Larry Ostola talks to Ross Fair about his book, Improving Upper Canada: Agricultural Societies and State Formation, 1791–1852.

Agricultural societies founded in the colony of Upper Canada were the institutional embodiment of the ideology of improvement, modelled on contemporary societies in Britain and the United States. In Improving Upper Canada, Ross Fair explores how the agricultural improvers who established and led these organizations were important agents of state formation.

The book investigates the initial failed attempts to create a single agricultural society for Upper Canada. It examines the 1830 legislation that publicly funded the creation of agricultural societies across the colony to be semi-public agents of agricultural improvement, and analyses societies established in the Niagara, Home, and Midland Districts to understand how each attempted to introduce specific improvements to local farming practices. The book reveals how Upper Canada’s agricultural improvers formed a provincial association in the 1840s to ensure that the colonial government assumed a greater leadership role in agricultural improvement, resulting in the Bureau of Agriculture, forerunner of federal and provincial departments of agriculture in the post-Confederation era.

In analysing an early example of state formation, Improving Upper Canada provides a comprehensive history of the foundations of Ontario’s agricultural societies today, which continue to promote agricultural improvement across the province.

Ross Fair is a lecturer in the Department of History at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Image Credit: University of Toronto Press

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