The purpose of the dissertation is to argue that John Strachan’s involvement in politics and education stemmed from his belief that a generally Christian and particularly Anglican Tory British culture would provide the healthiest form of society in Upper Canada. The project provides a counterbalancing view to the common narrative that Strachan was an ambitious and greedy theological turncoat who stifled the political, educational, and religious development of Upper Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues instead that Strachan was consistent with the thoughts and beliefs of an eighteenth-century Anglican Tory. Chapters 1 to 3 detail the key political and religious events of the eighteenth century in Britain and North America, as well as Strachan’s early life and personal influences. These chapters show that Strachan’s worldview was shaped by the events of the eighteenth century, and that it is difficult to understand his beliefs and actions without recognising the formative power of those occurrences. Chapters 4 to 6 detail Strachan's theological beliefs in the three central areas of church, education, and politics, emphasising the firm and unchanging nature of these beliefs, and their defining role in his life and actions. Chapters 7 to 9 illustrate how he put those theological beliefs into practice in the three instances of the Clergy Reserves, King’s College, and the battle over Responsible Government. Compromise was unthinkable for Strachan, and caused his defeat in each of the three engagements, a fact that dispels the idea that he was motivated solely or mainly by personal ambition. Instead, Strachan is shown to be an Anglican Tory, theologically motivated and consistent in his support for the established church, Christian university education, and the need to preserve the “Glorious Constitution.” / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Recent historians who have written about the development of Methodist religious identity in Upper Canada have based their narratives primarily on readings of documents concerned with ecclesiastical polity and colonial politics. This study attempts to complicate these narratives by examining the way religious identity in the province was affected by the cultural production and distribution of books as denominational status objects in a wider North American market before the middle of the nineteenth century. The first chapter examines the rhetorical strategies the Methodist Book Concern developed to protect its domestic market in the United States from the products of competitors by equating patronage with denominational identity. The remaining chapters unfold the influence a protracted consumption of such cultural commodities had on the religious identity of Methodists living in Upper Canada. For more than a decade after the War of 1812, the Methodist Book Concern relied on a corps of Methodist preachers to distribute its commodities north of the border. This denominational infrastructure conferred the accidental but strategic advantage of concealing the extent of the Concern’s market and its rhetoric from the colony’s increasingly anti-American elite. The Concern’s access to its Upper Canadian market became compromised, however, when Egerton Ryerson initiated a debate over religious equality in the province’s emergent public sphere in the mid-1820s. This inadvertently drew attention to Methodist textual practices in the province that led to later efforts on the part of Upper Canadians to sever the Concern’s access to its market north of the border. When these attempts failed, Canadian Methodists found ways to decouple the material and cultural dimensions of the Concern’s products in order to continue patronizing the Concern without compromising recent gains achieved by strategically refashioning themselves as loyal Wesleyans within the colony’s conservative political environment. The result was the emergence of a stable and enduring transnational market for Methodist printed commodities that both blunted the cultural influence of British Wesleyans and prepared the ground for a later secularization of Methodist publishing into and beyond the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Recent historians who have written about the development of Methodist religious identity in Upper Canada have based their narratives primarily on readings of documents concerned with ecclesiastical polity and colonial politics. This study attempts to complicate these narratives by examining the way religious identity in the province was affected by the cultural production and distribution of books as denominational status objects in a wider North American market before the middle of the nineteenth century. The first chapter examines the rhetorical strategies the Methodist Book Concern developed to protect its domestic market in the United States from the products of competitors by equating patronage with denominational identity. The remaining chapters unfold the influence a protracted consumption of such cultural commodities had on the religious identity of Methodists living in Upper Canada. For more than a decade after the War of 1812, the Methodist Book Concern relied on a corps of Methodist preachers to distribute its commodities north of the border. This denominational infrastructure conferred the accidental but strategic advantage of concealing the extent of the Concern’s market and its rhetoric from the colony’s increasingly anti-American elite. The Concern’s access to its Upper Canadian market became compromised, however, when Egerton Ryerson initiated a debate over religious equality in the province’s emergent public sphere in the mid-1820s. This inadvertently drew attention to Methodist textual practices in the province that led to later efforts on the part of Upper Canadians to sever the Concern’s access to its market north of the border. When these attempts failed, Canadian Methodists found ways to decouple the material and cultural dimensions of the Concern’s products in order to continue patronizing the Concern without compromising recent gains achieved by strategically refashioning themselves as loyal Wesleyans within the colony’s conservative political environment. The result was the emergence of a stable and enduring transnational market for Methodist printed commodities that both blunted the cultural influence of British Wesleyans and prepared the ground for a later secularization of Methodist publishing into and beyond the middle decades of the nineteenth century.