Peopling the North American City: Montreal 1840–1900 (review)

Sherry Olson and Pat Thornton have lived and breathed the city of Montreal for many years, and they have fathomed the depths of its archival treasures. As their generous acknowledgements and voluminous references make clear, their book is an example of the research collaboratory that has emerged in recent decades: databases shared among many individuals and teams; ideas shared so widely that Olson and Thornton name others whom they consider to be co-authors of specific chapters; partnerships extended to include family history organizations, museums, and international networks. Two scholars take the accumulated wealth of data and the research of a generation, add their own abundant talents and resources, and give us a new and translucent re-visioning of their city.

The authors modestly claim to offer an ‘analytical experiment’ in connecting ‘the individual thread of destiny’ to ‘the chorus of hundreds of thousands’ (3). There is nothing modest about the questions they pose and the challenges they face, as they move between micro- and macro-level scales. What was this ‘City of Wealth and Death’ (21)? Who were its people, and how did they shape the urban environment to their individual and familial destinies? How can thematic coherence be achieved when a single grand hypothesis is suggested neither by the sources nor by the secondary literature on urban geography, social history, and historical demography? The experiment that responds to these challenges is a bold reconnaissance that pulls down disciplinary boundaries and attempts a re-integration of the social sciences sufficient to capture ‘the wholeness of social life in which behaviours were embedded’ (358).

Each of the twelve chapters moves within the frame of historical demography, drawing from an international literature that has moved beyond the dichotomy of economy versus culture toward new ways of seeing the complex interactions among place, family, religion, economy, communication, and culture. Cultural community is another frame of coherence. Key to the analytical nexus of demography and culture is the authors’ sampling strategy. There is no ‘surfeit of numbers and technicalities’ (363), and the description of methods is lucid and efficient. The authors construct a miniature Montreal, a sample of twelve surnames yielding a thousand married couples and their offspring across the decades, with roughly equal numbers from each of three groups: French-speaking Catholics, English-speaking Catholics, and English-speaking Protestants. The sampling procedure allows the tracking of descendants from original couples and the tracking of individuals across sources (census, parish records, notarial records). The limits to the sample are carefully specified, although some scholars may worry about the cluster effects of surname samples in statistical analysis. Nevertheless, the authors demonstrate remarkable skill in compensating for those limits, moving well beyond their miniature Montreal to tell us about diversity within and beyond the major ethnic clusters.

Discoveries are abundant; a tidy listing is impossible. So different are the patterns of birth, marriage and death, the authors argue, that we are observing distinct demographic regimes among the three religio-linguistic communities. Infant mortality is related to ethnicity, as expected, but also to annual rent and even proximity to horses. Fertility and mortality are connected to breast-feeding and thence to cultural differences and to communication within the sisterhoods of women. The fertility of Protestant women was unexpectedly high. The growth of the French-Canadian population resulted not so much from marital fertility as it did from early marriage, low rates of celibacy, and in-migration from the countryside. People moved in and out of households and neighbourhoods; yet there was a high level of persistence and the old idea that the nineteenth-century city contained a permanently floating population does not seem to apply to Montreal. Social mobility may be measured plausibly, and it was especially evident among Irish Catholics. Cultural communities articulated ethnic boundaries through symbols, social bonding, rituals, music and gesture.

Answers give rise to new problems, to guide and inspire another generation of scholars. What are the implications for...