British Businessmen and Canadian Confederation: Constitution-Making in an Era of Anglo-Globalization (review)

Andrew Smith’s welcome book offers a relatively straightforward argument: without the support of an influential group of British financial investors, the union of several key British colonies in northern North America might never have occurred. To understand the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, Smith contends, we must attend to the imperial financial center more than to the politics of the colonial periphery. In presenting the story of Confederation in these terms, Smith both confirms and qualifies the argument advanced by Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins that Britain’s was an empire of “gentlemanly capitalism.”

This is a useful book on Canadian Confederation not because the main argument is entirely new or surprising, but because previously the argument has been scattered in unpublished dissertations and scholarly articles, and at times has been suggested rather than fully developed or documented. Worse, when Cain and Hopkins incorporated the Confederation example into their own work, they relied on the work of Canadian scholar R. T. Naylor, whose work, Smith diplomatically remarks, is “hotly contested” (p. 11). Smith carefully outlines the significance of the colonies to a number of particular investors, the formation and activities of the British North American Association in support of their interests, and the discussion among the British chattering and investing classes over the financing of an intercolonial railway, the nature of a union of the colonies, and related matters.

Smith’s argument about the influence of financial investors and their political allies is particularly convincing for the period 1860–1863. It was at this point that the British North American Association helped promote the connection between troubled British investments in the Grand Trunk Railway, an intercolonial railway that would link the three mainland eastern colonies, and the union of the British North American colonies. Discussions about an intercolonial railway during the 1840s and 1850s had failed repeatedly, and proposals for a union of the colonies had gained very little traction. Between 1860 and 1863, British leaders helped sustain and revive interest in these projects, even as it appeared colonial leaders might again lose interest in them.

Thereafter, as even Smith acknowledges, the initiative really shifted to the colonies, and both the British North American Association and the City largely observed and commented upon political and constitutional developments. It is clearly important that no powerful investor interests opposed the union of the colonies or British government financial assistance to the intercolonial railway project. Precisely what they had to say in their commentaries is interesting but less important to the story of Confederation between 1864 and 1867. As a result, the later chapters of the book are less compelling than the early ones.

Smith warns that while he considers the role of British investors to be critical, it would be going too far to describe them as the unknown Fathers of Confederation. Too late. I regularly annoy my students by presenting them with an image of Edward Watkin and reclaiming him as one of Canada’s founders. I therefore welcome this book for helping strengthen my lecture. I also welcome and recommend this book for bringing together and clearly developing a number of ideas that have been floated but remained underexplored by Canadian historians and for effectively connecting the history of Confederation to the history of the mid-Victorian British Empire.