Tenants in Time: Family Strategies, Land, and Liberalism in Upper Canada, 1799-1871 (review)

Canadian social historians are currently engaged in lively debates about the "liberal project" in the Canadas, stimulated largely by Ian McKay's account of the "Liberal Order Framework."¹ Catharine Anne Wilson's, Tenants in Time, does not specifically address the debate, but can be read as a contribution to it and related topics, changing land policies, a culture of tenants' rights, landed family "strategies" and nineteenth-century social mobility. She also addresses the absence of a nineteenth-century Ontario tenants' movement, a curious absence given the politically volatile anti-rent movements in Ireland, Prince Edward Island and especially in neighbouring New York State in the 1830s and 1840s.

Following her earlier work, Wilson takes up the story of tenancy in Upper Canada (Ontario after 1867) from the turn of the nineteenth-century to the first years after Confederation (1867). She argues that landed tenants were largely relegated to the margins in cultural and ideological terms, and have remained there in subsequent historical interpretations. The social, cultural and political importance of a freeholding "yeomanry" was a central tenet of nineteenth-century liberal rhetoric and belief. Only ownership conferred the essential qualities of a liberal actor: free, independent, self-reliant, mobile and committed to social order. Tenancy was the preserve of the lazy or the incapable or those who would run down the land having no long-term stake in its improvement. In a liberal cultural formation tenants were viewed as disabled economic actors and citizens and landlords as exploitative speculators. Wilson's sustained argument is that, despite living in the shadows, widespread and widely varying forms of tenancy fitted a liberal order very well, providing adaptable and affordable entry into, movement within, and sometimes long-term gains from the Upper Canadian farm market.

In nine clearly-written chapters, Wilson draws on a wide variety of sources, from newspapers and correspondence to the more structured evidence of assessments and censuses. The centre of her study is a highly detailed case study of one township, Cramahe, Northumberland County, located on the northeastern shore of Lake Ontario. The township is selected for the usual historians' reasons of unusual surviving, rich evidence. Following the introduction a short chapter rehearses the ideology of landholding and concomitant disdain for tenancy. A third chapter gives an account of the origins, prevalence and surprising diversity of lease arrangements, beginning with an account of the colonial government's lead in establishing the clergy and Crown land reserves (each one seventh of every township), land that attracted tenants as early as 1803. Apparently, in the first half of the nineteenth century one quarter to one half of the farming population of Upper Canada were tenants, with the height captured in the 1848 census, when reported district rates ranged from a third of all land occupiers to nearly 60 percent. Reported rates are hard to interpret: tenants declined to about 15 percent of occupiers in the much more systematic 1871 census. Nevertheless, Wilson persuasively demonstrates that tenancy was an integral feature of early Ontario's economic and cultural formations. Another chapter examines landlords and landlord-tenant relationships. We are introduced to large landowners in the mould of an "Old World" landed aristocracy, to corporate landlords, to land speculators, and to the most numerous landlords, ordinary freehold farmers (retired farmers, widows, small businessmen, local merchants, and active farmers who leased land). Wilson shows that in many respects lessees were not so very different from their landlords. A further chapter reviews the types and levels of rent. Rents were generally low, given prevailing conditions of high geographic mobility and land availability, which fostered tenancy and mostly benefited lessees. Chapter six examines the penalties for and legal negotiations over nonpayment and arrears, and a seventh unravels a complex, negotiated culture of customary tenants' rights - a form of ownership Wilson argues. This is the most interpretively rich chapter, showing this culture largely equalized relations that...