I'm particularly impressed by Todd Webb's review of American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, the
new book by the terrific American historian Alan Taylor, which Webb announces as "bleak and brilliant." Taylor is trying to make Americans aware that their vaunted democracy -- for white men -- was also a powerful force for aggressive expansionism in the new republic:
One of the main narrative threads knitting together American Republics involves the bloody expansion of the United States at the expense of any group that seemed to get in the way of the dream of a white nation.
Also new at Borealia is Elizabeth Manke and Adam Nadeau's review of Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World. Both book and review raise some of the same themes as Webb on Taylor: Colley's argument is also about written constitutions and colonial democracy as vehicles for violence, oppression, exclusion and marginalization.
She says nothing, however, about post-1783 British colonial constitutionalism, and how that constitutional tradition might have been informed by the explosion in written
constitutions. Even more significantly, Colley gives no consideration to how colonial constitutionalism in places like British North America, later Canada, might have informed her argument.
But I found myself quibbling with some of Mancke and Nadeau's takes on the BNA Act, 1867. Surely we should get beyond the warmed-over Creightonism of:
The Canadian delegation, dominated by John A. Macdonald, wanted a single jurisdiction, but the delegates from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were wary of this idea.
With all the Lower Canadians and Brown's Reformers having vetoed the idea when the Province of Canada coalition was formed in 1864, there was more sympathy for centralization and legislative union among the Maritime delegations than the Canadian one. It was a non-starter, in any case.
In picking up Colley's suggestion that written constitutions encouraged dispossession of indigenous peoples, Mancke and Nadeau supply Canadian examples. But they do not note that the Royal Proclamation and the treaty relationship were embedded, not denied, in the BNA Act (s.91 c.24), which is why one of the first consequences of confederation was all the numbered treaties. Canadian governments and their constituencies certainly did not live up to those treaty commitments, but it's hardly the fault of the constitutional text.
The reviewer bio at the bottom of the post declares Manke and Nadeau "share a firm opinion that the history of the Canadian constitution is seriously under-appreciated as a window into understanding the global history of constitutionalism in the modern era." Gotta agree with that one.
