From the Other Side of the Ocean: Environment and Empire

A decade ago, John McNeill provided an impressive set of reflections on the state of environmental history. Practitioners within the field could not help but feel ebullient about the diverse and vibrant intellectual activity surrounding the study of reciprocal relationships between humanity and the rest of the natural world across time and space. McNeill’s assessment of Canadian contributions was less encouraging, however, as he noted, “Canadianists have almost entirely ignored the genre.” The nature of his discussion belied potential difficulties in locating Canadian environmental history. The several lines devoted to Canada were offered in the context of cross-border environmental history: nature does not respect political boundaries and transcends the nation-state. The discussion of Canada, therefore, was part of an effort to place American environmental history in a North American context. Shortly thereafter, McNeill noted that the British Empire and Commonwealth was an “especially strong” representative among imperial themes in environmental history. McNeill’s observation became a springboard for a survey of regional and national offerings in environmental history across the globe.¹

Despite stating the strength of the British Empire and Commonwealth in imperial environmental history, McNeill had elected at this point not to introduce Canada, the largest colony of overseas settlement. In part, McNeill’s placement of Canada reflects the current trajectory of the nation in its North American context: since the Second World War, Canada has increasingly distanced itself from the British Empire and Commonwealth as it has sought closer economic and political ties with the United States. This shift has generated a field of Canadian studies that often defines itself through comparison with the United States. The comparative search for “difference,” however, suggests some of the possible historical limitations to a “natural,” trans-boundary North American approach to environmental history. American environmental historian Donald Hughes has argued that “Canadians have their own distinct perspectives on many environmental subjects, not least because of their historical connections to the British Empire and Commonwealth, and the unique presence of Francophone Quebec.”²

Hughes’s observations seem perfectly sound, but if we apply McNeill’s criterion to an examination of relevant scholarship, we will be hard-pressed to find a self-conscious Canadian imperial environmental history. Recently, in fact, Canadian imperial history has struggled to garner interest. On the one hand, imperial and Canadian historiographies have diverged since the Second World War, as part of a broader political and economic drift away from Empire and Commonwealth. Canada’s place within the historiography of the British Empire has also shifted over the past half century, as illustrated by two multi-volume histories of the British Empire that constitute significant benchmarks. The nine-volume Cambridge History of the British Empire (1929–1959), which focused principally on self-governing Dominions and India, devoted a separate volume to Canada, the oldest and largest of the Dominions. In general, the Cambridge History was a triumphal-ist celebration of imperial expansion. The five-volume Oxford History of the British Empire (1998–99) offered a critical corrective, devoting greater attention to Britain’s African and Asian colonies, and to its informal empire, than to the Dominions. The perceived neglect of Canada within the more recent Oxford History has since been addressed by the publication of Canada and the British Empire (2008), as part of the Companion Series. Nevertheless, this companion monograph does not contain self-conscious explorations of environmental history themes – albeit in a determinist vein, the environment enjoyed a greater profile in the earlier Cambridge Canadian volume than the more recent Oxford one.³

An exploration of self-conscious environmental history within the context of Canada and the British Empire and Commonwealth is a promising prospect. It would speak to an area of imperial history that has experienced considerable growth over the last two decades. Much of this growth has focused on the tropics and semi-arid zones, with considerably less attention devoted to temperate and Arctic zones. Coming in the wake of the rapid and profound transformations that were borne of post-Second-World-War decolonization, this focus on Asia and Africa...