Empires of Nature and the Nature of Empires

The authors of these short essays were asked to reflect on the state and future of Canadian environmental history in relation to the literature on a particular area or subject matter. Selecting the British Empire as one of them probably seemed like a good – even inescapable – idea at the time. These colonies, this former Dominion, this container that absorbed hundreds of thousands of British immigrants, this parliamentary democracy, this great splash of red on world maps of the late nineteenth century and lynchpin of the Commonwealth in the twentieth, surely belongs in the imperial frame. But what exactly is this frame? J.F.M. Clark knows it is there, but he spends little time describing it, even as he fleshes out a picture within it to meet the mandate of his assignment. Finding surprisingly little “self-conscious Canadian imperial environmental history,” and acknowledging that Canadian imperial history has “struggled to garner interest” of late, he looks backward to demonstrate that Canada’s place in writing about the British Empire has changed over the last half century, and to identify potential avenues for future scholarship in a handful of early twentieth-century contributions to understanding Canada. Appreciation of this earlier work on metropolis and periphery and on the relations “between environment, empire, and Canadian history,” he says, can provide a springboard for exploration of “key themes in imperial environmental history within a Canadian context.”

Well and good. But I want to take a more contemporary, more specific tack, to build upon Clark’s foundation, extend his horizons, and complicate the notion of empire. My title is borrowed from John M. Mackenzie’s Callander Lectures, delivered at the University of Aberdeen in 1995.¹ Trained in imperial history at the University of British Columbia, the productive and often-provocative Mackenzie was among the first to bring the emerging field of environmental history into fruitful engagement with that older-established discipline through his work on hunting, conservation, and British imperialism. Published as The Empire of Nature in 1988, that work, like much of Mackenzie’s oeuvre, was focused on Africa, Asia, and the metropole, rather than on Canada.² Mackenzie’s examination of the environmental effects of imperialism’s social and economic impacts across the globe has produced Canadian offshoots, most obviously in books by Greg Gillespie, John Sandlos, and Darcy Ingram. Their works draw to a degree upon Mackenzie’s lead (and his ambition to illuminate “the nature of imperial power … exercised in the relationship between humans and the natural world”) to reinterpret encounters between hunters, game, and Indigenous people in “Canadian” space.³ Karl Hele has deliberately inverted the title of Mackenzie’s Callander lectures in an edited collection offering “Indigenous or Indigenous-influenced perspectives” on the efforts of empires (United States, Canada, and Britain) to control nature in the Great Lakes basin.⁴

Given John Clark’s interesting invocation of an early twentieth-century Scottish geographer at the centre of his essay, it is perhaps tempting to think of this recent Mackenzie-inspired work as a Newbiginning. But if I can get away with the pun, I am less certain I can sustain the claim. In truth, the lines of filiation behind this work are multiple: Gillespie writes from an interdisciplinary standpoint, with a particular “theoretical focus on textualism and meaning”; Sandlos owes much to American environmental historians; and Ingram is careful to attend to local and regional, as well as imperial, contexts. Moreover, as the parenthetic phrase describing Hele’s collection suggests, “empire” also holds complex, braided meanings early in the twenty-first century. Indeed, with such well-known historians as Jack Granatstein and Phil Buckner pondering, in recent years, the vitality and character of two of the fields central to this discussion – Canadian history and imperial history – one might easily despair of the prospects for sustained lively engagement between historical scholarship on the Canadian environment and the British Empire.⁵ But there is hope, though it is as well to be clear about the terms and tone in which the debates are framed. Granatstein offered a polemic about how little most...