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

‘Rural is not a term that British Columbia historians use in their work,’ observed historian Ruth Sandwell a decade ago. James Murton’s Creating a Modern Countryside suggests that this may no longer be the case. Challenging the older historiography that privileged urban and industrial themes in British Columbia history, Murton explores bc‘s rural development policies after the First World War. Four studies constitute the core of the book: the bc government’s efforts to establish two soldier settlements, at Merville on Vancouver Island and at Camp Lister in the Kootenays south of Creston; the story of the draining of Sumas Lake in the Fraser Valley near Chilliwack; and the state-sponsored creation of the Southern Okanagan Irrigation Project. ‘What was new in the postwar projects,’ Murton argues, ‘was the idea of modernizing the countryside and the direct involvement of the state in planning and carrying out resettlement.’ Significantly, through these stories Murton sees the countryside as the leading edge of the province’s transformation into a planned, science-based, modern society in the 1920s.

If the impulse towards modernity constitutes the book’s dominant theme, the government’s attempt to create a modern countryside by managing the rural environment constitutes a second focus. Murton’s discussion of the government’s willingness to employ scientific experts ‘to order and control’ nature in its rural development schemes provides the context for an insightful exploration of the relationship between the state and the environment in British Columbia history, a discussion facilitated by the theoretical insights of Donald Worster and James C. Scott. What stands out, however, are less the government’s plans to manage nature than the latter’s resistance to the development schemes of planners and engineers. Stories such as the Merville fire and the complications that hindered the draining of Sumas Lake provide some of the most engaging parts of the book. Murton concludes that the ‘difficulties of reforming nature in bc in the 1920s’ had larger implications for provincial history. By killing ‘the effort to establish agriculture and to build a modern countryside,’ environmental resistance turned the Pattullo government of the 1930s away from back-to-the-land policies and ended the rural focus of the province’s quest for modernity.

Murton’s analysis flows from his belief that the underlying ideological framework of British Columbia’s settler society shifted in the war and postwar years from classical liberalism – emphasizing a limited role for the state and the rights of individuals – to a ‘new liberalism’ that linked the good of society to ‘a greatly expanded and much more activist state responsible for the general welfare of its citizens.’ Murton’s insight usefully identifies the increasing role of the state in British Columbia through wartime reform measures and rural resettlement policy. But he may overstate the extent to which the 1920s marked the moment when ‘the classic laissez-faire liberalism of the nineteenth century . . . gave way to a more interventionist “new liberalism” of the twentieth’ (Graeme Wynn, ‘Introduction’). Creating a Modern Countryside clearly illustrates that a more statist outlook shaped government land policy after the war, but I wonder if Premier John Oliver, seen here as one of the architects of the modernizing impulse, can be considered a ‘new liberal.’ One of the hallmarks of the rural development schemes is that they were underfunded, a product in part of Oliver’s anti-statist views. Oliver was (arguably) a populist who strongly believed in the virtues of self-sufficiency and limited government, a laissez-faire liberal attracted to the soldier settlement and Sumas Lake schemes because of his deep-seated rural identity rather than because he was committed to ‘creating a new modernity.’ In other words, this intellectually engaging book may illustrate less a moment of fundamental change in British Columbia history than a transitional period marked by overlapping ‘new liberal’ and ‘old liberal’ influences.