Piling on, part 2: the Agrarian-Industrial transition

Agrarian Societies

It is fairly accepted notion the idea that any area has a certain carrying capacity of human life, depending on the nature of the human inhabitants. A region that is home to hunter gatherers can only support a few people. If it is good for agriculture, the same area might instead support many thousands. However, the degree of carrying capacity can vary with changes in the climate, land quality, migratory patterns, and other such things. Some places were always good for human habitation, regardless; France seems to have been home to significant human populations both in pre-history and the Modern age. On the other hand, some regions of the world were once home to great civilizations, and are now bereft of any significant human habitation once-so-ever, are, for example the southern coast of Arabia (eastern Yemen and western Oman), or in the upper Amazon valley.

Human beings react to changes in their circumstances, whether hunter or farmer, by moving to "greener pastures." However, as human history amply demonstrates, there are usually other people in the way who need be destroyed to make room for the newcomers, like the Canaanites. Now, sometimes the invaders win, and sometimes they don't, but the relationship of the land to the survival of the society is clear. If you don't have it, you cease to exist. If you are an ambitious chief and want to become greater and stronger, or even just more secure, you need more of it. There are of course improvements in agriculture possible, and these can help bolster population densities maybe for a time, sometimes longer, bringing you wealth and strength. But ultimately, strong agrarian civilizations were a combination of both density and expanse.

Such was the relationship between human beings and the Earth for almost their entire existence. When Canada federated as "the Dominion" in 1867, this relationship of people to land had begun to change. The Industrial Age meant that for the first time in human history, a state could exploit intensity of land use over the quantity of land in use. Hence, a behemoth like China or Russia could be embarrassed in turn by the "dwarf pirates" of Japan. The greatest world power of the time, Britain, transitioned from a land and sea power to an industrial one, and many nations of the world attempted to follow suit.

The underlying premise of industrialization is the notion of "value-added." If you have the resources, you process them and turn them into things of value. The famous "economy of scale" will come in turn - you can produce more of these goods in less time and for a lower price, allowing you to make more profit, expand your business, expand its reach, which in turn increases your profits. The money can be invested into technology - which leads to further gains.

However, growing, dirty and deadly cities need inflows of population. In Great Britain, these new industrial cities could be served by the abundant villages of the countryside, which were entering their own "small town death." Inhabitants of these villages could either emigrate to new lands to try to continue their way of life, as they were replaced at home by more efficient machines, or stay close to home and help make the machines. Very few English seemed to make the move across the seas at this point; more migrants seem to have come from the worse off, and often deported populations of Ireland and Scotland. The villages could continue to support population, who farmed with more intensity, or mined with more efficiency, or did other essential tasks aided by new technology. However, the growing population of cities like London or Liverpool could no longer be supported by resources from within their border. Canadian grain and Argentine beef helped keep these people alive.

While Britain emerged as the world's first industrial giant, its new technologies, specifically the steam train and the steam ship, pushed the frontiers back and allowed humanity to expand to the edge of arable land. Investments in irrigation and new technologies allowed the agricultural frontier to push beyond even the previous frontier of settlement, but often impermanently. Russians could now grow cotton along the Aral Sea, at least until their irrigation scheme destroyed the Aral Sea. More locally, Canadians with mechanical tractors could farm the virgin soils of western Canada that had proved impervious to human ploughs and even horses.

The previous arithmetic relationship of land to human habitation still remained true, though. More land could be farmed, which fed more people, but the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s was a century away. Only so many people could be fed, even with mechanical farm equipment and more robust strains of crops, like Canada's cold-resistant Marquis Wheat.

As Canada was one of the last places one Earth with an expanding agricultural frontier, it should come as no surprise that we are among the last of the developed nations to be experiencing this "death of the small town." Indeed, literally no country has grown as much in size as Canada since its creation (in fact, all the European empires, even Russia, have geographically shrank while their populations grew; and arguably, so too the United States). In Canada this expansion allowed for more towns, new towns, to service new areas and the exploitation of new resources. Rail and steamship allowed for the surplus of these resources to feed the mouths and industries of people worldwide, making Canada, for the first time, a valuable target for investment. We began to catch up with our wealthier new world counterparts, like the USA and Argentina.

However, the limits of Canada's small-town farming and resource economy could be seen. Canadians could not become as wealthy as the Americans. Canadian towns couldn't just spread forever. Some towns were already abandoned as their local resources were exhausted, and some farmlands, too. Canada's small industries, concentrated as they were in the centre and south of the country, could not attract or employ all the Canadians unemployed or attracted by opportunities to the south. We continued to lose people to our greatest rival.

So Canada's leaders were presented with the question: were we forever to be just hewers of wood and drawers of water? The consequences of such a fate were clear to Canada's leaders: our population would continue to grow slowly, while more Canadians would move to the growing cities of the USA. Could we use our own resources for ourselves? Could we provide our own people with enough work, good paying work, to keep them at home and make Canada stronger? Could Canada really make its mark as a rival and competitor to the great powers of world? Or were we doomed to either poverty, irrelevance, annexation, or all of the above?

In the third part, I will try to explain why Canada's frontier is collapsing into the big cities.

Thanks for reading.

Piling On: The Death of Small Town Canada, part 1.

This post, my first in ages, was inspired by the recent Aaron Hutchins article in Maclean's, "What's Killing Rural Canada." It's a nice piece of reporting in how it focuses on the people, there today. What is missing, though, is a historian's take on the decline of rural Canada - a process which isn't even unique to here, either, but which is happening in almost every country, worldwide. The reasons may be different, but the final effect has not.

So what has happened in Canada? Why is this question so important? The truth is, the question of "rural decline" is central to the very existence of Canada as an independent state. It is an old process, which afflicted the British colonies of North America so severely that it inspired desperate political action to prevent the loss of land and people to the United States.

By the middle of the 19th century, the agricultural frontier of British North America had been pushed to its maximum extent. Further, as legacy of European settlement along the Atlantic going back to the early 1600's, many parts of Canada were experiencing land exhaustion and frequent crop failure. Canada is a cold and difficult land, and at rural Canada's greatest extent, could only call itself home to a handful of British colonies amounting to barely three million people. The colonies were generally poor, and home to poor people - because of poor land and unskilled and poorly paid work. This was terribly apparent in relation to the wealth, prosperity, and dynamism of the United States.

It was at this time that Canada began to lose population to the United States. Canadian history talks of this period as the time of the Great Migration, when the country received its first great wave of immigrants from Europe. What is usually unmentioned is that many of the immigrants were using British North America as a stepping stone to the United States (like the father of Henry Ford), and were joined in their movement west and south by many British North Americans. My ancestors, the Loyalist Powells of New Brunswick, were just one such family to move to the United States at this time.

Now, how does one prevent the loss of population to a neighbour - or rather, a rival and frequently hostile expansionist country? If your population is leaving rural areas they are moving to two possible places: either new rural areas or urban ones. Accordingly, you can pursue two strategies: open up new areas to rural settlement, or create an industrial base to take in the excess population. The United States, in its 300-year long prosecution of permanent war against First Nations people, succeeded greatly in the former, allowing more and more arable land to open up to new cultivators, many of whom were migrants from British North America. The United States, of course, was also wildly more successful at industrializing than Canada, with its open waterways, coasts, and abundant, wealthy consumer base.

The British North American strategy was centred on the same principles. Industrialization would be encouraged within the colonies (as much as it went against Imperial policies). Secondly, the acquisition of Rupert's Land would finally push the agricultural frontier of the country outwards. Much is often said that the West would become home to immigrants from Europe who would become customers for products from the East. However, perhaps more importantly, it would become home to migrants from within Canada. Of course, it would also deny the Americans the chance of taking the expanse of farmland and resources for themselves.

Against great odds, the British North American colonies seemed to succeed in both goals. Rupert's Land was bought from the Hudson's Bay Company. A "National Policy" was set up to prevent international trade in manufactured goods from destroying Canadian industry, and diplomats went west to secure the land peaceably from its original inhabitants. The country grew in wealth and population, as it has largely continued ever since.

However, this is to overlook the difficulties experienced along the way. The obvious were the resistances of the Metis in 1869-70 and 1884-1885. However, there was also the apparent failure of both settlement and industrialization policies. The Canadian population grew from 3 million to 5 million, but the country was often in depression, the government on the verge of bankruptcy, and the drain of talent to the United States remained in full effect. While Canada added two million people in its first 30 years, the United States went from more than 30 million to 70 million. It was also rivaling the greatest powers in the Old World in its industrial power and naval might.

Canadian policies to expand and protect "small-town" Canada in this time can be viewed largely as a failure. Notwithstanding the greener pastures of the United States, which had higher quality land, a longer growing season, and bigger markets, Canadians had to deal with high costs for moving grain, expensive Canadian goods, terrible weather, and a mercurial government. The aforementioned Metis resistance of 1884-1885 overlooks by its name the fact that initially the Metis enjoyed the support of all the White settlers in the area, who were angered by the Canadian Pacific Railroads decision to move the planned rail-line hundreds of miles to the south, stranding them in the wilderness.

The Canadian situation only began to improve in the late 1890s under the leadership of Sir Wilfred Laurier's Liberals. The Liberals began to take immigration more seriously, devoting more energy and resources to the file. There weren't enough farmers in the west for a viable market, and the Conservative focus on Anglo-Saxon immigration was failing to attract immigrants. So, the Liberals did away with it - enabling immigrants from less desirable backgrounds to immigrate to Canada, for example, Slavs. The population of the country began to expand rapidly, opening up business opportunities throughout. It was at this time that my American great-grandparents, including Grace Powell, UEL, moved to Calgary.

There were markets; there was free land for the taking; there were business opportunities to be had. Modern sanitation and health care allowed for huge families to take root in the west. New farmlands opened up in the Palliser triangle of the southern prairies, to the Peace Country in the north. There was room to grow and money to do it. And there wasn't much choice - communities were bound to their local stores, grain elevators and railway stations. Communities were as far apart as these stations - five miles, which was enough to prevent competition from other stores, churches, schools, etc. Money circulated locally before going off to banks in the "cities" of Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg. Saskatchewan was catapulted in population so much it was the third biggest province. Winnipeg was the third greatest city in Canada.

The outlook in the West was bright. Rural Canada, small-town Canada, here was thriving in this "virgin-land." These new settlers were enough to support in the industries of the east, preventing their populations from stagnating. Well, not the whole east... just the central part, Ontario and Quebec. The Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island are today the most rural provinces in Canada. Their industries, far from the action, were failing, and even then, their population was barely growing. Instead, their people were migrating west or south, to where opportunity might lie. So, the problem of small-town Canada continued, without pause, just in one corner of the country.

So, while the article mentions the issues of the modern West, we can see historically similar problems afflicting the rural populations of the Maritimes over one-hundred years ago. There was no room to grow, no new resources to exploit. Only so much industrialization could occur on the fringe of the country. The big opportunities lay elsewhere, and so the excess youth of those provinces departed. However, while farms remained small, industries remained demanding in manpower, and transportation remained inefficient enough for growth to continue. In the 20th century, all of that would change, spelling for small-town Canada a precipitous collapse in population, wealth, health and influence.