How Agriculture Made Canada: Farming in the Nineteenth Century

摘要

Canada entered the Anthropocene by the dim light of its burning forests. Thirty million acres of land, mostly eastern woodland, were "improved" for agriculture in the nineteenth century, and almost sixty million more were added in the Prairie West by 1931. The ecological disturbance was matched in many ways by social and economic upheaval. People moved, and were displaced, almost constantly. Fortunately, these crises and upheavals were well documented by a society obsessed with enumeration and measurement, and they have been analyzed now by half a century of social, economic, and environmental histories of agriculture. Peter Russell has taken on the daunting task of synthesizing these accounts and outlining the trends of this critical period. How Agriculture Made Canada will guide readers of any specialization through the seminal studies of agriculture in the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. The book argues that farmers made Canada-agriculture was both the main economic sector and the vector of resettlement-but readers will find the content is mainly about how Canadians made farms. It is about the disturbance of pioneering itself, and in that way, it is an important contribution.