‘Not so very fine and healthy as has been reported’: Settlers, Malaria, and the Construction of the Rideau Canal (1826-1832)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nineteenth-century understandings of malaria as an environmental illness led Euro-Americans to pathologize certain places as healthy or unhealthy, including Upper Canada where the disease was endemic. Using the construction of the Rideau Canal (1826-1832) as a case study, this thesis asks how British imperial agents reconciled their visions of settlement, agriculture, and growth for Upper Canada with malaria’s presence in the colony. Drawing on the written work, financial reports, and correspondence of John Mactaggart and Lieutenant-Colonel John By, I argue that imperial agents mobilized knowledge of disease from across the British Empire to rationalize their presence in Upper Canada. Mactaggart carefully crafted the personae he presented so that experiences with disease flagged his loyalty and dedication to the imperial project. Meanwhile, By dealt with malaria’s paralyzing effect on canal construction by avoiding disease as much as possible and expanding his vision of the canal so that it healed the landscape it traversed. The canal was subsequently understood as a kind of health infrastructure by settlers. My thesis emphasizes the Rideau Canal’s role as settler colonial infrastructure and situates Canada within the global imperial history of malaria, thus also showing the limitations of current understandings of malaria as a “tropical disease.” My work also adds to our understanding of environment and health’s interconnectedness in pre-Confederation Canada. I end by investigating the environmental longue durée of the canal’s construction in the twenty-first century, focusing especially on those associated with health such as wetland drainage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".