Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History ed. by Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu (review)

“The world needs more Canada,” or so goes the line first concocted by the Canadian Tourism Commission, but since adopted by booksellers, rock stars, and presidents to promote Canada as a model of an open, peaceful, and pluralistic society. However, according to the authors and editors of Within and Without the Nation, when it comes to the writing of Canadian history the obverse is true: Canada’s history has remained far too parochial in an age of globalization. To reframe Canadian history in light of the global, the authors use the insights, methods, and possibilities raised by what has become the most important paradigm shift in the historical profession over the last two decades – transnationalism. Though the definition of what constitutes transnational history remains somewhat fuzzy, at its core is a decentring of sweeping national narratives by situating them within a flow of ideas, peoples, technologies, and institutions that transcend political borders. Though some authors here remain cautious about the “transnational turn” their insights offer exciting new directions to rethink Canada’s place in the histories of the world’s peoples.

The collection is divided into three sections that follow both temporal and thematic lines. The essays in section one examine policies of Indigenous dispossession across multiple sites of the British Empire. The contributions of Ann Curthoys and Elizabeth Elbourne seek to understand how and why imperial policies constructed to protect Indigenous peoples from the rapaciousness of settler colonial populations were quickly abandoned as colonial self-government became a reality. Tolly Bradford and Penelope Edmonds on the other hand seek to understand this transcolonial debate over the place of Indigenous peoples in colonial societies from the bottom up. Bradford in particular worries that the transnational gaze too often obscures “local voices.” Here she examines how two Indigenous missionaries attempted to navigate the liminal spaces at the edges of Indigenous and settler cultures. Similarly, Edmonds challenges the teleology of transnational analyses, which tend to conflate both British Columbian and Australian policies of racial exclusion in the name of a united Anglophone Oceana, when those responsible for shaping them saw fundamental differences. In both instances, Bradford and Edmonds remind us that good transnational history must be simultaneously local and global.

Section two focuses on the global flows of peoples and ideas. Bettina Bradbury’s contribution on property relations, gender, and the law in the Cape Colony and in Québec is an interesting examination of the conflicts between imperial and colonial understandings of British Common Law. If it is true that the British Empire was built on “law” there was little agreement on whose laws applied (colony or metropole), when they applied, or whether movement across time and space could or should change the law. Henry Yu’s examination of trans-Pacific migrations of Chinese peoples seeks to overturn the dominant Atlantic focus of much of Canadian immigration history. Like those who crossed the Atlantic to take up homesteads in the Canadian West, he emphasizes how British networks of trade also facilitated the Cantonese diaspora. Further, Yu adroitly points out that anti-Asian legislation was not meant to keep Canada “white,” but to make it so; Cantonese migrants had long been “settled” across Canada before many Europeans undertook their trans-Atlantic journeys. The final two essays by Laura Ishiguro and Karen Flynn examine the flow of ideas and emotions across borders. Ishiguro’s focus on familial epistolary networks reminds us both how mobile and dispersed families often are, and how their emotional bonds competed with and constituted other identities. Similarly, Flynn reveals how discourses of nursing professionalism provided opportunities for both physical and intellectual exchanges that created common identities across borders. Though she notes these exchanges were often unequal when it came to Caribbean nurses, the ideals of professionalism often provided connections across more divisive identities of race, class, and gender.

The final section focuses on competing claims of nationalism and...