Canada, 1670-1935: Symbolic and Instrumental Enforcement in Loyalist North America

Resource type

Authors/contributors

Craven, Paul (Author)
Craven, Paul (Editor)
Hay, Douglas (Editor)

Title

Abstract

Master and servant has a paradoxical history in Canada. There was a great deal of penal legislation. ...Indeed, new legislation to punish workers for disobedience and desertion was enacted after 1875, the year of final repeal in Britain, and even after the Canadian Parliament's own Breaches of Contract Act two years later. But compared with Britain and the other white dominions, let alone other parts of the empire, enforcement was sporadic, convictions relatively few, and punishments rarely harsh. It is easy enough to construct an explanation for inconsiderable enforcement out of the structure of the economy and the characteristics of the labour force, but these at the same time cannot account for the variety and persistence of penal legislation. The answer seems to lie as much in the symbolic as the instrumental uses of employment law in this part of the empire. --Introduction

Book Title

Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955

Place

Chapel Hill, NC

Publisher

University of North Carolina Press

Date

2004

Pages

175-218

Language

English

ISBN

978-0-8078-2877-9

URL

http://archive.org/details/mastersservantsm0000unse

Accessed

11/3/24, 4:17 AM

Notes

Contents: England, 1562-1875 : the law and its uses / Douglas Hay -- Early British America, 1585-1830 : freedom bound / Christopher Tomlins -- Law and labor in eighteenth-century Newfoundland / Jerry Bannister -- Canada, 1670-1935 : symbolic and instrumental enforcement in loyalist North America / Paul Craven -- Australia, 1788-1902 : a workingman's paradise? / Michael Quinlan -- The Colonial Office, 1820-1955 : constantly the subject of small struggles / M.K. Banton -- The British Caribbean, 1823-1838 : the transition from slave to free legal status / Mary Turner -- Urban British Guiana, 1838-1924 : wharf rats, centipedes, and pork knockers / Juanita de Barros -- South Africa, 1841-1924 : race, contract, and coercion / Martin Chanock -- Hong Kong, 1841-1870 : all the servants in prison and nobody to take care of the house / Christopher Munn -- Britain : the defeat of the 1844 master and servants bill / Christopher Frank -- India, 1858-1930 : the illusion of free labor / Michael Anderson -- Assam and the West Indies, 1860-1920 : immobilizing plantation labor / Prabhu P. Mohapatra -- West Afrira, 1874-1948 : employment legislation in a nonsettler peasant economy / Richard Rathbone -- Kenya, 1895-1939 : registration and rough justice / David M. Anderson.

Citation

Craven, P. (2004). Canada, 1670-1935: Symbolic and Instrumental Enforcement in Loyalist North America. In P. Craven & D. Hay (Eds.), Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955 (pp. 175–218). University of North Carolina Press. http://archive.org/details/mastersservantsm0000unse

Link to this record

http://labourstudies.ca/lsi/YGK94FGT