Description
Book SynopsisColonial Canada changed enormously between the 1760s and the 1860s, the Conquest and Confederation, but the idea of civilization seen to guide those transformations changed still more. A cosmopolitan and optimistic theory of history was written into the founding Canadian constitution as a check on state violence, only to be reversed and undone over the next century. Civilization was hegemony, a contradictory theory of unrestrained power and restraints on that power. Occupying a middle ground between British and American hegemonies, all the different peoples living in Canada felt those contradictions very sharply. Both Britain and America came to despair of bending Canada violently to their will, and new forms of hegemony, a greater reckoning with soft power, emerged in the wake of those failures.
E.A. Heaman shows that the view from colonial Canada matters for intellectual and political history. Canada posed serious challenges to the Scottish Enlightenment, the Pax Britannica,
Trade Review
"Civilization bridges philosophy and Canadian history by blending insights from a major school of moral philosophy with certain founding practices, biases, and debates in nineteenth-century Canada. The result is extremely original and thought-provoking. The writing is rich: a pleasure to read and written in an individual style with a humanist’s regard for language and breadth of disciplines. I am convinced this book will have a lasting impact on Canadian scholarship about national values past and future." John Weaver, McMaster University
"E.A. Heaman's lengthy and important new book engages with imperialism, colonization, residential schools, oppression, conquest, and much else in a Canadian context, but its overarching concept is that of civilization. More balanced in its assessment of imperial ambition and colonial folly ... Heaman's tome resists simple binaries of heroes and villains. …As Civilization demonstrates so well, a lot depends on who does the civilizing, to whom, and how.” Literary Review of Canada
