HIST2F90: Money & Power in the Atlantic World Main Menu Syllabus 2024-25 How to Succeed in this Course 2024-25 Academic Integrity 2024/25 Term 1 - Assignment 1 2024/5 Term 1 - Assignment 2 2024/25 Term 2 - Short Assignment Options Winter 2025 Term 2 - Final Assignments Winter 2025 Module 1. The Pre-Modern West Overview of Module One Rulers and Subjects (1) Traditional Authority Rulers and Subjects (2) Competing Reformations Agricultural Revolutions Understanding Debates amongst Historians (2024/5) How to Read Early Modern Texts: Component Parts and Transcriptions 2024/25 Module 2. Colonial Expansion Europe's Empires Expand 2024/5 Early Modern Africa 2024/5 The Columbian Exchange 2024/5 The Slave Trade 2024-25 Module 3. Conflicting Worlds Indigenous North American Cultures 2024/5 Missionaries 2024/5 Visualizing History 2024/25 Settler Colonialism The Seven Years War Britain, France, and Several Indigenous Nations Fight for their Place in North America Settler-Indigenous Treaties What was negotiated in Britain's colonial era treaties with Indigenous peoples? Consumer Societies and Commercial Expansion The expanding consumer and commercial worlds of 18th-century British America The Practice of Slavery How was slavery supported and maintained in the 18th and 19th centuries? Winter 2025 Module 4. Revolutions The American Revolution The French Revolution 2024-5 The Haitian Revolution 2024-5 Module 5. The Early Liberal Era Abolition 2024/25 Work and Freedom M. Driedger, D. Samson, and T. Tattersall

Canada's Revolution

1

Big Questions this week:

Why didn't all the colonies in British North America join the American Revolution?
What did revolution in the Canadas look like?


Learning outcomes


By the end of this week, you should have …

Questions to consider, and learning activity


This week you will contribute to the Discussion as usual, but aim to discuss the sources in a broader Atlantic context. You should also ask yourselves, what did liberal reform look like in the colonies that now make up Canada in the early 19th century? How does this fit into a larger discussion of liberal reform in the Atlantic World?
 

Background


As we explored earlier this semester, the Seven Years War fundamentally reshaped North America. It removed the French from any significant role in the future of the continent; it offered the British empire, and especially the increasingly expansionary colonies, militarily weaker western and northern frontiers; and it effectively killed a major strategy of many Indigenous peoples (especially the Haudenosaunee): playing the French and British off each other. The British knew this too and it’s exactly why they passed the Royal Proclamation in 1763. The Royal Proclamation reserved all land west of the Appalachian Mountains to Indigenous peoples. It was a move designed, on the one hand, to offer a kind of reassurance to Indigenous peoples that they would not be penalised for their relationships with the French, and on the other hand to contain the expansion of the rapidly growing American colonies. The British understood clearly that the American colonies were increasingly independent of their colonial masters. Ironically, in their many measures to contain the colonies, the British may have in fact given fresh momentum to an emerging sense of the colonies’ autonomy. Indeed, as we learned, the American Revolution that occureed fifteen years later,  was very much a direct outcome of that story.
 
What had this meant for Canada? In New France, it meant wholesale change. What had been a French territory, was now British, though it remained populated primarily by French-Canadian Catholics. The Quebec Act (1774) went a long way toward appeasing that population by preserving French law and the rights of Catholics in the British-ruled colony. Ironically, that increased the anger of the British colonists who had just fought to defeat the same French Catholics. Why, they asked, was Britain protecting the rights of these people with whom we had just fought a war? A war in which our own people gave their lives? Some British and British-American settlers moved into Canada, but nowhere near enough to upset the demographic dominance of the French population. Like Acadia had been, Canada would be peopled by French Canadians and Indigenous peoples, but ruled by a handful of Britons and Anglo-Americans.
 
Nova Scotia was different. Of course, it had been in British hands longer (since 1713) and so there was more time, but the British (and New Englanders) were much more aggressive about utilising Nova Scotia as a settlement colony. Over the 1750s, 60s and early 1770s Britain sought to remake Nova Scotia as a British Protestant colony. They imported foreign protestants from England, Switzerland and Germany, as well as almost 10,000 New England settlers. By 1775, on the eve of the American Revolution the demographics of the colony had changed dramatically, turning it from a primarily French-Catholic (Acadian) and Mi’kmaq (many of whom had become Catholics) to a largely English-Protestant colony, most of whom came from New England.
 
In the end, neither Canada nor Nova Scotia formally joined the American Revolution and so remained in British hands after the revolution ended in 1783. The result of that defeat was another large-scale movement of refugees into Canada, the so-called Loyalists: those American colonists who had remained loyal to the British during the revolution. Over 40,000 American colonists settled in Canada and Nova Scotia, and they too now additionally shifted demographic (and therefore political!) boundaries. That required a political response in the constitutional organisation of the remaining British colonies (the Constitution Act of 1791). Those changes gave basic shape to modern Canadian politics.

The twenty years after the War of 1812 saw both a consolidation of Loyalist-Conservative rule and a deepening of the popular discontent against that rule. The major issue was political: that the constitutional arrangements established in 1791 allowed a democratically elected assembly, but centralized much of the power in the appointed legislative council. Thus, much of the politics of the 1820s and 30s was directed at shifting power downward, away from the Council and toward the Assembly. In many ways, these criticisms mirrored republican sentiments to the south - notions of popular rule and the will of the people - and thus the Loyalist elite painted such demands as American and therefore disloyal, effectively forestalling substantial debate on the issues.

The first half of the nineteenth century in British North America was a period of change and tension. As we saw, the early century featured a powerful focus on Loyalty as a kind of unofficial (and sometimes official!) measure of citizenship, while the 1830s, 40s and 50s, saw a opening of reform and enhanced democratisation. The achievement of responsible government in most of the colonies in 1848 was key here. It marked a moment where much greater power was granted to members elected to the people’s assembly, and the diminishment of the appointed executive. At the same time, there were many avenues of political and social organisation that demanded work at the local level, as well as many groups who were denied formal representation even in these people’s institutions. Much of this work occurred in what we call civil society.

 
When historians talk about emerging democracy in this period, they are often drawn to the concept of civil society. Civil society is that political space between the private sphere (the sphere of the family or the individual) and the public sphere (the sphere of business and politics). It’s where private and public interests meet. People with common interests come together, form groups or societies, and work to promote those interests. We might read these civil society organisations as an examinations of how race, class, and gender often defined the issues by which they joined together. Some societies like the agricultural societies in Nova Scotia, were already well-placed, and they joined together to promote good farming practices in their communities. Our supplementary reading list points to some examples of these societies. Their members were not politically weak; they were the elites of their local communities, typically the best educated and wealthiest members. But they felt it was important to show themselves to be leading their communities, to be offering a good example, and to be participating in the major questions of the day. Here we might conceptualize these people as members of an emerging middle class collectively asserting their leadership both in their local communities and on the larger provincial stage.

Liberal politcal reforms meant that what we might call "the political tent" was growing bigger - i.e., more and more people were gaining admittance, but this access was still limited. While liberalism promised liberty and freedom, many people had weaker claims on that freedom. This week's sources explore Canadian challenges to the promise of liberty and revolution in America. As you explore them, explain the response to American Revolution in New Brunswick, and by the Mi'kmaq in Nova Scotia? Who is Jane Ellice, and what is her experience of these rebellions? In what way might we read the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada as extensions of liberal reform? How did those in positions of power react to popular rebellions?
 

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Listen to:or

Read one of:


Supplementary Materials

Forbes, James. “‘God Has Opened the Eyes of the People’: Religious Rhetoric and the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 12, no. 1 (2018): 1–25.

Ducharme, Michel (2006). "Closing the Last Chapter of the Atlantic Revolution: The 1837–38 Rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada" (PDF). Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. 116 (2): 413–430.

"Improving Upper Canada: Agricultural Societies and State Formation, 1791-1852", Witness to Yesterday, Podcast, Episode 285, 2024.

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