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Book Review
| Rusty Bittermann, Rural Protest on Prince Edward Island: From British Colonization to the Escheat Movement, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Pp. 372. $65.00 cloth (ISBN 0-8020-0439-3); $29.95 paper (ISBN 0-8020-7229-1).
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| In this thoroughly researched and expertly presented book, Rusty Bittermann offers an exhaustive analysis of the escheat movement on Prince Edward Island from 1800 to 1842. At root, the escheat movement pitted those in favor of revoking large land grants and redistributing the land to white colonists as fee simple holdings against those who hoped to preserve the island's prevailing distribution of property and power. But, as Bittermann demonstrates, the inhabitants of the island divided over the issue in unexpected ways. Some members of the colony's political and economic elite opposed escheat because it threatened the colony's political and economic hierarchy, and they sided with landlords, who resisted escheat for obvious reasons. Other elites, however, supported escheat because they saw it as a chance to generate much-needed revenue for the colony by compelling landlords to secure their claims by paying quitrent or by providing officials to reap the rewards of selling land to tenants and squatters. Outside the political and economic, tenants and squatters supported escheat both because they hoped to acquire the land they occupied and improved and because land ownership meant stability and greater political autonomy. In the end, opponents of escheat won out and the movement had stalled by 1842. |
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Bittermann traces the life of the escheat movement chronologically. The first third of the book explores the issue of land titles and distribution to establish the background for escheat. In the middle third, he outlines how the escheat movement grew in importance in island politics and examines how opponents increasingly relied on collective action either in support of escheat or to thwart it. In the final third, Bittermann explains how, after their protests failed at nearly every turn, lower sort rural protesters took direct political action by electing representatives directly to the lower house of the island's assembly. But four years in the halls of power brought no dramatic changes to the rural landscape, and an improving economy diminished the efficacy of politicians who hoped to use escheat to raise money for the colony. Throughout it all, Bittermann skillfully weaves narrative and analysis to explain the complicated, overlapping, and changing political and social alliances made during the escheat movement and the actions those groups took to advance their cause. |
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Although the movement had stalled by 1842 when pro-escheat representatives lost some impetus as the economy grew and as merchants and land agents increased their political power, the dispute fundamentally changed the island's political language and altered the island's political landscape. While elites presented their arguments in the halls of the legislature, in reprints of speeches, or in widely read publications, those in favor of escheat generally voiced their protests in petitions to the legislature or in front of other protesters. As was the case in most land disputes in North America, Bittermann shows how the arguments of insurgents, escheaters in this case, became part of the broader formal and informal political lexicon, demonstrating that while escheaters ultimately failed in their quest for land, they qualitatively changed the terms of politics. During the debate over escheat, politicians increasingly invoked the insurgents' labor theory of land value—that a tenant's labor and occupancy on the land gave that land value and added to the tenant's claim to the land, an argument made in other places in North America at other times as Bittermann rightly notes. As was the case in other regions, changes in language precipitated changes in perspectives and, together, set the groundwork for future escheat. More than that, although they were unsuccessful at changing the law, escheaters recognized that holding political office offered them a greater platform to enact change. Once in power, escheaters stayed in the political mix and took the island in new directions. |
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The changes in language, political outlook, and composition of the lower house of the assembly brought about during escheat also affected the status of tenants and smallholders on the island. Besides giving tenants and squatters a political platform to advocate and access to political power, the escheat movement forced an end to landlordism by reducing political support for it. Moreover, escheat altered how politicians on the island and in Britain regarded questions of land ownership in a society in which political and economic autonomy depended on owning a freehold. |
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Rural Protest goes beyond the confines of the history of Prince Edward Island and Canada. It offers a point of comparative analysis for conflicts over land ownership, the emergence of rural people's relationship to the land, and of the basis of rural collective action in North America and beyond. In short, this is an excellent study. |
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| Thomas J. Humphrey
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| Cleveland State University |
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