Book Notes: Bill Graham, The Call of the World (part two)

In the previous post inspired by Bill Graham's memoir The Call of the World,  I was contemplating Graham's brief vivid summary (pp 76-77) of the 1980s shift from global tariff reductions (largely completed) to a global campaign against non-tariff barriers to trade.

Did the World Trade Organization's official approval of a war on non-tariff barriers (virtually all of which are governmental or quasi-governmental actions) give cover and impetus to the anti-regulation, anti-government ideological crusade we have all been plagued by in the recent half-century -- with dire consequences for everything from house prices to economic inequality to the survival of democracy.

As an international trade lawyer in the 1980s, Graham was instinctively supportive of free trade.  His whole career had concerned smoothing the international business operations of his clients, and any government policy that complicated such operations seemed worth opposing.

But in 1988, Graham was running as a Liberal candidate in that year's federal election, and his party and its leader John Turner were basing the whole Liberal campaign on opposition to Prime Minister Mulroney's free trade agreement with the United States.

Graham's explanation for why he supported the Liberal's anti-free trade campaign is instructive:  

If you are going to have economic integration, you'll need an institutional framework to oversee it. The tighter the integration, the more sophisticated that international framework has to be. [at p.105-6]

Graham had spent many years observing the range of trade courts and other impartial arbiters that the European community had established and also the long struggle to make the World Trade Organization into a kind of global trade court -- on the principle that independent tribunals were essential to preventing larger economic powers from bullying smaller ones under the guise of harmonization.

"The Americans would never agree to a similar framework in North America," Graham continues. Canada's 1989 Free Trade Agreement, with only one large economy and one small one participating:

was a North American model with inadequate institutional mechanisms to protect our interests. Given the asymmetry, the most powerful guy usually rules.

When the FTA and then NAFTA came into effect, Graham noted how the American advantage worked out.  If the US disregarded its free-trade commitments (e.g., softwood lumber), Canada's only recourse was to impose tariffs as punishment.  But the American counter-tariffs would always be more damaging.  In practice, there was no recourse.

The looser the rules and the looser the dispute-resolution mechanism to enforce those rules, the more the Americans could get away with." (p.137)  

Graham wrote this in 2015 and died in 2019. Trumpian tariffs were not on his horizon. Still, it's a more precise and succinct description of our current relationship with the United States than most of what is being written today.

History of democratic collapse?

With the retreat of the United States into authoritarianism, there seems to be an urge for Canadians to declare that, gee, we could have that too.

Adam Dodek, Ottawa law professor, had a long essay in the weekend Globe and Mail arguing "It Can Happen Here" and "it" means Donald Trump, whose name is in almost every sentence of his opening paragraphs. I've also become aware of the forthcoming Democratic Collapse by Quebec City journalist and podcaster Nora Loreto -- which is actually the third book in her series Canada in Decline, the others focusing on the social safety net and corporate control.

I've been thinking of a response to some of the points in Adam D's essay that cry out for revision, but parliamentary journalist Dale Smith is way ahead of me with an online takedown today on his website. Dodek in his essay argues that the pathway to salvation is a massive expansion of the Reform Act (2014). For Smith the Reform Act is always "the (garbage) Reform Act," and he goes full-tilt for Dodek's praise of it. 

How exactly Dodek would get the anti-democratic forces to enact such legislative amendments is a puzzle. And Smith's arguments  -- essentially that the Reform Act has put all kinds of limits on parliamentarians that did not exist in legislation previously -- are worth pondering.

Myself, I still rather like the Reform Act, and I admire Michael Chong, Canada's most successful backbencher, for getting it heard and passed (in a weakened form, it is true) against the instincts of most of his fellow Conservatives and most Liberals too.  

What both Dodek and Smith need to recognize is that the Reform Act is like those fixed election laws that Canadian legislature constantly pass, but which premiers and prime ministers ignore whenever it suits them -- without suffering any pushback. 

The Reform Act, like the fixed-election acts, needs to be understood as essentially aspirational. They both urge parliamentarians to follow certain paths. But fixed election laws cannot cancel a premier's constitutional authority to dissolve the house (as courts have already ruled). And the Reform Act can in no way constrain the freedom of MPs to remove their leaders, defy their parties, and even defeat their own government.  Those are the constitutional powers of the elected representatives of the Canadian people and cannot be abridged. To the extent the Reform Act hobbles them, it is suggestive only and has no power.  

Still the Reform Act urges MPs to be more assertive, and surely that is an appetite that grows with the eating -- and therefore a good start, if insufficient. More assertive MPs is the thing we need -- really, the only thing we need -- not amendments to the Reform Act.

Book Notes: Unparliamentary

I was browsing in Unparliamentary: Tales from Canada's Colourful Parliamentary Past, a recent book by scholar of parliament Charlie Feldman. Anyone who writes or talks about Canadian parliamentary doings is going to want to mine this book for its wealth of stories about funny, bizarre, and unexpected events unearthed from Feldman's trawls through Hansard and other sources.  (He also has a lively presence on Bluesky, presenting more of the same.) 

Feldman regrets, in an amusing way, that his publisher (University of Toronto Press) insisted on putting all his notes in the back as endnotes, when he thinks they should all be footnotes at the bottom of the pages to which they connect. He might do better to distinguish source notes (for which endnotes are perfect) from commentary notes, which make excellent foot-of-page notes. The trick is not to run wild with marginal comments: one's editors are likely to tolerate a prudent amount. Many of Feldman's would-be footnotes could have been incorporated in the text itself, I suspect. But a book like this with no index -- that's a publishing crime!

His commitment to annotation reflects his efforts to distinguish between true (or at least documentable) parliamentary stories and ones he suspects are apocryphal (i.e., invented).  His test case is the story of John A. Macdonald vomiting in mid-speech on an electoral platform and getting away it with a clever joke.  I read his analysis of that one nervously since I've used that story myself. 

But like Feldman, I cited it to Biggar's Anecdotal Life of Sir John Macdonald, (p. 193), and I am glad he thinks there is at least some basis for it.  Biggar indeed is almost single-handedly responsible for the image of Macdonald as a fun guy to be with.

From Molly Ungar, August 12

Thank you for mentioning that often-neglected but very significant element of publishing – the back of the book Index. In my time, I’ve indexed a number of books, and contrary to (perhaps) popular belief, the best Index is human-created.

 

Unfortunately, an Index costs $$$ and a really good Index costs even more $$$$ and takes time. Apart from the $$$ aspect, if and when the author has anything to say, it’s usually something stupefyingly impolite. 

Loved each and every one of my Indices.

History of Bessie Borden

I recently caught the episode of Witness to Yesterday (Canada's busiest history-book podcast, I'd say) in which Donald Wright converses with Carmen Miller about Miller's book The Black Box: Lady Bessie Borden's Family 1863-1956, newly published by University of Toronto Press.

I might have left "Lady" out of the title. Any Canadian with Sir or Lady before their name seems distinctly passé in our times.  We don't have Australia's colourful phrase about a bunyip aristocracy. But we know that whole thing didn't work here either, despite the efforts of families like the Bordens.  The wrongest aphorism ever coined about Canadian history is Carl Berger's "[Canadian] Imperialism was a form of nationalism."  No, the belief that titled Canadians really could share in running Britain's empire for them always was a form of colonialism.

So I  would not rush instinctively to a book about the knights and ladies of the Borden family of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Nova Scotia and Ottawa (and London, England).  

But the podcast episode kept me listening throughout -- it's a lively interchange. Maybe we should read The Black Box. 

Carmen Miller had already published a book about Sir Frederick Borden, but he could not get much of a grasp of the personality behind the politician until a Borden descendent gave him a black box full of the personal papers of Fred's wife Bessie -- papers Miller says the archives he visited had never found worth acquiring. His conversation with Donald Wright nicely captures the surprises of archival research and the pleasures of family history. From the UTP blurb for the book:

In a remarkable tale of tragedy, war, family conflict, and imperial diplomacy, The Black Box presents a collective biography of four generations of women in an elite Nova Scotia family during the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. These intelligent, educated, artistic women.... 

Listen and see if you have the same reaction -- and check out a hundred other CanHist conversations there.

History of the Grimke family -- and the new book about them

Allan Levine draws my attention to a story in the New York Times about an emerging scandal in historical scholarship and publishing.

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family by Tufts University historian Kerry K. Greenridge starts with the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, daughters of a slave-owning plantation family in South Carolina who became famous for their abolitionist activity in the Northern states well before the Civil War.  But she also introduces the black Grimkes, who include three black sons of Sarah's and Angelina's plantation-owner brother; the three sons' mother, the enslaved woman Nancy Weston; and other black members of the extended Grimke family down to the twentieth century.

Published in 2024, The Grimkes became a much praised and widely read new study of slavery and freedom. Until lots of scholars of slavery began questioning the source notes for the book -- many of which they said could not be found in the cited archives -- and for uncredited borrowings from other historians.  Book and author are in trouble, the author is fighting back, and her university and publishers are distancing themselves from her. 

Full story in the New York Times: if I have done this right, non-subscribers to the Times should be able to access this gift link. 

Book Notes: Macfarlane and Puddister on lawyers and political scientists; Boyko on Sandford Fleming

I

At Substack, the political scientist Emmett Macfarlane reports on his new edited collection with Kate Puddister, Disciplinary Divides In The Study of Law And Politics, on the subject of how differently lawyers and political scientists look at questions of law and politics and the constitution and federalism and the Charter and all that. It's a set of academic essays by law profs and polisci profs who work on the contested territory between them.

Having written a bit about both constitutional politics and legal history, I'm tempted to read in it. I can certainly believe in the difference in perspectives. I'd be even more interested in a book about how differently historians and political scientists think about these things.  Or about how differently historians and lawyers do.  

I suspect too few historians care about such theoretical matters to engage the way the political scientists and the law profs actually do. Come to think of it, there are not that many who even engage with, say, confederation any more.

But I do sometimes reflect that a lot of political scientists say "in the time of Jean Chretien" (or the older ones "the time of Pierre Trudeau") to mean what other people mean when they say "in the mists of antiquity." A historical sense does not always seem to be a prerequisite.

II

John Boyko is launching a new biography of Sandford Fleming, In Pursuit of Tomorrow. I recall a previous Fleming biography, Time Lord by the Canadian-American novelist Clarke Blaise, an original and idiosyncratic appreciation.  It was very much focussed on Fleming's role in establishing global time zones and, beyond, on the very nature of time and how it was changing in the 19th century. I remember liking it quite a lot.

I have not yet read Boyko's but it is clear this seeks to be a complete and straightforward biography of the man and all his diverse accomplishments (and some failures too, maybe).  More comments may follow, as Sutherland House publishers has kindly send me a copy to peruse.

History of Maple Syrup

In the Globe and Mail, Maura Forrest reports on how the mayor of Plessisville, QC. (pop. 9000), the until now undisputed "Capitale mondiale de l’Érable" is responding to the adoption by the Montreal suburb of Mirabel of the title "Capitale internationale de l’Érable."

The depth of Mr. Morin’s displeasure is not easy to translate. “J’étais en tabarnak,” he said.

Which is a good hook on which to hang a mention of journalist Peter Kuitenbrouwer's recent history of the industry, Maple Syrup: A Short History of Canada's Sweetest Obsession. and particularly its chapter on Plessisville's own Cyrille Vaillancourt, who in the 1920s organized Quebec maple syrup producers into a cooperative that  helped put an end to the reign of the "Maple King," an American commercial monopoly that for a time had been able to offer "take it or leave it" offers to unorganized producers across New England and Quebec. (That chapter was excerpted in The Walrus last winter.)

Matthew Thomas, the maple sugar historian (who knew!) and biographer of Viallancourt'sNew England rival Thomas Cary, has written an amused and sympathetic review of Kuitenbrouwer's book for the Maple Syrup Digest (again, who knew!), while expressing some observations about the limited amount of history in Kuitenbrouwer's mostly contemporary history.  

Book Notes: Carleton and Sinclair on Residential School Denialism

University of Manitoba Press announces a forthcoming title for September 2026: Truth before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism, edited by Sean Carleton and Niigaan Sinclair.

Sean Carleton and Niigaan Sinclair, along with a team of expert historians, educators, Survivors, archivists, and archeologists, analyze the genesis, methods, and consequences of denialism; push back on denialist claims; and highlight some of the primary sources and peer-reviewed scholarship that denialists ignore or misrepresent. Importantly, they also document the harms denialists have inflicted on Survivors and communities.

It's  a timely topic, it seems. British Columbia's The Tyee has a Emily Enns feature up on the topic, focussing mostly on denial actions around British Columbia and the West, but linking in some national organizations and                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     networks of retired academics. It doesn't mention Toronto's Canadian Institute for Historical Education, which began mostly to assert that John A Macdonald is blameless in all things indigenous and deserves more statues but has hosted residential school denial talks by Nigel Biggar and David Frum.  

Update, May 11: Molly Ungar comments:

The CIHE should re-name itself The Canadian Institute for Historical Gatekeeping.

 They might take it as a compliment.

Book Notes: Ghosts of Ortona

I have not read this, but it sounds like an interesting take on military history by an anthropologist  -- a history of what people don't talk about, almost.  

As a young anthropologist, Ian Cosh set out to document the memories of a little-known but costly World War II battle fought over Christmas in the Italian town of Ortona. His research took him across western Canada, and to Italy and Germany, interviewing veterans and civilians. In their stories, he encountered puzzling details—hints of things unspoken and unresolved. Sam was obsessively mapping a minor skirmish on graph paper. Mel kept mentioning an Indigenous sniper he’d never met. Ted was haunted by the ghost of a church. Bill recalled nothing of Christmas dinner, though his comrades swore he was there.

When the project ended, Ian tried to leave it behind. Now returning to his field notes and interview transcripts, he’s determined to understand what was missed.

-- from the publishers' blurb for Ian Cosh, Ghosts of Ortona: Reckoning with the Traumas of Canadian World War II Veterans. 

Book Notes: Greer on Rum in the Seaboard Review

In these days of the dwindling of book reviews and publications that run them, it's worth noting a newish (two years) review dedicated to reviewing Canadian fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and doing so on a frequent basis -- sometimes several times a week, it seems. 

It's called The Seaboard Review and its webpage is here.  It's a Substack production, actually, and the webpage is mostly just a link there.  Its review skew more to fiction, poetry, memoir, and literary nonfiction than historical writing.  But this week it includes a thoughtful review of Allan Greer's recent MQUP history, Canada in the Age of Rum.

If you like a book review with diverse interests written and published in Canada , it's worth a look,  They welcome subscriptions but you can read it free.

Book Notes: Karen Dubinsky on Cuba

Queen's University historian Karen Dubinsky has a new book out: Strangely, Friends: A History of Cuban-Canadian Encounters. It's an exploration of many Canadian networks of contact with Cuba during the long American crusade against the island: everything from engineering to cattle breeding to salsa music. It includes her own contacts: Dubinsky has co-taught a course at the University of Havana for years and has visited constantly.

The Canadian government does not seem to think Cuban survival in the face of Trump holds much value, but over the decades a lot of Canadians have seen it differently.

Book Notes: John Fraser on the GGs

Went down last night to Massey College to join a noisy sociable crowd at the book launch of The Governors General of Canada: An Intimate History of Canada’s Highest Office, by John Fraser, the journalist, homme de lettres, and man-about-Toronto. I have been browsing in it in advance thanks to a copy sent by publishers Sutherland House.

It’s not that kind of intimate; it gets its title from the way Fraser has managed over the years to be in the company of quite a few of the GGs, sometimes covering them as a journalist, sometimes inviting them to Massey College during his years as master there. It’s short, chatty, gossipy, and manages to be a Fraser memoir as well as a set of profiles of the Canadians who have held the post from Vincent Massey on - with some serious reflections on the office itself. It's a lively read. About the most disparaged office the country has, that's no small feat. 

Fraser, who loves the monarchy, likes the office of governor general for its reflected glory, and he likes most those GGs who are most in the monarchical style, that is, dignified, reserved, mannered, and a bit de haut en bas. Massey, Georges Vanier, Roland Michener, Jules Leger, and recently David Johnston pass muster. Somewhat to my surprise, he respects Adrienne Clarkson as well. He explains by quoting another anecdote: “She’s a total monarchist. She just thinks the wrong person is on the throne.” She filled the role, in other words, and Fraser respects that. He likes as well how well John Ralston Saul handled the difficult role of GG spouse.

He’s less keen on Sauvé, Schreyer, Hnatyshyn, and Leblanc – too political, too ordinary, and a bit too “just folks” for his taste. He’s cool about Michaelle Jean, too. Perhaps, Fraser admits, it’s because he never managed to have her visit Massey College. Perhaps, he also admits at some length, because his daughter may be right when she accuses him of thinking of her mostly as a DEI hire despite all evidence to the contrary.

Fraser is most blinkered on Mary Simon, whom he calls “a one-trick pony,” “missing the boat” -- because all she talks about is reconciliation. For Fraser, reconciliation is causing national depression and Simon is failing to get “us all” safely past it. Madame Simon, stay on your pony – John Fraser inadvertently shows us how much we need you.       

Quick trip to Quebec et la Nouvelle-France

We were briefly in Montreal last week  -- colder and snowier than Toronto, but still a pleasure to visit.  

While we were there, the debate about Quebec's Bill 21, the one about secularism that mostly bans various clothing items for Muslims, Jews, and others, was in the Supreme Court of Canada and in the news.

As it happened we were staying on Rue Saint-Paul, and the streets around us were called Francois-Xavier, Notre-Dame, and Saint-Sulpice, and so on.  When we took the subway we noted stations with names like Pie IX, and l'Assomption, and Sainte-Catherine. Way above us the cross atop Mont-Royal shone bright.

Either the movement for official secularism has a long way to go, or maybe the critics are right to say it is mostly cover for an effort to keep the visible minorities in their place.

Meanwhile, I have been reading People, State, and War Under the French Regime in Canada by Louise Dechêne, translated by Peter Feldstein. The original French-language edition was published (posthumously) in 2008 and the translation in 2021. I regret having to admit I had not been aware of either until very recently.

Because Louise Dechêne really was a terrific historian, and this, like all else she wrote, is most original, deeply source-based, deeply thought-out, and frequently takes no prisoners in what she says of other scholars of New France.  I admire her immensely, and may have more on this book when I'm done with it.

Book Notes: Allan Greer on the Rum Economy

Nice to see a substantial early Canadian history piece by Allan Greer, McGill University historian, featured in the Toronto Star, and based on a book published by McGill Queen's University Press.

The story is about the enormous role of rum in early Atlantic Canada, with particular focus on how the truck system in the transatlantic cod fishery enabled captains and proprietors to sell large quantities of greatly marked-up rum to their employees so as to drive them into debt and avoid having to pay their wages.  

The statistics are persuasive. Still, I'm not sure if it is Allan Greer or just the way the Star selected a bit from his book, but I have to be a little sceptical of the article's suggestion that every poor fisherman was inevitably driven hopelessly into rum-fuelled debt for the profit and convenience of their owner. 

There are many anecdotal accounts of fishers in the records who made long careers -- sometimes credited with making forty or even more annual visits from European ports to the North Atlantic fishing grounds. Presumably at least some were not ruined every year, or the whole economy of the fishery would have collapsed. It was a grim proto-industrial business altogether, no doubt, but its survival for several hundred years suggests it was not a completely irrational economic system.  

Still, a fun read on a Saturday morning. And for once major media runs a history op-ed that is about history, and not a diatribe against wokeness in history and how we are not doing enough to ram patriotic facts down the throats of school children so we can all forget about it later.

Book Notes: Scott McIntyre and Erna Paris

I've been reading two recent books about the history of Canadian writing and publishing in the last half-century or so: Scott McIntyre's A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing and Erna Paris's Hunting History: A Writer's Odyssey (and with Richard Stursburg's Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Publishing, previously noted here, in the background.)

Scott McIntyre had a remarkable career as a publisher, from holding a senior executive position at McClelland & Stewart at the age of 25, to building Douglas & McIntyre, one of Canada's best and biggest trade publisher, and having a lot of fun all the way through. Also he published one book by me and one by my father -- a good experience for each of us.

But looming over his story is 2012, when Douglas & McIntyre went into receivership -- a defining moment in the collapse of Canadian publishing in the "free trade era" when all the promises of cultural exemptions proved hollow. And when several writer friends of mine were left with royalties never to be received. Stursburg's book is the big picture; McIntyre's is the lived experience.

Erna Paris's memoir is not about a failing publisher. From a very early age, Erna Paris developed a profound involvement with justice, human rights, and how societies deal with the horrors of their past. She did it entirely as a journalist and a writer, always outside academia, but well supported by publishers. Her memoir does take readers into her life experience, but the book is structured by her books, one after another, to reveal her remarkable lifelong continuity of interests and concerns. 

As a Jew (from a relatively privileged beginning in Toronto), she began with painful questions of how to confront the Holocaust. After studying in France and marrying a Frenchman, she wrote Unhealed Wounds, using the trial of Klaus Barbie to interrogate how France denied and dealt with its collaborationist past.  

In The End of Days, she went back to how early modern Spain went from multi-cultural tolerance to the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews.  

She studied Israel and Palestine in The Garden and The Gun. Long before Gaza loomed over all, she concluded, "The policies of the State of Israel as they had evolved challenged my most deeply held convictions of ethics and justice."  

In Long Shadows, perhaps her best and most original work, she travelled the world to explore the much-contested rise of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions as a way for conflicted societies to confront their past.* (I'm proud to say I was part of the jury that awarded Long Shadows the Writers' Trust prize in nonfiction.) In The Sun Climbs Slow, she moved on the International Criminal Court and its possibilities for redress and judgement. 

I knew and admired Erna Paris, but before reading Hunting History, I really had not grasped the magnificent scope of her achievement. Nor had I had known how much of an international audience, and worldwide translations, and even political influence and respect she had earned over the years

So maybe she was sheltered somewhat from the travails of Canadian publishing.  But this memoir -- lovingly completed by her children and published after her death in 2022  -- is published (quite beautifully) by the ominously named At Bay Press, a small Winnipeg publishing house I had never heard of before, when it deserved to come out triumphally to national acclaim from a major Canadian house with the resources to give it the attention it deserves. Those days have ended too. 

Will Erna Paris be remembered in Canada as she deserves? We will need a Canadian literature and a Canadian culture to make it so. 

____

* Long Shadows was published in 2000. Erna Paris was already living with cancer as Canada's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission transformed how we discuss Indigenous and settler-colonial issues in Canada. Her brief closing remarks on that matter in Hunting History are sensitive to the topic, but not what she might have given us had she lived longer.     

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.  

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?

Praise is where you find it

The Canadian Institute for Historical Education, referred to in a recent post below, sent out a New Year's message less combative than its Christmas one. They invited a number of recent contributors to their History Matters podcast to suggest favourite history books.  One of their guests, Sean Conway, the retired Ontario politician and sage on all things CanPoli, was kind enough to focus on my own political history writing: 

Sean Conway:  “I’m going to recommend two books by the same author, Christopher Moore; they’re not recent but they’re very, very good.  The first one was published thirty years ago: 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal (1997); and the second one, Three Weeks in Quebec City: The Meeting that Made Canada (2015), deals with the really important Quebec Conference of 1864 that laid the foundation for what became the British North America Act.  

"What I like about Chris – he’s such a talented guy – is that he takes you through complicated things but you see it through the lens of the participants, and not just the menfolk, because many of the principals brought their spouses and daughters.  Donald Creighton once said that history is the record of the encounter of character and circumstance; I completely agree with him.  These two books by Christopher Moore humanise that story in a way that gives you the didactic benefit – you learn something – but you think, well, maybe we Canadians aren’t as dull and boring as everybody thinks we are.” 

Thank you, Sean!  I do note that the contributors invited by the CIHE comprised seven men and two women, and no indigenous or minority scholars (though contributor Charlotte Gray salutes one, Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii), the author of Valley of the Birdtail).  

Book Notes: O'Brien on World War II

I've been thinking of making some notes on the big, mostly Canadian, histories I came across in 2025.  But a book I had requested from my local library some time ago came in unexpectedly, and (also unexpectedly) took over my holiday reading.

I borrowed How the War Was Won, a 2015 history of the Second World War by Scottish historian Phillips Payson O'Brien, because it was praised to the skies by Paul Krugman, who is an economist but has good taste in historical literatures. With that in mind, I was not surprised that How the War Was Won does focus on economics (very much macro-economics). But I was surprised by how engagingly written it is, and even more by how much it enlarged my sense of how to write military (and other kinds of) history.

O'Brien starts with a provocative sentence: "There were no decisive battles in World War II."  Most military histories of that war, he observes, focus on Stalingrad, El Alamein, Midway, and D-Day, the titanic battles that became turning points in the conflict. But he directs our attention to the numbers. 

In 1943, Germany devoted about 7% of its weapons output to armoured fighting vehicles - and its enemies did much the same.  All the combatant powers, in fact, devoted more than half, sometimes up to 70%, of their production to air and sea forces, and only the leftovers to the land forces. At the start of the war, the United States projected an army of more than 250 divisions (a division, the basic building block of land warfare, is infantry, armour, artillery, logistics, and command -- often 15,000 men in total). Manpower and materials could have been found for 250 US divisions. But quite soon the American army reduced its objective: to 100 divisions. On all sides the money went elsewhere: to ships and planes. 

Now sea power has always been a big story in military history, and much has been written about fighter combat and bombing campaigns in World War II.  What O'Brien really does is hammer home is the numbers, in ways that battle narratives rarely can, and what the numbers say about air-sea warfare in the 1940s.  

Victory in warfare comes from preventing one's enemies from assembling forces and moving them where they are needed, while at the same time maximizing and moving your own forces successfully. Despite the horrific destruction of lives and equipment at a Stalingrad or a Midway, the numbers pale into insignificance compared to what it meant and what it cost for the sea power that enabled the Allies to move their forces into place, and for the air and sea power that increasingly prevented both Germany and Japan from producing what it needed and from transporting it to the vital battlefields. Not by a little bit, but by huge orders of magnitude.

O'Brien's method confirms some familiar views about the Second World War:  defeating the U-Boat threat and successfully moving troops and materials across the Atlantic was indeed vital to victory and has long been acknowledged. But his book presents many new angles.

During the great battle in Normandy in 1944, the western allies were also engaged in something called Operation Crossbow. Crossbow was the attempt to stop the launching of thousands of V2 rockets from Germany toward Britain and the bridgehead expanding from Normandy.  It succeeded; relatively few V2s flew successfully, and Crossbow may get a few lines in standard D-Day and liberation histories.  What O'Brien shows is that Germany had spent as much developing the V2 as the US spent developing the atom bomb. And the air power the allies sent against the V2 was as large and costly as that devoted to supporting the armies in Normandy. Crossbow insured that the vast German expense on the V2 -- money that might have been spent elsewhere -- was almost entirely wasted. In terms of enemy power destroyed, it was a second Normandy at least, almost unnoticed

O'Brien has a thousand examples like this. (In the latter stages of the war, more than half, often much more, of all the fighter planes that Japan and Germany struggled to produce and send into battle were destroyed before they ever got into combat against the allies.) 

How the War Was Won is a reminder to historians  -- and O'Brien is a historian not an economist -- that in any kind of history the dramatic moments are not necessarily the decisive moments.