Tenant League of Prince Edward Island 1864-1867
Presents, explains and places in context the history of the Tenant League of Prince Edward Island, an agrarian movement committed to use of direct action to end the system of leasehold land tenure which Great Britain had imposed upon the colony in 1767
When Prince Edward Island was finally handed over to the British in 1763, virtually the entire land surface of the island was turned over to private proprietors on the understanding that they would finance both settlement and administration of the territory. The proprietors did not fulfill their obligations, but did cling tenaciously to their privileges, ultimately becoming an anachronistic group of landlords - partly absentee - on a North American continent where freehold tenure was regarded as the norm. The colony the British government created at the behest of the proprietors did not flourish and merely existed on the fringes of British North America, but it did survive as an autonomous government to become the smallest (in both land area and population) of the provinces of Canada. Its early history, though often tangential to the larger dynamic of Canadian development, was a tumultuous and complicated one.
