Using a variety of documentary sources, including hundreds of petitions, letters, and reports to the government, Little traces the complex relationship between community life and government regulation. He reveals that at the same time development of responsible government was leading to increasingly centralized authority at the provincial level, a persistent sense of localism was forcing the state to decentralize its new institutions at the community level. The local population of this largely American-settled corner of Quebec, Little shows, clearly exerted an important influence on the evolution of the education, legal, social welfare, and municipal systems. State and Society in Transition makes a major contribution to the study of state formation in the recently unified province of Canada by taking into account not only the dialectical process between the centre and periphery but also the impact of institutional reform on social and economic development in general.
- ISBN10 6612854375
- ISBN13 9786612854378
- Publish Date 24 February 1997 (first published 1 January 1997)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 12 October 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint McGill-Queen's University Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 352
- Language English