Land, Power, and Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada. By John Clarke. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. Pp. xxxvii, 747. $75.00.

Extract

John Clarke, an historical geographer at Carleton University, has provided us with a magnificently detailed and exquisitely researched look at the disposition of land in the first 80 years of one county of Upper Canada. Essex County, most readily identified as the westernmost part of southern Ontario, south and southeast of Detroit, was the earliest settled of the counties of Ontario, yet among the last to have settlement completed. At the time of the creation of the colony of Upper Canada (1791) there was a pre-existing French community, augmented by Loyalists, many of whom had been in the fur trade or had taken up arms for Britain against revolutionary America. Nevertheless, the county was slow to have most of its land taken up. Clarke has exhaustively worked through the land records from the initial patenting of Crown land up to the middle of the nineteenth century. For very few districts of North America do we have such a thorough examination of land holding and land transactions.