Book Notes: Dalrymple's Golden Road

I've been greatly enjoying The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple.  Most of the buzz that led me to read it emphasized the enormous trade between Rome and India that developed once Rome secured control of Egypt, with almost all the trade carried by South Asian merchant fleets plying the Indian ocean long before their contact with the Roman market. And I was also aware that Dalrymple wants to stress that India's seatrades were much larger and more globally consequential than the overland Silk Road that briefly thrived during the Mongol control and management of the land-based route from China to the Mediterranean.  

But trade is only one interest of Dalrymple as he tracks India's farflung influence in the first millennium of the modern era.  Buddhism evolved and took shape in India, but was successfully exported to the Himalayan regions and to China, first by merchants, later by Chinese scholars who studied at Buddhist centres in India and returned home to make Buddhism one of the most widely followed Chinese religions. He then tracks in great detail how Buddhism made the same voyage into South East Asia, leading to such monuments as Angkor Wat in Thailand and Borobudur in Java. Hinduism was not far behind Buddhism in penetrating South East Asia but more successful in becoming the faith of ruling monarchs there, leading to a unique blending of Hindu and Buddhist cultural influences in much of South East Asia.  All these religions evolved not only in India but in the other territories.

Dalrymple then moves on to set out how the elaborate mixing of culture, art, philosophy, and science, including mathematics, progressed mightily in the Indosphere before being transmitted back into India and west into the Islamic world, picking up the earlier innovations of the classical Greeks and moving on from there to Muslim Spain, and from there into Christian Europe. He lays out in great detail how the 9-digit counting system, the zero, and many of the fundamentals of western science were shared out from Indian roots.  And he concludes that he argues that much of Europe's extensive borrowings from Arab and Islamic culture, by way of Spain, Sicily and the Crusader kingdoms included within them strong Indian components.

In conclusion he sees the end of the Indosphere coming with the consolidation of Muslim religion and government across India and deeply into South-East Asia.  And eventually the Christian West used its learnings from the east in science, technology, and commercial methods to build its own global influence and reduce India and South Asia to colonial poverty and subservience, only recently ended. 

But India had a very good millennium, he proposes, and one much too often neglected and misunderstood. One of the very great civilizations, and you cannot understand world history without it.  Very impressive, the best of Dalrymple's books I have seen.

This Month at Canada's History

Canada's History for Spring 2026 is now going out to subscribers.  The cover is a terrific image by Alberta artist Fred Curatolo illustrating the cover story, "Canada's Comedy Greats" by John Semley -- pretty good too.

Among the stories this month: Ann Hall on the Edmonton Grads, Lisa van der Geyn on psychiatric-care pioneer Clarence Hincks, Gabriel Milhet on Nova Scotia black rights campaigners, John Lorinc with a big article on a series of mid-century floods that transformed Canadian disaster response, and several more.

Also a big review section and much else. It's looking good. You really ought to subscribe. (And I'm deep into the Hudson's Bay Charter for an upcoming story, so waste no time.) 

Threatened with capture by a foreign country!

Have I ever mentioned I'm an immigrant? I was not yet four years old when I arrived in Canada, and have no clear memory of the country I was born in. I came essentially undocumented, "on" my mother's passport. I held no passport of my own until I formally claimed and received Canadian citizenship and (later) a Canadian passport. Canadian, Canadian only, proud to be Canadian, intent on being Canadian exclusively.

Because of where I was born and where my grandfather was born, I think I could apply (or at least could have applied) for British or Irish or European Union citizenship or (for a while) all three. Indeed I have often been told I should have done so -- that it is wonderful to have many citizenships, to be able to choose whatever lineup is shortest at the arrivals terminal, or perhaps even assist one's children in living elsewhere at some point.  

But I have always avoided doing so. I'm a Canadian through and through and have never held any other documentation. I like to say, if you claim a second nationality, eventually that other country will want to tax you or conscript you, and I'm only prepared to accept that possibility from the country of which I am proud and prepared to be a citizen. My (Canadian) papers are in order. My kids will fend for themselves in foreign parts.

I'm just discovering that His Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom sees it differently.  

Britain is the country I was born in, lo these many years ago, and Britain now declares that all who are British citizens with some other nationality can only enter Britain by showing their British passport (or under some circumstances using a one-time special dispensation -- that costs almost 600 British pounds).   They have a website that enables you to find if you count as a British citizen -- and yep, being born there is the first, pretty much unavoidable, proof. (Here's the webpage.)  In effect, if I arrive at a British airport, the British government can refuse to recognize my Canadian citizenship and passport, and throw me out of the country forthwith for arriving without a British one.

Fortunately a lot of people who are a lot more British-ish than I am -- former passport holders and so on -- are beginning to notice this emerging situation. And are finding it "scandalous and unacceptable."  Resistance is afoot.

I'm beginning to think my inherited (and I must admit, not much acknowledged) guilt for having benefitted from the British Empire is now being visited on me. When I was brought to Canada, there was practically no paperwork for white British people to immigrate to Canada: we just came. The Canadian government hardly considered us as foreigners. "A Canadian citizen is a British subject," it used to say.  And now I'm being punished for it -- or would be if I dropped in at Heathrow.

On the other, I am simultaneously beginning to think that Mark Carney's massive military build-up has to allow for another target needing to see the full force of our Canadian wrath: the country that wants to kidnap a whole lot of us Canadians into becoming somehow British, despite us having all made the conscious choice to be free and independent Canadians instead.

Anyway, if you are in a similar situation to mine, you might consider your plight before you decide to go walking in the Cotswolds, or playing a round at St Andrews, or taking in some West End theatah-- or whatever else one does in that foreign land. Eat a crumpet?

Meanwhile, if you happen to be an immigration and citizenship lawyer reading this blog, feel free to advise how I can avoid being shanghai'd.  

(Actually, Canada also requires dual nationals entering Canada to present their Canadian passport. But I'm not sure Canada imposes dual nationality on people who just happened to be born here, as the British seem to find themselves promising to do.)

George Brown on talking to Americans

Previously posted on this site in 2018, but some things never get old. This is newspaperman and statesman of confederation George Brown on talking to Americans... in 1852: 

...when you get hold of a Yankee, drive it home to him; tell him his country is disgraced; wound his pride; tell him his pure institutions are a grand sham; send him home thoroughly ashamed of the black blot on his country's escutcheon. In steamboat, or railroad, or wherever you are, hunt up a Yankee and speak to him faithfully; there is no other man so sensitive as to what others think of him.

H/T Russ Chamberlayne, who first drew this to my attention.

Book/Blog Notes: Loomis and Pincus on Charles II

The American historian Erik Loomis, a key contributor to the long-lived blog Lawyers, Guns and Money, has an equally long-running series there called "Erik Visits an American Grave" in which he visits and photographs the graves of more or less famous Americans and gives a quick and often opinionated appreciation of their lives and careers.  He likes union members, and pop musicians, never mentions a Southern Confederate without applying the phrase "treason in defence of slavery," and tends to be hard on captains of industry with elaborate monuments.  He has published over two thousand of these "Visits" at LGM.  I find them admirable as blogging and often intriguing and informative as history, since he is widely informed about American history and frequently up on the latest scholarship.

Loomis visited Britain some time ago and has begun adding visits to non-American graves. 

His latest non-American grave is that of King Charles II (died 1685), and this time he has completely misunderstand the man and the history. Loomis takes him to be a nice, practical guy, smart and curious but beset by Britain's endless Protestant-Catholic hatreds, and that's about it. 

Americans! You can take them out of the country but...  

Some years ago I was massively impressed by the study of Charles's period and subsequent events written by the historian of early modern Britain Steve Pincus, called 1688: The First Modern Revolution. Pincus makes a powerful case that Charles II was a skilled and ambitious king, with big plans to modernize England's economy and governance -- but that his model for modernizing was Louis XIV of France, whose powerfully autocratic personal rule Charles intended to recreate in England. Had Charles lived longer and succeeded in his program, Britain might well have entered the 18th century as autocratic as France under the Bourbon monarchs who brought on the French revolution. 

Pincus argues that the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, which deposed Charles's brother and heir James II,  was a profound struggle about two modernizing programs, one intensely monarchical, the other committed to binding kings to parliamentary (and eventually democratic) control.  For Pincus, it was the English Whigs' unwillingness to tolerate the autocratic model Charles was instituting that brought on the upheavals of 1688 and the replacement of James II by William of Orange (and Mary), whose Dutch model of capitalist development they preferred. Their victory permanently confirmed parliamentary rather then monarchical supremacy in Britain. So: a huge reshaping of European and world history -- with Charles central to it, though on the losing side in the end.

I still like "Erik Visits an American Grave" but it's too bad Loomis has extended his coverage without extending his reading. Particularly since Steve Pincus, professor of history at the University of Chicago, is a fellow American. I think he would like 1688.

Book Notes: Patricia Roy on John Hart

I sometimes forget to go back to The British Columbia Review (see the link at right), but when I return, it does not just feed my westcoast roots but reminds me of what an impressive survey of all that gets published in the Pacific province the BC Review provides.

Lately, the floods of fiction, poetry, and memoir the west coast produces almost overwhelm my searches for the B C history books I am principally looking for.  Such as this one, an evidently very substantial biography of a long-ago and little-known premier of British Columbia, John Hart, by a historian with a long and extraordinary track record in the history of her province, Patricia Roy. Hart was premier for seven years, but wrote 21 provincial budgets -- a tough score to match. 

Here is Ron Verzuh's review of Patricia Roy's biography of Hart: John Hart: A Businessman in British Columbia Politics.  

History of judges

One of the brilliant things about the Canadian constitution is how it structured the administration of justice.  

The (deeply flawed) American constitution created state courts for state law and federal courts for federal law, with separate personnel and separate administrative responsibilities for each.  The Constitution of Canada, by contrast, understands justice to be indivisible, while administration need not be.  

So each province has its own courts, built, administered, and paid for by the province, and with judges who must come from the legal profession of that province.  But those judges have always been empowered to adjudicate federal law as well as provincial law -- they have a national role, in everything from criminal law to constitutional law. 

Given the federal (as well as local) law they must adjudicate, it is appropriate that judges wherever they sit be federally mandated, chosen and paid for by the federal government. While property law (for instance) is provincially made and criminal law (for instance) is federally made, the one court system and the one hierarchy of courts and judges handle both from first instance to final appeal. We have one seamless justice system rather than two.

Having a provincially-run justice system with federally appointed judges should be understood as evidence of the skill with which the original constitution-drafters designed our federal system.

Then there is Premier Danielle Smith of Alberta. She recently demanded that she be empowered to participate with the feds in the choosing of judges.  She threatened that if she cannot, she might withhold provincial funding for new judicial appointments.  (She also recently demanded more power to "direct" the judgments Alberta judges make.) 

But the judges she is talking about are paid from appointment to retirement by the federal government.  All she could withhold is the provision of courthouses and office spaces and staff for them.

Frankly, she is already doing that. In Alberta, as in most of the provinces, courts are generally overcrowded and understaffed.  So it's an inconvenience to Albertans, but not much of a threat, maybe reflecting a misunderstanding of where judicial salaries come from.

 Oliver Mowat, the 19th century premier of Ontario, created several new courts in Ontario during his time in office, happily allowing the federal government to pay for all the new judges. "It would of course be highly improper to ask the appointment of a greater number than the actual necessities of the country required," he said, with a devious little smile, perhaps.  

But I don't think we have had yet a federal-provincial crisis over the provinces creating too many courts.

Historiographical note:  many historians of confederation seem to have been a bit baffled by the provincial/federal mix of judicial matters. Often they have fallen back on the theory that the feds wanted the appointing power simply for the patronage powers it offered.  The wisdom of provincially administered local courts adjudicating both provincial and federal law, in a single justice system with federally appointed judges is rarely noted in the standard accounts of confederation.

Appendix:  At confederation, provinces did retained the authority to appoint and pay judges for the "lowest" courts, the ones that adjudicated minor aspects of law, whose judges at that time were not even legally trained but mostly lay magistrates. 

The scope of these courts with provincially-appointed (and paid) judges has expanded mightily since the mid-twentieth century. But it is still the federally appointed judges that handle the more serious matters, including all trials by jury, and the decisions of provincially-appointed judges can of course be appealed to the "higher" courts with federally-named (and paid) judges, right to the Supreme Court of Canada if necessary.

Black History bicentennial

My local CBC outlet has a story about First Baptist Church in Toronto, a church founded in 1826 by Black Americans escaping bondage in the United States forty long years before the ending of slavery there.  At the time the newcomers were barred from existing churches that, so the broadcast said, "only accepted free people."  Hence the new church, which has been serving an increasingly multi-ethnic congregation ever since.

There are still not that many two hundred year old institutions around Toronto.  It's another indication of how appropriate it is that a prominent Toronto gathering place be renamed Sankofa Square to acknowledge the long black contribution to this city and country. What did Lord Dundas bring to Toronto again? 

Right, nothing. Even if the Canadian Historical Review won't admit it.  As it said:

The Dundas episode illustrates a disturbing trend in historical reckonings in which everything is judged by anachronistic standards of contemporary social justice.

Sure it does. 

  

M. Dion sur les lecons d'histoire de Mark Carney

Gotta love this:  Prime Minister Carney's recent talk at the Quebec Citadel on the Plains of Abraham has launched a high-level discussion of the fundamentals of Canadian history. The latest to weigh in is Stéphane Dion, political scientist, cabinet minister, ambassador, and Liberal Party leader, who published an opinion piece in the National Post yesterday.  

(The Post wants me to create an account, but the essay is available here even if you don't.)

In his essay Dion sometimes flies a bit high (as he sometimes did as Liberal leader) 

I will argue here that, in judging Canada’s past, which Quebec nationalist circles reproach for conquest and assimilation, one must consider the tragic nature of universal history.

and

If we had to consider all countries born from past conquests as illegitimate and undo them, we would turn the planet upside down! It is only recently, during the 20th century, that conquest war was outlawed in international law.   

And then there is something about the czars. But he gets into his stride in hitting back against the Parti Quebecois mantra of Quebecers permanently opprimés et humiliés. Here is the gist of it:

If the French-Canadian population has been able to maintain itself and grow, it is thanks to its admirable persistence, its faith, its clergy, but also because it wisely leveraged British institutions before helping to give rise to Canadian democracy, one of the oldest in the world.

What was exceptional in Canada was not the desire for assimilation expressed in the Durham Report. That was in the air at the time. What was exceptional is that this report was set aside by the Baldwin-Lafontaine agreement, and then the Macdonald-Cartier agreement, which led to the federation we have today.

This is pretty good history. In the 1840s events cited by Dion, the British conqueror relinquished to Canadians self-government, and on an electoral franchise that gave full voting power to (more or less) every French Canadian household. Even tenant farmers on seigneurial estates voted -- a voting power far broader than existed in Britain or indeed nearly anywhere in the world at the time.  Henceforth it was mostly impossible to govern Canada without francophone participation and consent. Quebecers have long had power in Canada, and power to run their own affairs in Quebec as well.  

And that was kinda the point of Mark Carney's history lesson too -- to which I was giving some love the other day -- with a link to Carney's full text if you need.

   

 

Book Notes: Richard Stursberg, Lament for a Literature

Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature The Collapse of Canadian Book Publishing hit me with a shock of recognition. I’m not in it, but it sounds like the story of my life and career.

When I left the historic sites service of Parks Canada in the mid-1970s, there were lots of books being published, lots of publishers, lots of independent newspapers, magazines, radio stations, bookstores, and libraries to welcome writers and promote their books. I figured Pierre Berton alone could not fill the demand he had created for Canadian historical nonfiction. Why shouldn’t I seize a share?

So I did. At the end of the 1970s I became a freelance writer about Canadian history. My first book  was published in 1982 with the contract for a second already signed, and I had no other career until I decided it was time to let others to take up the torch.  If people ask if I am a famous writer, I usually say “Well, I am if you have heard of me.” But books I wrote got published and noticed and promoted and sometimes awarded. And the books led to a host of ancillary work in historical journalism and broadcasting and to historical consulting projects large and small in forms I could never have predicted. It was a living.

Richard Stursberg’s slim hundred pages are an explanation of how that world came to an end. By the time I was ready to let other aspirants take over, that writing and publishing world had largely faded away. If I had potential heirs, their path were harder or at least very different than mine.  

And boy, does Richard Stursberg show why. In true Canadian spirit, he divides the rise and fall of Canadian writing and publishing into Canada’s five seasons:  Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Even More Winter. 

Stursberg is not always persuasive as a cultural critic – he calls Marian Engel’s Bear “a book about bestiality,” cites Solomon Gursky Was Here as Mordechai Richler’s best novel, and thinks Canadian writers should be obliged to set all their stories in Canada. He seems to miss a lot of the sort-of-samizdat by which Canadian writers endure and distribute their works despite the collapse of all the big institutional supports. He even believes ‘wokeism’ and DEI have helped cause the downfall of Canadian nonfiction writing when in reality the reassessment of figures like John A Macdonald is our best hope, not just for reconciliation, but for a new and livelier writing of Canadian history.

But mostly Stursberg has found the causes of Canadian publishing's collapse – and lays them out with copious tables and charts.  

Canada fought hard to place a “cultural exemption” in the 1988 free trade agreement.  But -- surprise! -- it never took. As soon as it was signed, all the major Canadian publishers were turned into branch plant operations.  Soon Amazon and Kindle were given a free hand to undermine Canadian bookselling, tax free. The Carney government’s recent surrender on the Digital Services Tax and its cutbacks to federal cultural agencies suggests the tide has not turned. Significantly, Stursberg notes that where film and broadcasting are governed by an independent commission required to publicize its decisions, which can be litigated, decisions to support or undermine Canadian publishing have always been made by secretive bureaucracies.

As he writes, “For over fifty years, the government has failed to abide by its signature and most basic policy: ensuring that the Canadian book business, both publishing and retail , is owned and controlled by Canadians." 

If Richard Stursberg’s little book can help stem the ongoing assault on Canadian writing and publishing, he will have done the country a service. Can a book still make a difference in Canada?

Cuts at the War Museum and Canadian History museum

Maybe this is what the Carney government really thinks about the importance of historical and cultural matters in our current situation. The CBC reports:

The Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian War Museum will be cutting permanent staff levels by 18 per cent over the next three years due to cuts announced in the federal budget.

Avra ​​Gibbs-Lamey, a spokesperson for the history museum — which also manages the war museum — told Radio-Canada that permanent staff will drop from 371 to 304.

Mark Carney's take on Canadian history

From the media, I got the impression that Prime Minister Carney made a faux pas when he gave a speech about Canadian solidarity on the Plains of Abraham last week.  In fact, his staff started to say he made the speech at the Citadel of Quebec, as if the Plains of Abraham was maybe the wrong place to praise Canada. 

The whole thing rather played into my concern that the prime minister, a banker by trade, is big on economic development (and mostly by the private sector) but not much oriented to other important elements of national identity, including history.  

But then I read the speech. I think he got a bad rap, too much of it influenced by the Quebec nationalist trope that the one thing to know about the history of the Québécois is that they have always been oppressed. To my surprise, Carney's take on the long sweep of Canadian history seemed to be a pretty fair and sophisticated one.  

I wondered if John Ralston Saul had been at the prime minister's elbow recently: the reference to Charles Taylor, the emphasis on three founding people, "the fundamental insight that unity does not require uniformity."

The speech surely goes off track when it says, "The Plains of Abraham mark a battlefield, and also the place where Canada began to make its founding choice of accommodation over assimilation." No, the Plains were and remain a battlefield. Better perhaps to have said, "The City of Quebec marks a battlefield and also the place ....."

But broadly, I find that Carney's speech is alive to the reality of conflicts, of disagreements, of conflicting identities that have always existed within Canada, while still insisting that accommodation and tolerance have also been vital to Canadian progress.  

I thought he was justified in quoting Georges-Etienne Cartier saying Canadians were "of different races, not for the purpose of warring against each other, but in order to compete and emulate for the general welfare."  It's a claim that I have quoted in print myself, but no doubt he and his speechwriters would have found it elsewhere.  

Carney might had alluded to George Brown's observation that a century after the conquest, "here today sit the descendants of the victors and the vanquished ... seeking amicably to find a remedy for constitutional evils complained of not by the vanquished but by the victors," with "the representatives of the French population discussing in the French tongue whether we shall have it."  That was pretty on the nose when he said it in 1865; maybe it still is.

We have not seen the Carney government give much suggestion that it thinks cultural or historical aspects of Canada should be significant in our current crisis. It would be nice to hope this speech leads to a change in that.

In any case, it's better than just calling for more Macdonald statues, which seems to be widespread in Canadian historical chatter these days.

New reasons to close the 49th Parallel

 

“We’ve never needed them [NATO] … They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan … and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the frontlines.”

What's the difference between Donald Trump and Nato, somebody said on Bluesky.  "Donald Trump would never put on a uniform to defend the United States." 

Part of what's troubling about this stupid cruel insult is that vast numbers of Americans will presume it is true. Canadian historian Marc Milner's recent book Second Front is a close examination of how most American historians have tended to downplay non-American contributions to the D-Day landings and pretty much the whole of World War II. 

Even now, many Americans cling to their bizarre faith that  America alone represents freedom and democracy and remains a lonely beacon to the world.  

Canada's Historic Places to be Deregistered

 

Here's a strange one.

The National Trust of Canada reports that Parks Canada will shut down the Canadian Register of Historic Places, "an online searchable database of historic places in Canada which have been formally recognized for their heritage value by federal, provincial, municipal or territorial authorities."  It records more than 13,000 such places across the country.  It will cease to function in the spring of 2026, according to Parks Canada.

For the time being you can still search the fed's Register yourself at historicplaces.ca.  The National Trust report includes a list of federal and provincial ministers and agencies you can complain to.

Update, February 5.  The CBC reports that within 24 hours some tech-smart guy named Stephen Taylor, who did not like this plan, simply scraped all the data on the Register and reposted it all on a new site of his own creation called Heritage Guide Canada, with many new features and a cleaner modern interface. It's free to all - as the old one is. If the feds want it back, he'd be happy to give it to them, he says.