Rough Work: Labourers on the Public Works of British North America and Canada, 1841-1882 by Ruth Bleasdale (review)

Bertolt Brecht once famously asked who built the pyramids. Ruth Bleasdale has spent much of her career answering even more probing questions about not just who built the canals and railways in mid-nineteenth century British North America and Canada, but what their life was like and how it changed over time. With great empathy and studious balance, this book carefully presents her findings. Initially, most labourers were immigrant Irish Catholics, but as early as the late 1840s their work camps were home to an increasingly varied mix of local residents, Americans, and Europeans. Despite the temporary nature of these camps, they were also home to many wives and children. If regional Irish factional identities marked many of the earliest labour struggles on the canals, this had already given way to more coordinated movements against mechanisation that challenged work place authority by the 1850s. In the much more diversified work forces of the 1870s, labourers successfully organized short-lived unions and even established alliances with skilled workers as they struggled for better wages in the bleak years of depression. Bleasdale concludes that it is in the lived experiences of these thousands of unskilled working men and women rather than amongst skilled male workers where we should look for the fertile ground that permitted the rapid growth of the Knights of Labour in the 1880s.

The structure of her argument flows from the choice of subject matter: this is not a book about the unskilled labourers who made up a fifth to a third of the period's waged work force; it is a study of labourers building or enlarging canals in the Canadas and constructing railways in and to the Maritimes on large-scale public work projects. Logically then, it starts with the contractors, explains the problems inherent in the bidding process and the manifold difficulties most faced in completing their contracts. Once this stage is set, we are introduced through three chapters to the labour force, the work, and the living conditions. Each of these cover the entire period, and Bleasdale works hard to ensure we grasp the variety of situations people faced. The work may have been simple, but their lives were anything but. The qualitative changes suggested by these introductory chapters are examined in the heart of the book through the lens of first community and then struggle. Each merit two chapters in order to highlight how different the situation of the 1840s and 1850s was from that of the 1870s.

The evidential base for her argument is a careful culling of public records, census returns, and English-language newspapers and secondary literature. These are at best refractory sources, telling us far more about how labourers were viewed and very frequently feared by their social superiors than anything meaningful about the workers and their families themselves. Here is where Bleasdale's empathy and scholarly expertise is most in evidence. She frequently speaks to us on behalf of her people, explaining why actions that were uniformly denounced in the press were often necessary and rational from the perspective of the labourers. She is particularly good at drawing out evidence of sympathetic relations between these labouring people and their temporary host communities. Understandably, it is for the Lachine and Welland canals, where work went on throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, that she can marshal the strongest evidence of community support. Hence the importance of her analysis of census enumerations of boarding houses, hotels, and even the occasional work camp in establishing the many local ties of workers in the more mobile sites from the late 1840s onwards.

This is an exemplary study in English Canadian labour history, a subfield that has long been one of our discipline's greatest strengths. Labourers on the canals were never left out of our history, if only because the not infrequently murderous response of contractors and the state to...