Canada and the British Empire: A Review Essay

British imperialism remains alive and well as a subject of historical inquiry in the early twenty-first century. The field is dynamic; its historians are extremely productive. Over the past quarter century, the idea of the end of the British Empire, the growth of post-colonial and gender-theorized academic politics, and an increasing intellectual interest in the global context of local experiences have stimulated a thriving industry of new imperial histories and historiographical debates. It has been several decades since imperial history has been represented in academic scholarship as being, essentially, the work of empowered British men. The fact that there is no consensus on how the history of the British Empire should be understood or represented is evidenced by the several strikingly dissimilar reviews that the recently published volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire have received.¹ For example, while both Antoinette Burton and Philip Murphy agree that it is unfortunate that the books offer no serious engagement with the highly influential theories of (among others) Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak, their general assessments of the Oxford empire history project differ greatly. Burton offers a scathing critique of the ‘very traditional narratives’ that dominate the volume on the nineteenth century (she particularly laments the relative lack of attention to women, aboriginal peoples who acted as agents of their own destinies, and gender and race as categories of analysis) and the overtly conservative, ‘view from the Senior Common Room’ discussion of British Empire historiography in volume five of the series.² Alternately, Murphy’s review is congratulatory: ‘The three final volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire confirm that the project has been an enormous success. They do credit to everyone involved, and above all to the general editor of the series, Wm Roger Louis. . . . [Few] scholars would have dared even to embark on such an undertaking, and fewer still could have brought it off with such skill.’³ As these reviews pointedly remind us, the writing (and reading) of imperial history is a political activity.

The integration of empire history into the Canadian historical context (along with historians’ disinclination to do so) is likewise politically charged. Until recently, historians of Canada have shown little interest in writing histories that seek to illuminate the nation’s imperial past. In spite of the fact that Carl Berger’s Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914 (published in 1970) became recognized as an important contribution to Canadian national history, it seems to have generated limited enthusiasm for further studies of the subject.⁴ According to Phillip Buckner, the historical relationship between Canada and Britain had practically disappeared from Canadian studies by the time he took it upon himself to stir up interest in the subject with his presidential address to the Canadian Historical Association in 1993.⁵ Moreover, Buckner notes, the lack of interest by Canadian historians in this subject has coincided with a historiographical trend in the field of imperial history to favour studies of Britain’s ‘informal’ empire over studies which focus upon Britain’s white settler societies, so that Canada has been largely written out of empire histories produced by academics situated outside of Canada. The Oxford History of the British Empire series serves as a case in point. In Buckner’s opinion, ‘if the Oxford History is to be criticized for downplaying the significance of the Dominions to the Empire, contemporary Canadian (and Australian and New Zealand) historians must accept some responsibility for encouraging them to do so.’⁶ In other words, historians of the British Empire have systematically robbed Canada and the other dominions of their rightful positions of central importance in...