Description
Book SynopsisCanadians often characterize their military history as a march toward nationhood, but in the first eighty years of Confederation they were fighting for the British Empire.
From 1867 to 1947, war or threat of war forced Canadians to define and redefine their relationship to Britain and to one another. As French Canadians, Indigenous peoples, and those with roots in Continental Europe and beyond mobilized in support of imperial war efforts, their participation challenged the imagined homogeneity of Canada as a British nation.
From soldiers overseas to workers on the home front and from the cultural ties of imperial pageantry to the bonds of race and class Fighting with the Empire examines the paradox of a national contribution to an imperial war effort. This insightful collection of connected case studies explores the middle ground between narratives that celebrate the emergence of a nation through warfare and those that equate Canadian nationalism with British
Trade Review
Fighting with the Empire is a wonderful piece of scholarship and should appeal to a broad range of academic interests. -- Katelyn Stieva, University of New Brunswick * Canadian Military History *
Table of Contents
Introduction / Steve Marti and William John Pratt
Part 1: Mobility and Mobilization
1 Fathers and Sons of Empire: Domesticity, Empire, and Canadian Participation in the Anglo-Boer War / Amy Shaw
2 Daughter in My Mother’s House, but Mistress in My Own: Questioning Canada’s Imperial Relationship through Patriotic Work, 1914–18 / Steve Marti
3 Postal Censorship and Canadian Identity in the Second World War / William John Pratt
Part 2: Persons and Power
4 Guardians of Empire? Imperial Officers in Canada, 1874–1914 / Eirik Brazier
5 Francophone-Anglophone Accommodation in Practice: Liberal Foreign Policy and National Unity between the Wars / Robert J. Talbot
6 Claiming Canada’s King and Queen: Canadians and the 1939 Royal Tour / Claire L. Halstead
Part 3: Hardly British
7 For King or Country? Quebec, the Empire, and the First World War / Geoff Keelan
8 Anti-fascist Strikes and the Patriotic Shield? Canadian Workers and the Employment of “Enemy Aliens” in the Second World War / Mikhail Bjorge
9 First Nations and the British Connection during the Second World War / R. Scott Sheffield
Conclusion / Steve Marti
Selected Bibliography; Index
