Ruth Compton Brouwer receives award for family history book

Ruth Compton Brouwer, Professor Emerita of History, recently received the Clio Award from the Canadian Historical Association for her book, All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia.

“The Clio prize is especially gratifying in that it recognizes All Things in Common as a solid and professional work of historical scholarship,” says Brouwer. The Clio Prize is awarded by the Canadian Historical Association for meritorious publications or for exceptional contributions by individuals or organizations to regional history.

Brouwer looked to her own family history for inspiration for All Things in Common. In 1909, the Compton family of Prince Edward Island pooled their resources and began operating a cluster of communally owned businesses, subsequently incorporated as “B. Compton Limited.” Family members from across Canada and the United States returned to the island commune to work in enterprises that ranged from a sawmill to lobster boats to farms. Although the Comptons never called their PEI communities a “utopia,” their island ventures held many similarities to such utopian endeavours as Sointula on Vancouver Island or Oneida in upstate New York.

The book begins with loyalist refugees William and Sarah Compton and is not a sanitized or romanticized story, instead chronicling the praiseworthy and the questionable, relating details of unconventional sexual and marital relations, bad business decisions, and failed aspirations. It is also a history of dissenter Protestantism, with a focus on the little-known but robust McDonaldite sect, founded by the renegade Church of Scotland missionary Donald McDonald on Prince Edward Island in the early 19th-century.

Brouwer says she did not intend to write All Things in Common, as it is a complete departure from her previous monographs. She was also hesitant, as a professional historian, to take on the project because she is a descendant of the people she would write about. “But I eventually came to recognize that this family's utopian community and the circumstances that led up to it were a fascinating part of Canadian and, indeed, North American social history,” says Brouwer.

Work on the book began in 2012, with a great deal of archival and online research as well as research into the uncatalogued papers of the principal figure in the family's utopian community. 

“Fortunately, the research phase was largely complete when COVID-19 struck,” says Brouwer.

Brouwer was hired at King’s in 1993 by “the late and much-loved history chair, Jacques Goutor.” She adds that “the King's History department was a stimulating and collegial place to work. Several of my colleagues there remain good friends and, through them, I remain aware of its stellar work in teaching and research.”

You can purchase All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia at Chapters or on Amazon.