The liberal corporate order and the market transition in colonial Upper Canada, 1825–1841

ABSTRACT This analysis of the corporate ‘franchise state’ in the settler colony of Upper Canada (Ontario) highlights its role in introducing both a liberal market and a corporate revolution. I contrast the liberal legislative project to create laissez faire markets with the private corporate agenda of those legislators, a group of ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ known as the Family Compact. The corporation became the vehicle by which these oligarchs controlled trade and introduced managed markets in the fictitious commodities of land, labor and money; the fictitious commodities were legal reifications (as was the corporation itself) used to govern the trade in real commodities. Control of these corporations allowed these gentlemanly capitalists to also assume control of British emigration and thereby introduce new forms of ‘systemic colonization’ and settler colonialism; and change conceptions of colonial citizenship from loyalism to liberalism. The corporate revolution was thus key to the formation of liberal settler colonialism in the province.