Empire Grown: Land, Agriculture and the British Colonial Food System in Canada
My major research interrogates the implications for Canadian communities of late-19th to mid-20th century food systems, seeking to discover the effects on local environment, and community cohesion, of a turn from local foods to distant producers in Canada, the United States and the British Empire.
This research is funded by a SSHRC Standard Research Grant.
Completed Research
Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia
Winner of the K.D. Srivastava Prize for excellence in scholarly publishing.
My recently published book examines the role of the environment in the end of the longstanding effort of the BC state to establish agricultural lands in the valleys of the province. It argues that the state’s relationship to the environment in the 1920s and ‘30s was determined by the then-new idea of centralized, “scientific” management of social problems by experts – known as progressivism or new liberalism.
The efforts of new liberal experts to reshape forests and deserts into farmland largely failed, the result of their inability to properly comprehend environmental and social complexity. Yet ironically the lesson of the program was not humility but instead the greatly expanded state of the post World War II era, with its greatly expanded efforts to manage environmental change.
For more information or to buy a copy see the UBC Press website.
Reviewed in Environmental History and H-Net Reviews.