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

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2008 by Murton, James

A second potential centre of gravity in a future rural history research is the land itself. Land, Sandwell suggests, was a contact zone where competing rural and urban agendas came together. Saltspring Islanders' ability to retain control over their land provided a base with which to then exploit the resources of the natural environment around them. The idea that land was a gift from God, and an adaptation to the short growing season and cold winters of Manitoba were central to the pre-Disjunctare life of Manitoba Mennonites, Loewen argues. If an attention to land draws us into a consideration of the importance of environment and fine-grained adaptations to place, Bittermann shows us that wider forces of colonialism, capitalism, and law were critical to shaping the experience of the land. Rural people understood the effect of wider forces on them, and worked to manipulate these forces. Control over land-at the cost of Native peoples, and with the risk of environmental damage-nevertheless offered independence. The availability of land was the key difference between the city and the country. The use and experience of land, how it is to be farmed and how much smaller the country is in a car than in a wagon, are central to the experience of the countryside. Thus land-as legal entity, source of wealth, focus of hopes and dreams, as distance, time, and place, and as part of a larger ecology-has the potential to pull together the simultaneous attention to the local and the global, the big and the little, the bluebell and the court of chancery, that has long been the strength of rural history.

Notes

1. Though most of the essays in the book are by Little, he includes this one essay by another author because, as he explains, it "adds a sub-theme-commercial life-that I have not examined" (2006, 8).

References

Bittermann, Rusty. 2006. Rural Protest on Prince Edward Island: From British Colonization to the Escheat Movement. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Harris, Cole. 1997. The Resettlement of British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Little, J.I. 2006. The Other Quebec: Microhistorical Essays on Nineteenth-Century Religion and Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Loewen, Royden. 2006. Diaspora in the Countryside: Two Mennonite Communities and MidTwentieth-Century Rural Dtyuncture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Loo, Tina. 1994. Making Law, Order and Authority in British Columbia, 1821-1871. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McKay, Ian. 2000. "The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History." Canadian Historical Review 81 (4): 617-45.

Sandwell, R.W. 1994. "Rural Reconstruction: Towards a New Synthesis in Canadian History." Htooire Sociale/Social Htoory 27 (53): 1-32.

_____. 2005. Contesting Rural Space: Land Policy and Practices of Resettlement on Saltspring Island, 1859-1891. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Shover, John L. 1976. First Majority - Last Minority: The Transforming of Rural Life in America. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press.