Sobering the State: The Cultural Origins of Alcohol Regulation in Canada, 1820-1929

Ethan Shapiro, University of Toronto

The current research investigates the origins of contemporary Canadian alcohol regulation, focusing on the roughly hundred-year period from pre-Confederation to the era of national and provincial prohibitions. I ask: how does drinking become a public problem in Canada? How is responsibility for this problem negotiated between state and society actors? The paper suggests that between the first few decades of the early 19th and 20th centuries, ownership of the ‘alcohol problem’ was transferred from civil society to the state – a process epitomized by the transition from mass temperance to prohibition in Canada. Drawing on textual analysis of period documents (from manifestos and histories of temperance ‘moral entrepreneurs’ to the diaries and observations of contemporary laypersons), I argue that two key necessary conditions define this regulatory transition from society to state: (1) the social structuring and material implications of alcohol use prior to regulation, and (2) the active cultural work of intermediaries to problematize this existing structure. While the socially stratified impacts of alcohol use in pre-Confederation Canada created a potential coalition of actors with converging ‘interests’ against alcohol (e.g., women, employers, clerics), the combination of religious and economic doctrines by temperance leaders enabled the formation of a coalition between these actors in practice. Beyond conventional interpretations of temperance as a top-down imposition of middle-class Puritan values, the analysis offers a view of the cultural processes through which elites and laypeople pursue alcohol regulation.

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 Presented in Session 99. Interpreting the State