Consumers in the Bush: Shopping in Rural Upper Canada (McGill-Queen's Rural, Wildland, and Resource Studies, 3) (Volume 3) - Softcover

McCalla, Douglas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 077354500X ISBN 13: 9780773545007

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015

Synopsis

General stores are essential to the image of a colonial village. Many historians, however, still base their stories of settlement on the notion of rural self-sufficiency, begging the question: if general stores were so common, who were their customers?

To answer this, Consumers in the Bush draws on the account books of country stores, rich evidence that has rarely been used. Douglas McCalla considers more than 30,000 transactions on the accounts of 750 families at seven Upper Canadian stores between 1808 and 1861. These customers were typical of rural society - farmers, artisans, labourers, and often women. At village stores they found a wide variety of products, most imported from Britain, a few from the United States, and a surprising number that were produced locally. Three chapters focus on the major product categories of dry goods, groceries, and hardware; a fourth considers local products, and a fifth addresses a variety of items - from household goods to footwear to school books. In telling us about the goods colonists bought, this book explores what they were used for and the stories they allow us to tell about rural lives and experience.

By seeing rural Upper Canadians as consumers, Consumers in the Bush reveals them as full participants in the rapidly changing nineteenth-century global world of goods.

About this title

About the Author

Douglas McCalla is university professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Guelph.

From the Back Cover

Series editors: Jennifer Bonnell, James Murton, and R.W. Sandwell

The Rural, Wildland, and Resource Studies Series includes monographs, thematically unified edited collections, and rare out-of-print classics. Inspired by Canadian Papers in Rural History, Donald H. Akenson's influential occasional papers series, it seeks to catalyze reconsideration of communities and places lying beyond city limits, outside centres of urban political and cultural power, and located at past and present sites of resource procurement and environmental change. Scholarly and popular interest in the environment, climate change, food, and a seemingly deepening divide between city and country, is drawing non-urban places back into the mainstream. The series seeks to present the best environmentally contextualized research on topics such as agriculture, cottage living, fishing, the gathering of wild foods, mining, power generation, and rural commerce, within and beyond Canada's borders.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 077354500X
• ISBN 13: 9780773545007
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 312