Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
CONSUMERS IN THE BUSH, our latest from the McGill-Queen’s Rural, Wildland, and Resource Studies Series, looks at Upper Canadian general stores and the goods that settlers bought during the 19th century.
Challenging the popular notion that early settlers were self-sufficient and cut off from the market, author Douglas McCalla looks at the consumption patterns during this period and shows evidence of a more active and varied consumerist society.
With more than 30,000 transactions from the account books of general stores between 1808 and 1861, McCalla’s research provides key insight into the everyday material world of rural Upper Canadian life.
Douglas McCalla is our guest blogger! Here, he describes his research process and how the general store ledgers tell a much larger story than he initially expected.
This was going to be a simple project. During earlier research I had used country store accounts to learn how farmers paid their bills, but for lack of time I did not look at the other side of their accounts. Now (with my research assistants, Laura Zink and Annette Fox), I wanted to see why they had bills to pay. What goods were important enough to rural families that they would charge them to their accounts? Based on the literature, I expected we could identify a standard package of goods, embodying what historians have called “real needs”. Once I knew what these were, it would be possible to build a price index representing the experience of rural consumers. Documenting their purchases would, I hoped, also serve professionals, interpreters, and visitors at museums and living history sites that seek to represent the material world.
As we began to explore store accounts, a more complicated reality appeared. First, individual purchasing patterns varied so widely that the dream of identifying a straightforward set of rural “needs” quickly faded. Second, our list of goods kept growing – it would reach 900 before we began to combine and consolidate entries, leaving more than 650 to be listed in the book. Third, although some products were familiar, tea for example, others, such as opodeldoc, were not. And on closer examination, even the familiar, like calico or rum or nails or shoes or gunpowder, proved anything but simple.
Making sense of these goods, how people bought them, and how they used them is the central purpose of Consumers in the Bush. Although the research was sometimes elusive and mysteries remain, the pleasure and the challenge lay in pursuing as many of these goods as possible – into every kind of source that could help to explain them – then relating that information to stories that have been told about them and about rural life.At the same time, a larger story began to take shape. Far from living the simple, traditional, and timeless lives that some images offer, the farmers and artisans of Upper Canada were participants in a domestic economy of surprising complexity and actively engaged in a rapidly changing global economy. If the latter phrasing carries echoes of today’s world, it is not meant to equate very different settings and circumstances. But there are continuities, and they have implications for histories of consumption that starkly contrast the settlement era with a later period of revolutionary change.
As for the price index, the book offers many clues, but no index. It is clear, however, that British industrialization and nineteenth-century globalization meant that the prices of many of the goods Upper Canadians purchased fell sharply, much farther than the prices of most of the produce farmers sold to pay for them. It is no wonder that immigrants flooded into Upper Canada in the period and that such a large proportion of them sought to farm.
To learn more about this book, click here.
For media requests, please contact publicist Jacqui Davis.
No comments yet.