'Freedom of the Fassions' : The Politics of the Street in Montreal and the Struggle against the British Fiscal-Military State

Type of resource
Authors/collaborators
Title
'Freedom of the Fassions' : The Politics of the Street in Montreal and the Struggle against the British Fiscal-Military State
Abstract
The authors examine street protests in early nineteenth-century Lower Canada as a lens through which to study the movement of economic and political liberal ideas around the British Empire. They point out that these were not backward-looking evocations of an anticapitalist moral economy but embraced the tenets of the new political economy emerging in Britain. The authors show that protestors drew on the work of British political economists, as well as currents of Irish agrarian radicalism, to mobilize a constituency of small merchants and artisans. They explain that by using a variety of legal records, the mainstream colonial press, and the satirical Scribbler permits a multilayered analysis of the cultural and political meanings expressed in out-of-door political activity. If, as recent historians have argued, the British empire was imbricated with the development of liberalism, the authors argue that their microstudy illustrates that British colonies were critical sites for the articulation of modern notions of economic and civil rights, including the rights of consumers.
Publication
Critical Historical Studies
Volume
Vol. 4
Issue
no. 1
Pages
75-104
Date
Spring 2017
Language
en
URL
Citation
Christie, Nancy, and Michael Gauvreau. “’Freedom of the Fassions’ : The Politics of the Street in Montreal and the Struggle against the British Fiscal-Military State.” Critical Historical Studies Vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 75–104. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/690969.
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