Description
Book SynopsisDuring the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a host of journalists, ministers, medical doctors, businessmen, lawyers, labor leaders, politicians, and others called for an assault on poverty, slums, disreputable boarding houses, alcoholism, prostitution, sweatshop conditions, inadequate educational facilities, and other "social evils." Although they represented an array of political positions and advocated a range of strategies to deal with what they deemed problems, historians have come to term this impulse "urban reform" or the "urban reform movement." This book considers the history of reform ideology in Canada. It does so by considering four leading reformers living in what might be described as the most Canadian of Canadian cities, Winnipeg, Manitoba. While the book engages in discussions/debates surrounding the particular individuals it considers, its more general argument is that to understand the history of reform in Canada requires viewing reformers as simultaneously experiencing and responding to two basic phenomena simultaneously. It requires understanding them as confronting the polarizing tendencies, exploitation, and sometimes grinding poverty that was central to the economic order they (often unwittingly) helped to impose in northern North America. It also, however, requires seeing them as fundamentally shaped by the process and legacy of the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples, and the changing nature of Aboriginal-settler relations that were also central to the development of Canada.
Trade ReviewThis is a remarkable little book. Although coming in at just slightly over 200 pages – including endnotes – it manages to pack a brief and theoretically sophisticated précis of Canadian and Winnipeg history, four de facto biographies, and much new analysis of seemingly well-known subjects into a coherent and eminently readable whole…. All in all, this is a book that makes a contribution to several fields at once. It fits well with a host of new works that study settler colonialism, certainly fits well with many of the newer approaches to British Imperial history and is a valuable addition to the historiography of both western Canada and Winnipeg. It is well worth the read. * Labour/Le Travail: Journal Of Canadian Labour Studies *
[A] valuable addition to this growing literature.... [A]n insightful look at the intellectual and social history of an urban outpost of empire…. [T]his book successfully combines the tools of social and intellectual history to reframe the city of Winnipeg as part of an expanding Greater British settler society. By reinterpreting Anglo-Canadian ideas of race, nationalism, and social reform in both local and global contexts, Korneski illuminates the extent to which the problems of urban industrial development – in a word, modernity – were the products of, and conceived within, Britain’s imperial world-system. One need not embrace its framework of a liberal capitalist order to learn from this valuable study of the Western Canadian corner of the British World. * Britain and the World *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Empire, Nation and City Charles W. Gordon and the Christian Democracy Minnie J.B. Campbell: Loyalism, Nation, and Empire Secular Settler Nationalism in the Politics of John W. Dafoe Francis M. Beynon, Progressivism, and the Pursuit of Order Conclusion Bibliography
