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

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2008 by Murton, James

The works reviewed here demonstrate the continuing diversity of rural history. Sandwell seeks explicitly to understand rural society; Bittermann's book might fit best in the literatare on political culture; Loewen seeks to understand ethnic identity in a time of deep cultural conformity; Little has a social historian's emphasis on agency and resistance. At the same time, lines are drawn on issues central to rural history alone. Where Sandwell argues that rural society must be understood using conceptual tools distinct from those developed to understand urban society, Bittermann stresses the cultural and ideological links between rural and urban within the larger Atlantic World. Sandwell and Little stress the persistence of the country, Loewen the power of the city. Where Loewen sees modernity as an almost irresistible force, Sandwell stresses opposition to it.

These books also suggest to this reviewer some avenues for a future rural history. The first of these follows the liberal order paradigm, which I think Sandwell dismisses too quickly. Modernization and the liberal order are not the same thing. Elsewhere, Sandwell (1994) has identified the ways in which the idea of modernization easily achieves a monolithic sense of inevitability, which the cases of Saltspring Island and BC's bush farms contradict. The liberal order, by contrast, is characterized by its proponents (of which I am one) as a process, "more like a verb than a noun," propounded initially by a set of identifiable people in the mid-nineteenth centary. As a project, it was ongoing and never complete. Support for it could be coerced, but it could also be bought or cajoled. Compromise and contradiction reigned. Saltspring Island could be seen as a challenge to the liberal order, or it could be seen as a compromise made by politicians and development advocates in Vancouver and Victoria, who might have thought that the lives of Saltspring Islanders proved, to themselves as much as to others, the benign nature of the entire system. The ability of the liberal system, in other words, to tolerate such "aberrations" was proof of its effectiveness, not its weakness. Tina Loo's analysis of the implantation of law and order in early BC shows that lawmakers had to incorporate demands for local autonomy and the pre-existing quasi-legal traditions of miners who had lived largely without central authority in California (1994); but the project proceeded.

Further, much of what happened to the Saltspring Islanders was clearly the result of the liberal order. As Sandwell argues, they were there because the BC state wished to develop a landscape of individually owned, liberal, capitalist farmers. The land laws that the Islanders so successfully bent to their own ends were a product of this desire. To the east, the experience of the Escheat Movement, as I have indicated above, was in at least one way about contending visions of liberalism. We might see Manitoba Mennonites as abandoning a communitarian social order for a liberal social order. In its emphasis on contingency, conflict, and compromise, the concept of a liberal project potentially offers much to rural historians tasked with explaining both the increasing linkage of farming into capitalist suppliers and markets, and the continuing existence of a distinct rural society.