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Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2026
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Summary
[T]he subject of Colonization … has, in upwards of fiveand- twenty years, occasioned me to more reflection than any of my literary productions; indeed, than all my other works put together … . If we look at home, all is in revolutionary fermentation, and it is only by casting our eyes to the colonies—those safety-valves, to which the existing frame of society may owe its preservation—that the ebullition, the progress of knowledge, may be continued with safety.
—John Galt, “Colonization”Origins
Over the course of 1827, John Galt wrote regularly from Upper Canada to his publisher William Blackwood in Edinburgh. Well known for his many novels of Scottish life, Galt was also the founder and inaugural superintendent of the new Canada Company. This joint-stock venture had garnered a million pounds in capital investment and a Crown charter to clear and settle the Huron Tract, a million acres of land between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron that, for millennia, had been home to indigenous peoples including the Wendat (Huron). Galt arrived in Upper Canada in 1826. By the end of 1827, he had already founded two towns in the Huron Tract: Guelph, “reported to be situated in one of the finest tracts of land probably in the whole American continent”; and Goderich, the “remotest British settlement on the continent of America, out[side] of the Hudson Bay territories.”
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- Bogle Corbetor The Emigrants, pp. xvii - lviiiPublisher: Edinburgh University PressFirst published in: 2026
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