‘Union Is Strength’: W.L. Mackenzie, the Children of Peace, and the Emergence of Joint Stock Democracy in Upper Canada (review)

This book is brimming with ideas and intelligence. It assumes an ambitious agenda to explain the emergence of a democratic culture in Upper Canada during the first half of the nineteenth century. At the root of that culture, Schrauwers argues, were voluntary economic institutions such as the Bank of the People and the Farmers’ Storehouse. These were commercial entities created to help ordinary Upper Canadians protect themselves in a debt-ridden economy that was in transition to capitalism. They were also, he contends, political entities since they practised rough democracy in their internal operations and engaged in directly political activities such as petitioning the legislature and supporting political figures such as Mackenzie.

There are strong echoes here of Jeffrey McNairn’s work. What is different is that, where McNairn emphasizes voluntary associations as primary schools for democracy, Schrauwers shifts attention to economic organizations. In a sense, he is creating an amalgam of McNairn’s civic voluntarism with Ian McKay’s liberal order framework. Schrauwers shares McKay’s Marxism and his interpretation of the central importance of liberal capitalism.

The case rests on weaving together a variety of examples of voluntary economic associations, political unions, and charitable societies. It is not easy to keep so many balls in the air and they sometimes hit the ground. The reader struggles to keep track of themes and groups that disappear for long stretches, only to re-emerge. Schrauwers’s enthusiasm for what he has found is usually refreshing; however, too often it leads to inclusion of unnecessary detail and excursions onto sidetracks. A ruthless editing of the manuscript would have made it much more readable and understandable.

Much of the argument is well supported and convincing. It reminds us of the importance of debt in Upper Canadian life. Debt was an economic, social, and political factor, and it was fear of the implications of debt that led farmers and others to create self-help organizations. Schrauwers skilfully demonstrates how Upper Canadians fought to maintain their independence from debt. Independence meant full citizenship, including the right to participate in politics. The Children of Peace, the schismatic Quaker sect who settled on northern Yonge Street, are used as an example of how the spectre of debt was confronted through charity and joint stock enterprises. They are also the link into broader exercises in stockholder democracy, since the Children of Peace were active in Reform politics and all of the auxiliary organizations associated with that politics.

Schrauwers frames much of his account with the competition between two corporate models. One he calls liberal capitalist, based on licensed monopolies and a compliant state. The other, stakeholder democracy, was premised on democratic accountability and a version of economics that grew out of older ideas about a ‘moral economy,’ in which commercial behaviour was regulated by community standards. He is skilful in describing this struggle without becoming reductionist. The development of capitalism in Upper Canada, he contends, was propelled by corporate entities rather than by individual actors. Yet he gives individuals their due and shows how David Willson of the Children of Peace, William Lyon Mackenzie, and others illustrated, if they did not create, the economic changes.

That said, the case might be overstated. There was much more to the Upper Canadian oligarchy than ‘gentlemanly capitalism.’ Schrauwers may be overcorrecting the older non-commercial portrayal and, in the process, simplifying the complicated character of a ruling class in an age of economic and political transition. Equally, he sometimes reaches for evidence of stakeholder democracy where it is hard to discern. Robert Baldwin is portrayed as reflecting ‘the civic humanist and republican leanings of his farmer constituents in the Home District’ (220). The correspondence of Baldwin and David Willson speaks of the awkward alliance that was Home District Reform. Whatever republican might mean in this context, it is difficult indeed...