Abstract

Nineteenth-century understandings of malaria as an environmental illness led Euro-Americans to pathologize certain places as healthy or unhealthy, including Upper Canada where the disease was endemic. Using the construction of the Rideau Canal (1826-1832) as a case study, this thesis asks how British imperial agents reconciled their visions of settlement, agriculture, and growth for Upper Canada with malaria’s presence in the colony. Drawing on the written work, financial reports, and correspondence of John Mactaggart and Lieutenant-Colonel John By, I argue that imperial agents mobilized knowledge of disease from across the British Empire to rationalize their presence in Upper Canada. Mactaggart carefully crafted the personae he presented so that experiences with disease flagged his loyalty and dedication to the imperial project. Meanwhile, By dealt with malaria’s paralyzing effect on canal construction by avoiding disease as much as possible and expanding his vision of the canal so that it healed the landscape it traversed. The canal was subsequently understood as a kind of health infrastructure by settlers. My thesis emphasizes the Rideau Canal’s role as settler colonial infrastructure and situates Canada within the global imperial history of malaria, thus also showing the limitations of current understandings of malaria as a “tropical disease.” My work also adds to our understanding of environment and health’s interconnectedness in pre-Confederation Canada. I end by investigating the environmental longue durée of the canal’s construction in the twenty-first century, focusing especially on those associated with health such as wetland drainage.