1. Objectifs

Intentions :
This chapter focuses on XIXth century Quebec and the Cape colony, and «explores the question of which marriage or inheritance law determined the rights of husbands and wives when couples or single people migrated. [It also] compares the very different early responses to British settlers’ claims to the right to British laws. [Finally, it explores], the ways some politicians asserted a particular version of very British bourgeois masculinity rooted in common-law rules of husband and wife against the greater rights these particular colonial laws offered wives, widows, and children.» (p. 147)

Questions/Hypothèses :
The chapter is based on the following questions: « Did the property laws of particular colonies have an impact on their attractiveness and reputations as destinations for migrants? Did migration to colonies of settlements modify the expectations of migrants regarding the property rights and claims of wives, husbands, and children […]?» (p. 147)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
«The Quebec material used here draws on nineteenth-century political debates, legal cases reports, and colonial investigations […].» (p. 163)

Type de traitement des données :
Analyse de contenu
Réflexion critique

3. Résumé

«Debates about inheritance and marriage law in colonial legislative councils and assemblies and their reporting, along with the transcripts of prominent court cases in colonial newspapers, placed domestic issues in the public sphere. They taught citizens the details of the law and of the differences between bodies of law. And they reiterated the lesson that good men provided for their wives and children. Roman-Dutch law, or the Custom of Paris, in contrast to Aboriginal rules of marriage, presented an alternative […]. In colonies in which friction and cooperation between two groups of Europeans colonizers were grafted in diverse ways into the ongoing brutal colonization of Indigenous people and their lands, such debates served at times to reiterate and remake differences between the British and the ''other'' conquered Europeans of each colony […]. Public debates concurrently sustained their collective assertions of superiority as Europeans and affirmed the centrality of legal, heterosexual marriage between Europeans to the success of white settler colonial projects. Debates about marriage or inheritance law were never only about the intimate and the economic rights of men and women within families. As colonies competed with each other for settlers and sought to forge vibrant economies, laws about marriage, inheritance and property were critical components in fostering, or hindering, colonial progress and civilization.» (p. 161-162)