Landscapes of longing: Colonization and the problem of state formation in Canada west

• Main Author: Walsh, John C.
• Other Authors: Snell, James
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Guelph 2001
• Subjects: colonization; strategy; practice; Canada; state formation; era of union; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10214/25250

This thesis is a study of colonization as a strategy and practice of Canadian state formation during the era of union, 1841 to 1867. The state's efforts to colonize a large frontier region, the Ottawa-Huron Tract, were intended to transform the forested wilderness into thriving agricultural communities as existed in the more southern areas of Upper Canada/Canada West. These visions of what colonization should produce, what this thesis calls 'dreamscapes' or 'landscapes of longing,' were a complex amalgam of utilitarian, romantic, and liberal impulses that, while intended to fix immediate financial problems in the Province of Canada, were also endemic throughout the mid-Victorian, North Atlantic world. In striving for this imagined future, the Canadian state financed a number of initiatives. Townships, individual lots of property, and a network of colonization roads were surveyed. The Crown Lands Department deployed local agents to manage the settlement of the roads, which featured free grants of 100 acres,and to see that other public lands were sold to honest 'actual settlers' who would clear trees, plant crops, and contribute to the civilizing process of the frontier. Under the direction of the Bureau of Agriculture, immigration agents in various points of entry along the St. Lawrence River, the north shore of Lake Ontario, and in the city of Ottawa, as well as overseas agents sent to various ports in Europe, were part of an effort to manage the flow of population into Canada. Together, both departments employed a range of practices--reconnaissance, mapping, evaluation--in an effort to know and thus order the people and places being subjected to the colonization project. The sum total of the state's involvement with this colonization project was the formation of a massive archive of knowledge in the form of reports, correspondence, work diaries, maps, statistics, educative pamphlets, and even material specimens. Rather than seeing this knowledge as markers of some other history, this thesis asks questions about ...