Canada and the British Empire (review)

Reviewed by: Canada and the British Empire Andrew Smith Canada and the British Empire. Edited by Phillip Buckner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. 320, $75.00 Editor Phillip Buckner and his contributors should be commended for their fine work. This collection of essays will give readers a more complete understanding of the essential role of Britain in the making of the Canadian nation-state and of the impact of the British Empire on Canadian society. This book should be read by every Canadian historian, regardless of his or her temporal or thematic specialization. The first five essays in this collection give a narrative history of the British Empire’s impact on present-day Canada from the seventeenth century onwards. This section of the book will be particularly useful to undergraduates, since it provides a framework for understanding the thematic essays in the second half of the collection. The essay by John Reid and Elizabeth Mancke, which looks at the period before 1783, is especially helpful because it presents a concise summary of British policies towards First Nations, Acadian, and French-Canadian people. J.M. Bumsted surveys developments in the early nineteenth century. Buckner’s essay on the period from 1860 to 1901 underscores Britain’s crucial part in the creation of the Dominion of Canada. Buckner correctly points out that Canadian Confederation in the 1860s, far from being a bid by nationalists hoping to reduce British control, was designed to ensure the survival of British rule in northern North America (67). John Herd Thompson’s essay on the period from 1901 to 1939 calls into question the widespread notion that the Great War was Canada’s ‘war of independence.’ Thompson shows that strong imperialist sentiment survived the war and that Britishness remained central to the Canadian identity in subsequent decades. He thus demolishes the myth that English-speaking Canadians somehow ceased to regard themselves as British because of Vimy Ridge (97). Many readers will be surprised by Buckner’s essay on the period between 1939 and 1982, which shows that a strong British-imperial identity persisted in Canada until the mid-1960s. [End Page 539] The thematic essays in this collection match the high quality of the narrative chapters. Many of these essays advance conclusions that will surprise some readers. Colin Coates’s study of French-Canadian attitudes to the empire shows that a minority of French Canadians were militantly loyal to Britain. Sarah Carter’s essay on the relations of First Nations to the Crown comes to a similar conclusion. The chapters by Jane Errington and Marjory Harper on migration from the British Isles to British North America provide an excellent introduction to the literature on migration studies. Essays by James Hiller on Newfoundland’s place in the empire, Adele Perry on gender and imperialism, Philip Girard on Britain’s impact on Canadian law, and Douglas McCalla on Anglo-Canadian economic linkages round out the collection. This is a work of first-rate scholarship. Many of the essays blend political and social history to show that the rivalry between social and political historians that preoccupied Canadian historians in the 1990s was based on a false thesis. For instance, Philip Girard shows that the tendency of Canadian policy-makers to look to Britain as a role model contributed to Canada’s decision to decriminalize homosexuality and abolish capital punishment in the postwar era (275). Girard’s research is hard to categorize as either political or social history, but it does illuminate the impact of Britain on Canadian law and the complexities of the Anglo-Canadian relationship. This book is not without problems. All of the essays deal with the empire’s impact on Canada. Perhaps a chapter on imperial Canada’s impact on the United Kingdom would have been in order. Such a chapter could have examined the role of transplanted Canadians in British politics (one became prime minister) and would have underscored the fact the imperial relationship was reciprocal rather than unidirectional in its impact. Another major shortcoming of this book is the lack of attention paid to the impact of the British connection on the evolution of Canada’s welfare state after 1939. For instance, nobody familiar...

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