The Past Speaks

I received the following message from an Australian historian:

“My research on Justice John Walpole Willis’ colonial career has focused so far on his time in Port Phillip (now Melbourne, Australia).  I am now moving onto the Canadian phase of my research.

I am particularly interested in Upper Canada in the late 1820s, and would appreciate your recommendations of scholarly texts that would give me an understanding of Upper Canada at that time.  My Port Phillip work
has taken a bottom-up approach, but of course as an Australian, I already have a broader contextual understanding of Australian colonial society at that time.  I find that I lack this completely for Upper Canada.

Would you be able to recommend works that would assist me?”

So, which books and articles would I recommend to a professional historian from the other side of the world who knows very little about Upper Canada but wants to find out more? I am taking the liberty of sharing this list here, in case it might be of interest to others. I’m not including any books on British Imperial history in this period or the function of the Colonial Office, since the Australian historian knows about these already.

Willis lived between 1793 and 1877. He trained as a lawyer and was appointed to the bench in Upper Canada in the 1820s. He quickly ran afoul of the Family Compact and was removed by the Lieutenant Governor. He was then appointed to a court in British Guiana. In 1837, he took up a judicial appointment in Australia. He returned to England in the 1840s.

To clarify, let me remind people that Upper Canada was the name given to what is now southern Ontario between 1791 and 1841. In 1841, the official name was changed to Canada West, but the term Upper Canada persisted in common discourse until 1867. Between 1791 and 1841, Upper Canada was a separate colony with its own legislature.

The obvious starting point for reading is Gerald M. Craig’s Upper Canada: the Formative Years, which was first published in 1963.  It is a good general narrative history and will give you the basic chronology of political events. Although this book is essential reading, it is now somewhat dated. It should be read alongside the following works.

The divided ground : Indians, settlers and the northern borderland of the American Revolution by Alan Taylor

It is impossible to understand politics in Upper Canada without knowing about what was happening in the United States in the same period. I recommend the two following books from the Oxford History of the United States. They are brilliant works of synthesis and include up-to-date bibliographies.

Empire of liberty : a history of the early Republic, 1789-1815 by Gordon S. Wood.

What hath God wrought : the transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe.

Because the researcher is interested in legal and political history, I would recommend the following books on Upper Canadian legal culture.

Popular politics and political culture in Upper Canada, 1800-1850 by Carol Wilton.

Sir John Beverley Robinson : bone and sinew of the compact by Patrick Brode.

Jeffrey L.McNairn, The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791-1854.

Colonial justice : justice, morality, and crime in the Niagara District, 1791-1849 by David Murray

The Australian historian Greg Taylor has published a very interesting book called The law of the land : the advent of the Torrens system in Canada. This book shows how an Australian system of land tenure called the Torrens system spread first to British Columbia and then to other Canadian jurisdictions. It might be of interest.

All of these books are the catalogue of the national library of Australia and should be available through inter-library loan. In an ideal world, you would buy all of these books. However, since you have to prioritize, I would recommend buying the books by Craig and Brode. They will be the most helpful for your research, I would imagine.

Good luck with your fascinating project!