Hopefully getting empirically and theoretically stronger with Harris and Perry

Last week, I apologized to my comps field supervisor for not being as strong at the theoretical side of things as he and I would like. He responded that I seem to be struggling with the empirical side of history as well. Ouch! Hopefully I've rectified it this week! Two very interesting books, of which I've focused more on Harris's historical geography as it is a bit further than Perry's work from the sort of study that I'm accustomed to.

Cole Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia

Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire

Adele Perry and Cole Harris, in their work on the history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Columbia, destabilize the narratives of “settlement” that they argue is problematic to Canadian history. Perry accomplishes this through an intersectional, poststructural analysis that emphasizes colonialism as a “popular social experience” that pervaded nineteenth-century British Columbia.[1] Harris portrays the European presence in British Columbia as one of resettlement, highlighting the important link between pre-existing First Nations communities and the land. Both authors focus on linkages in this colonial experience: Perry describes gender and race as “mutually constitutive,” while Harris argues for a similar entangled relationship between colonialism and land, in which colonialism was a product of geography, yet also shaped it.

Perry’s work follows from a wide body of postcolonial work, such as that of Catherine Hall and Ann Laura Stoler, which emphasizes gender as a major category of analysis for colonialism. She argues that race must be treated in a similar manner, suggesting and modeling an interrogation of whiteness just as previous historians have done with masculinity, and interweaving these problematized categories. It is likely through this development that Perry’s work has become prominent in postcolonial histories of British Columbia and Western Canada more broadly. She is careful to note, however, that her own work is not explicitly ‘post’ colonialist; she is hesitant to use such a label, but draws from postcolonial theory to inform her analysis of imperialism and race. Perry gradually unfolds the discourses that constructed Aboriginal peoples and white settlers, showing these discourses to be “fictive and changing” constructions.[2]

Both Perry and Harris purport to use discourse in their analyses. Perry clearly does this; Harris, arguably, does not. Perry’s monograph is replete with analyses of songs and poetry describing the experiences and perceptions of a variety of settlers. These verses show evolving and often contradictory images of Aboriginal peoples and settlers, predicated upon gendered representations, furthering Perry’s argument that colonialism was about contact between two peoples as men and women, rather than in the absence of gender relations. For example, by portraying Aboriginal women as opposite to white women, colonists could define womanhood to be the exclusive purview of white women; on this basis, Perry claims that “woman” as a category had clear “racial contours.”[3] Perry notes that in a poststructuralist approach, all sources are discursive in character. Her consideration of discourse is strongest in her analysis representations through poetry and lyrics; while she analyzes laws and policies as well, she does not attempt the same depth of textual analysis with these sources as she does with those of a more literary slant. Much of her analysis of legal texts focuses on inclusion and exclusion of various bodies from the law.

Cole Harris has a decidedly unorthodox definition of discourse. Whereas poststructuralists would generally define discourse as pertaining to language, seeing words as key to the construction of meaning, Harris defines it without relation to language (“the interrelated ideas, assumptions, and practices associated with a particular configuration of social power”[4]). This allows him to write a chapter that is ostensibly focused on discourse, with minimal analysis of language itself. This chapter analyzes power relationships in the fur trade with reference to performances of surveillance and discipline. From a theatrical perspective, however, it is akin to a play with a set and stage directions, but no script.

Another theme running through both Perry’s and Harris’s work is that of discipline, regulation, and reform. In several of Harris’s essays, the resettlement of British Columbia is portrayed as one of discipline, surveillance, and ordering of native peoples and land. He frames forts in the fur trade, for instance, in relation to their potential as sites of discipline and surveillance for the fur trade, emphasizing their status as ordered space.[5] There is a definite drawback to this strand of analysis, however: through this emphasis on colonialism implementing order and discipline, Harris implies, likely inadvertently, that Native society and land use was disorderly. This is also a potential pitfall in Perry’s work. While she considers Aboriginal agency to a greater extent than Harris, there is a clear division in her conceptualization of power, whereby Aboriginal attempts to manipulate society are framed as resistance, and European settler attempts to manipulate society are framed as discipline. In Perry’s analysis, non-Aboriginal targets of reform projects could cross or straddle this line between implementing discipline and effecting resistance, while Aboriginal peoples were, by default, objects of imperialism.

Harris’s chapter on the 1881 nominal census, written with Robert Galois, illustrates how he engages with both power and discourse, while also highlighting the regional specificity of British Columbian history. Harris and Galois analyze the 1881 census as a means to show the recalibration of space and society, considering it as “an instrument of the growing regulatory power of the modern nation-state, and a reflection of the white Canadian society that devised and administered it,” again emphasizing both the mutually constitutive role of colonialism and the nation-state in relation to land and the centrality of regulation and discipline in Harris’s own analysis. Harris’s consideration of census categories borders on discursive analysis, scrutinizing representations of Native peoples as “Indians” rather than simply “people.”[6] This analysis is more in relation to the space allocated to various categorizations within the census, rather than language itself, however. More consistently with the rest of Harris’s collection, Harris and Galois indicate that the 1881 census overall shows British Columbia as a unique and regionally diverse society, and one to be considered on its own terms rather than subsumed into a wider history of colonialism.[7]

A particularly fascinating insight in Harris’s work is his consideration of ‘space-time compression’ as a factor that makes British Columbia a unique site in European colonialism. Harris’s sixth essay, “The Struggle with Distance,” shows the importance of communication and transportation infrastructures to British Columbia as a colonial project. The implementation of such infrastructures was, according to Harris, part of the integration of British Columbia into a modernizing world, and therefore neither politically nor culturally neutral.[8] Unlike in other areas of a modernizing world, these changes occurred very quickly, as Harris outlines in his discussion of the Fraser Canyon as a compressed story of emerging modernity, with a unique periodization of colonialism and resistance compared to other areas.[9]

There are a handful of peculiarities in Harris’s collection of essays. These include his references in a couple of chapters to “Coyote” as representative of Aboriginal peoples. This quite problematically situates Aboriginal peoples within a spiritual realm, referring to religion without truly analyzing it or considering its impact on Aboriginal worldviews. As a rhetorical device, such references are jarring, and border on inappropriate given Harris’s position as a white scholar with an admitted lack of Aboriginal perspective. Harris’s work is occasionally quite self-conscious in tone, with many autobiographical notes and caveats in his introduction to position him as a settler with a clear link to particular places in British Columbia. In one essay, this self-consciousness is troubling: in fairly extensive prefatory remarks to his seventh essay, “Industry and the Good Life around Idaho Peak,” Harris notes that this particular essay is an older work than the rest of the collection, and criticizes his own previous assumptions and assertions that Aboriginal peoples had not been present in the land around Idaho Peak as symptomatic of the hegemony of colonial narratives.[10] It is therefore puzzling that Harris opted to include this particular essay without significant edits. It has certain value in expanding Harold Innis’s staples thesis, through Harris’s demonstration of the importance of economies that lay on the margins of staples trades.[11] However, this section is theoretically a step behind the rest of the collection, and less integrated into the trajectory of Harris’s overall argument.

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[1] Perry, 7.

[2] Perry, 5.

[3] Perry, 56.

[4] Harris, 281.

[5] Harris, 48.

[6] Harris, 157.

[7] Harris, 160.

[8] Harris, 162.

[9] Harris, 105.

[10] Harris, 194.

[11] Harris, 216.

This only skims the surface

These three monographs gave me so much to work with that it was hard to stay within a manageable length (my Canada comps field supervisor reads these in the morning, after he arrives at his office but before I get there - so I try to keep them short! I could potentially avoid this length restriction by sending them to him earlier, but then they'd be shorter because I'd have less time to work on them. An odd cycle). Tomorrow when we discuss them in person I'll get to properly sink my teeth in.

Reading Response: Little, Loo, Curtis

Making law. Building the educational state. Reforming institutions. The titles of monographs by Tina Loo, Bruce Curtis, and J.I. Little, respectively, show various actions in state formation in British Columbia, Canada West, and Canada East, all temporally clustered in the mid-nineteenth century. Through their analyses of law, education, and institutions more broadly, one can see the tensions in historiography of the 1990s concerning pre-Confederation state formation. Despite existing on a spectrum of engagement with theory, these works are united by their local emphases, problematizing of the relationship between communities and the state.

Tina Loo presents a study of legal discourses, their formation, and their implementation, in British Columbia, primarily prior to Confederation. Her goal is ostensibly to show how conflict and negotiation were involved in shaping the economic system, with law as an underpinning of a liberal economic order.[1] Ultimately, her conclusions read more as a discussion of liberalism itself, reached through a number of case studies of legal controversies that reached courts in British Columbia. Her approach is decidedly post-structuralist, and she offers a definite example in favour of conducting such an analysis, which was relatively novel among historians when her work was published. As such, Loo’s work is theoretically strong; by providing clear definitions of liberalism and discourse analysis, she avoids the pitfalls faced by later historians—Greg Gillespie comes to mind—who take their theoretical underpinnings for granted. Her bridging between empirical and theoretical approaches to writing Canadian history through discourse analysis shows the legal order in British Columbia as constructed rather than natural, but that this construction, and liberalism itself, is limited rather than totalizing.[2]

Bruce Curtis offers, as Philip Corrigan’s prefatory remarks indicates, a “genealogy of the embodied educational state” in Canada West.[3] To Curtis, the organization of education was a struggle regarding the form of a colonial state, subsuming class- and gender-specific understandings of state schooling, the emergence, stabilization, and normalization of mass schooling, and the management of resistance to public schooling in a series of interlinked studies.[4] In contrast to Little, Curtis takes a Foucauldian approach that sees education very much as a means of social control that is sufficiently hegemonic as to appear natural. This hegemony emerged through ideology, but more importantly, habituation, pedagogy, and discourses of education as pleasurable for students.[5]

J.I. Little outlines institutional reform during a transformatory period following the defeat of the Rebellions in Lower Canada. He rejects hypotheses of institutional reform based on social-control theory; according to Little, this elite implementation of institutions to serve a capitalist system was applicable for an urban area, but not for a rural, pre-industrial society. In contrast to Curtis’s work, Little argues that the social-control thesis and related approaches incorrectly suggest that state institutions were central and elite.[6] It is in his treatment of education that Little’s work most clearly contrasts with Curtis’s; Little contends that in the Eastern Townships, education had local support prior to the Rebellions. Similarly, he indicates that taxation was not an imposition from the elite, but was implemented with popular consent. Little’s main goal is to locate public figures and institutions Eastern Townships within a ‘state-community spectrum,’ with both ‘state’ and ‘community’ as fluid entities.[7] Little thus argues that state formation occurred at the community level, rather than as an interchange between the centre and periphery.[8] While Loo is very explicit in her terminology and precise in the theoretical links she draws, Little does not provide definitions quite so readily; in his third chapter, for example, “community regulation” goes undefined, leading the reader to infer how such issues as the charivari, temperance, and smuggling are linked within this category. More troublingly, as Curtis charges in his review, Little is ambiguous as to the form taken by the state in his study, arguably portraying it, in Curtis’s words, as a “monolithic entity” or a “straw opponent.”[9]

Little’s work is thematically broader than either Curtis’s or Loo’s, covering both education and law in his monograph. This breadth allows him to draw substantial conclusions, emphasizing a limited state role and significant localism on many fronts. In tackling so many facets of institutional reform, analyzed through case studies rather than wider trends, he sacrifices the theoretical depth concerning particular facets of the state; this depth is a major strength of Curtis’s and Loo’s monographs. Whereas Curtis and Loo highlight the applicability of their work to regions wider than their geographical areas of study, Little highlights the local specificity of his work. To Curtis, the application of the educational state extends through international state-building projects, arguing that the educational condition and project were “central constituents of political rule in the bourgeois order.”[10] Loo, while arguing that British Columbia is unique within Canada and therefore best understood “within the particular discursive space provided by liberalism” rather than other frameworks, situates her work as an example of the larger significance of the link between law and liberalism, to make larger and more theoretical claims about the nature of rights, justice, and legal discourse.[11] Little, more cautiously, makes no such contentions; he does not claim that his findings extend beyond the Eastern Townships, emphasizing their unique position in a struggle against isolation.[12] For historians of areas other than the Eastern Townships, the strength of his work is not in his untangling of the specificities of that region, but in his examination of institutional reform from a non-governmental perspective, extending an analysis beyond the government and its legislation.

Little, Curtis, and Loo differ profoundly on their use of theory. While Little rejects Foucauldian approaches such as the social-control thesis, Curtis’s work is theoretical, bordering on conspiratorial, in his claims that the educational state was embodied within schoolchildren. Loo decidedly takes a middle ground, with an extensive but critical application of post-structuralism and liberalism. While Loo is not as explicit as the other authors in engagement with social-control theory, she is closer to Curtis than to Little in this respect, situating the state as an instrument of capitalism through law premised on liberal discourse, with the class oppression that this would presumably entail. The state, to Loo, is still an overarching force, with power over the people, though not to the extent that Curtis postulates.

A critical omission of all three texts is the relative lack or weakness of analyses of gender, and race. While these are political rather than social histories, the absence of strong analyses of these elements of privilege and marginalization hinder all three considerations of the state, by positioning the local community as, by default, white and male. The fairly limited treatment of Aboriginal peoples in Loo’s work, and apparent absence of such an analysis in Curtis’s, is particularly striking given their geographic situation and theoretical underpinnings, respectively. For Little, this is a less critical concern, but nonetheless an issue he could afford to engage with more.

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[1] Loo, 4.

[2] Loo, 162.

[3] Corrigan, cited in Curtis, 9.

[4] Curtis, 12.

[5] Curtis, 378.

[6] Little, 5.

[7] Little, 7.

[8] Little, 12.

[9] Curtis, review, 214, 213.

[10] Curtis, 380.

[11] Loo, 157, 161.

[12] Little, 240.

Forgot to post this one: Craig, and more Greer

I had a very busy week, and as you can see, I didn't finish one of the two books before having to hand in a reading response! I was hesitant to post this one at first, for that reason. And then I forgot to post it. But here it is now...or, ok, after a bit of a reflective preamble.

This week is reading week, which, unsurprisingly, I am using for exactly its intended purpose. I have six books to read for next week, of which I've finished not quite two, and I also hope to go back through some of my other readings that I didn't do in as much detail as I'd have liked. I also have a goal of writing up all of this week's books, in three reviews/responses (as they are on three very different topics!). We shall see how I do... 

There was some minor panic last week. Actually, that's a deceptive way of structuring that sentence: I panicked entirely last week about comps. I feel behind on readings, meaning that I had to go into class on Thursday not having completed two of the three books I was to have read. I have a personal policy of fessing up to the prof if I'm not prepared, and I did so. Some of my classmates are somewhat critical of that, since it wouldn't be good for my grade. But I worry that I'd get found out anyways, in such a small class. I'd rather have a 100% chance that the prof knows that I wasn't prepared and perhaps assumes me to be unreliable, than take a 50% chance that I get found out anyways and am thought dishonest, or a 50% chance that I say something ridiculous in my attempts to bullshit through class, and have him think me stupid. It's all a bit of a tradeoff. Ideally this will be the last time I'll be unprepared, as that was a very anxious day for me. Fortunately after panicking a bit for two days after that (and I do not use the word "panic" in a hyperbolic sense!) a friend who wrote her comps a couple of years ago mentioned that she felt similarly panicked for much of her first year of her PhD. At least knowing that my anxiety is, to some extent, normal, meant that I could focus on work again.

In terms of feedback from my professors (and I am putting this here so that I have a narrative of my comps work, rather than to share grades with the world! I do find it somewhat shocking that people actually bother to read my analyses) I've had one of these graded; the Poulter response got an A-. In theory I should think that's good enough, but in practice, well, I'd like to get As more often. It's not about the actual grades (although I am so fond of my GPA from the past couple of years that I am borderline secretive about it) but because I know that my work will probably slide a bit as I get more and more stressed out as comps approaches. If I can reliably get As and A+s on my work at this point, then hopefully I will still pass comps (I'm pretty sure that "pass" in this context is equivalent to a B. They have high standards!). Apparently these should be more like reviews than essays.

Enough reflecting and waffling. Here's the actual response:

Craig: Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists

Greer: Peasant, Lord, and Merchant

I write this response with one large caveat: I admittedly have not finished Greer’s work, and am basing this off what I learned from the preface. This will therefore be a response largely to Craig’s monograph. I can only hope that the assumptions I make about Greer’s work from his preface do not show themselves to be entirely incorrect once I finish reading his text.

Béatrice Craig’s Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists: The Rise of a Market Culture in Eastern Canada is a quite thorough examination of economic transitions in the Upper Saint John Valley, also referred to as Madawaska. Based on official statistics and local record keeping—including, for example, business ledgers and account books—Craig outlines how a variety of players participated in a local commercial economy. Among Craig’s main points is refuting the “staple thesis” which many historians use to understand economic development; rather than revolving around a single staple, Craig emphasizes how Madawaskayans maintained a diverse economy involving local, regional, and international markets. She highlights the agency of various participants in the economy, including men and women of various nationalities and social classes.

Among the strengths of Craig’s work is how she problematizes a range of terms, including capitalism, farming, the economic sphere, and markets. She questions binaries that are common in analyses of emerging economies, such as subsistence/commercial, family/economy, and production/consumption, making a clear case for blurred boundaries and elastic terminology.[1] Her rejection of binaries is among her reasons for rejecting a Marxist definition of capitalism, as it would imply a binary of employers/labourers that did not exist in the Madawaska region.[2] She points out that many historians label an economy as capitalist by attributing values to their behaviours, even when their views aren’t specified in historical records.[3] Peculiarly, Craig has no such qualms about assuming agency based on an individual’s actions, without records of their motivations.

An emphasis on agency is a current through Craig’s work. Craig argues that the economy in Madawaska was a “product of human agency…rather than the consequences of abstract forces.”[4] Notably, however, Craig portrays this human agency as, perhaps, unintentional, arguing that through their attitudes and actions, producers and consumers unknowingly shaped an economic transition.[5] Through this emphasis on agency, Craig also shows capitalism as not an inevitable economic destination.[6] Agency, for Craig, is not limited to those with social or financial capital; for example, she considers as well women’s agency through crafting their engagement with textile markets, and as consumers. Rather than merely following a capitalist market, Craig shows how Madawaskayans engaged with various levels of the economy in very specific ways, using the market only when it benefitted them, rather than by default.

Although not to the extent of the political histories written by Fyson, McNairn, and Greer, Craig’s work is still limited in gendered analysis; in many cases, women are ghettoized into specific chapters. Her discussion of power relationships is mostly class-based. Native peoples are mentioned, but remain in the background of Craig’s analysis, and she offers little hint of intersectional identities. This is quite likely a result of the sources that Craig had available for her research, in which men were the default gender of producers except in specific industries such as textiles; women became visible as producers in a very circumscribed way, and were therefore the subjects of Craig’s chapters on textiles and consumption, but in the background through the rest of the monograph.

Structurally, Craig’s decision to organize her analysis thematically seems quite sensible. She occasionally, however, refers to “earlier” and “later” periods, without being explicit as to what periods she means. One potential weakness of Craig’s work falls in her emphasis on production, with consumption as the major subject of only one of her nine chapters. While her chapters on production seem, collectively, fairly definitive, her chapter on consumption reads as a preliminary examination, perhaps due to the lack of records. This imbalance creates the impression, likely untrue, that consumption was less important than production to the economy. While Craig carefully outlines women’s roles as both producers and consumers, her discussion of men’s economic roles emphasizes their production. It could potentially be fruitful to divide the monograph into equal sections, discussing production and consumption, or perhaps to avoid this possibly problematic binary by integrating both production and consumption more clearly into each chapter.

Ultimately, Craig convincingly portrays the economy in the Upper Saint John Valley as largely commercial, with people living in a world that was influenced by capitalism despite not necessarily being capitalists. This distinction between commercialism and capitalism may be innovative, but I cannot judge this without knowing more about the surrounding historiography. Her analysis of this divide is particularly apparent in her discussion of “principal men” or entrepreneurs, who sat at a boundary between porous economic layers.[7] These men had varying roles in social hierarchies, either disrupting or reinforcing them through their social mobility and economic linkages.[8] Overall, however, they were quite individualistic, a quality which Craig carefully disentangles from capitalism.[9] While not all major mediators, and occasionally more parasitic than beneficial to the community, these principal men encouraged the community to identify with the outside world, provided access to goods, and offered venues for social exchange by opening public houses and inns.[10]

Greer’s work, like Craig’s, is an in-depth study of a particular local area. He similarly outlines how the commercially isolated area of the Lower Richelieu entered a commercial, but not necessarily capitalist, world.[11] Greer’s definition of capitalism is somewhat wider than Craig’s; he describes it as an economy in which commodities are produced for market exchange, with capital-owning entrepreneurs and property-less wage-earners at its centre. While Greer portrays the parishes in his study as commercially isolated, Craig has a different view of the Madawaska. A main part of her argument is that the region, though geographically remote, was not isolated, and in highlighting economic linkages in the area, Craig refutes the staple thesis and shows export-led models to be inadequate for conceptualizing such an economy.[12] Thus, the different thrusts of their studies may be due to the differences between regions, as well as their starting points with different definitions of capitalism.

Situated in Quebec, Greer’s work is necessarily more political than Craig’s. Greer notes, early on, that his insistence on the feudal aspects of rural society in the Richelieu entails neither accepting the actions of the bourgeoisie, nor assuming that the area maintains a feudal, non-capitalist cultural legacy.[13] Greer and Craig also offer quite different justifications for the communities they opt to study. Craig selected the Upper Saint John Valley due to its arguably unique and strategically important position in local, regional, continental, and transatlantic exchanges. Greer, however, selected his regions for their apparent typicality, as well as based on the availability of sources. As Greer portrays his chosen communities as unexceptional, his work offers more potential to extrapolate his conclusions to other parts of rural Quebec; Craig’s work, however, must to some extent stand on its own as a study of such a particular region.

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[1] Craig, 9-11.

[2] Craig, 18.

[3] Craig, 19.

[4] Craig, 14.

[5] Craig, 230-231.

[6] Craig, 13.

[7] Craig, 225-226.

[8] Craig, 70.

[9] Craig, 71.

[10] Craig, 70.

[11] Greer, xii.

[12] Craig, 227.

[13] Greer, xiv, xiii.