From Politics to the Political: Historical Perspectives on the New Canadian Political History

This ain't your father's political history.

As a recurring feature of the Canadian Historical Review, the editors periodically invite a selection of scholars to reflect on a particular theme or issue. For this Historical Perspectives section, we invited practitioners of the new Canadian political history to reflect on changes in the field, discuss new avenues of research that are opening up, and consider possibilities for the future. The idea for it originated with two events organized by the Canadian Historical Association's (cha) Political History Group, which has been an affiliated committee of the cha since 2009.¹ The authors in this section took part in political history roundtables organized at the cha's annual meeting at Ryerson University and the Canadian Political History Conference held at the University of British Columbia, both in 2017.

Political history in Canada has had an image problem in recent decades and with some good cause. Since the 1960s, it has been the "other" against which newer approaches to understanding the past–social history, gender history, cultural history, and so on–have at least partly defined themselves. For some, the term itself continues to evoke an old-school, "great man," history of high politics, wars, and diplomacy, which is interested in top-down and government-centric narratives, with little interest or regard for the broader societies in which these histories occurred. And, at times, its practitioners have been overtly hostile towards the newer–and now well-established–approaches to Canadian history that have flourished over the past several decades. It is fair to say that political history represented one side of the so-called Canadian "history wars" of the 1990s, and many of its exponents derided the value of the many dimensions of social and cultural history. Others feared that political history was besieged and in danger of disappearing entirely.

But, unlike the famous parrot of the Monty Python sketch, Canadian political history is not dead, although it may look quite different now in its reinvigorated contemporary incarnations. Keen to maintain the best features of a well-established branch of history, the new political history has widened its scope to encompass a broader array of topics, incorporate methodologies from other branches of history, welcome new practitioners, and encourage those who once would have shunned the label to embrace "political historian" among their professional identities. As Shirley Tillotson, whose book Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy won the 2019 cha prize for Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History, quipped at the cha new political history roundtable: "Political History is no longer just the old white guys. Although bless you all!"²

The authors in this Historical Perspectives section explore issues connected to how Canadian political history has transformed in recent decades, providing both global overviews and examples drawn from their areas of specialization. The section begins with reflections from Stéphane Savard, currently chair of the Political History Group / Groupe d'histoire politique and editor of the Bulletin d'histoire politique (bhp). While English-speaking Canada does not have a stand-alone journal dedicated to political history, the bhp has played this role for over twenty-five years for French-language scholarship and has been a keen advocate for a broad interpretation of political history. Its approach includes both "politics" as understood by previous generations of political historians and a broader conception of "the political"–designated as "la politique" and "le politique" in the French-language scholarship.³ In addition to reflecting on transformations of the field of political history in Quebec, and offering examples of how this new definition of "the political" has been shaping, and can continue to nuance and deepen, our understanding of the Quiet Revolution, Stéphane Savard outlines how we might conceptualize the political as a series of concentric circles of different types of political actors who interact with each other, defining and influencing political life and political culture.

This reconceptualization of our understanding of politics, and the geometry thereof, continues in P. E. Bryden's "Foxes, Hedgehogs...