History

Elsbeth Heaman

Clash of knowledge

Mark Reynolds | Elsbeth Heaman is an authority on authority.

Owen Egan

The Canada Research Chair in Early Canadian History -- who, appropriately enough, started work at McGill on July 1 -- studies the history of knowledge and its impacts on public and political life.

"I would like to see how knowledge functions in wider society and when knowledge claims become particularly effective or impressive," she said.

Her research has taken her from the British Parliament of the 18th century to the agricultural fairs of 19th-century Canada, on a quest to discover how we know we know what we know. Her enthusiasm for the subject is evident -- she tends to speak of long-forgotten Parliamentary debates in the present tense.

Heaman has already written two books: The Inglorious Arts of Peace: Exhibitions in Canadian Society During the 19th Century and St Mary's: The History of a London Teaching Hospital. The former examines how knowledge of agriculture was (pardon the pun) harvested, seeded and spread in the general population.

In the 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution, it was generally understood that Great Britain had the best and most advanced agricultural practices in the world. It was assumed that the largely illiterate French-Canadian farmers could benefit from English know-how. The question was how to get the knowledge to the hinterlands.

"It's a wonderful example of the problem of metropolitan and colonial," said Heaman.

"The farmers actually know a lot more about how to farm in Canada than the so-called experts. Another problem is that the population is illiterate -- how do you teach adults in a liberal society where you can't send them to school; you can't force them to learn things."

The solution was the agricultural fair, where farmers could gather and compare for themselves what worked and what didn't.

"It's a way of circulating information among a very wide group of people and bribing them to behave in a certain kind of way," she said.

Heaman has moved on from how knowledge is disseminated to the public to how the interplay between classes affects knowledge acceptance. She recently presented a paper that examined the debates on the 1774 Quebec Act in the London Parliament.

When Britain suddenly became responsible for a people with a foreign religion, language and set of laws, they had no idea how to go about governing them, nor did they know much about Canada. The process by which they became officially informed about the half-continent they were now to administer was a complex one.

"They had a huge debate about how much do we have to know about Canada; it's very difficult for Parliament to know things authoritatively. They had debates as to whether they were going to impose French law or English law on Lower Canada. The problem is they know English law but they don't know French law," said Heaman of the Parliamentarians who debated the Quebec Act.

"I see it as a clash of two forms of knowledge. One is a knowledge of history -- capital H -- which the British have. They know what makes the empire prosperous and their history is exemplified by good laws. People like [political philosopher and statesman Edmund] Burke are saying we've got to impose our laws on the French."

Heaman said that the problem is that British law works because it is organic to the society that produced it. She said the then-Attorney General, Edward Thurlow, expressed the need to preserve French customs in the new British colony. Heaman paraphrased his argument this way: "If you take away civil property [the law] you take away people's social relations, husbands and wives and children, and you're forcing them to rethink all of that, and the rights of conquest have never gone so far. He went on to liken it to slavery."

Heaman's appointment to McGill is a homecoming of sorts. The B.C. native did both her undergraduate and Master's degrees here. The university is a different place from when she was a student.

"Things are a lot more efficient than they used to be," she observed.