Kenneth M. Sylvester – författare

"The Limits of Rural Capitalism" is an important study of the social and economic development of the Municipality of Montcalm, a largely French-Canadian community in southern Manitoba. It challenges the view in prairie historiography that agriculture had commercialized before the west was opened to settlement, and that ethnic communities alone resisted the market's potential. Using a novel combination of demographic, financial, and legal evidence, Sylvester shows that both Ontario and Quebec migrants came west within family networks, and that neither economic individualism nor ethnic clustering overshadowed the importance of family strategies. In an environment where landed proprietorship was the norm, the demands of parents on the unpaid labour of their children constrained the growth of labour markets, and concerns for farm succession limited the accumulation of wealth. In the shadow of an industrializing and urbanizing world, these people, who came mainly from the District of Montreal and eastern Ontario, sometimes via New England, raised large families, drew largely on the unpaid labour of kin, owned their own farms, limited financial entanglements with outsiders, and established multiple heirs. While household autonomy diminished over time, the limits of rural capitalism persisted.

Navigating Time and Space in Population Studies presents innovative approaches to long-standing questions about the diffusion of population and demographic behavior across space and over time. This collection utilizes newly-available historical data along with spatially and temporally explicit analytical methods to evaluate and refine core demographic theories and to pose new questions about mortality and fertility transitions, migration, urbanization, and social inequality. It adds a spatial dimension to the analysis of temporal processes and a temporal element to spatial processes. Chapters cover a broad range of geographical settings, including the United States, Europe, Latin America, and the Islamic world, and span time periods from the eighteenth to twentieth century. Contributors from a variety of disciplines reveal the complexity of factors involved in population processes that spread across space and unfold over time, and demonstrate a rich set of tools with which to explore, analyze, and test the spatial and temporal dynamics of these phenomena. The theories, methods, and substantive findings presented here provide new lenses through which to view time and space in population studies, offering useful models and valuable insights to demographers and other social scientists exploring both historical and contemporary questions about population dynamics anywhere in the world.

Navigating Time and Space in Population Studies presents innovative approaches to long-standing questions about the diffusion of population and demographic behavior across space and over time. This collection utilizes newly-available historical data along with spatially and temporally explicit analytical methods to evaluate and refine core demographic theories and to pose new questions about mortality and fertility transitions, migration, urbanization, and social inequality. It adds a spatial dimension to the analysis of temporal processes and a temporal element to spatial processes. Chapters cover a broad range of geographical settings, including the United States, Europe, Latin America, and the Islamic world, and span time periods from the eighteenth to twentieth century. Contributors from a variety of disciplines reveal the complexity of factors involved in population processes that spread across space and unfold over time, and demonstrate a rich set of tools with which to explore, analyze, and test the spatial and temporal dynamics of these phenomena. The theories, methods, and substantive findings presented here provide new lenses through which to view time and space in population studies, offering useful models and valuable insights to demographers and other social scientists exploring both historical and contemporary questions about population dynamics anywhere in the world.