Improving Upper Canada

Agricultural societies founded in the colony of Upper Canada were the institutional embodiment of the ideology of improvement, modelled on contemporary societies in Britain and the United States. In Improving Upper Canada, Ross Fair explores how the agricultural improvers who established and led these organizations were important agents of state formation. The book investigates the initial failed attempts to create a single agricultural society for Upper Canada. It examines the 1830 legislation that publicly funded the creation of agricultural societies across the colony to be semi-public agents of agricultural improvement, and analyses societies established in the Niagara, Home, and Midland Districts to understand how each attempted to introduce specific improvements to local farming practices. The book reveals how Upper Canada’s agricultural improvers formed a provincial association in the 1840s to ensure that the colonial government assumed a greater leadership role in agricultural improvement, resulting in the Bureau of Agriculture, forerunner of federal and provincial departments of agriculture in the post-Confederation era. In analysing an early example of state formation, Improving Upper Canada provides a comprehensive history of the foundations of Ontario’s agricultural societies today, which continue to promote agricultural improvement across the province.

We tend to think of contemporary concern for reform in education as unprecedented in its intensity and scope. But as this book about mid-nineteenth century educational ideology shows, the urge to improve society through its schools has been with us a long time. The author examines the attitudes that shaped the Ontario public school system during its formative years, when Upper Canadians first explored and the provincial government finally adopted the principle of compulsory mass schooling under the auspices and control of the state.

This book presents a thorough analysis of agricultural societies and their purpose in Upper Canada.

Volume VII of the Canadian Centenary Series Now available as e-books for the first time, the Canadian Centenary Series is a comprehensive nineteen-volume history of the peoples and lands which form Canada. Although the series is designed as a unified whole so that no part of the story is left untold, each volume is complete in itself. With firm authority based on expert knowledge and in a lively and straightforward manner, Gerald M. Craig recounts the events in Upper Canada from the flood of immigration in the aftermath of the American Revolution and the Act of Union in 1841 which reunited the two Canadas. During this period the great and abiding issues of Canadian history--the adjusting of French and English institutions, the relationship between church and state, and the claims of responsible government against those of imperial unity and American expansionism--were raised and hotly debated. Those crucial years were to shape the character of much of English-speaking Canada and to lay the foundation for Confederation. Never before had this turbulent era in a colony divided by political, religious, and economic rivalries been so vividly and excitingly set before the reader. Professor Craig brilliantly tells not just the story of the the Simcoes and Mackenzies, the Strachans and the Durhams but also the story of the ordinary people who cleared the land and built the farms and towns, who evolved from war and invasion, rebellion and confusion, to be neither British nor American, but distinctive in their own new Canadian personality. First published in 1963, Gerald M. Craig’s important contribution to the Canadian Centenary Series is available here as an e-book for the first time.

Literature emerging from nineteenth-century Upper Canada, born of dramatic cultural and political collisions, reveals much about the colony's history through its contrasting understandings of nature, ecology, deforestation, agricultural development, and land rights. In the first detailed study of literary interactions between Indigenous people and colonial authorities in Upper Canada and Britain, Kevin Hutchings analyzes the period's key figures and the central role that romanticism, ecology, and environment played in their writings. Investigating the ties that bound Upper Canada and Great Britain together during the early nineteenth century, Transatlantic Upper Canada demonstrates the existence of a cosmopolitan culture whose implications for the land and its people are still felt today. The book examines the writings of Haudenosaunee leaders John Norton and John Brant and Anishinabeg authors Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Peter Jones, and George Copway, as well as European figures John Beverley Robinson, John Strachan, Anna Brownell Jameson, and Sir Francis Bond Head. Hutchings argues that, despite their cultural differences, many factors connected these writers, including shared literary interests, cross-Atlantic journeys, metropolitan experiences, mutual acquaintance, and engagement in ongoing dialogue over Indigenous territory and governance. A close examination of relationships between peoples and their understandings of land, Transatlantic Upper Canada creates a rich portrait of the nineteenth-century British Atlantic world and the cultural and environmental consequences of colonialism and resistance.