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

The transportation revolution of the mid-nineteenth century left its mark on the landscape of eastern and central Canada: a circulatory system of canals and railways that opened up the northern portion of North America for settlement, development, and exploitation. This infrastructure generated wealth, which was visible back in the imperial metropole of London and in colonial towns like Montreal, Halifax, and Toronto. This wealth was produced, however, not only by the displacement and disempowerment of local Indigenous nations but also by the back-breaking labour of a predominately migrant workforce working in terrible conditions. Ruth Bleasdale's Rough Work: Labourers on the Public Works of British North America and Canada, 1841–1882 is a comprehensive study of the men who laboured on these worksites, the men who oversaw this work, and a state apparatus that devoted considerable attention to ensuring that this all went as smoothly as possible. It is a study that is built around an admirably close and nimble analysis of state records, the local press, and the documents produced by the private contractors who carried out these projects.

Bleasdale addresses some questions that are of paramount importance to those interested in nineteenth-century Canada. How did these projects come to fruition? She walks us through the political process of financing infrastructure projects, the recruitment of labourers, and the efforts made to introduce order and discipline on these worksites. Bleasdale focuses the bulk of her attention on creating a profile of the men who worked on these projects. Popular depictions of the industrial revolution tend to focus their attention on the technological innovations of this period, but Bleasdale demonstrates that back-breaking and often dangerous manual labour continued to serve as the foundation of Canada's transportation revolution throughout this period, as new machines often proved unreliable in the challenging environmental conditions of rural North America. Workers faced outbreaks of malaria and suffered accidents induced by fatigue. They shuffled between rambling, improvised shanty towns in search of work. This work was done by migrants, first primarily from Ireland and, as the study moves deeper into the second half of the nineteenth century, from a more diverse array of European countries. Local residents, Bleasdale suggests in a few different contexts, were deemed unreliable because they would often decide to return to family-owned farms and other economic opportunities. This is a classic endeavour of social history: trying to understand the experience of people who did not leave behind documents the way that the wealthy and powerful tended to. The fact that these labourers remain cloaked in anonymity tells us a great deal about the social and economic transformations of the Victorian period.

Findings like this underscore the important contribution that Bleasdale is making here to the literature on nineteenth-century capitalism – namely, that it relied on the persistent exploitation of displaced economic migrants. Keeping this flow of migrants coming, and ensuring that their collective efforts to demand better remuneration and safer working conditions were largely contained, was key to generating profits in the infrastructure business. The paternalist bonds that had once knit employees and their employers together were in the midst of being stripped away during these decades. The contractors who hired gangs of labourers to dig a stretch of canal or lay railway ties viewed their hires as disposable commodities, not as people to whom they owed any lasting obligation. Bleasdale provides a rich analysis of the dynamic world of labour protest that emerged on the public works, which often drew on rich customs of popular agitation that she traces back to peasant revolts in agrarian Ireland. The raucous and contentious culture that emerged around public worksites stoked the anxieties of the colonial elite, who saw it as a threat to the social order. Everything from police forces to gun control legislation was introduced in an effort to smooth out the rough edges of this culture...