Canadian Papers in Rural History

Volume III (1982)

A Reconsideration of the State of Agriculture in Lower Canada in the First half of the Nineteenth Century
by R.M. McInnis, pp.9-49. 
Professor McInnis surveys the historical literature that dominated the debate on Quebec agriculture and analyses both the assumptions of the scholars involved and the conclusions they have drawn. His percipient analysis calls into question the terms of the entire debate on the on the alleged "agricultural crisis" in Lower Canada and the explanations adduced for that putative occurrence. His works has implications not only directly for agricultural history, but indirectly for the social history of the French Canadians in Quebec, for he undercuts the notion of the French Canadian farmer as being a peasant farmer of the most backward and intractable sort.

Time, Context, and House Type validation: Euphrasia Township, Ontario
by Darrell A. Norris and Victor Konrad, pp. 50-83. 

The Activity of an Early Canadian Land Speculator in Essex County, Ontario: Would the Real John Askin Please Stand Up?
by John Clarke, pp. 84-109. 

Robert Gourlay's Vision of Agrarian Reform
by Gerald Bloch, pp. 110-128. 

Upper Canada: A Poor Man's Country? Some Statistical Evidence
by Peter A. Russell, pp. 129-147.

Economy and Society in Central Alberta on the Eve of Autonomy: The Case of the SLHC
by Bruce E. Batchelor, pp. 148-155. 

Developments in Plowing Technology in Nineteenth-Century Canada
by Alan E. Skeoch, pp. 156-177. 

The Waterford Merchants and the Irish-Newfoundland Provisions Trade, 1770-1820
by John Mannion, pp. 178-203. 

Ontario: Whatever Happened to the Irish?
by Donald H. Akenson, pp. 204-256. 
This paper suggests that the Irish in Ontario in the nineteenth century did not settle mainly in urban centres as is usually claimed, but chiefly on farmsteads and in small towns. This pattern held true for both Protestants and Catholics of irish origin. The Irish in Ontario, then, cannot be understood in terms of the urban model imported from American history, but only in terms of the indigenous rural culture of central Canada.