In the 1850s, the government of Canada West initiated a project to colonize a vast region of the Canadian Shield known as the Ottawa-Huron Tract. Later, in his influential interpretation, Arthur Lower argued the myth of the inexorable forward movement of the settlement frontier was here shattered by a reality of lakes, rocks, and forest inherently unsuitable for farming. This refrain continues to be repeated by proponents of what I call the failed-settlement narrative. A contrasting narrative emphasizes the perseverance of settlers and their descendants. This dissertation was born of an interest in the tension between these competing narratives. On the one hand, the failed-settlement narrative ignores the fact many people succeeded in farming on the Shield. On the other hand, the romanticized image of the pioneer is disconnected from the larger historical contexts which shaped the settlement process and informed those notions of success and failure by which we judge the actions of people in the past. If the colonization project was an unmitigated failure, how do we account for the persistence of settlers and their descendants? If the landscape and soils of the Shield were unsuited to cultivation, why did people continue to cultivate the land for decades after the settlement project was condemned? What follows is an exploration of these questions, focusing on the township of Brudenell, Ontario as a site of Canadian colonial experimentation. Failure and desertion were certainly important parts of the settlement experience in the Ottawa-Huron Tract, but these themes have been overemphasized by historians. Early on, many settlers realized the variability of the landscape in places like Brudenell and found small parcels of land which they turned to a variety of purposes. Settlers took advantage of government policies that made landowning a realistic goal even for those of modest means and diverse backgrounds. By embracing new and emerging forms of local authority settlers were also able to tune the structures of the colonial state to further their own interests. They profited from the proximate shanty market for agricultural produce wherever practicable, while also pursuing economic activities oriented toward local, regional, and national markets. Economic opportunities and the accessibility of land in Brudenell allowed cultural groups to develop spatially-distinct communities, which expanded to fill much of the available land in the township. This revision of the failed-settlement narrative stands out in the historiography of the Ottawa-Huron Tract, but dovetails with histories of settlement in other agriculturally-marginal regions of nineteenth-century Canada. / Graduate / 2019-03-01

This dissertation examines the origins and development of the cheese industry in rural Ontario between the 1860s and 1930s from the perspective of environmental history. Scholars have generally accepted contemporary beliefs that cheese was a “natural industry of this country” and that its growth was cooperative and inevitable. This dissertation tests these claims by comparing the rhetoric and actions of the rural elite and state officials against the human and extra-human work involved in manufacturing cheese for export, a method that has yielded new interpretations about the character and development of the industry. I build on James Murton’s concept of “alternative rural modernity” to argue that rural cheese manufacturing was a project of rural reform encouraged by elite ‘dairy reformers,’ rather than a natural development. Reformers believed cheese factories could support the social, economic and environmental stability of rural society indefinitely. Through cheese, they sought to create a society that was liberal and capitalist, but also cooperative and stable. They also believed that dairying would restore fertility to the region’s soils. In practice, however, their results were mixed. Although cheese became one of the province’s most significant export-oriented industries, transformed the environment, and deepened liberal values amongst rural people, it failed to deliver the alternative rural modernity reformers had envisioned. I provide two reasons why. First, the reformers’ mechanistic vision could not contend with the complexity and unpredictability of the socio-ecological world they sought to control. Second, the industry could not withstand the pressures of the emerging global capitalist food system and, ironically, facilitated the rise of ‘Big Dairy’ after the First World War, which hastened the industry’s demise. Overall, this dissertation emphasizes the dynamism of rural Ontario, contributes to an environmental history of liberal order in Canada, and contextualizes the resurgence of craft-based rural development in the twenty-first century. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation examines the origins and development of the factory cheese industry in rural Ontario between the 1860s and 1930s. I challenge the belief that cheese manufacturing was a “natural industry of this country” whose development was cooperative and inevitable. Instead I argue that the industry was a deliberate project of rural reform encouraged by elite ‘dairy reformers’ who believed cheese factories could sustain the social, economic, and environmental progress of rural society indefinitely. The industry failed to deliver all the reformers promised, even though it became one of the province’s most significant export-oriented industries by the early-twentieth century and transformed the environment and rural society in the process. Rural people and the environment behaved in more complicated ways than reformers anticipated, and the changing capitalist economy made the industry’s long-term success untenable. This study also contextualizes the twenty-first century resurgence of craft production in Ontario.

A la fin de l'Ancien Régime le nord-est du Quercy est une région d'habitat dispersé dont le mas constitue le territoire de base. Les hommes y vivent d'une poly-agriculture traditionnelle. Une fiscalité accablante les assujettit aux pouvoirs englobants de la monarchie et des seigneuries, essentiellement ecclésiastiques. La thèse étudie le comportement de ces populations devant les prélèvements de la taille royale, des rentes seigneuriales et des dîmes. La description de la terre utilise les deux instruments que sont : les compoix communautaires et les terriers seigneuriaux. Faute de plan cadastral, une méthode originale est mise en œuvre pour représenter sous forme de graphes géoréférencés les parcellaires fonciers. La terre et les hommes sont ainsi mis en perspective dans des réseaux de proximités géographique, agraire et sociale. La recherche examine l'organisation des communautés d'habitants en face d'une administration étatique de plus en plus contraignante. De son côté, la seigneurie, forte du « complexum feudale », propriétaire éminente de la terre, prélève à l'intérieur des mas des rentes en nature en vertu des censives indivises et perpétuelles que les emphytéotes lui reconnaissent en échange de leur droit de propriété utile. Enfin, l'Eglise est un élément fédérateur et unificateur dans cette société, qui est encore à moitié protestante, au début du XVIIe siècle. Un vaste corpus démographique permet d'analyser le fonctionnement endogame de cette population qui pratique un système successoral inégalitaire. L'héritage de la terre constitue la seule richesse sur le long terme. Les stratégies de reproduction sociale des élites locales et des paysans sont abordées. / At the end of the « Ancien Regime » the mas (sive village) is the elementary territorial unit in the northeast of the Quercy province. Men in their estate are living from traditional farming. They suffer heavy taxes from the encompassing powers, the monarchy and the ecclesiastical lords. The thesis studies the behavior of the population in front of the different tax levies, property taxes, private incomes, tithes. As maps are not used at that time, the two types of archive documents for land registers, the « compoix » and the lord « terriers », are analyzed by an original method, using geographical referenced graphs. The soil and the human being are represented in geographic, agrarian and social networks. The research focuses on the communities of inhabitants confronted by the growing monarchic state. Consuls designed annually by the farmer's assemblies have the thankless task to collect the royal taxes, the « taille ». On another side the lords, using their property rights known as the « complexum feudale » takes off foodstuffs from the harvests. The church also plays a central role in that society where the beginning of the XVIIth century protestantism is still present. A large demographic corpus allows the study of that endogamous population which practices an unequal inheritance system. The land constitutes the only long term wealth and so directs the social reproduction strategy. The thesis considers how following the individualism growth, the rise of the population, the matrimonial diffusion, the society progressively becomes, on one side, free from the lord domination and on the other side, dutiful to the state power.

Cette recherche doctorale porte sur la relation des sociétés aux territoires qu’elles construisent dans une perspective diachronique. Je fais l’hypothèse que le rapport à l’espace participe de la classification des individus en plusieurs groupes, selon la résidence, le statut familial ou la richesse en terre. Cette série ne saurait être considérée comme ni exhaustive ni ahistorique. Dans cette perspective, la Cerdagne (Pyrénées de l’Est) est apparue comme un terrain idoine compte tenu des lignes de fracture, sociale et spatiale, qui révèlent et recomposent les différents rapports à l’espace entre le XVIe et le XIXe siècle. Trois questionnements envisagés à trois échelles différentes se sont posés. À petite échelle, l’apparition d’une frontière politique au milieu du XVIIe siècle (traité des Pyrénées, 1659) modifie-t-elle les rapports à l’espace en créant un nouvel horizon étatique ? Et quelle place tient la ville de Puigcerdà dans la structuration de ces sociétés de montagne ? A l’échelle des communautés d’habitants, quels types de rapport à l’espace se noue autour de l’accès aux biens collectifs tant au niveau intercommunautaire qu’intracommunautaire ? Enfin, à grande échelle, quels rapports se créent et se recréent entre les familles, les individus et la terre dite « privée », alors que du point de vue historiographique, la Cerdagne se situe dans une aire pyrénéenne marquée par la primogéniture et l’exclusion des puînés de l’héritage foncier. / This doctoral research dwells on the relationship between societies and the territories they shape within a diachronic perspective. The hypothesis at the core of this work is that the relation to space partakes of the classification of the individuals into several groups, according to localities, family status or land wealth. This list is neither to be considered exhaustive nor ahistorical. From this perspective, Cerdanya (in the Eastern Pyrenees) qualified as a terrain, given the social and spatial divides which bring to the fore and reconstruct the manifold relations to space between the 16th and 19th centuries. Three questions arise at three different scales. On a small scale, does the coming upon the political scene of a frontier in the middle of the 17th c. (with the Treaty of the Pyrenees, 1659) modify the relations to space by creating a new state, a new actor ? Then, what about the role held by the city of Puigcerdà in the shaping of these moutain societies ? On the community scale, what kinds of relations to space form when it comes to common lands as much on the intercommunal as the intracommunal level ? Lastly, on the large scale, what are the links weaving between families, individuals and the land called “private”, when, from a historiographical point of view, Cerdanya is located in a Pyrenean aera where primogeniture and the exclusion of the youngest is deeply rooted.

Les artisans-paysans forestiers et les pasteurs constituent toute une frange de la population des campagnes médiévales qui se caractérise et se différencie de ses contemporains par son mode de vie itinérant et son implantation temporaire dans l'inculte. Marginalisée dans l'imaginaire collectif médiéval, elle est oubliée par l'historiographie, à cause de la dispersion et la fugacité des traces qu'elle laisse dans la documentation écrite et archéologique. Ce mode de vie itinérant découle de la pratique d'une activité fondée sur l'exploitation de ressources végétales ou animales, le plus souvent saisonnières, dont la répartition spatiale est, par définition, hors de l'espace cultivé, en marge des terroirs villageois. La mobilité des usagers de l'inculte revêt différentes formes et engendre par conséquent l'adoption de différentes stratégies résidentielles en fonction des activités : du simple mouvement pendulaire résidence-lieu de production jusqu'à l'implantation temporaire sur le lieu de production, au plus proche des ressources pour la durée de la saison d'exploitation. La construction d'habitat temporaire est le fruit de la conjugaison de contraintes techniques (chaîne opératoire technique, temps opératoire, surveillance des processus...), écologiques, temporelles, spatiales, et enfin réglementaires. / Woodlands craftsmen and shepherds make up a whole section of medieval rural population which is characterized and differentiated from its contemporaries by their itinerant lifestyle and their temporary settlement in the incultum. They are marginalized by medieval collective imagination and they have been forgotten by the historians, because their traces in written and archaeological sources are too scattered. Their mobility and their residential strategies depend on the exploitation of available seasonal resources, be it vegetal or animal. These seasonal resources are naturally found away from the areas already cultivated by local village people. This itinerant lifestyle takes on different forms, and results in different strategies from a pendular motion home-workplace to temporary establishment near to the raw materials during the season of exploitation. A temporary stay is determined by technical constraints (technical process and operational time), and also by environmental, time and law factors. Technology, time and space are connected, so it's necessary to study the « temporary dwelling » system as a whole from technical processes to social life, via the temporary encampments, which are the materialization of the way of life; this through a historical, archaeological and ethnoarchaeological cross-study

Conçue comme une enquête sur les élites rurales, cette thèse vise à restituer les étapes permettant au notable rural, un idéal-type social, de s'imposer dans un territoire donné. Le contado florentin est un cas paradigmatique. Les mobilités sociales et I'inurbamento des ruraux aisés sont vus comme les facteurs d'affaiblissement de communautés rurales livrées aux appétits citadins. La recherche mobilise le fonds de trois abbayes vallombrosaines, Montescalari, la Vallombreuse (Coltibuono, en se concentrant sur le quart Sud-Est du contado florentin (fonds Diplomatico de l'Archivio di Stato d Flo rence). La reconstitution de trajectoires familiale s'oblige à replacer ces trajectoires dans l' évolution plus large de logiques de la distinction sociale . Les éléments qui fondent la sociabilité rurale se transforment radicalement. Une société organisée à l'échelle locale, et très hiérarchisée dans le cadre seigneurial, fonctionne, jusqu'aux premières décennies du XIIIè siècle, sur l' exploitation de la terre et des hommes et sur la redistribution des bénéfices de la rente foncière entre un grand nombre de familles. Ce sont moins les profits du commerce et de l'artisanat rural qui font évoluer cette situation que l' intégration des patrimoines seigneuriaux aux dynamiques économiques de la ville. Le crédit fonctionne alors au dépens des anciennes solidarités pour devenir un facteur de différenciation sociale. Au même moment, on observe un transformation des cercles à l ' intérieur desquels se conservent et se transmettent les capitaux symboliques et matériels : la famille et ses prolongements; les seigneuries rurales ; les communes rurales et les clientèles de la haute aristocratie. / This thesis is an investigation into rural elites. It aims to evidence the process by which rural notables, considered here as a social type, establish their ascendency over a given territory. The Florentine contado is a case in point. Social mobility and the move of the wealthiest inhabitants of the country to the city are shown as primarily responsible for undermining the social cohesion of rural communities, increasingly preyed upon by townsmen. This research is based on three monastic archives, Montescalari, Vallombrosa and Coltibuono, and focuses on the Upper Valdarno valley and the Chianti hills (the archives are held by the Archivio di Stato of Florence, in the Diplomatico). Reconstructing the history and careers of the local notability provides a wider understanding of the way in which social distinction works and evolves over time, transforming rural communities and traditional rural sociability. From the early 12th century up to the first decades of the 13th century, rural communities in the contado were organized on a local and feudal basis, around a significant number of landowning families who exploited the land and the men who worked it, and organized the redistribution of the rent. That pattern changed, not so much because of the rise of city merchants and artisans, but because landlords started to use their lands and feudal power as a means to gain ground in the new urban economy. They neglected older rural solidarities to become providers of credit, which soon worked as an important factor of social differenciation. The social structures (the extended family, fiefdoms, rural towns and the nobility's clientele) which had been the traditional framework for keeping and transmitting capital (both economic and symbolic), were radically transformed in the process.

Le Banat est une région d’Europe balkanique conquise en 1716 par les Habsbourg sur l’Empire ottoman et directement administrée par Vienne. Dans les discours des administrateurs habsbourgeois, l’usage des catégories nationales est pragmatique. Il permet de déterminer les pratiques de gouvernement acceptables envers des groupes aux limites floues, dans le respect des intermédiaires traditionnels et d’une communication politique effectuée en langue vernaculaire. Mais l’action d’un État uniquement fiscal et militaire est remise en cause par l’élargissement de son périmètre d’action et l’arrivée d’une nouvelle génération de fonctionnaires en 1769. L’influence du caméralisme et de la statistique administrative amène à considérer les nations sous un angle exclusivement culturel. Mais cette identité imposée n’est pas assimilée par les populations. Celles-ci se réapproprient l’ancien usage des nations privilégiées dans leurs revendications politiques au cours des années 1780. / The Banat is a large region of the Balkans. It was conquered in 1716 by the Habsburg power over the Ottoman Empire and then governed directly from Vienna. In this context, the Habsburg civil servants made a pragmatic use of national categories. They were a means to determine an acceptable political behaviour towards groups defined by vague social boundaries, while respecting traditional middlemen and using the vernacular for political communication. However, the action of this strictly fiscal and military State was called into question by the widening of its prerogatives and the arrival of a new generation of civil servants in 1769. The influence of Kameralismus and the administrative statistic led the latter to consider the nations from a cultural point of view. But this imposed identity did not seem to be taken up by the population. On the contrary, people began to use the old sense of the privileged “nations” in their political claims directed to the emperor in the 1780s.

Ce travail porte sur les représentations des campagnards et des paysans dans les mentalités des Romains de l’époque républicaine, en se fondant sur l’étude de textes littéraires. Dans l’ensemble des œuvres latines de Plaute à Virgile, les ruraux donnent lieu à des images multiples et contradictoires, passant tantôt pour des rustres ridicules, tantôt pour des citoyens modèles. Nous montrons comment, malgré une telle diversité, ces représentations engagent une vision d’ensemble cohérente, liée à différentes conceptions de l’identité romaine. Une étude préalable du champ lexicographique couvrant les différentes dénominations de l’habitant des campagnes et une mise au point historiographique soulignent la place essentielle qu’occupaient encore les ruraux dans la vie sociale, économique et politique de l’Vrbs aux deux derniers siècles de la République. Il apparaît ensuite que le stéréotype du rustre, susceptible d’être analysé en termes de marqueurs, constitue un véritable type théâtral dans la Néa, lequel influence d’autres textes où son utilisation dans l’invective se mêle parfois à un discours métatextuel. Car le rusticus ridicule, bien que constitué en contre-modèle de comportement, est paradoxalement associé à une identité romaine mise en débat. C’est elle qui entre aussi en jeu dans les discours des agronomes faisant l’éloge de la ruralité. Le stéréotype du bonus agricola, incarnation d’un mos maiorum rural, renvoie à des représentations collectives et à une valorisation axiologique de l’activité agricole – distincte du travail physique et de l’élevage – autant qu’à des prises de position idéologiques personnelles en faveur de la rusticitas. / Based on the study of literature, this work deals with the representations of the countrymen and peasants in the mentalities of Romans in the Republican era. In all the Latin books from Plautus to Virgil, the countrymen are depicted trough multiple and contradictory images, in which they are made out to be either ridiculous uncouth people or model, ideal citizens. We show that, in spite of such a diversity, these representations reveal a coherent global vision of the peasantry which is linked to different conceptions of Roman identity. A preliminary study of the lexicography encompassing the various denominations of the countryside inhabitants and a historiographical focus underline the essential place that the rural still had in the social, economic and political life of the Vrbs in the last two centuries of the Republic. It then comes out that the stereotype of the uncouth man, which could be analysed in terms of “markers”, is in the Nea a real theatrical type. These type influences other texts, in which it is used for the invective, sometimes mixed to a metatextual speech. Indeed, even if the ridiculous rusticus is a counter-model of behaviour, he is paradoxically associated to a debatable Roman identity, which also comes into play in the agronomists’ speeches praising rurality. The bonus agricola stereotype embodying a rural mos maiorum, points out to collective representations and to an axiological valorisation of the agricultural activity – unlike physical work or breeding – as much as to personal ideological stances favouring rusticitas.

Au Canada, la première forme de système politique comportant une assemblée de représentants élus a vu le jour à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Dans l’ancienne colonie de la Nouvelle-France, une population qui n’avait jamais connu de démocratie auparavant s’est familiarisée avec la vie civique en moins de 50 ans. Ce mémoire porte sur une expérience de mobilisation populaire à la veille des Rébellions de 1837-1838. Il cherche plus précisément à comprendre les modalités mises en place dans le monde rural afin de canaliser l’appui populaire envers le Parti patriote dans le district de Montréal. Cet angle permet de faire ressortir la participation accrue des Canadiens lors de la période tendue qui suivit le dépôt des Quatre-Vingt-Douze Résolutions en 1834. Cette thèse se propose donc de montrer le lien entre la mobilisation politique et les pratiques émanant de la masse populaire. Ce mémoire démontre donc l’influence de la population paysanne du Bas-Canada dans la culture politique des patriotes et de ce fait, souligne les procédés que les individus ont mis en place au cours de leur apprentissage démocratique. / In Canada, the first political system with popular representation was established in the late 18th century. In the former colony of New France, a population that had never known democracy before familiarized itself with civic life in less than 50 years. This thesis focuses on one case of popular mobilization on the eve of the Rebellions of 1837-1838. It specifically seeks to understand the practices established in rural areas of the district of Montreal to channel popular support for the Parti patriote. This angle allows us to emphasize the increased participation of Canadiens in the tense period following the filing of the 92 Resolutions in 1834. This thesis proposes to show the link between political mobilization and practices emanating from the masses. The humble ambition of this thesis is, therefore, to show the influence of the peasant population of Lower Canada in the political culture of the Patriotes and therefore underline the practices that individuals adopted in their democratic learning process.

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