Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia (review)

In Creating a Modern Countryside, historian James Murton employs a case-study approach to investigate the interplay between the interwar liberal order in British Columbia and settler society’s unwavering belief in the potential of modern science to transform the natural world to better suit Euro-Canadian habitation. To this end, Murton investigates projects to settle returned soldiers at Merville near Courtney on Vancouver Island and at Camp Lister in the west Kootenays. The draining of Sumas Lake in the lower Fraser Valley and the irrigation works of the southern Okanagan to facilitate agricultural settlement are also incorporated into this thoughtful study.

With a nod to Ian McKay’s thought-provoking writing on the proliferation of the liberal order in Canada, Murton argues, in part, that ‘new liberals’ in British Columbia in the interwar period envisaged an alternative modernity in which ‘the concept of humans and nature coming together was central to . . . the goal of building in the countryside a better, more natural form of modern life’ (156). Following the lead of expert advisors, modern science, and their own convictions that a more proactive state was necessary to solve the problems of modern societies, the new liberals in government in interwar bc moved to build a modern countryside, a project that was given a sense of urgency with the return of veterans from the First World War.

Murton recognizes that part of the province’s concern was based on practical considerations related to the potential for radicalization and combination of unemployed former soldiers and later of the army of unemployed workers displaced by the Depression of 1930s. But for Murton, British Columbia’s new liberals of the late 1910s and 1920s accepted that there were systemic flaws that needed to be addressed by governments more active in ameliorating social ills. These acknowledgements, though, were never sufficient to shake the new liberals’ core understandings or the naturalness, supremacy, and simple rightness they saw in the primacy of the individual and in unfettered private capital accumulation. Even efforts by settlers to organize for their collective benefit were looked upon with suspicion.

Murton does an admirable job in illustrating the limits new liberal policy-makers imposed on the implementation of their ideals. While at one level they believed that scientific experts would provide them with the tools necessary to shape the environment and society into a cohesive and thoroughly modern manifestation of liberal thought, they regularly ignored, or neglected to request, the scientific evidence necessary for the success of their projects. Further, they were unwilling to make essential investments in time, money, or consultation and largely ignored local knowledge and conditions. At the same time, liberal bureaucrats withheld information from local property owners and were known to employ heavy-handed techniques of instruction and inspection. While British Columbia as a whole was the primary beneficiary of these projects to reform nature, local settlers were expected to shoulder all related costs. That these settlers often supported their government’s vision of progress, even if their own experiences were somewhat less than positive, is demonstrative of the extent to which liberal notions and the primacy of the classical liberal individual were internalized.

Murton argues that the ideal of creating a modern countryside with nature and humans coming together as imagined by British Columbia liberals in the interwar period was short lived. Failures in soldier settlement contributed to a shift in liberal thinking away from a belief in the central place of agriculture in the social and economic development of the province. By the 1930s, even the most ardent supports of new liberalism were swept away by the apparently irresistible force of liberalism’s cohabitation with industrial capitalism.

On the broader issues involved in this study, Murton makes the convincing argument that ‘understanding environmental change requires moving beyond the consideration of ideas explicitly about nature to more general logics – such as liberalism – that implicitly encourage a particular form of engagement with nature’ (6). Yet beyond his illustration...