Brown-John: Colonel Talbot — SW Ontario’s first autocratic despot

By: Lloyd Brown-John

In both politics and organizational theory, the exercise of power is central.

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Power can be exercised with consent, through consensus-building, through force of will, and even through simple coercion or force.

Now we have recent examples of power being exercised with force, including Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea and Xi Jinping’s China. There are quite a few additional prominent exercisers of political and social power scattered globally.

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Absolute power exercised fully is often quite different from the exercise of power one might wield as an autocrat. A domineering management style — whether in business, politics or public service — is in fact autocratic. The use of rigid principles to justify a chairperson’s authority is a key characteristic of an emerging autocrat.

Autocrats can emerge in any number of areas and roles, from public service boards to community service organizations. Longevity rather than merit, especially as chair of a board or committee, can lead to a chairperson’s adoption of autocratic behaviour.

“I’ll decide who speaks” or, “I’ll decide how the principles are to be applied,” and even: “My skill or no skill.” We’ve all had experience with petty autocrats infused with glimmers of conceit.

An individual can become autocratic by virtue of powers vested in them — inherent powers to a role such as chair of a publicly elected board or committee.

My favorite example of an autocrat in local history was Colonel Thomas Talbot (1771-1853) who actually held in his grasp most lands from what is now Norfolk County through Elgin County, much of Middlesex County, southern Kent County and all of Essex County

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Of Anglo-Irish nobility, he served several important roles in Upper Canada, including his final years as Crown Land Agent. In that capacity, he selected those to whom land could be granted based on whether they appeared to him to be productive and industrious settlers.

In “Lake Erie Baron: The Fable of Colonel Thomas Talbot” Frederick Hamil wrote about Talbot’s mode of allocating land: “He has a surveyor’s arrangement with 100 acre plots of land numbered and pencilled in a settler’s title.” Settlers had been obligated to clear the street abutting their land, form a cabin and clear land for agricultural purposes.

Failure to meet the stipulations can also (and did) lead Colonel Talbot to make spend of his India rubber eraser and change one settler’s title with one other. As Hamil suggests: “He is resolve, jury and executioner of his non-public regulations … (there is) no authority extra despotic than the vitality which Colonel Talbot possesses.”

Among the most legend of Talbot’s actions connected to Essex County and the founding of the City of Essex — or Essex Centre as in the inspiration named — can also additionally be camouflage in a well-written and well-researched ebook on early City of Essex historical previous.

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In “The Rising Village: An Early Historical previous of Essex Ontario” Laura Brett paperwork how the first settlers along what grew to develop into ceaselessly known as Talbot Accelerate obtained their land grants from the on the total capricious Talbot. Brett’s ebook is extra than an legend of Talbot as her cause is to narrative and narrative the emergence of a town she, and hundreds of others, preserve dear.

Windsor writer Patrick Brode’s “Alexander Cameron and the Flowering of the County of Essex, 1853-1893” is about an early local land developer. Cameron at one point thought of naming the emerging Essex Centre community after his wife Medora. She did rate a street title in Essex.

In the case of Talbot, his autocracy was once frankly unrestrained. He prevailed in a period when democracy, consensus and compromise were not needed attributes either of politicians or land agents.

The colonel was once our first regional operational autocrat. We’ve had others but none with such a noteworthy historical past. And take into consideration how many roads are named in his honour.

Autocracy can seep into organizational behaviour. Those with a preference for democracy can also remain vigilant to autocrats wherever they emerge.

Lloyd Brown-John is a University of Windsor professor emeritus of political science and director of Canterbury ElderCollege. He can also be reached at [email protected].

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