I recently (a few months ago) read Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer. In it he talks about the settlement of what became the U.S., broken into four regions: New England, the Midlands (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware), Tidewater (Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas), and Appalachia. He talks about what sort of people generally settled there from the British Isles, and how all four regions can trace their cultural lineage to a region of Britain.
New England was settled primarily by Puritans from Anglia/Eastern England, Appalachia by northern English and Lowland Scots (who also made up most of the people who went from Britain to Ulster, and then from there to America too), the Midlands by Quakers and merchants (a lot of Dutch there too, but he was focused on Britons mostly) from central England, and Tidewater by the very rich and the very poor of southwest England, coming to establish plantations or work as indentured servants, respectively.
I was wondering what sort of Britons settled in Canada? Was there a real "type" of people who came? I would guess merchants maybe, because of the resources and it doesn't seem like the type of place you could make vast plantation estates in like the South. You don't really hear much about any sort of Puritan heritage in Canada either like in New England, but then I don't know much about Canadian culture or history so maybe there is. Did you not get many people from Britain until after the Seven Years War?
Not many people came here until after the Seven Years War. Before then it was mostly French.
We've got mostly descendants of Highland Scots and Northern English in the Maritime Provinces while United Empire Loyalists settled in Ontario and New Brunswick after 1812. Not sure about Newfoundland but they were a British colony until 1949 so I'd assume they're all descended from more recent English and Irish immigration.
>>903028
Interesting, so did all of your French people outside Quebec get deported to Louisiana? I also heard of a few Acadians going to New England too. But like was the whole population almost transplanted? And why did Quebec stay French?
>>903051
No there are lots of French people in other provinces. Basically Quebec is the epicentre and the fewer it gets the further away from it you go, with BC and the territories being the least amount of francophones and the maritimes/parts of Ontario being the most.
>>903051
No there are still a few communities of Acadians in New Brunswick. For the most part though the area has been Anglicised since the expulsion. Quebec remained mostly French due to the Quebec Act which guaranteed them their language and religious rights.
>>903051
Nope, in the Maritimes (especially New Brunswick, but to a lesser extent PEI and Nova Scotia) there are plenty of Acadians. New Brunswick is 1/3 Francophone.
Other provinces have smaller francophone minorities, though in some cases long histories like in Manitoba.
In addition to what that other anon said, the Highland Clearances in Scotland and the Famine in Ireland sent a lot of Scottish and Irish immigrants here. A huge chunk of Nova Scotia and PEI are of Scottish descent. There are around 2,000 Scottish Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia and the language has never died in Canada.
Newfoundland has a lot of Irish and English. While French has pretty much disappeared from Newfoundland there are still a lot of places with French names. At one point Irish was spoken in Newfoundland but it died out about 100 years ago.
A lot of Anglos in Quebec have Irish descent. The British tried to use Irish immigrants to put the power of the Catholic Church into British hands, taking advantage of the tension between Irish and French-Canadians, though it didn't work.
Here's a nice song written in the 1700s about a Scottish settler who came to Canada because of the Highland Clearances.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNS4u9b7U4U
>>903091
>Anglo
>Irish descent
>>903093
Anglo meaning Anglophone.
>>903093
They speak English, close enough.
>>903051
>And why did Quebec stay French?
Stupidly high birthrate, look up "la revanche des berceaux"
>>903116
Not only that, but the British were never really interested in wiping out French. Even only a few years after the conquest people in Quebec were guaranteed the right to their language, religion, and French civil laws. To this day Quebec law incorporates Civil Law whereas other provinces don't.
Official bilingualism is relatively new, but historically there was never any active effort to get rid of French in Canada. The country has always been bilingual in a sense.
>>903116
dat Quiet Revolution though. Anglo Strong.
>>902996
In terms of ethnic groups, English, French, Scottish and Irish are the four largest groups (in that order.
My family is from the northern highlands,and my great grandparents spoke Gaelic as their mother tongue but its mostly a gimmick for us now.
We came here as the hunting-trapping sort, and until my generation the family still does. I'm within the first group to live in the city to get an education, but I sometimes wish I kind of kept with the family.
That's mostly speaking for me, but its a fairly old "Canadian" family, and I'm sure others have similar stories.
Thanks for the replies guys. I don't know a terrible lot about Canada so this is interesting.
>>903261
That's fair. I'll readily admit historically Canada is not a very interesting country. But its a nice place to live so I don't mind.
Here something I find interesting.
Europe is warmer than Canada because of the hot water flowing northward up the Atlantic. British sailors used to joke that they were heading south for the warm weather when they were going to Hudson Bay because it was indeed further south but was significantly colder than Britain.
[spoilers on his]And if climate change shuts down the oceanic conveyor then Europe will become as cold as Canada. Also we may all suffocate on hydrogen sulfide.[/spoilers on his]
