Towards a History of Canadians: Transcultural Human Agency as Seen Through Economic Behaviour, Community Formation, and Societal Institutions
Authors
Dirk Hoerder
Abstract
Social history approaches to Canadian history have expanded the master narrative
to encompass a comprehensive story. Within social history, a perspective taken from
common people’s life-writing changes interpretation in similar ways as community
and life-course approaches have done. People’s own life projects were at first based
on economic mutualism in the local community, which, over time, gave way to a
slowly imposed capitalist economy. However, the mail-order business and its relation
to the earlier local economy, based on trust rather than an abstract market,
constituted an important factor in the emergence of Canadian society. Nineteenthcentury
immigrants, like their predecessors from the dynastic states of France and
the United Kingdom, came from pre-national, many-cultured societies and found a
feeling of belonging in their participation in institution-building in a decentralized
civic society. The historic dynastic states, comprised of many peoples, provide historical
and conceptual antecedents that can help us understand the state and society
of Canada.
