Rural Reconstruction: Towards a New Synthesis
in Canadian History
Authors
R. W. Sandwell
Abstract
Recent works in the field of rural history are offering a critical challenge to the
historiography of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada. The first part of
this article draws on a variety of rural studies to outline some problems that arise
in the growing discord between recent literature on rural Canada and traditional
Canadian historiography. These anomalies are linked to an historical discourse that
trivializes and obscures what is arguably the most important institution of rural
society: the household. Finally, the author reviews some recent rural studies that
explicitly search for ways to give the pre- and post-industrial rural household a
conceptual depth that it lacks within the constraints of neoclassical and Marxist
'evolutionist' constructions of the political economy.
