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Reviewed by:
  • The Orange Order in Canada
  • Allan Rowe
The Orange Order in Canada. Edited by David A. Wilson. Dublin: Four Courts, 2007. Pp. 272, $65.00

The Orange Order in Canada is a welcome addition to the historiography of Canadian Orangeism. As editor David Wilson notes in his introduction, recent scholarship on the order has focused predominantly on anti-Catholicism and sectarian violence. The essays in this collection go well beyond this narrow emphasis by examining the social, cultural, and political dimensions of the order, while at the same time situating Canadian Orangeism in an international context. [End Page 600] The result is a volume that significantly advances our understanding of one of Canada’s most important institutions.

This collection is taken from papers presented at a 2005 conference at St Michael’s College, the first conference devoted to the Orange Order in Canada. In addition to Wilson’s introduction, the book consists of nine essays covering a wide range of issues, written by some of Canada’s leading experts on Irish-Canadian history. The first two essays examine Canadian Orangeism within a British imperial context. Donald MacRaild analyzes financial mutualism and self-improvement as aspects of the Canadian Orange experience that nurtured the order’s core Protestant and loyalist identity, as British migration connected Canada to an emerging imperial ‘Orange world’ in the nineteenth century. Eric Kaufmann’s comparative study of Ontario, Newfoundland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland examines a wide range of demographic, social, and political factors, both local and international, that influenced the success of the order in each jurisdiction. Ian Radforth and David Wilson contribute essays analyzing the political dimensions of Orangeism in mid-nineteenth-century Canada. Radforth’s engaging article focuses on the unsuccessful efforts by Orangemen in Canada to gain royal recognition during the 1860 royal visit of the Prince of Wales. This episode, argues Radforth, was representative of the tension that often marked relations between the order and representatives of the British Crown in both Ireland and Canada. Wilson analyzes Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s personal evolution from anti-Orange hostility toward an eventual political alliance with ‘moderate Orangeism.’ While offering significant insight into McGee’s own politics, the essay also situates the Orange Order in the shifting political landscape of the 1860s, illustrating some of the pragmatic compromises made by Orangemen on contentious issues such as separate schools legislation. Brian Clarke revisits the theme of religious riot in Victorian Toronto, examining the frequency and intensity of street fights between the Orange Young Britons and their Catholic counterparts, the Young Irishmen. While the two groups clashed on numerous occasions in the 1870s, Clarke argues that the violence was limited in scope and rarely caused loss of life or property; further, the number of fights subsequently declined in the face of popular pressure and Orange restraint, the latter a result of the order’s effort to present a more respectable public image. William Jenkins provides a fascinating account of Orangeism in early-twentieth-century Toronto, illustrating how the city’s Orange lodges became sites where notions of duty, masculinity, and respectability were inculcated among Toronto’s young [End Page 601] Protestant men. Located in the self-declared ‘hub of the Empire,’ Toronto’s lodges were also spaces where local, national, and imperial identities were often fused, with struggles against Home Rule in Ireland and French Catholic rights in Canada conceptualized as part of the same fight against a global papist threat. John FitzGerald examines the order’s role in Newfoundland’s Confederation debates during the 1940s, while Cecil Houston and William Smyth analyze the factors that contributed to the decline of Orangeism in Canada after 1920. While the essays cover a wide range of issues, the revisionist goal of going beyond the traditional historiographic focus on anti-Catholicism brings a strong degree of unity to the collection. For example, MacRaild argues that associationalism provides a window into Orange identity that goes beyond sectarian violence; Wilson illustrates the constructive role played by the order in the emergence of a pluralistic Canadian nationality; and Clarke’s analysis explicitly challenges the stereotype of Toronto as the ‘Belfast of North America.’

The book closes with an essay by...

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