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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Kenneth Michael Sylvester, The Limits of Rural Capitalism: Family, Culture, and Markets in Montcalm, Manitoba, 1870–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) |
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FRANKLY, I am uncertain what to make of this book, since it leaves one with a mixed and sometimes confused assessment. On the one hand, somewhat in the tradition of Paul Voisey's Vulcan, Sylvester has done a fine community study of Montcalm, the only rural municipality in Manitoba settled almost entirely by francophones from Québec. Tracing three or four generations, Sylvester documents the survival strategies of a unique experiment in Prairie settlement. Providing some contrasts to anglophone settlers, Sylvester explains what was initially different among the settlers of Montcalm: the ties of extended families provided conduits for successive waves of settlement; the larger families furnished considerable amounts of unpaid family labour, affording insulation from too early or too extensive reliance on wage labour; there was a better sex ratio achieved largely as a result of the family-based settlement strategies; family strategies for inheritance and land access allowed for a greater retention of a growing population and slowing down of outmigration; and strong linguistic and cultural barriers provided a solid sense of community. Much of the book subsequently tells the story of how these unique features were gradually gnawed away by an emerging rural capitalism as "their working lives and ambitions became commoditized and costed by the calculus of the market." (4) This is the great strength of the book. |
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On the other hand, one is overwhelmed by too much detail and sight is lost of the bigger picture. Sylvester never succeeds in weaving these often apparently idiosyncratic local events into either the bigger events in Canadian politics that shaped the Canadian political economy, or the generally well-known fate of the agrarian petite bourgeoisie in a modernizing capitalist political economy. From time to time these insights are tangentially mentioned, but only as an aside that the alert reader must grasp. |
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Further, the general fate of the Québec francophone diaspora in the Prairie West is dealt with only tangentially and often by implication. Yet the story of Montcalm must surely be more centrally and clearly tied to the unconstitutional withdrawal of French language and education rights in the Prairie West, and the related events that made it clear to francophones in Québec (later, the Québécois nation) that they were not welcome to participate as meaningful partners in the development of Canada's West. Again, one can sense this impact in Sylvester's chronicle, but it is never made as explicit or as central as it should be. As events unfolded, it evidently became clear to the francophone Montcalmois, in common with other enclaves of francophone settlers across the Prairies, that they were to be isolated and always a minority. Hence we needed some development of their story around the theme of La Survivance, not from the perspective of francophones in Québec, but from the perspective of those abandoned in the diaspora. Again, Sylvester's chronicle touches on these big events but only in passing. |
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Do not get me wrong. Sylvester's volume is an outstanding piece of meticulous scholarship, but he fails to solve the macro/micro dilemma of the social sciences. How can we do research, writing, and, indeed, theorizing, in such a way that we can move easily and gracefully back and forth between micro and macro levels in order to achieve a dynamic and full understanding of a community's development? |
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Part of Sylvester's problem arises from his apparent lack of a clearly defined theoretical perspective. When he says, for example, "the biggest mystery of prairie farming is that ... the western countryside was never truly industrialized" (4), he appears to forget that Prairie agriculture, especially with the Wheat Boom of 1896, was, and remained, industrial and extensive at its most advanced and sophisticated. The author seems to confuse "industrial" with "capitalist," and seems to believe that since there were family barriers or limits to the fullest development of capitalism in Prairie agriculture, therefore Prairie agriculture was somehow something other than capitalist agriculture. The well-documented fact is that what developed in the Prairie West, from the start, was a sophisticated industrial and capitalist agriculture. And what Sylvester has shown in his work is how farm families in Montcalm struggled to negotiate the terms of their incorporation into that political economy, and to defend their agrarian petite bourgeois class interests. Again, Sylvester teases one with this understanding implicit in his text, when, for example, though never explicitly adopting a class analysis, he describes how the agrarian petite bourgeoisie imposed and maintained its hegemony on local government. (123–29) |
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Family strategies for survival and well-being, which Sylvester seems to suggest uniquely placed limits on capitalist development in Montcalm, were a common response among all classes to the development of capitalism, not just those lucky enough to own property. As capitalist modernization worked out its sometimes painful and often ugly logic on humanity, destroying whole classes, cultures, and continents, uprooting communities, flinging the propertyless onto the labour market, all families strove to salvage survival and dignity, those dispossessed from the highlands of Scotland no less than those from Quebec seeking a better future in Montcalm, Manitoba. And, certainly, the agrarian petite bourgeoisie of Montcalm, as francophones from Québec, were able to adapt and resist in some unique ways, thanks to large families, a strong extended family network, francophone linguistic and cultural barriers, and family-based patterns of settlement. Sylvester has done a first-rate job in detailing those patterns, but, at the end of the day, as Sylvester himself arguably shows, the fate of the agrarian petite bourgeoisie of Montcalm was a common one shared with their comrades across Canada as the capitalist modernization of agriculture continued its relentless and ultimately irresistible course. |
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J. F. Conway
University of Regina
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