Introduction

Introduction It was Tony Kirk-Greene who, having been successful in his recent proposal for a seminar in Berlin to mark the centenary ofthe Berlin West Africa Conference of 1885, first suggested a Durham sesquicentennial conference. On a summer evening at Oxford in 1985, while the Sauternes and nuts were circulating in the Senior Common Room at the end of a College guest night, he and Alan Wilson quickly agreed on two points. First, such a conference must be located in Canada; Wilson's host had a venue in mind, having earlier been Visiting Scholar at Trent. Second, as with Berlin, the concept must not be.celebration or memorial, but straight-forwardly a recognition and re-examination. With fifty more years behind us of scholarship and of Canadian nationhood, together with commonwealth development, we ought to be able at least to question the Great Man image that had over-shadowed the August 1939 conference at Queen's. Surely we could eschew any tendency to flatter a would-be founder or search for an eternally lasting landmark. Durham might well be important in 1989, as he certainly had been in 1839 and a century later; what was likely to be different in 1989 was the quality ofthat importance, its definition and interpretation. Hence our beliefthat, in 1989, such a conference might legitimately hold up Durham, his Report, and his times to more searching scrutiny at a deeper level in Canada's social, cultural and intellectual setting. Further, surely we could explore wider implications in the international context ofthe impact of slogans like 'representative institutions' and 'responsible government' on the transfer of power in Asia and Africa. What we had in mind, then, on that evening in an Oxford summer, was to take as our scenario Durham's own valedictory reflection ofhow, looking back on the Report, he allegedly declared, "One day Canada will respect my memory." We anticipated that what Durham and his Report had been perceived to mean in Canada in 1939 might well turn out to mean quite a bit more (and maybe somewhat less in some respects) in Canada, and beyond, in 1989. Hence the Durham Conference of May 1989 at Trent University. Happily, many able scholars, established and fresh out, agreed with our strategy. The result was a series ofpresentations that prompted lively and reflective discussions ofdiffering disciplinary standards ofjudgement and ofevidence in history, geography, politics, and sociology. The Conference was ably initiated by David Cameron in an impressive and relevant keynote address, the Morton Lecture for 1989. Janet Ajzenstat and Ged Martin prompted us to examine whether the myths surrounding Durham were well founded - whether or not there was an unambiguous recipe for reformed colonial government in the Report, or whether that was less important than the fact that people believed that a judgment had been made and a precedent set for future development ofthe Old Empire and, later perhaps, of new nation states. Contemporary social theory infused much of the discussion as it had characterized many of the papers. The revisionism of Serge Courville IJeanJournal ofCanadian Studies 3 Vol. 25. No. I (Pri11tm1ps 1990Spri11g) Claude Robert/ Normand Seguin on Lower Canada's regional life was a fine case in point, as were the insights ofStephane Dion and William Westfall on the intellectual climate and on the education and values of European and Canadian aristocracies to enter public service. The portraits of "warring nations" and of White-White conflict in Africa, Asia and Australia, of"Durham in the East," and ofcomparative patterns in patronage and society, as presented in the distinguished papers ofour Oxford and Australian guests, were a reminder of the validity of W.L. Morton's plea for more "connectional" studies. Unfortunately we could not include all ofthe papers given at the Conference. The demands for space even in this greatly enlarged special issue ofthe Journal made it necessary to squeeze out several, including the splendid contributions of the designated commentators. The Conference was fortunate, however, in having strong support from many individuals and constituencies within Trent University, as well as other generous encouragement and assistance. We should particularly like to thank the following : our colleagues in Trent's Canadian Studies Programme, its History...