Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada by Robert Bothwell (review)

Robert Bothwell is a first-rate historian. He eschews theory, reads widely, draws clear-sighted conclusions, and expresses them with verve and humour. This, his most recent book, displays these qualities in spades. Your Country, My Country retells a familiar story through a broad lens, mostly to introduce American readers to their northern neighbour. Against a backdrop of European colonialism, especially the British imperialism from which the two North American English-speaking colonies sprang, Bothwell traces the joint evolution of Canada and the US over the last 400 years. There are early chapters on contact and settlement, and gems on the American Revolution and its close cousin, the War of 1812, both set against the unfolding panoply of European and global geopolitics.

Most of the book is devoted to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For Bothwell, Canada–US relations came of age around the First World War, a historical threshold that set these countries apart. After the competitive sparring of the late nineteenth century, the era bracketed by the two world wars brought recognition and acknowledgement, then wary friendship, and finally, convergence. Your Country, My Country rejects notions of American exceptionalism; though each is distinct and unique, Bothwell argues, it is Canada and the US that are joined in a North American exceptionalism.

Your Country, My Country is acutely aware of the distribution of power and money, with easy nods to the forgotten (Indigenous peoples on both sides of the border) and the dispossessed. Bothwell’s light references to North American transnational histories reflect his encyclopaedic reading and disdain for the theoretical. The book’s chapters read as concise and self-contained essays, though joined by their author’s preoccupation with explaining the similarities and differences that unite and divide these two American siblings, jointly making them exceptional. Bothwell argues that their shared North American geography, characterised by porous borders, fluid population movements, and a common inherited British liberal political culture, guaranteed that each would resemble the other. Of course, there were obvious points of difference. Size matters, and being ten times richer than Canadians gave Americans a different view. Similarly, the French imperial remnant that became Quebec shaped political and social life in Canada. The border postponed or modified, but rarely stopped similar phenomena from shaping life in both countries.

Big ideas abound. Bothwell tackles the American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipsett, who famously insisted that the US revolutionary tradition distinguished the United States from Loyalist Canada. Bothwell recasts the struggle as a nasty civil war, with revolutionaries and loyalists on both sides of the border. He throttles the notion that Canada ever served as a linchpin between the UK and the US. And he dismisses the idea, perpetuated by pundits from Goldwin Smith in the 1890s to Diane Francis today, that these two countries are so close that they should merge. ‘Resemblance is not identity, and closeness is not harmony’, he reminds us (p. 9).