Backwoods consumers and homespun capitalists : the rise of a market culture in eastern Canada

"In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a local economy made up of settlers, loggers, and business people from Lower Canada, New Brunswick, and New England developed on the banks of the Upper Saint John River in an area known as the Madawaska Territory. This emergent economy was ostensibly part of the Atlantic capitalist system but differed from it in several major ways." "In Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists, Beatrice Craig analyses this economy from its origins in the Native fur trade, the growth of exportable wheat, and the selling of food to new settlers and ton timber to Britain. Craig vividly portrays the role of wives who sold homespun fabric and clothing to farmers, loggers, and river drivers, helping to bolster the local economy. The construction of saw, grist, and carding mills, and the establishment of stores, boarding houses, and taverns are all viewed as steps in the development of what the author calls 'homespun capitalists, ' The territory also participated in the Atlantic economy as a consumer of Canadian, British, European, west and east Indian, and American goods. This case study offers a unique examination of the emergence of capitalism and of a consumer society in a small, relatively remote community in the backwoods of New Brunswick."--Jacket