Colonial Canada changed enormously between the 1760s and the 1860s,
the Conquest and Confederation, but the idea of civilization seen
to guide those transformations changed still more. A cosmopolitan
and optimistic theory of history was written into the founding
Canadian constitution as a check on state violence, only to be
reversed and undone over the next century. Civilization was
hegemony, a contradictory theory of unrestrained power and
restraints on that power. Occupying a middle ground between British
and American hegemonies, all the different peoples living in Canada
felt those contradictions very sharply. Both Britain and America
came to despair of bending Canada violently to their will, and new
forms of hegemony, a greater reckoning with soft power, emerged in
the wake of those failures. E.A. Heaman shows that the view from
colonial Canada matters for intellectual and political history.
Canada posed serious challenges to the Scottish Enlightenment, the
Pax Britannica, American manifest destiny, and the emerging model
of the nation-state. David Hume’s theory of history shaped the
Canadian imaginary in constitutional documents, much-thumbed
histories, and a certain liberal-conservative political and
financial orientation. But as settlers flooded across the
continent, cosmopolitanism became chauvinism, and the idea of
civilization was put to accomplishing plunder and predation on a
transcontinental scale. Case studies show crucial moments of
conceptual reversal, some broadly representative and some unique to
Canada. Dissecting the Seven Years’ War, domestic relations, the
fiscal military state, liberal reform, social statistics,
democracy, constitutionalism, and scholarly history, Heaman shows
how key British and Canadian public figures grappled with the
growing gap between theory and practice. By historicizing the
concept of civilization, this book connects Enlightenment ideals
and anti-colonialism, shown in contest with colonialism in Canada
before Confederation.
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