the quasi-manorial land system of Prince Edward Island (PEI). PEI had been colonized in the late eighteenth century through the granting of land to a small group of proprietors. In exchange for the grants, the Crown had required landlords to locate a certain number of people on the land and to ensure its development. Few met these terms. Tenants, seizing on these lapses, called for the imperial government to "escheat-revoke -proprietorial grants and redistribute lands to settlers in fee simple grants" (4). Escheators argued that the state was obligated to ensure a "just social and economic order" (4) and that settlers' work on their land gave them rights-more rights than their landlords. British authorities saw the Escheators as an example of mob rule and crushed them.

Out of a richly detailed study of petitions and elections, high politics in London, and rent resistance in places like Bay Fortune comes one of Bittermann's key points: that PEI cannot be understood without considering London, the Escheators without the Lower Canadian Patriotes. Grievances were local, arising from a system where farmers were obligated, year in and year out, to pay their rents, dreading the day when a bad harvest or ill health put them in debt to the landlord; but always the experience of the larger Atlantic world loomed. Tenants understood their situation in the context of the enclosed farms and wage-labour jobs they had left Britain to escape, or, in the initial stages of resettlement when many of them were Loyalists, in the context of the fee simple title they had held to lands in what was now the United States. Colonial administrators were thinking of the revolt of the United Irishmen when they spoke of the danger of mob rule inherent in the Escheat Movement. Rural protest did not simply arise from conditions of exploitation. Escheat was built on local meetings and thousands of signatures on petitions, and was given definition and momentum by debates in the Legislative Assembly and the speeches of supporters and opponents printed in newspapers and discussed at community meetings. In these ways, the local and the metropolitan came together.