Search Results: Returned 2 Results, Displaying Titles 1 - 2
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2022., McGill-Queen's University Press Call No: NEW QWF 971.03 H432c Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: 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 Britannia, 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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2017., McGill-Queen's University Press Call No: QWF 336.7109 H434t Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Carleton library series Volume: 240.Summary Note: "What if Canadian history was actually about the money? In 1867, Canadians wrote themselves a new constitution because they needed a new tax deal. Confederation was not just about the taxes, but it was never not about the taxes, and the founding principles of 'Peace, Order, and Good Government' should be reconsidered accordingly. Modern Canada, like Britain, France, and the United States, was born of a tax revolt. But in Canada, George Brown's tax revolt became John A. Macdonald's tax coup: a quasi-imperial fiscal federalism that successfully withstood half a century's worth of popular agitation before it began to unravel. This book describes how politics in Canada became social politics between 1867 and 1917. Canada was constructed in 1867 amidst fierce debates about fair taxation and reconstructed in 1917 amidst even fiercer ones. What did fairness mean to Canadians? That was always a 'who' question as well as a 'what' question. Some people demanded fairness for their region, others demanded fairness for their race, and still others rewrote fairness to reflect changing understandings of wealth, poverty, and land ownership. Successive chapters provide detailed case studies of those local debates and then recount how the new ideas gradually infiltrated and transformed federal politics. But the old regime did not die quietly. It fought bitterly for its clientelist, regressive fiscal federalism and the Canadian people paid a terrible price for their tax reforms. The story of that struggle has never been more timely."--
