The Historiography of the Provincial Norths ed. by Ken Coates, William Morrison (review)

588 The Canadian Historical Review structures of power. Professor Hodgetts is aware of the importance of saying something about the background of senior state servants, but he makes little effort to investigate either their individual or their collective biographies in detail. One consequence is the absence from the work of any analysis of government as domination or as cultural hegemony. The breadth of his field forces Hodgetts to be selective in his coverage. While his discussions of things like the Liquor Control Board, Marketing Boards, and Mothers' Allowances suggest areas for future investigation, they are also cursory, restricted mainly to chronological recounting. We do not learn why some domains rather than others were incorporated into the state syst~m. The importance of the Education Department, ignored more or less completely in Pioneer Public Service, is stressed in a few brief passages in the present work, yet these seem to have been written before the appearance of four recent monographs on the subject. A final critical comment will suffice: Hodgetts's project encourages him to focus on the development of the state system as a more or less coherent administrative entity characterized by an internal division of labour. His focus makes it hard for the reader to come to grips with movements and social forces that cut across the state system as a whole. For instance, in one chapter, the reader hears about the Liquor Control Board and the Temperance Act; in another, that there was an inspector of theatres and an amusement tax; in a third that the attack on patronage politics after the First World War was promoted by the same groups that attacked the consumption of alcohol. Could it have been political projects, rather than an increasing functional specialization in response to social needs, that shaped the state system? Despite some drawbacks, From Arm's Length to Hands-On nevertheless provides a useful introduction to an extensive and still-neglected domain of investigation. BRUCE CURTIS Carleton University The Historiography of the Provincial Norths. Edited by KEN COATES and WILLIAM MORRISON. Occasion Paper Series I8. Thunder Bay: Lakehead University Centre for Northern Studies I996. Pp. 325. $25.00 This volume contains an excellent collection of easily readable bibliographical essays that clearly outline historiographic trends over the past decades, while indirectly pointing the way to much needed future research . The editors are well known a1,_ respected for their scholarly volumes on northern themes, including The Forgotten North: A History Book Reviews 589 of Canada's Provincial Norths, published to acclaim in 1992. In the pithy three-page introduction to this ·most recent volume, they claim that the territorial North has secured the primary attention of scholars of the North, leaving the large, vital, and diverse provincial Norths 'even more profoundly understudied.' In a _ sense this wonderful book proves their thesis to be incorrect or at least overstated. As they admit, all ofthe Norths need much more study. Indeed, Shelagh Grant argues that it is the Inuit and the Arctic that most urgently require the greatest attention. The chapter on northern Ontario by Ernie Epp, appropriately the middle third of the book, takes up 110 pages. Northern Ontario is clearly a macroregion of Canada, with a population and size greater than most provinces. The reported historiography clearly indicates that it encompasses at least three subregions. The chapter contains 629 footnotes, most of them with multiple references. Is this a record? Clearly, there is no lack of published material on that North. Yet, as Epp argues, there remain huge gaps, especially in the area of Aboriginal studies. Preceding 'Northern Ontario' are a chapter on Labrador by Melvin Baker and Robert H. Cuff and one on northern Quebec by Femand Harvey. The former essay, while richer than expected, indicates the severe dearth ofrecent historical work on the Inuit and Innu (Naskapi). Furthermore, from experience and from criteria used for other chapters , this reviewer would argue that the great Northern Peninsula ofthe Island of Newfoundland (from Gros Mame to St Anthony and L'Anse aux Meadows) should be considered as part of this province's North. Harvey's Quebec chapter surveying the rich historiography, mostly in French, on the province's delineated...