Imperialist Canada

Imperialist Canada exposes Canada's imperialist past and present, at home and across the globe. Todd Gordon interweaves histories of aboriginal dispossession in Canada with the cold facts of Canadian capital's oppression of indigenous peoples in the global South. The book digs beneath the surface of Canada's image as global peacekeeper and promoter of human rights, revealing the links between the corporate pursuit of profit and Canadian foreign and domestic policy. Drawing on examples from Colombia, the Congo, Sudan, Haiti and elsewhere, Imperial Canada makes a passionate plea for greater critical attention to Canada's role in the global order.

Rooted in thousands of pages of Access to Information documents and dozens of interviews carried out throughout Latin America, Blood of Extraction examines the increasing presence of Canadian mining companies in Latin America and the environmental and human rights abuses that have occurred as a result. By following the money, Gordon and Webber illustrate the myriad ways Canadian-based multinational corporations, backed by the Canadian state, have developed extensive economic interests in Latin America over the last two decades at the expense of Latin American people and the environment. Latin American communities affected by Canadian resource extraction are now organized into hundreds of opposition movements, from Mexico to Argentina, and the authors illustrate the strategies used by the Canadian state to silence this resistance and advance corporate interests.

Prior to the publication of The Sense of Power most studies of the Canadian movement for imperial unity focused on commercial policy and military and naval cooperation. This influential book demonstrated that the movement – which held that Canada could only become a great nation within the British Empire – was significantly influenced by its leading advocates’ belief in nationalism. Carl Berger explores the emotional appeal and intellectual context of this belief, arguing that these advocates’ support of imperial unity can be grasped only in terms of their commitment to certain conservative values and in relation to their conception of Canada. The Sense of Power was commended by the Toronto Star when it was first published as “entertaining as well as brilliant,” and in 2011 Ramsay Cook noted that “few first books, or for that matter few books, have made as marked an impact on the interpretation of a major theme in Canadian history.” This second edition brings to life the work’s incisive analysis and its important contribution to Canadian intellectual history.

During the First World War, Henri Bourassa – fierce Canadian nationalist, politician, and journalist from Quebec – took centre stage in the national debates on Canada’s participation in the war, its imperial ties to Britain, and Canada’s place in the world. In Duty to Dissent, Geoff Keelan draws upon Bourassa’s voluminous editorials in Le Devoir, the newspaper he founded in 1910, to trace Bourassa’s evolving perspective on the war’s meaning and consequences. What emerges is not a simplistic sketch of a local journalist engaged in national debates, as most English Canadians know him, but a fully rendered portrait of a Canadian looking out at the world.

Sara Jeannette Duncan’s classic portrait of a turn-of-the-century Ontario town, The Imperialist captures the spirit of an emergent nation through the example of two young dreamers. Impassioned by “the Imperialist idea,” Lorne Murchison rests his bid for office on his vision of a rejuvenated British Empire. His sister Advena betrays a kindred attraction to the high-flown ideals in her love for an unworldly, and unavailable, young minister. Nimbly alternating between politics and romance, Duncan constructs a superbly ironic object-lesson in the Canadian virtue of compromise. Sympathetic, humorous, and wonderfully detailed, The Imperialist is an astute analysis of the paradoxes of Canadian nationhood, as relevant today as when the novel was first published in 1904. Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.

"In the Age of New Imperialism, Canada figured prominently in British imperial dreams and public debate ... The nine stereotypical British views presented here show how great was the gulf between imperially motivated illusions and harsh Canadian realities."--back cover.

Normand Lester, a journalist with Radio-Canada (the French-language equivalent of the CBC) stirred up a hornet’s nest when he revealed that the federal government had secretly funded television’s Heritage Minutes which, in his view, provided a sanitized version of our shared history. He was subsequently, controversially, let go. The Black Book of Canada is his impassioned defence of his native province and an implicit repudiation of the anglophone media’s unfair, yet all-too-common attacks on Quebec and Quebecers. While English Canada may think itself a “just society,” in this highly controversial book – which sold 50,000 copies in French – Normand Lester chronicles English-Canadian intolerance: the expulsion of the Acadians; Lord Durham’s anti-French policies; the hanging of Louis Riel; R. B. Bennett’s funding of anti-Semitic publications; and the internment of Japanese Canadians in the Second World War. Lester argues that the myth of two equal, amicable co-founders of the nation, a myth actively promoted by the federal government over recent decades, ignores the fact that there will always be two incompatible national histories.

Sarah Carter’s "Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies" examines the goals, aspirations, andchallenges met by women who sought land of their own. Supporters of British women homesteaders argued they would contribute to the “spade-work” of the Empire through their imperial plots, replacing foreign settlers and relieving Britain of its "surplus" women. Yet far into the twentieth century there was persistent opposition to the idea that women could or should farm: British women were to be exemplars of an idealized white femininity, not toiling in the fields. In Canada, heated debates about women farmers touched on issues of ethnicity, race, gender, class, and nation. Despite legal and cultural obstacles and discrimination, British women did acquire land as homesteaders, farmers, ranchers, and speculators on the Canadian prairies. They participated in the project of dispossessing Indigenous people. Their complicity was, however, ambiguous and restricted because they were excluded from the power and privileges of their male counterparts. Imperial Plots depicts the female farmers and ranchers of the prairies, from the Indigenous women agriculturalists of the Plains to the array of women who resolved to work on the land in the first decades of the twentieth century.