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This article considers the relationship between the increasingly humanized spaces of early Canada and the patches of settlement that, at Confederation, were assembled into a country. It suggests that Harold Innis correctly identified some of the essential spaces of early Canada as, in his American way, did Frederick Jackson Turner. Both, however, offer limited perspectives: Innis because his analysis ill fit the areas of agricultural settlement where most people lived, Turner because of the imprecisions of his analysis and also because, in early Canada, the bounded nature of agricultural settlement severely constricted the westward expansion on which his analysis turned. But Innis was right about staple trades in non-agricultural areas, and Turner was right that areas of recent agricultural settlement were loci of particularly rapid cultural change. Both analyses can be filled in, and that, particularly with regard to Turner, this article attempts to do. In so doing, it considers the extent to which the early rural societies in Canada, the loci of most lives, can be considered to have been ideologically liberal. It also considers the particular patterns of secondary migration in and beyond bounded settlements, and their relationship to the construction and maintenance of social and cultural difference. Overall, the article suggests that the receptacles within which countries develop are important, that the Canadian and American receptacles were strikingly different, and that the spaces of early Canadian life have their continuing legacies in an ongoing engagement with sparsely settled land and with very different ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on Canadian social scientist Harold Innis and his works on 19th century Canada. Production of primary resources for distant markets and the problems of transportation as characteristics of Canadian spatial economy; Emphasis on environment, technology and distance; Assessment of the fur trade; French beginnings in Canada; Innis' insistence on contextualized theory.