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The regular publication of the debates of the Upper Canadian House of Assembly in colonial newspapers after 1821 redefined the political status and role of newspaper readers, elected representatives and non-elective legislative institutions. Developing insights from Jürgen Habermas, the transition from scarcity to abundance of parliamentary intelligence and the resulting political dynamics are seen as playing a crucial role in the broader process of defining and lending credibility to deliberative democracy in the province.

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British travellers commented frequently on those of African descent they encountered in colonial Nova Scotia, especially their material conditions and prospects. Those who published accounts at the peak of the campaign to abolish slavery in the British Empire intervened directly in debates about whether former slaves would prosper under conditions of colonial freedom. They cast themselves as objective imperial observers and Nova Scotia’s black communities as experiments in free labour. Attending to how most crafted and reworked their observations to argue against emancipation in the West Indies situates Nova Scotia and travel texts in intellectual histories of the production of colonial knowledge, debates about slavery, and the nature of nineteenth-century liberalism.

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