The British Colonial Era

It would be fairer to compare New France to the other colonies of the Canadian Shield that shared the same geography and economic limitations. Despite claims to Nova Scotia dating back to 1621, Britain had been unable to settle the colony, which was populated by native peoples and about 500 French immigrants, most of whom came as indentured labourers before 1650. After the area formally became British in 1713, nothing changed. Decisive action was only taken within the larger context of the Seven Years War when Britain decided to rid North America once and for all of the French. Dictated by military considerations, its active involvement in immigration paralleled that of the French crown a century earlier. In the mid-1750s, 12,000 Acadians were deported from their homeland. At the same time some 3,000 French- or German-speaking Rhineland Protestants were brought over by the British government. During the following decade 7,000 New Englanders, faced with soil exhaustion at home and drawn by the prospect of free and cleared land in Nova Scotia, took up the prosperous farms left behind by the unfortunate Acadians. Britain expected many more American colonists to move north after Quebec’s cession in 1763, but this immigration simply did not materialize.

The American War of Independence dramatically changed that situation as 45,000 refugees – largely farmers, artisans, and merchants – sought asylum in British North America. Three out of four Loyalists went to Nova Scotia (which then included New Brunswick), while most of the rest moved into the area north of Lake Ontario. A resettlement program was quickly put into place. Generous land grants, as well as supplies and implements, were provided by the Crown, but not to everyone. Although blacks comprised one-tenth of Maritime Loyalists, they were the object of renewed discrimination and marginalization. About 1,000 of them decided, as a result, to move on to Sierra Leone along the coast of west Africa. Native Loyalists, for their part, initially received liberal treatment. Some 2,000 were given a very large concession of land along the Grand River in what would become Upper Canada (Ontario), but the Crown soon reduced its size, as did speculators. The British, like the French before them, saw land as a tool for creating a hierarchical society in which disbanded soldiers would receive favoured treatment. Veterans of the American war were accordingly given land allotments according to their rank that were much larger than those acquired by civilians.

Between the Loyalist migration and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, immigration to British North America came mostly from the United States as some 100,000 land-hungry farmers crossed into the Canadas. Meanwhile, a smaller stream of Highland Scots and Protestant Irish, a number with relatives among the veterans of the American war, made their way to the Maritime colonies and Upper Canada. Finally, some 10,000 Irish and West Country fishermen emigrated to Newfoundland in defiance of Britain’s ban on permanent settlement, designed to protect the captive labour market exploited by British fishing interests. The success of the Crown’s overall efforts at colonization may be gauged by the fact that the descendants of French settlers were still more numerous than the recently established British population. In all, the movement of peoples from Europe to British North America was rather limited before the nineteenth century.

The end of the Napoleonic Wars, however, heralded a new era. In the British Isles, the enclosure of common land, troop demobilization, and technological innovations in agriculture and manufacturing created large-scale social dislocation, resulting in mass migration. Over the next forty years 1 million people from Great Britain – mostly Irish and Scots farmers and artisans – left for British North America. The region was favoured by the fortuitous growth of a new staple, timber, which generated unprecedented levels of economic activity and maritime traffic. The ships that carried wood to the homeland returned with emigrants who were drawn to the British colonies because of the availability of land, the possibilities of commercial agriculture, and their general prosperity. Trade in lumber and wheat in turn stimulated improvements to internal transportation, such as the construction of the Rideau and Welland canals in the 1820s and 1830s, which provided jobs for cash-strapped immigrants.

Britain certainly did not oppose emigration, which was considered to be a safety valve against social unrest at home. British immigrants were also seen as strengthening ties to the homeland both in populous Lower Canada (Quebec), where the troublesome canadien majority entertained “vain hopes” of autonomy (in Lord Durham’s words), and in Upper Canada, where the local population was overwhelmingly of American origin. In fact, after the War of 1812 Britain positively discouraged United States immigrants from settling in Upper Canada by making their civil rights contingent on residency in the colony for seven years. This policy was exacerbated by the Upper Canadian authorities, who in the early 1820s cast doubt on not only the political but also the property rights of all American-born residents. However, the opening of the American midwest in this period was more effective than these British and colonial measures in ensuring that land-hungry citizens of the United States moved westward rather than north. In fact, the virgin lands of the American frontier also attracted substantial numbers of immigrants landing in British North American ports.

Although favourably disposed to emigration, the British government wished neither to encourage nor to discourage it so as not to irritate powerful lobby groups at home that resented the loss of a captive pool of labour. Except for minor officially sponsored schemes of resettlement that were expensive and limited to the first decade of peace, most immigrants came to British North America through private means. They either used their own resources or relied on the recruitment efforts of individuals such as Lord Selkirk and Thomas Talbot or speculative enterprises such as the Canada Company. Family and kinship networks, however, played a more enduring role in keeping the flow of migrants at a high level.

Britain’s laissez-faire policy effectively placed the burden of dealing with the worst effects of immigration on the colonies. Sailing vessels crammed with migrants often carried contagious diseases as a result of poor diet and unsanitary conditions – diseases that had devastating effects on local populations as well. In Lower Canada the Canadiens harboured the not implausible fear that mass migration was being used by the British as a device for overwhelming them in their own homeland. In 1832 the colonial government established a quarantine station at Grosse Isle near Quebec City, financed by a head tax on immigrants. The typhoid epidemic resulting from the Irish famine migration of the late 1840s produced such an uproar in the colonies that Britain reluctantly agreed to pay for relief measures related to this tragedy. Pauperism, whether originating in the home country or resulting from misfortunes suffered in transit, was another social evil that compelled the colonial authorities to initiate programs of public assistance in the form of small land grants and makework projects. On the whole, however, local administrations, dominated as they were by landed interests, were ineffectual in combatting the widespread practice of land speculation that hamstrung newcomers’ efforts to acquire land and market produce.