Transatlantic Subjects: Ideas, Institutions, and Social Experience in Post-Revolutionary British North America (review)

The era of pure national history may be coming to an end. Historians have traditionally been content to examine state formation, institutional and social developments, and the emergence of political cultures within the confines of imagined political borders that serve to define the outer limits of historical inquiry. When defined as "Colonial" American or "pre-Confederation" Canadian, however, research begins with assumed protagonists and antagonists. Over the past few decades historians have begun to realize that these rigidly defined and artificially imposed boundaries are stifling rather than revealing. After all, nations and cultures do not exist in a vacuum. A transnational approach to history, on the other hand, emphasizes the centrality of political, social, and cultural contexts that very seldom respect the political boundaries drawn on a map or the categorical and historiographical limits imposed by historians. It is a relatively new approach, which holds much promise for future scholarship, as indicated by Transatlantic Subjects: Ideas, Institutions, and Social Experience in Post-Revolutionary British North America.

Arising from a conference held at McMaster University in October 2004, Transatlantic Subjects, edited by Nancy Christie, responds to J. G. A. Pocock's call for a "new British history" that would synthesize the study of the peripheral places of empire with the history of the metropole. For Pocock, British history is the history of Greater Britain and vice versa — a point, it should be noted, made by Seeley in 1883. The term British should thus be construed broadly, as the events of British national history have had as much significance for colonists and colonized peoples on the periphery as they did for those in London. Pocock, who provides a forward for Transatlantic Subjects, drives home this point, writing, "the essays in this volume convey a dominant impression that the religious and political problems disturbing the colonies of Upper Canada were derived from those disturbing the British state … it is British history that Transatlantic Subjects both obliges and encourages the reader to study" (p. ix). Pocock is correct in his evaluation of this book's contribution to Canadian historiography.

Christie, a diverse and accomplished scholar of the family, the welfare state, and Protestant churches in Canada, has assembled eleven essays in this eclectic collection. The introduction, which at times totters toward the verbose and dense, nevertheless effectively reunites long-estranged historiographies and sets the stage for a book that aims to analyse the transference of various British cultures and social and political institutions to the New World (p. 18). Through examinations of socio-political institutions, religion, and intellectual discourse, it emerges that Britishness as a value or identity was contested and shaped by the colonial experience, not merely transposed by British loyalists and emigrants. British identity is therefore a product of the interplay between centre and periphery, a unique product of shared transnational contexts.

To make this overarching argument, the book is divided into three sections. "Agrarian Patriots" examines popular or unofficial responses to the imposition and recreation of British institutions, ideas, and power relationships in British North America. Essays by Donald Fyson, Nancy Christie, and Brian Young examine French Canadian acceptance of the civil courts in Lower Canada, the role of Upper Canadian domestic servants in subverting traditional class relations, and the centrality of social institutions to the consolidation of elite power in Lower Canada. The second section, "Provincial Britons," examines how British institutional ideas were reinvented in the British North American colonies. Todd Webb, Michael Gauvreau, and Bruce Curtis focus on the influence of religious and educational institutions and ethnic identity in the formation of British identity. Webb effectively argues that Methodists constructed an inclusive definition of Britishness to counter the notion that they were subversive dissidents, while Gauvreau posits that ethnic and religious diversity in British North America prevented the formation of an integrative British, Protestant identity (p. 235). Bruce Curtis rounds out the section with an examination of the ways in which...