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  • How Agriculture Made Canada: Farming in the Nineteenth Century by Peter A. Russell
  • Richard A. Hawkins
Peter A. Russell , How Agriculture Made Canada: Farming in the Nineteenth Century ( Montreal and Kingston : McGill-Queen’s University Press , 2012 ), 400 pp. 20 tables. Cased. $100 . ISBN 978-0-7735-4064-4 . Paper. £22.99 . ISBN 978-0-7735-4065-1 .

This is a collection of essays by Peter A. Russell on the historiography of agriculture in nineteenth-century Quebec and Ontario followed by an agricultural history of the Prairies. He has excluded the Maritimes and British Columbia from this study.

Russell begins with a survey of the debate regarding Fernand Quellet’s thesis of an agricultural crisis in Quebec beginning in the first decade of the nineteenth century. He suggests that some scholarship provides a measure of support for Quellet’s analysis. Russell then considers the debate regarding whether farmers in Quebec were inferior to those in Ontario. He concludes that Canadiens were as successful as Anglophone farmers where they had opportunities. Russell then surveys the historiography of the staples theory first expounded by W.A. Mackintosh in 1923 and subsequently developed into the pre-eminent theory of Canadian economic growth by Harold Innis. He concludes that ‘Innis, by an apparent exclusive focus on wheat as an export staple, mistook an important part of the colonial economy for the whole of it … Without the support of the subsistence-oriented domestic economy, the wheat staple would not have been possible’ (p. 141). Russell ends the first half of his book with an exploration of the debate over David Gagan’s thesis that rural Ontario suffered an agricultural crisis during the mid-nineteenth century.

Russell begins his agricultural history of the Prairies with an analysis of the struggle between anglophone and francophone settlers for supremacy in the transition of the Red River settlement into the new province of Manitoba. He then explores the role played by railways and homesteading in the agricultural development of the prairies. He shows that while the influence of the US Homestead Act of 1862 on the Dominion Lands Act of 1872 is often commented upon, less attention has been given to the influence of Dominion land policy on US federal legislation. In the early twentieth century tens of thousands of Americans moved north to take advantage of Canadian free or cheap land. The US federal government responded by making its land policy more attractive. Russell argues that Canadian free homesteads played a much more significant role in western settlement than their American counterparts. Russell also shows that the First Nations successfully developed commercial agriculture on the Prairies before the later non-indigenous settlers. However, the Indian Affairs Branch was opposed to economically independent indigenous Canadians and imposed peasant subsistence farming from the late 1880s. This type of farming was ill-suited to the Prairies and resulted, in some cases, in starvation. Russell observes the Indian Affairs Branch also sought at the same time to reduce the size of native reserves to open more land to white settlers.

This book is a significant addition to the literature on the history of Canadian agriculture. It has one major shortcoming – insufficient maps. Not all readers will be familiar with the historical geography of nineteenth-century Canada.

Richard A. Hawkins
University of Wolverhampton
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