The Limits of Rural Capitalism: Family, Culture, and Markets in Montcalm, Manitoba, 1870-1940 (review)

Kenneth Sylvester's study of the municipality of Montcalm, on the west bank of the Red River just north of the North Dakota border, was inspired by 'countless kitchen table discussions' with his maternal grandmother who had moved to the Prairie West during the Depression. It was inspired, too, Sylvester notes, by memories of watching 'the prairie landscape unfold from the back seat of my parents' car as we returned like nesting birds from various points of exile across Western Canada.' The monograph was 'a way of revisiting these memories and exploring a rural past that remains mysterious to most of us.' His motivation for writing the study is appealing. Unfortunately, after reading Sylvester's book, the general reader is unlikely to find the rural past of Manitoba any less mysterious.

This is a pity, because Sylvester's research is impressive. He sorts out the patterns of migration that brought settlers, primarily Quebec-born francophones, to Montcalm, many by way of the mill towns of New England. As well, he analyses important aspects of Montcalm's development. His study captures, among other things, the relative growth of the francophone component of the population in the district in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the significance of land access to family formation and fertility, and the mixed farming strategies that 'Montcalmois' adopted in the first decades of settlement. It also tracks the acquisition of increasingly sophisticated and expensive farm machinery, the growth of new sources of farm credit, and the declining importance of being able to give heirs land that was free of encumbrances. In short, Sylvester looks closely at a number of facets of rural life in Montcalm and provides useful insights into how they change over time. In doing so, his study effectively employs a wide variety of evidence. Scholars with an interest in rural fertility patterns, farm financing, inheritance strategies, or any of the other areas of agrarian life that Sylvester covers will find this a useful case study.

What is frustrating about the book is its failure to provide more. The reader gets little sense of the overall significance of the accumulation of detail, laid out in dozens of tables and charts. Sylvester's study does not adequately explain what all the data on various facets of rural existence taken together reveal about life in Montcalm. Nor does it effectively situate Montcalm's history in the broader patterns of change in the Prairie West. While the inspiration for this work may have been kitchen table discussions of what it was like to live in the Prairie West, the final product provides little sense of the rural experience in Montcalm. Energetic readers, though, can use Sylvester's material to begin to sort these things out for themselves.

In fairness to Sylvester, the research agenda for this study is shaped in large part by the historiography of the transition debate in North America. Sylvester sets for himself the task of measuring the presence and growth of capitalist norms and relations in the areas of rural life that he considers. For example, his close examination of how residents of Montcalm responded to the challenges of purchasing expensive farm equipment, such as threshers, how they financed their farm operations, and how they coped with providing for their offspring as local land became increasingly scarce provide useful insights into the growth of capital markets and changing economic strategies. Again, in these and other areas of rural life that Sylvester considers, there is much that scholars with an interest in the development of capitalism in the countryside will find of interest. But as a whole, the book is disappointing in its handling of the issue.

Sylvester's conceptual framework, and the vocabulary in which he expresses it, is at times puzzling. He emphasizes the importance of 'independence,' 'independent living,' and 'social independence' to the migrants who settled in Montcalm, but it is never...