- Violence, Order, and Unrest: A History of British North America, 1794–1876 ed. by Elizabeth Mancke et al.
To what extent can we understand the history of the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century northern British colonies through the lenses of violence, order, and unrest, as compared to the familiar mantra of "peace, order, and good government"? Furthermore, do we conceptualize the former as consisting of more familiar events, such as Orange-Green violence, the Rebellion of 1837, or the Fenian invasions, or do we switch our gaze to ones less familiar or perhaps less obvious: education in Wendat and Mississauga communities, Loyalist Freemasons in late eighteenth-century New Brunswick, Métis women in Plains Bison Brigades, or rowdy boys and young men on the streets of Toronto?
So far as the authors whose work is collected here, the answers are quite a lot and both (perhaps less so the Fenians). The editors see violence, unrest, and attempts to control them, both by the state and civil institutions, as not only endemic in colonial society but also fundamental to its formation. Violence, Order, and Unrest incorporates political, social, and intellectual history; as well as the topics mentioned above, it also examines elite politics, religious debates, migration strategies, the press, the law, and the creation of civic and public spheres and spaces. Organized into five thematic sections, the book deals with loyalty, liberty, and visions of order; the shift from tory imperialism to liberal settler colonialism; resistance and dispossession; the legitimization and contestation of the public sphere; and the law and press as instruments of social order. Some chapters encompass wide-ranging imperial and/or transatlantic worlds or link developments in the colonies to the United States, while others focus more narrowly on particular colonial locations. However, they also point to international ties of governance, political ideology, or voluntarism that left a lasting [End Page 338] mark on local developments. Moreover, while the central actors in many of the chapters are Anglo-American or British settlers, emigration agents, newspaper editors, imperial officials, and politicians, the collection also encompasses runaway slaves and Indigenous and Métis men and women. Finally, the majority of chapters focus on the Canadas, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, with the occasional mention of Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland; Red River and the Prairies feature in two separate chapters.
In the face of so much persuasive evidence, one might be tempted to replace those frameworks–liberal order, settler colonialism–that historians have suggested can help explain nineteenth-century Canada with this collection's themes. However, a number of chapters demonstrate that these concepts need not be jettisoned. John Reid's work on settler colonialism and violence, for example, provides a nuanced reading of a topic much discussed elsewhere (particularly in the Australian context), suggesting that even the more "settled" nature of British North America, with fewer overt acts of physical aggression such as the hunting of Aboriginal Australians by white settlers, may be seen as underpinned by violence. Moreover, a number of chapters on the colonial state clearly demonstrate just how entangled liberal governance was with violence. As the editors argue, "history works best when scholarship is based not on a single interpretive schema but, rather, on a dialogue among scholars who see Canada through different methodological lenses" (11).
In this collection, violence and the search for order took place in multiple sites; what unites these chapters, for the most part, are their public manifestations. Yet other kinds of colonial violence existed, a fact that some of the authors acknowledge but which could stand more sustained attention. In particular, the concept of epistemic violence, pioneered by Gayatri Spivak, seems to have little purchase here, even though a number of chapters explore the construction of colonial knowledge in which epistemic violence occurred. In a similar vein, I wondered if reports of violence from other colonies–such as the 1857 Indian Uprising, the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, or the reports of...