Hunting for Empire: Narratives of Sport in Rupert’s Land, 1840–1870 (review)

John Reiger’s American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, published in 1975, advanced the thesis that upper-class American sportsmen played a significant, and largely benevolent, role in fostering a conservation ethos that spread across North America during the nineteenth century. Since then, a number of historians have challenged Reiger’s ‘conservation’ thesis and brought greater nuance to the role sportsmen played in ‘appropriating’ the forests and streams of the North American wilderness. Mark Gillespie’s examination of the imperial dimensions of the British hunter in North America makes Hunting for Empire a welcome addition to the ongoing dialogue concerning sportsmen and their wilderness landscape.

Gillespie takes as his primary source material about a dozen monographs written by British hunters who visited Rupert’s Land between 1840 and 1870. Gillespie covers a formative period, still little studied, when a vanguard of elite sportsmen laid the foundation for what would become a more popular state-promoted outdoor tourism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author’s use of these hunting monographs as his main corpus of study is notable. While some popular texts have cited this material uncritically, more scholarly studies dismissed what are essentially vainglorious accounts of far-flung sporting adventures – of questionable veracity – that the elite used to measure their sporting achievements against others of their class. What makes Gillespie’s use of this material unique, however, is his careful and systematic analysis of the writing, rhetoric, and even the artwork found within these narratives. In so doing, he convincingly demonstrates the historical and cultural value of these often misused and largely misunderstood texts.

In six brief chapters, Gillespie lays out how the British hunter invested what he saw as an exotic colonial landscape with the values and cultural codes of the British gentleman hunter and by extension those of the British Empire. He begins with an analysis of how the authors of these monographs often paradoxically undercut their own promises to provide true descriptions of their experiences. Nevertheless, as the author makes clear, it is not the absolute truth that gives these works value, but the ‘verisimilitude’ couched in the elite rhetoric concerning nature and empire.

Gillespie covers common themes found in other works of the genre, including British hunting culture and its link to tradition, sporting codes, and class relationships to nature. Nevertheless, the author’s specific focus on the hunter is valuable and illuminating. Many other scholars have too broadly characterized the activities of hunting and angling – activities that while sharing certain ideas about nature, nevertheless had fundamentally different characters and codes, each leading to a different pattern of environmental consequences. At the same time, he removes the hunter from his place as a figure of leisure and places him in the role of an agent of imperialism. Subsequent chapters discuss how the hunting narrative revealed through its picturesque and sublime descriptions the ways that the elite British hunter exercised his masculine superiority by bringing cultural order to a disorganized and unknown colonial wilderness through the integration of natural history, the making of maps, and even the introduction of species.

Overall, Gillespie’s study, while both temporally and geographically limited, provides a crisp snapshot of the elite British hunter’s cultural and environmental footprint in Rupert’s Land. Yet, despite the excellent discussion of the epistemology found in these narratives, which convincingly ties the British hunter to broader themes of cultural appropriation of landscape, the author misses the opportunity to connect the British hunter to the increasing sophistication and spread of an over-arching environmental imperialism. Indeed, elite American hunters in Eastern Canada during the same period employed much of the same rhetoric. They, too, wrote detailed monographs and mapped out the results of their own explorations and sublime experiences, all illustrated by similar picturesque imagery. By the mid-nineteenth century there was an emerging struggle between British, American, and Canadian sportsmen over the...