Imperial Colonization Reports - Some Thoughts

Because the settlers from Lewis and Harris received substantial financial support their homesteads and livelihoods were under regular surveillance, and their ability to pay back debt or their need for increased assistance was constantly evaluated. The Imperial colonization board published reports on the conditions in the colony on a yearly basis from 1890-1906.

The debts the Killarney settlers incurred through purchasing machinery are a recurrent theme in the reports.

Many of the crofters have purchased expensive machinery, such as seeders, mowers, rakes, harrows, ploughs, and binders. I remonstrated with them strongly for incurring such weighty obligations and pointed out that a binder should cut at least for crofters’ grain, and that a mower, rake, seeders, and harrow, should serve the same number of crofter families (ICB 1891, 7).

It is perhaps a matter for regret that the settlers have acquired so much machinery on credit. They were warned against doing so, but the allurements of implement agents seem to have been difficult to withstand, and the scarcity of labour often makes it difficult to harvest the crops with rapidity, especially if reliance has to be placed on machinery not entirely under the control of the farmer (ICB 1892, 4).

I have shown machinery purchased by crofters to give the Board an idea of the weighty obligations ($8,779.56) incurred by them. I have taken every opportunity to point out to crofters how unnecessary it was to go so largely into machinery. I have tried to convince them that half the quantity would, if used in partnership, perform the work required. A number of them still contend that ‘each man wants his own’ and ‘they were not hard to get’  ... It will be my intention, should the Board send out any more crofters, to inform the different implement firms the of the conditions of the lien given by a crofter to the Board so that they could instruct their subagents (ICB 1892, 6).

The regretful purchasing of machinery is just one of the aspects the Imperial Colonization Board employee criticizes the crofters for. They also do not take on the Board's advice on building inexpensive types of houses to replace the initial ones erected for them on their arrival. The board constructed a sample house in the tradition of the ‘German speaking settlers from Russia’ for the crofters to inspect. Those were dug five – six feet into the ground and in part even deeper to create a cellar. A double slanting roof was erected over the ‘hole’ and at its center it was ten- twelve feet above the floor surface. Despite the houses being a third or at most half of the cost of the initial houses and being described as comfortable, airy and ‘quite sufficient for the first few years’ (ICB 1890, 10), the crofters did not adopt this building style, reportedly objecting to living underground. 

These examples of the inspection of the material acquisitions of the settlers, coupled with the encouragement in building of inexpensive houses and sharing machinery is a result of the pressure the colonization board was under to reclaim the money and show that the scheme was financially viable. Of course that is not to say that the welfare of the crofters was irrelevant or secondary. However, it stresses the centrality of the appropriate consumption and production that was expected of the crofters and points towards the surveillance they were subjected to.

At first inspection, there furthermore appears to be an inherent contradiction in the ICB’s efforts which on one hand were supporting the crofters’ towards a better life in Canada, to modernize their farming methods and encourage their participation in the capitalist economy and at the other hand to reign that development in, to promote cooperative farming, sharing of machinery and the building of inexpensive houses of a relatively simple construction.