"In these two volumes, which replace the Reader's Guide to Canadian History, experts provide a select and critical guide to historical writing about pre- and post-Confederation Canada, with an emphasis on the most recent scholarship" -- Cover.

Canada's four easternmost provinces, while richly diverse in character and history, share many elements of their political and economic experience within Confederation. In this volume thirteen leading historians explore the shifting tides of Atlantic Canada's history, beginning with the union of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick with Ontario and Quebec to form the Dominion in 1867. Continuing on through Prince Edward Island's entry into Confederation six years later and Newfoundland's in 1949, they take the story of Atlantic Canada up to the 1980s. Collectively their work sheds light on the complex political dynamic between the region and Ottawa and reveals the roots of current social and economic realities. Fragmentation versus integration, plenty versus scarcity, centre versus periphery, and other models inform their analysis. The development of regional disparity, and responses to it, form a major theme. The tradition of regional protest by Maritimers, and later Atlantic Canadians, runs deep; so does their commitment to the idea of an integrated Canadian nation. Protests, over the decades, have primarily been expressions of frustration at perceived exclusion from the full benefits of national union. The creation of national markets for labour, capital, and goods often operated to their detriment, and political decisions at the national level frequently reinforced rather than alleviated the regional predicament. More than an account of the wealthy and powerful, this book often places ordinary men and women at the centre of the story. Above all, it reveals the resilience of Atlantic Canadians as they have struggled to overcome their problems and to share in the benefits of life in the Canadian community.

"In these two volumes, which replace the Reader's Guide to Canadian History, experts provide a select and critical guide to historical writing about pre- and post-Confederation Canada, with an emphasis on the most recent scholarship" -- Cover.

Nearly thirty years ago W.S. MacNutt published the first general history of the Atlantic provinces before Confederation. An outstanding scholarly achievement, that history inspired much of the enormous growth of research and writing on Atlantic Canada in the succeeding decades. Now a new effort is required, to convey the state of our knowledge in the 1990s. Many of the themes important to today's historians, notably those relating to social class, gender, and ethnicity, have been fully developed only since 1970. Important advances have been made in our understanding of regional economic developments and their implications for social, cultural, and political life. This book is intended to fill the need for an up-to-date overview of emerging regional themes and issues. Each of the sixteen chapters, written by a distinguished scholar, covers a specific chronological period and has been carefully integrated into the whole. The history begins with the evolution of Native cultures and the impact of the arrival of Europeans on those cultures, and continues to the formation of Confederation. The goal has been to provide a synthesis that not only incorporates the most recent scholarship but is accessible to the general reader. The book re-assesses many old themes from a new perspective, and seeks to broaden the focus of regional history to include those groups whom the traditional historiography ignored or marginalized.

Globalizing Confederation brings together original research from 17 scholars to provide an international perspective on Canada’s Confederation in 1867. In seeking to ascertain how others understood, constructed or considered the changes taking place in British North America, Globalizing Confederation unpacks a range of viewpoints, including those from foreign governments, British colonies, and Indigenous peoples. Exploring perspectives from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France, Latin America, New Zealand, and the Vatican, among others, as well as considering the impact of Confederation on the rights of Indigenous peoples during this period, the contributors to this collection present how Canada’s Confederation captured the imaginations of people around the world in the 1860s. Globalizing Confederation reveals how some viewed the 1867 changes to Canada as part of a reorganization of the British Empire, while others contextualized it in the literature on colonization more broadly, while still others framed the event as part of a re-alignment or power shift among the Spanish, French and British empires. While many people showed interest in the Confederation debates, others, such as South Africa and the West Indies, expressed little interest in the establishment of Canada until it had profound effects on their corners of the global political landscape.

Without pressure from a small but influential group of London financiers, Confederation would not have occurred in 1867, if at all. These financiers supported the unification of the British North American colonies because they believed it would rescue their under-performing investments and keep British North America within the British Empire. Andrew Smith discusses the role of British investors in Canadian Confederation, covering the period from the construction of the Grand Trunk Railroad in the 1850s to Canada's purchase of Rupert's Land in 1869-70. He describes how some investors lobbied the British government for the policies that made Confederation possible, working closely with the Fathers of Confederation, many of whom were participants in the same trans-Atlantic crony-capitalist system. British factory owners with classical liberal beliefs, however, disliked Confederation because they believed it would delay the political independence of the North American colonies, something they saw as beneficial. British Businessmen and Canadian Confederation reminds Canadians that most contemporaries of Confederation saw it as a way to preserve the colonists' bonds with Britain rather than to expand their political autonomy. It should interest a wide audience - from students of Canadian political history to historians interested in Victorian globalization.

In Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation, 1837-1867, Ged Martin offers a sceptical review of claims that Confederation answered all the problems facing the provinces, and examines in detail British perceptions of Canada and ideas about its future. The major British contribution to the coming of Confederation is to be found not in the aftermath of the Quebec conference, where the imperial role was mainly one of bluff and exhortation, but prior to 1864, in a vague consensus among opinion-formers that the provinces would one day unite. Faced with an inescapable need to secure legislation at Westminster for a new political structure, British North American politicians found they could work within the context of a metropolitan preference for intercolonial union.

Covering themes that include the Supreme Court of Canada, changing policies towards human rights, First Nations, as well as the legendary battles between Mitchell Hepburn and W.L. Mackenzie King, this collection illustrates the central role that federalism continues to play in the Canadian polity.

By the mid-nineteenth-century, 'public opinion' emerged as a new form of authority in Upper Canada. Contemporaries came to believe that the best answer to common questions arose from deliberation among private individuals. Older conceptions of government, sociability and the relationship between knowledge and power were jettisoned for a new image of Upper Canada as a deliberative democracy. The Capacity to Judge asks what made widespread public debate about common issues possible; why it came to be seen as desirable, even essential; and how it was integrated into Upper Canada's constitutional and social self-image. Drawing on an international body of literature indebted to Jürgen Habermas and based on extensive research in period newspapers, Jeffrey L. McNairn argues that voluntary associations and the press created a reading public capable of reasoning on matters of state, and that the dynamics of political conflict invested that public with final authority. He traces how contemporaries grappled with the consequences as they scrutinized parliamentary, republican and radical options for institutionalizing public opinion. The Capacity to Judge concludes with a case study of deliberative democracy in action that serves as a sustained defense of the type of intellectual history the book as a whole exemplifies.