Trouble at the Edge of Town : Policing Montreal's Urban Periphery in the Middle of the 19th-Century

The author reflects on how, during a tumultuous decade in the history of Montreal, it was the city’s western periphery, an area that was still often associated with pastoral beauty that became the focus of those concerned with the maintenance of public order. He demonstrates how employing a micro-geographic lens can enrich the understanding of a decisive period in urban history. The author explains that at the outset of the 1840s, Montreal was in the midst of surpassing Quebec as the most populous settlement in British North America. Montreal stood on the precipice of industrialisation, a process that would take hold over the course of the next half century. Two crews of Irish migrants arrived on the western fringe of Montreal at the end of 1842 to begin work on the expansion of the canal. They established a ramshackle shanty town on the banks of the existing canal, which stretched fourteen kilometres west from the city’s harbour front.

Micro-Geographies of the Western City, c.1750–1900

New York, NY

Routledge

2020

Chapter 12

en

0-367-35030-0