Canadian pastoral: promotional images of British colonization in Lower Canada's Eastern Townships during the 1830s

Abstract

This paper examines the pamphlets that promoted British colonization of Lower Canada's largely American-settled Eastern Townships during the 1830s. As part of its strategy to stimulate British migration to the region, the imperial government had sold most of the remaining crown land to the London-based British American Land Company. The image that emerges from the letters and testimonials printed in the company's colonization brochures is of a picturesque and healthful environment ideally suited to pastoral agriculture. That image stamped the region with the imperial aesthetic landscape during a politically turbulent era, but it would have little practical appeal to the vast majority of British immigrants who continued up the St Lawrence to Upper Canada where they could produce the cash crops that would facilitate their economic independence.