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| The Limits of Rural Capitalism: Family, Culture, and Markets in Montcalm, Manitoba, 1870-1940 |  | Author: Kenneth M. Sylvester
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Category: Book
List Price: $72.00
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Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 7,091,368
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 296
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.9 x 1
ISBN: 0802048080
Dewey Decimal Number: 971.274
EAN: 9780802048080
ASIN: 0802048080
Publication Date: February 24, 2001
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Product Description
A study of the social and economic development of the Municipality of Montcalm, a largely French-Canadian community in southern Manitoba. It challenges the view in Prairie historiography that agriculture had commercialized before the west was opened to settlement, and that ethnic communities alone resisted the market's potential. Using a combination of demographic, financial, and legal evidence, Sylvester shows that both Ontario and Quebec migrants came west within family networks, and that neither economic individualism nor ethnic clustering overshadowed the importance of family strategies. In an environment where landed proprietorship was the norm, the demands of parents on the unpaid labour of their children constrained the growth of labour markets, and concerns for farm succession limited the accumulation of wealth. In the shadow of an industrializing and urbanizing world, these people, who came mainly from the District of Montreal and eastern Ontario, sometimes via New England, raised large families, drew largely on the unpaid labour of kin, owned their own farms, limited financial entanglements with outsiders, and established multiple heirs. While household autonomy diminished over time, the limits of rural capitalism persisted.
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A leading example of Canadian rural history August 20, 2001
pnotley@hotmail.com (Edmonton, Alberta Canada)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
One of the weaknesses of Canadian historiography is the way that history, political science and economics tend to be separated. There is less of the interdisciplinary approach which has done so much to benefit Anglo-American historiography since the sixties. As a consequence much analysis of economics and political science is confined by the abstractions of those disciplines, while much history tends to have a "high politics" or even frankly patriotic character. This has particularly hurt the study of rural history, where most Canadians lived before the second world war. Sylvester's monograph seeks to look more closely at the rural countryside. His book starts off promisingly by noting how American historiography has paid increasing attention to questions of how capitalist the countryside was. Sylvester looks at the francophone community of Montcalm, Manitoba, and he emphasizes that one cannot assume that the Canadian prairie was born capitalist. Instead the limits of rural capitalism persisted well into the twentieth century. He then goes on to helpfully discuss such matters as the demographics of prairie life, the limits of credit and commercial diversification, and how inheritance practices subtly changed as farmers sought to benefit their children while Montcalm society became more commercialized and less egalitarian.All this is useful, but one wishes for more. There is not the kind of detail one finds in Christopher Clark's The Roots of Rural Capitalism, or Steven Hahn's The Roots of Southern Populism. Whereas class was central to these books, especially Hahn's, class and the details of commercialization are given much less focus. On questions like mutuality and common property there is almost nothing. More could have been said about divisions within the community; Sylvester prefers to concentrate on the family. More could have been said about gender: the most interesting role women play in Sylvester's account is when they inherit as wives. Indeed, there is rather little on capitalism per se, except to say that as long as most people were farmers they were not fully capitalist. A comparative account might lead one to suggest that in many ways 1880 Manitoba was clearly more capitalist that an 1880 Georgia struggling over the legacy of slavery. There is also surprisingly little on politics; there is a brief account of an election squabble in 1878 that led to bloodshed, but there is nothing on Progressivism, or the two party system, and next to nothing about rural registration. There is not much here about conflict at all. Considering that scholars such as Hahn, David Szatmary, Alan Taylor and Charles Sellars have seen "subsistence culture" as crucial to the rise of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, as well as later protest movements, the absence of such a discussion in Sylvester's account is striking. There are some comments on Catholicism and francophone identity, and there is a brief mention that most farmers did not appreciate the classical pretensions of francophone newspapers editors. There are some tantalizing accounts of francophone reaction to the first and second world wars, which seem to suggest a more national and anti-Petainiste attitude than one might have thought. But usually Catholicism and identity are taken for granted. Rather revealingly, when Sylvester talks about emigration to Winnipeg, he concentrates on the businesses that francophones formed, and not in their roles in unions or political parties. Much of the book is based on court records, and this unfortunately leads to a rather dry tone. Clearly, Canadian rural history is in no danger of running out of questions to answer.
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