(1 June 1796-12 July 1872), economist. Born at Footdee, Aberdeen, Scotland. Parents: John Rae and his wife Margaret Cuthbert. He was educated at Marischal College in Aberdeen and as a medical student at the University of Edinburgh. Though he did not receive a medical degree, he was often referred to in later years as Dr Rae. He was married to a wife whose Christian name was Eliza but whose surname is not known. In the spring of 1822, Rae emigrated with his wife to Canada. From later that spring, till November 1831, he operated a boys’ school at Williamstown, GC. It is possible that while he was in Williamstown he also practised as a physician, and he was certainly appointed a coroner for the Eastern District. Rae, who had shown marked intellectual and scholarly interests from an early age, continued his researches and reflections in Canada. In 1834, he published an important and highly original work in economics called Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy (Boston, Hilliard, Gray & Co., 1834; pp. xvi, 414). This work was only a portion of a treatise on the prospects and resources of Upper Canada on which Rae had been working for some years.

     From 1834 to 1848, Rae was headmaster of a grammar school in Hamilton. His wife died in Aug. 1849. Leaving New York by ship in Dec. 1849, Rae set out for the California gold fields by way of Panama, and from California he moved on in the spring of 1851 to the Hawaiian Islands, where he spent most of the rest of his life on the island of Maui. There he operated a school, held several public offices, and continued his studies and his writing. The wealthy New York businessman Roderick William Cameron (later Sir Roderick) was an old friend of many years’ standing. Cameron was one of Rae’s pupils at Williamstown, and he had plenty of opportunity to know Rae during the time when both men lived in Hamilton. He now persuaded the elderly Rae to leave Hawaii to spend his remaining years in the Cameron home, Clifton Burley, on Staten Island. Rae arrived in New York in the summer of 1871, and he died about a year later. He was buried on Staten Island, but the grave remained unmarked.

     It is reasonable to suppose that a good part of the work for Rae’s Statement was done during his years in Glengarry. His biographer R. Warren James makes the valuable point that Rae should not be seen entirely as an isolated or rural figure– he had carried out his basic researches in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Paris before coming to Canada. (James, I, 189) During Rae’s years in Williamstown, a number of able and well-connected men lived nearby: Duncan Cameron (Sir Roderick’s father), Simon Fraser, Col. Alexander Fraser of Fraserfield, the Hon. John McGillivray, John Macdonald of Garth, and the great Bishop Macdonell. Unfortunately, we know little of what exact intellectual connections, if any, he had with his neighbours during his years as a Williamstown schoolmaster. Given that the social status of a schoolmaster in Upper Canada at that time was generally low, Rae himself may not have felt it consistent with his dignity to try to create bridges between himself and his social betters. Dr James Grant, another GC link with the Scottish enlightenment, did not come to GC till the year after Rae left. Donald McDiarmid, another Williamstown teacher of this time, had a literary interest in the poet Ossian.

     Rae’s book was admired by Nassau William Senior and the great John Stuart Mill but it attracted little attention in the wider scholarly community in the 19th century, and Rae remained through his life a thoroughly obscure and neglected figure. However, there was an Italian translation of the work in 1856, and in 1905 an American scholar Charles Whitney Mixter brought out a new edition under the title of the Sociological Theory of Capital, in which he included information on Rae’s life. More recently, in a distinguished scholarly edition, Rae’s principal writings, including his Statement, have been edited and reprinted by R. Warren James, with much biographical material on Rae. This edition is known as John Rae Political Economist: an Account of His Life and a Compilation of His Main Writings (2 vols., University of Toronto Press, 1965). While R. Warren James’s edition was in preparation, a New York publisher also reprinted the Statement in 1964. A conference on Rae was held at the University of Aberdeen in March 1996 to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth and to honour him as a “distinguished alumnus.” The conference was also, necessarily, a tribute to Warren James, who did so much to restore Rae’s life and work. The conference proceedings have been reprinted as a collection of scholarly essays by various authors under the title of The Economics of John Rae, ed. O. F. Hamouda, C. Lee and D. Mair (London and New York, Routledge, 1998; pp. xvi, 288; series Routledge Studies in the History of Economics).

     The Statement was Rae’s only published book, but in the journals of his time he published on topics which included education, church-state relations, the Clergy Reserves, geology, the Polynesian languages, and the diseases of the Sandwich Islands. Until R. Warren James’s edition drew attention to him, Rae was a totally forgotten figure in Glengarry, well known though his good friend Sir Roderick Cameron remained. It may be noted that c. 1832 another Dr Rae, a graduate of Edinburgh, was practising medicine in an area the northern Glengarrians knew, that of St. Andrew’s, Que., south of Lachute. (Rigby) John Rae was the brother of Ann Cuthbert Rae and was the uncle of Robert Knight and the great-uncle of Robert Skakel Knight. R.Warren James was told that a portrait of Rae (which has now evidently vanished) hung “for years” in Sir Roderick Cameron’s “Clifton Burley.” (I, 54)

The main sources for Rae’s life are R. Warren James’s two-volume edition of John Rae (as cited), and R. Warren James’s life of Rae in Dictionary of Canadian Biography Vol. X * R. Warren James, “John Rae: the Lost Letters,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 23:3 (Sept. 2001) 343-352 * MDict * Bibliography of Glengarry: index * G. R. Rigby, A History of Lachute (1964) 30