Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kenneth Michael Sylvester's study of the largely Franco-Canadian settlement of Montcalm, Manitoba, is a social history organized around economic development and economic history that decenters capitalism by focusing on the priorities and ambitions of the farm family. Sylvester shifts the historical lens to view settlement from the perspective of the household rather than of governments and railway companies. The result challenges a staple of western Canadian history that casts the prairies as a vast untapped market. By foregrounding capitalism's "Others"—domestic and subsistence economies—Sylvester exposes the development of agribusiness to social processes, showing the complex ways in which farm families made an economy and how that economy in turn shaped farm families.

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Sylvester's primary question is deceptively simple. He asks how and when the lives of homesteader families became commoditized and costed by the calculus of the market. In doing so, he joins a still small group of western Canadian rural historians who are mapping the development of prairie communities. But his approaches will be more familiar to American readers. By drawing on a blend of annaliste, environmentalist, and phenomenological approaches, Sylvester alters the ground upon which such histories can be traced in Canada. Rather than documenting the integration of the West into a preexisting staples political economy, Sylvester probes the pace at which farm families adopted market principles and methods and how this in turn "modernized" homesteading families.

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