Ross Fair, Improving Upper Canada: Agricultural Societies and State Formation, 1791-1852. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2024. 400 pgs. ISBN 9781487553531.
Reviewed by Jake Breadman.
The foremost objective of Ross Fair’s Improving Upper Canada is to highlight the importance of the ideology of agricultural improvement to state formation in Upper Canada. The ideology of agricultural improvement coincided with the expansion of the British Empire in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, when improvers used science to make large-scale agriculture more efficient and productive to increase commerce and further develop the British state and its colonies (9-10). The book demonstrates the ideology of improvement and its connection to state formation through references to well-known Canadian historical figures like William Lyon Mackenzie, who wrote in his newspaper: “‘On you alone, Farmers, does Canada rely,’” and promised to devote significant attention to agricultural developments for Upper Canadians to emulate (112).
Fair’s book is divided into nine chapters. The first two chapters note that agricultural societies, the “institutional manifestation” of improvement, did not disseminate their ideas without issue. Despite the patronage of Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe and a coterie of other Niagara notables, the lofty ideals of improvement expressed by the Niagara Agricultural Society, the first agricultural society established in the colony, fell on deaf ears as ordinary farmers were more concerned with the laborious task of clearing land and attaining basic subsistence (28-31, 41, 49). The Upper Canada Agricultural and Commercial Society, founded by the disaffected Irishman Robert Thorpe, foundered due to Thorpe’s “performative leadership,” particularly his preoccupation with undermining the ruling clique at York and securing patronage from London (50-51, 70).
Chapter four looks at the watershed year of 1830, when Charles Fothergill introduced legislation to make agricultural improvement a state responsibility (116-120). These new agricultural societies were governed by the provincial government (via the allocation of funds); backlash from the conservative Legislative Council, and eventual compromise, centralized power through district agricultural societies (126-128).
Chapters five to seven look at attempts by both conservatives and reformers to establish district agricultural societies, but exactly who would receive funding proved contentious post-1815, when advocacy for responsible government, and backlash to it, increasingly governed political affairs. At York, William Lyon Mackenzie attempted to establish an agricultural society, but local oligarchs feared this organization would become a vessel for reform, and so retaliated by successfully wresting power from him and creating the Home District Agricultural Society, from which numerous satellite organizations sprung (143-145, 161). (Like-minded reformer Robert Gourlay suffered a similar fate to Mackenzie, as outlined in chapter three). The establishment of agricultural societies east of Toronto was equally contentious: Kingston gentlemen primarily led the Midland District Agricultural Society, much to the chagrin of residents in Prince Edward County, who founded their own society (176-179).
In chapters eight and nine, Fair demonstrates how the executives of these different societies used their “prominence and experience” to establish the first provincial agricultural association, the Agricultural Association of Upper Canada (AAUC), in 1846 (217-218). Subsequent lobbying by the AAUC resulted in the creation of the Bureau of Agriculture in 1852, “the culmination of a decades-long, multi-generational campaign for a provincial agricultural organization to better promote and coordinate agricultural improvement in Upper Canada” (278). Improvement was more easily directed and implemented by the central Bureau of Agriculture.
One of Fair’s professed objectives in Improving Upper Canada is to “identify a range of improvers… as well as others who have remained unrecognized for their role as an Upper Canadian improver” (16). I found it fascinating how so many political figures, whether members of Mackenzie’s “Family Compact,” moderate reformers or radicals, “found in agricultural improvement a commonality that rose above the highly fractured political lines of the day” (282). This is well-exemplified in chapter six, where Fair relates how Samuel Lount, vice-president of the Home District Agricultural Society (HDAS), supported Mackenzie’s attack on York in 1837 yet prevented Mackenzie from burning down the estate of fellow HDAS executive William Botsford Jarvis. Jarvis, also a sheriff, led Lount to the gallows and burst into tears at having to execute his friend and fellow improver (171). This incident is testament to the lively, deeply fascinating political history of nineteenth century Upper Canada that permeates Fair’s book.
Fair rightly notes that it was through “intermediate steps” that the ideology of improvement was disseminated, accepted, and implemented. Ordinary farmers attended cattle shows and exhibitions or tried new seeds on their farms. Through these activities, improvers “expanded the role of the state… to provide bureaucratic governance of agricultural improvement where only occasional and inadequate leadership had been offered before” (287-288).
Fair highlights how different district agricultural societies, funded by annual public grants, materially implemented the ideology of improvement. The importation and dissemination of pure-bred horses and cattle for breeding within certain districts represents just one attempt at improvement (206). Selfishly, because this is not the purpose of Improving Upper Canada, I hoped for more insight into the social history of ploughing matches, cattle shows, and exhibitions; for those interested in that, I would recommend reading Catharines Anne Wilson’s latest book as a companion piece to Fair’s work.1
Of notable interest to environmental historians of Canada, Fair sees his book working in conversation with, and building on, Suzanne Zeller’s book Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation, stating that Improving Upper Canada “might also be considered additional context” for the aforementioned book, providing “new information about the pursuit of agricultural improvement and how Georgian and early Victorian science were used to understand the Upper Canadian environment in order to exploit it for agricultural production” (14). As Zeller notes “social problems were manageable through quantification and the statistical accumulation of facts. Science in the utilitarian sense was a tool, not merely to locate sources of material wealth but also to construct an ordered society.”2 Science and the ideology of improvement facilitated the construction of a prosperous, ordered British North America. Additionally, Improving Upper Canada will be of interest to anyone interested in the histories of Upper Canada, British North America, agricultural and political history, and those fascinated with how the environment (agriculture) was perceived in Upper Canada.
1 Catharine Anne Wilson, Being Neighbours: Cooperative Work and Rural Culture, 1830-1960 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).
2 Suzanne Zeller, Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 5-6.
Jake Breadman
Latest posts by Jake Breadman (see all)
- Review of Fair, Improving Upper Canada - September 22, 2025
- “A Disposition to Carry on a Winter’s Campaign”: British Winter Military Operations during the War of 1812 - February 28, 2024