One West, Two Myths: A Comparative Reader (review)

Comparative history, particularly of Canada and the United States, is a recurring and still engaging topic, particularly for Canadian specialists. The publication of the papers of a conference dedicated to the US and Canadian wests is a welcome addition to the literature, particularly because all the essays are so closely related and advance our understanding of the history of the two regions. Collectively, they draw a picture of a large region united naturally by landscape but divided artificially by human history since the eighteenth century.

In the first, standard-setting essay, Elliott West suggests that historians should consider the counterfactual implications of north-south instead of east-west boundaries and they should always remember that, before the arrival of Europeans, most Aboriginal nations aligned themselves along North America's predominant geographical land forms. If scholars do so, West argues, they will highlight the role that the two states, driven by capitalist market economies, searching for natural resources, and aided by fast transportation and communication technologies, played the dominant role in the political division of the two wests. He challenges scholars to study how the states' definition of citizenship ran roughshod over Native tribal, band, and family relationships. Admitting that in many respects the Canadian and American wests developed differently, he urges historians to note how the landscape has made these divergences subtler and their historical roots more complex than usually argued.

Economic development, so Donald Worster argues in the second essay, is the sub-surface theme running deeply beneath the two wests. While American historians have emphasized the frontier in the historical evolution south of the boundary, Worster asserts that Canadians have stressed the influence of cities. Yet in the end, he notes, both theories see history as linear and a struggle against the environment. While the two historiographies are based on a notion of diverging origins and dissimilar processes, he reasons, they unwittingly converge on ultimate objectives – that is, the exploitation of natural resources to create wealth. Should historians not abandon traditional nationalist interpretations, Worster asks, and emphasize the deep ideological similarities that form the substrata of the one West?

In the third broad interpretive article, written primarily from a Canadian perspective, Gerald Friesen discerns four major historical periods in Canadian and US history, each of which brought a different interpretation of the boundary between the two countries. Common to all four epochs – Aboriginal dominance, European trade patterns, Euro-American capitalism, and military, cultural, and economic globalism – are economics and communications. In the second period, Friesen observes, trading patterns, dictated mainly by northward- and southward-flowing river systems, began to divide the multi-faceted northwestern segment of the continent into two empires. Subsequently, political/economic considerations accentuated the political boundary, and railway and telegraphs further hardened it. Yet, as could have been observed, these communication technologies, despite nationalistic political-economic policies to the contrary, began to knit the two nations together. That process, Friesen affirms, accelerated as it opened into the fourth era – globalization – and will force Canadians once again to redefine their political ideas and national loyalties.

These three broad interpretive themes – geography, development, and communications – open up valuable avenues for further exploration. One wonders if all could not be subsumed under yet another thematic layer – civilizing? To what extent did policy makers, entrepreneurs, soldiers, missionaries, and settlers participate in a centuries-old, and even global, struggle to civilize humankind and the environment? Could it be that ever since humans first tilled the soil or domesticated animals, their ancestors have laboured to subdue the natural wilderness to their purposes and sometimes worked to elevate themselves and others to supposedly higher levels of humanness?

The remaining five essays deal with specific topics, all of which confirm the hypothesis of a region unified by landscape and divided by politics and diplomacy. Three of the chapters use the history of indigenous people to establish this thesis, while the others deal with perceptions of region and nation. Interestingly all...