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HUMANITIES 461 requirements for bulk product shipping, Colonial Office schema for settlement, the cultural tilt of British jurisprudence as translated into the statutes of Ontario, an agricultural depression that has thus far not made it into any other Upper Canada history that I've looked at: the author surveys in authoritative detail these and a host of other features of the historical terrain that he has marked out. Not everyone will agree with Feltes's analysis, but no reader will be able to grumble about its presentation . Every argument proceeds step by step, every process undergoes methodical examination. We cannot demand that Feltes tramp north Tipperary as thoroughly as he has Sowesto, but we still need a historical examination of the violenceridden ·rural Ireland from which the Donnellys and their neighbours fled. Reaney's drama (and his DeB entry on James Donnelly) have glanced at this primal without resorting to Those Wild Irish and similar rhetorical devices legitimating imperial control. Other Canadian historians (I think particularly of the University of Toronto's Cecil Houston) are at work on historical accounts of the roots ofIrish rural violence and the routes by which murder gangs progressed.Typically, the dramatists have got there first, as Vincent Wood's At the Black Pig's Dyke demonstrates. Eventually, someone will produce a study as breathtaking as Angela Bourke's The Burning of Bridget Cleary as a tool for understanding some of the forces shaping Canadian as well as Irish history. In his preface, Feltes generously acknowledges a very minor role that I played in the inception of this project. What a pleasure to have performed as walk-on in a play of this quality! (DENNIS DUFFY) David Bright. The Limits of LAbour: Class Formation and the Labour Movement ill Calgary, 188]-1929 University of British Columbia Press 1998. x, 276. $29.95 Cities project their own personae, but Calgary'S well-marketed image of cowboys and capitalists provides few hints about the lives and identities of most of its inhabitants. Central to the world of most Calgarians has been an experience of wage labour that was quite remote from that of stampedes and oil barons. With considerable breadth of vision, David Bright explores the evolving world of work in Calgary, seeking to determine why this experience of class did not manifest itself in a more politically effective labour movement. Although the title suggests that Bright's study ends in 1929, he uses the Social Credit sweep of 1935 to clinch his argument about the shallowness of working-class identity in Calgary. The 'limits' of Calgary labour, of course, were not unique to the city. Others have pointed out how the frontier, penny capitalism, ethnic diversity, gender relations, political divisions, careerism, deference, 462 LETTERS IN CANADA 1999 patriotism, unemployment, and any number of other relationships and processes have blunted class identity and undermined the labour movement . Bright's goal is to historicize the .forces that both favoured and undermined workers' class consciousness and collective activity. This requires an exploration of class formation in the city in its various guises from the narrowly structural to the broader ability of Calgary workers to articulate a class-based social and political agenda. Bright sets about this task with considerable ability and insight. How can we measure workers' 'disposition to think and act as a class''? Here Bright's achievements are somewhat mixed. He attempts to eschew a reductionist'radical/conservative' dichotomy whereby workers are measured by some idealized external yardstick. Yet his workers come across as remarkably conservative. He argues that the focus on the Winnipeg General Strike of '9'9 has blinded labour historians to the relative unimportance of the postwar labour revolt in Calgary. Instead, Bright sets 1913 as the turrting point, when the winds of economic expansion subsided suddenly, leaving the city's labour movement becalmed and directionless in an unfavourable and changing capitalist sea. Yet Bright's own evidence suggests otherwise, as the city emerged as a centre of working-class electoral success in the 1920S. Labour candidates were elected at all three levels of government. The inunediate source of this assertive class behaviour was the local labour explOSion at the end of the war...

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