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The Reluctant Land: Society, Space, and Environment in Canada before Confederation (review)

The Reluctant Land is a magnum opus in a double sense. The honour is usually bestowed upon a work of large scale. Further back in time, however, it also meant the successful transmutation of base matter into gold. On both counts, Cole Harris’s most recent book fits the definitions. The Reluctant Land it is a lengthy work of original thought about the philosophical concept of ‘being’ in the emerging country of Canada. Simultaneously, it is a wide-reaching synthesis of the regional literature that is transformed into a larger whole as the reader is repeatedly shown patterns of similitude in what otherwise passes for a dissimilar corpus of historiography. ‘The research I admire most,’ Harris recently wrote in Canadian Geographer (52, no. 4 [2008]: 413), ‘is weighted heavily towards steeping, to the time it takes to begin to know a complex place, society, or set of issues, and, out of this protracted engagement, to begin to understand them.’. Harris is talking about the geographical concept of territorialité, and in The Reluctant Land one senses a book steeped in intimate, firsthand awareness of the passage of time, landscapes, and life worlds. Nearly half a century in the making, The Reluctant Land brings together Harris’s earlier work on French Canada (The Seigneurial System in Early Canada, 1966), his first attempt with John Warkentin at a national historical geography in Canada before Confederation (1974), his insights into the patterns and power relations of the colonial New World (‘The Simplification of Europe Overseas,’ 1977), his intimate contact with the historic cartography relied upon as editor of the first volume of the Historical Atlas of Canada (1987), and his reappraisal of indigenous peoples and colonialism in The Resettlement of British Columbia (1997). Frankly, the Canadian geographical and historical communities have been patiently waiting for