Canada Built by United Empire Loyalists [15min]

We're now at the joining of the 18th and 19th centuries. British troops are fighting in Flanders fields -- that's Flanders 1793. The British industrial revolution and the French constitutional Revolution are changing the ways people live and think. Thomas Jefferson has introduced the dollar, dime and cent. "This Sceptred Isle: Empire" is a narrative history of the British Empire from Ireland in the 12th century to the independence of India in the 20th, told in 90 programmes written by historian Christopher Lee and narrated by actor Juliet Stevenson. (You will be able to listen again online to up to five most recent episodes of "Empire".)

Britain has lost America but it has strengthened its hold on Canada largely because the 100,000 or so British loyalists who left America for the north. They were known as Tories or United Empire Loyalists. In 1791, the Canada Act created Upper and Lower Canada. In Lower Canada lived a 100,000 French and about 10,000 British who'd escaped from America. In Upper Canada lived some 20,000 British. Many headed west, including Alexander Mackenzie, who reached the Rockies and the Pacific in 1793. The Scots succeeded in Canada and by 1800 the most prosperous trading was controlled by Scottish merchants of Montreal.

In the 1830s there were rebellions in Canada and the first earl of Durham was sent to report on conditions and the need for a future structure of the colony. He produced the Report on the Affairs of British North America. Durham promoted the idea of assimilation, bringing the French into the larger colonial community. The Durham report was a broader comment on how colonies should be administered. There was emerging a concept that the local authorities represented grass roots but the legislatures represented the views not necessarily of the colony as a whole, but particularly the Crown. There was a clearer acceptance that to try to hold a colony by force would only bring revolution. The seeds of the independence movement were sown in the 19th and not the 20th century.