Book Notes: The Slow Rush of Colonization

I have been meaning to take a deep dive into Thomas Peace's big new book The Slow Rush of Colonization: Spaces of Power in the Maritime Peninsula 1680-1790.  But it's a book that demands quite a bit of undivided attention -- and I have not had a whole lot of that recently. (More on that tomorrow.)

But I'm already impressed. Peace is covering a period that starts when there has already been a century of so of contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples and nations of what is now eastern Canada.  It ends another century later, in what is still the remote past of Canadian history, but when colonial states were beginning to be able to operate with a much reduced need to give respect or attention to indigenous needs and requirements.  That I guess is the ""slow rush."

Peace documents all this in meticulous detail. But the conclusions are large. He's arguing, I think, that what happened in this time period set a template that still defines the deep constitutional underpinnings of Canada and of indigenous-newcomer relations. The book's way of getting inside indigenous policies and strategies in this period overthrows a lot of standard visions of "pre-confederation" history. But his argument about political fundamentals that endure today being established before the end of the eighteenth century is vastly expands what we might take to be the standard model of Canadian political history.

If you too have not taken the time yet to dive deep into The Slow Rush, you might listen to Tom Peace on the Witness to Yesterday podcast, particularly his concluding remarks about the enduring constitutional meaning of what went on in this period. 

More, maybe, when I've gone deeper into the book.  

History of that campaign to rename Dundas Street

When the renaming of anything in Canada named after Henry Dundas was mooted a few years ago, I was sympathetic mostly on the grounds that Dundas, a British politician and Scots grandee, never really had anything to do with Canada. The reason for cancelling him -- that in 1792 he was kinda, sorta opposed to the abolition of slavery -- seemed maybe a bit of a stretch, even at the time  But I thought that names with local significance could well replace his. 

Now a little twitter flurry has brought to my attention a very cogent, detailed, sensible, and copiously sourced argument [link corrected -- didn't mean to link to myself!] from a couple of years ago that Dundas was indeed a lifetime supporter of abolition, at some political risk to himself, and a better parliamentary strategist for abolition than some of his more radical allies. So if Toronto goes ahead with renaming Dundas Street, I'll be okay with it but aware it's another case of bad history driving out good. Or should I say, good results may come from bad history? 

Book Notes: Cole Harris on British Columbia

This is the first paragraph of James Murton's review of Cole Harris's newest book, A Bounded Land: Reflections on Settler Colonialism in Canada: in the most recent Canadian Historical Review

Cole Harris’s The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Change (UBC Press, 1997) landed in the world of BC history with a thunderclap. From this point forward, British Columbia had to be understood as a model creation of British settler colonialism. It was no longer possible – particularly following the subsequent publication of Harris’s Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (UBC Press, 2002) – to talk about the province without centring Indigenous people, and the same, Harris insists here, is true of Canada as a whole.

Commemoration and history

The current New Yorker has an article by Sam Knight about how Britain's National Trust is beginning to deal with the fact that many of the stately homes it maintains and presents to the public were built and preserved by revenues from slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation, which they sometimes display in horrifying forms:

The fireplace holds a collection of seventeenth-century delftware, above which hangs a museum-quality Dutch painting of ornamental birds, by a court artist to William III. Facing into the room, with their backs to the wall, are two statues of kneeling Black men with rings around their necks.

 The story explores how the Trust, "known by all minority communities as a white environment that was hostile - silently hostile," is starting to deal with such situations

The Trust, arriving late to the subject, chose to adopt a sweeping approach. In a hundred-and-fifteen-page “interim report,” the charity listed houses connected to abolitionists as well as to slaveowners, along with generals, civil servants, businesspeople, politicians, and artists whose lives were in some way entwined with Britain’s four-hundred-year saga of colonial rule, which touched every continent, including Antarctica.

Also explored at length is the furious reaction to the Trust's steps by those who prefer not to have such issues aired and prefer the Trust's traditional emphasis on gardens, architecture, and furniture.  (“Beauty is always sufficient, isn’t it?” he said. “Beauty is truth, after all.”)

It's all a reminder that Canada is not the only country where historical and heritage narratives are being reconsidered, and where that whole exercise of reconsideration is being furiously attacked.  

More in another post to come.   

 

Book notes: historians as time's monster?

In The Guardian, Maya Jasanoff takes note of Time's Monster: How History makes History, in which Stanford historian Priya Satia argues that history since the Enlightenment has mostly served to legitimize empire and global white supremacy

Morality was defined in terms of the progress brought about by the unfolding of history. History revealed the institutions and the peoples that had “become obsolete”. Obsolescence, novelist Amitav Ghosh has observed, is “modernity’s equivalent of perdition and hellfire”. The “most potent words of damnation” in the modern world, Ghosh has noted, “is the malediction of being on the ‘wrong side of history’”.

The Enlightenment’s obsession with progress, combined with an unshakable attachment to moral universalism, Satia suggests, helped “normalise the violence of imperial conquest”. Colonialism came to be seen as morally just, a means of bringing progress to non-European peoples, freeing them from their own barbarism.

History of dumb annexations.

Last month it was Ken McGooghan in the Globe proposing that Scotland become a province of Canada.  This month it's Canadian Richard Albert, a constitutional law prof in Boston, proposing that we make Haiti a Canadian dependency.  And there is that perennial suggestion about making the flight capital islands of the Turks and Caicos part of the country.

Guys, no.  This is not some kind of Risk or Diplomacy game to play with real people's lives. These are countries you want to throw around, not crazy-ass board tokens.