Canada and the British World: culture, migration and identity

Abstract

The volume is headed by an introduction written by the editors that provides a useful overview of how Canadian historians have approached their country's British and imperial past since the late nineteenth century. The nineteen essays that follow cover a broad range of topics, and are roughly arranged chronologically according to the period covered. While a thematic arrangement may have rendered the book more accessible to readers, the diversity of subjects and approaches probably proved an impediment.

In June 1998, the first British World Conference was held at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London; its success led to the organization of five further conferences, held between 2002 and 2007 in Cape Town, Calgary, Melbourne, Auckland, and Bristol. Seeking to address the decades-long marginalization of the Dominions in British imperial history and of the British empire in the histories of the Dominions, the broad aim of the conferences was to bring the colonies of settlement back to the attention of imperial historians, and to remind the historians of the Dominions of the importance of the imperial connection in the histories of their nations. Employing a new historiographical term - the 'British World', which can be roughly defined as the worldwide British community that was bound together by familial, cultural, commercial, and professional networks; flows of information, people, and ideas; and a sense of a shared British identity and culture - the conferences endeavoured to explore the usefulness of the British World as a concept and to interpret what belonging to this world meant to those who lived in it.

The third British World Conference was held in Calgary in 2003 and attracted over 120 papers. Two collections of papers from this conference have been published - Rediscovering the British World (Calgary, 2005) and Canada and the British World. With a strong showing of Canadian historians at the conference, the latter book reproduces nineteen of their papers. The result is an interesting volume that explores and questions the multifarious ways in which Canada - particularly its culture, identity, and populace - has been shaped by its connection to Britain.

The volume is headed by an introduction written by the editors that provides a useful overview of how Canadian historians have approached their country's British and imperial past since the late nineteenth century. The nineteen essays that follow cover a broad range of topics, and are roughly arranged chronologically according to the period covered. While a thematic arrangement may have rendered the book more accessible to readers, the diversity of subjects and approaches probably proved an impediment.

However, as is suggested by the title of the book, a reading of the volume does reveal a number of overlapping themes. One of the larger ones is that of migration. There are six essays that touch on the subject, including substantive essays by Marjory Harper on Hebridean emigration to Western Canada in the 1920s, and by Myra Rutherdale on the activities of the Salvation Army's Emigration Department and its relationship with the Canadian Department of Immigration.

Another main theme is that of the changing place of Britishness in Canadian identity and culture. Many of the essays that deal with this issue examine the first half of the twentieth century - the interesting years in which Canadians sought greater autonomy from Britain and increasingly adopted a separate Canadian identity, while at the same time continuing to support the preservation of British culture in Canada and participation in the British empire. Of particular interest in this respect are Patricia Dirks's essay on Canadian responses to the Boy Scout movement, Wesley C. Gustavson's essay on the clashes between Canadian and British historians over the writing of their respective official histories of the First World War, Marilyn Barber's essay on the employment of British teachers in Saskatchewan during the 1920s for the purpose of transmitting British values and culture, and Mary Vipond's essay on the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission's use of British programming and content during the 1930s.

In examining such topics as the Boy Scouts and the BBC, with other essays on Canada's contribution to the 1924-5 British Empire Exhibition and involvement with the Rhodes Scholarship, a number of essays in the volume thus touch on Canada's participation in cross-imperial movements, organizations, institutions, and events. However, while the bilateral Canada-Britain relationship is well explored in this volume (or, more accurately, the unilateral impact of Britain on Canada), it is a shame that very little mention is made in any of the essays of Canada's relationship with the rest of the British World. Indeed, the title of the volume could quite easily have been Britishness and the British in Canada. Work of a comparative nature - comparing and contrasting similar experiences and developments across the British World - is also conspicuously missing. While these absences may be partly attributable to the fact that these essays were originally short conference papers, it is to be hoped that, in the future, a broader focus will be taken in more work regarding 'Canada and the British World'.

It is perhaps this narrow, unilateral focus that also accounts for how tentatively the term and concept 'British World' is used in the essays in this volume, with almost half of the essays not even employing it. This hesitancy may have also been due to the fact that its meaning is still uncertain, imprecise, and even contested. There is, for example, still vigorous debate even over when the British World existed and especially over which areas of the world and peoples should be included (for instance, should the United States and non-British peoples within the British empire be included?). Therefore, while work is moving forward with regards to determining the defining features of the British World and how it was held together, it would seem necessary that some resolution should soon be found to these fundamental debates over the definition and boundaries of the British World and British World studies.