Consumers in the Bush: Shopping in Rural Upper Canada by Douglas McCalla (review)

Douglas McCalla has long been at the forefront of historians illuminating the economic history of nineteenth-century Upper Canada. In this book, he turns his attention to the individual family, examining purchases at local general stores to provide new insight into the way the family economy and economic exchange worked. Storekeepers’ daybooks, McCalla tells us, are more interesting than account ledgers, for they list what people actually bought (5). Using these sources, he debunks some cherished myths that have gained credibility largely through repetition. Specifically, his careful analysis calls into question our notions about isolation and scarcity on the Upper Canadian rural frontier. “By considering the details of what people actually bought,” McCalla and his research assistants (to whom he must be referring in his consistent use of “we”) “tell a different story,” one that situates his rural subjects “fully in the global consumption economy of their time” (7).

McCalla’s nuanced and imaginative analysis of storekeepers’ daybooks offers an exciting model for both researchers and university teachers. It could, for example, readily be used as the basis for an innovative course designed to teach students how to assess and use quantitative sources. Further, in carefully explaining his methodology, both in the text itself and in thirty-six tables and four appendices, McCalla provides other researchers with the means to replicate his study for other regions. Even this ambitious study required the establishment of parameters, and, rather than “multiply cases and regions,” he stopped at ten cases “to see what they would yield.” McCalla and his team identified and categorized almost four hundred products and services bought by five or more people, of which almost fifty were bought by seventy-five or more families, about 10 percent of the total number of buyers (21–22). The categories encompass the three main constituents of a general merchant’s imported stock—dry goods, groceries, and hardware—as well the local goods and services he sold.

McCalla’s groundbreaking findings lead him to question the emigrant guides, descriptions of colonial life, policy documents, and reminiscences that have shaped understandings of this society. Rejecting the myth of the self-sufficient pioneer farmer, he concludes that “household production should not be contrasted with market involvement. It was wholly compatible with—in fact at all times required—deep engagement in the international world of goods” (153). Even the most rural stores offered significant variety within the categories of goods stocked. From an early period, such staples as tea, tobacco, sugar, salt and pepper were widely available and likely routinely consumed. Further, stores carried both the means to produce some products, such as candles or clothing, along with the finished products. Some consumers purchased both. Thus the notions that women found it necessary to share scarce needles or that men found it necessary to make their own nails prove unfounded since both items were readily available for purchase in quantity and at low prices (5–7, 90–92).

McCalla emphasizes “how much rather than how little consumption in 1808 resembled consumption in 1861 for rural Upper Canadians” (22). Certainly change over time did occur, as prices dropped along with freight rates and a greater variety of goods became available. The appearance and purchase of new fabrics offer an obvious example of consumers’ awareness of shifting fashion and global market exchange. Yet McCalla makes a compelling argument that “the pattern is of evolution, not of a sudden and comprehensive transition” (149–50).

The realization that “Upper Canadian men and women routinely participated in the marketplace at multiple locations and through numerous points of access” (149) changes readers’ perceptions about rural life in the colonial period. McCalla points out that trade was highly competitive and people had choices about where to shop and what to buy. Not only were there several stores in a single village, but nearby villages and towns also had stores. Stores in villages with a population...