Narratives of Scottish Settler Colonialism in Nova Scotia: Re-examining Thomas Chandler Haliburton's Works
Modern and Contemporary History
Final Report Abstract
"Narratives of Scottish Settler Colonialism in Nova Scotia: Reconsidering Thomas Chandler Haliburton's Works" researched the representation of Scottish settler colonialism in the works of Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865). It explored the literary strategies used to denote Scottish settlers in Nova Scotia, Canada, in order to address the larger question how literary works depict the diversity of British settlers, particularly those from otherwise 'marginalized' groups, in the nineteenth-century Atlantic. The corpus consisted of both fictional and nonfictional works by Haliburton, most of which are set in Nova Scotia. The project was devised as an interdisciplinary project, situated between the fields of Canadian literary studies, history, and British Empire studies. The main focus of the project was on printed texts, especially on The Clockmaker (1836-1840) series and on Haliburton's historical works, A General Description of Nova Scotia; Illustrated by a New and Correct Map (1823) and An historical and statistical account of Nova-Scotia in Two Volumes. Vol. 1 and 2 (1829). In addition, some archival research added previously unpublished sources to the corpus. Archival work was conducted in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. The archival work was meant to explore the autobiographical works by Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who wrote several letters and other pieces about his Scottish family background and evidently took interest in tracing his family tree back to Scotland. The research results from both the archival work and the literary analysis countered the most common reading of Scottishness in Haliburton's works by Ian McKay and Robin Bates, who assumed from their reading of historical texts that Haliburton painted a largely critical image of Scottish settlers. Contrary to this assumption, a close reading of both fictional and non-fictional sources illustrates that Haliburton's works offer a bifurcated image of Scottish settlers in Nova Scotia. This bifurcated image echoes other narratives of Scottishness in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Nova Scotia, when contradictory narratives of progress vs. backwardness coexisted in relation to Scots. The project analyzed how humour functions as a rhetorical strategy to create such a bifurcated image, and also how humour serves as a tool to popularize and naturalize images of British settler colonialism in the nineteenth-century Atlantic. Haliburton's works were read by readers on both sides of the Atlantic, and they were particularly cherished for their humorous portrait of settler colonial life. The project thus contributed to existing research on Haliburton and Nova Scotia literature by adding humour to the set of rhetorical features that aesthetically shape settler colonial narratives. It also contributed to historical and British Empire studies by showing how 'marginalized' settler groups such as Scots are naturalized and popularized in literary works that portray the diversity of the British Atlantic in the nineteenth century.
