The Spirit of Industry and Improvement: Liberal Government and Rural-Industrial Society, Nova Scotia, 1790–1862 (review)

Reviewed by: The Spirit of Industry and Improvement: Liberal Government and Rural-Industrial Society, Nova Scotia, 1790–1862 David Bent The Spirit of Industry and Improvement: Liberal Government and Rural-Industrial Society, Nova Scotia, 1790–1862. Daniel Samson. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008. Pp. 448, $85.00 cloth, $34.95 paper Daniel Samson once said that history looked different from the countryside, and his new book, The Spirit of Industry and Improvement, does a splendid job of proving this point. In this work Samson takes [End Page 335] the story of the nineteenth-century rise of industrialism and liberalism away from its usual urban settings and places it in the countryside of northern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island. This area, Samson shows, was an epicentre of Nova Scotia’s industrial development and one of the key battlegrounds of its political construction. The area’s bounty of natural resources, particularly coal, triggered a confrontation between rural workers and elites over the appropriate means of economic production and resource ownership; the former leaned towards household and communal subsistence, while the latter was enamoured with economic expansion and state building. Samson reveals that the consolidation of modernity and the liberal order was a fragmented process, contested along class and ideological lines, that its outcome was far from certain, and that its primary battlefield in colonial Nova Scotia was the countryside. Nineteenth-century rural Nova Scotia was a society sharply divided along ethnic and class lines. As the century wore on, these tensions were further heightened by a rising ideological conflict between an older communitarian way of life and an emerging capitalist one. On either side of this divide were poorer settlers and middle-class ‘improvers.’ The former lived in communities where a moral economy of mutual aid and sustainability were paramount, while the latter ascribed to the philosophy of political economy, whereby increased personal wealth, economic production and efficiency, and national and imperial strength were the key prerogatives of any economic activity. Although liberal and progressive, improvement ideology retained some ideas of the pre-modern world it was working to displace, such as a belief in an ordered society ruled by an elite class that oversaw the regulation of the lives and labour of those it governed. Samson provides engaging intellectual biographies of two of the key contemporary economic theorists of rural Nova Scotia, John ‘Agricola’ Young and Thomas McCulloch. Young was an enthusiastic proponent of the improvement ideology, arguing that elites could educate and elevate the mass of rural workers with the newest methods of scientific agriculture. McCulloch was more sympathetic to the older, communal way of rural life but was no less an advocate of improvement, believing that attentiveness to one’s familial and Christian duties in agriculture and industry were the best way for personal and societal improvement. The struggle that occurred between these two groups was fought over the rights of coal and other natural resources that abounded in northern Nova Scotia, and the nature of common and private land. Trade in coal began in the earliest days of settlement, carried out by [End Page 336] poor settlers for their own use or for extra cash. The settler left few records, but Samson uses what sources are available to present the reader with a portrait of life and labour of the rural poor. The activities of the state were much better chronicled (hence they bulk large in Samson’s analysis), and its goals were far more ambitious – the control and regulation of Nova Scotia’s rural resources, industry, and economic relations. Thus the state increasingly intervened in formerly self-governing rural communities, often in the form of monopolistic corporations such as the General Mining Association. By enforcing Crown control of natural resources, these efforts were designed to limit their exploitation by traditional harvesters. Rural dwellers were drawn in by wages, and mining towns became industrial colonies in the countryside, but even here there was pronounced rurality, as most families grew crops or raised animals, thus maintaining a degree of their former sustenance. Efforts were also underway to improve agriculture with emerging agricultural societies led by the middle class. These bodies were dedicated to educating farmers...

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