This Side of Heaven: Determining the Donnelly Murders, 1880 by Norman N. Feltes (review)

720 lbe Canadian Historical Review ished stocks testify to the diminished place of fisheries in Canadian society. Inevitably, accounts ofthese stocks, and of the ways of life that once relied on them and that linger still in scattered outports, take on an almost forensic tone, tinged with sadness and regret. While there are no easy solutions, the historic relations between local cultures and their environments can provide insights into how we can relate our knowledge and our appetites to ecological realities. lbe future of Canadian fisheries remains obscure, but this excellent collection serves well in helping us to understand its past. STEPHEN BOCKING Trent University This Side of Heaven: Determining the Donnelly Murders, 1880. NORMAN N. FELTES. Toronto: University ofToronto Press 1999. Pp. 208. $40.00 With this strongly argued Marxist discussion ofthe Donnelly murders in Biddulph Township, north of London, Ontario, in 1880, it is possible to run a first-class graduate seminar on competing versions of historical causality. All the main forms of historiographic explanation are now available, focused on this one tiny spot at one moment in time. Feltes's version is good old-fashioned Marxism, with no chrome and no bells and whistles. Instead, he gives a strong, clear argument, almost jargon free. He believes there is such a thing as evidence, as varying degrees of probative force, and he also believes in logic as a valid historical tool. These characteristics make it a book worth arguing with and arguing about. One tiny problem has to be dealt with immediately. Feltes's entire volume is an argument that the Donnelly murders were overdetermined. lbis is a term that has fairly precise meanings within the Marxist tradition . However, his publishers have made the subtitle read 'Determining the Donnelly Murders.' lbis is doubly misleading. Within the Marxist tradition, determination and overdetermination are quite different concepts. But, worse, to the general reader, the title can be taken as saying that the book will determine the truth behind the Donnelly murders - truth in the judicial sense. That's more than a little misleading, for Feltes has not the slightest interest in the details of the Donnelly murders, nor does he claim to add anything at all new to the narrative ofthe killings as we already have it. Instead, this is an essay in contextualization. Feltes provides a general history of Biddulph Township that literally begins with the last ice age and passes through indigenous land occupation to land alienation to precapitalist formation to the staples economy and to the railway era. It is not a burlesque ofhis argument to summarize it as follows: Ifit had not Book Reviews 721 been for the path the local railroad took, the Donnelly murders never would have occurred. That is, the railway era was only the summation of a long series offorces and fissures that left the Donnellys on the losing side oflate-nineteenth-century capitalism. In his essay, Fortes argues explicitly and strongly against Marvin Mclnnis's view ofthe grain trade in central Canada. Strangely, he does not deal with Douglas McCalla's view of the interaction of nineteenthcentury farmers and the market economy. Even more curious is a frequent digging-in-the-ribs at Bruce Elliott's work on Irish migration patterns to various parts of Ontario, including Biddulph Township. Yet he never engages directly with Elliott's methods and arguments. The reasons, I think, are simple: ifhe challenges Elliott directly, Feltes loses, on two fronts. Elliott's work on migration is a broader and more successful work of contextualization than is Feltes's: why Feltes stopped at the borders of North America is hard to explain, given Elliott's demonstration that what went on in Ontario was in part determined by larger developments in the British Isles. And, second, Elliott's work, a deep prosopography of hundreds of families, is also more accurate at the particularistic level than is Feltes's Ice-Age to Train-Age conspectus. Other historians might disagree. The virtue ofthis book is that it has a strongly articulated argument that leaves the reader with the residual pleasure ofhaving encountered an original and reflective intelligence. DONALD HARMAN AKENSON Queen's University Spreading the Light: Work and Labour Reform...