After the American Revolution, the British gave away Six Nations lands at the negotiating table in 1783. The loyalist Six Nations claimed territory in what would become Upper Canada in 1791. The chapter first examines the corruption scandal around Guy Johnson’s abuse of Indian department funds in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. It then follows the move of the Six Nations to territory that would become Upper Canada, where their presence posed questions about Indigenous sovereignty and the extent of imperial control. Joseph Brant tried to exploit his interstitial role both to accumulate personal power and to promote Indigenous sovereignty, even as the Grand River community struggled over the best economic strategy to adopt and many rejected Brant. Despite considerable ambiguity and the enduring importance of kinship-based political strategies, the eventual colonial response to the challenge of Indigenous claims would eventually be to seek to control the membership of Indigenous communities, while failing to protect Indigenous lands or investments, even as ‘white’ and ‘Indian’ increasingly became separate social categories. Attacks on the power of Indigenous peoples were linked rhetorically to attacks on corruption and on family bio-power.

The story of Catholic Canada is not simply a binary of French and English. Rather, there were a number of groups, including significant populations of Scottish Catholics, in the Maritime provinces and Upper Canada (modern Ontario). This chapter takes as its starting point the regional nature of Canadian history and examines the development of distinctively (and distinct) Irish Catholic communities in the Maritime provinces and Upper Canada/Ontario.

The story of the fusion of law and equity often centres on the story of New York state, whence the Field Code went forth, or of England. This chapter shows the more varied experiences of fusion in colonial British North America, and the degree of experimentation pursued by colonial governments that differentiated the local arrangements – and means of administering equity – from the arrangements at ‘home’ in England, or those in New York state. Initially, equity was often administered only by the governor or colonial council – or by a court of concurrent legal and equitable jurisdiction. Specialist Courts of Chancery came later, and were criticised as the confederation movement grew. Later, the legal colonialism set in which saw the ways of administering equity in England mimicked in the colonies. Even then, local variation survived as in relation to the treatment of mortgages.