“Freedom of the Fassions”: The Politics of the Street in Montreal and the Struggle against the British Fiscal-Military State

Abstract

This article examines street protests in early nineteenth-century Lower Canada as a lens through which to study the movement of economic and political liberal ideas around the British Empire. These were not backward-looking evocations of an anticapitalist moral economy but embraced the tenets of the new political economy emerging in Britain. Protestors drew on the work of British political economists, as well as currents of Irish agrarian radicalism, to mobilize a constituency of small merchants and artisans. Using a variety of legal records, the mainstream colonial press, and the satirical Scribbler permits a multilayered analysis of the cultural and political meanings expressed in out-of-door political activity. If, as recent historians have argued, the British empire was imbricated with the development of liberalism, this microstudy illustrates that British colonies were critical sites for the articulation of modern notions of economic and civil rights, including the rights of consumers.