Conjuring Canadas: Historians and the Quest to Define a Canadian Nation and its Past, 1920-1967

This dissertation examines the various ways in which Canadian historical researchers confronted the “Canada question,” namely the challenge of defining the basis of a unified national community. In doing so, it follows the scholarship and activities of a network of historians and intellectuals centred on the Canadian Historical Review, a quarterly publication founded in 1920. This study examines their scholarship with the aim of identifying not only the various solutions they posed to the problem, but also the philosophical undercurrents that informed their reasoning in the process. It also traces the rise of a rival network in the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, a French-language historical publication founded in 1947 that by its very existence posed a significant challenge to the definition of the nation at the core of the Canadian Historical Review. This dissertation argues that the network bound together by the Review was engaged in a hegemonic project, one that sought to present a particular definition of Canada through a historical narrative that rested upon a liberal logic. Yet the greatest sustained challenge they faced in this endeavour emerged from Francophone historical scholars, who, although proposing vastly different Canadas to those imagined at the Canadian Historical Review, came under the sway of a number of liberal currents of thought as well. A detailed summary of the key traits of these liberal Canadas is found in the conclusion.

The Significance of the Disputed Territory in Bechuanaland 1887-1893

British Imperial policy in Southern Africa in the last three decades of the nineteenth century oscillated between two extremes. It began in the early 1870's with Lord Kimberley's attempt to effect confederation as a means of devolving Imperial responsibility and expenditure. It ended in 1899 with Britain's active intervention against the Boers. For most of the remaining years of those decades a middle course was adopted while the British Government struggled to reconcile its diverse political interests. Strategy, supremacy, economy, humanitarianism, and recognition of colonial aspirations were all at one time or another, in varying degrees, motivating forces behind Imperial policy. Many historians have pointed out how incompatible many of these ends were and how the attempt to pursue them all at once almost inevitably ended in at least one of them being sacrificed on the way. This study focusses on a relatively minor problem over a period of about seven years. It attempts to show how the British Government tried to reconcile, in this case, the predominant motives of economy and supremacy. The problem of the Disputed Territory now seems like a small fish in a big ocean because non the great hopes and fears that it raised were ever realized. But the anticlimactic nature of the outcome of events should not be allowed to conceal two important points: first, that the problem loomed large at the time in the eyes of the Imperial Government; and second, that in the case of its policy towards the Disputed Territory, the Government gained a greater degree of success in trying to reconcile seemingly incompatible ends than it did in many other instances.