Civilization: From Enlightenment Philosophy to Canadian History

Civilization: From Enlightenment Philosophy to Canadian History
ISBN-10
0228012880
ISBN-13
9780228012887
Series
Civilization
Category
History
Language
English
Published
2022-08-15
Publisher
McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Author
E.A. Heaman

Description

Colonial 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, American manifest destiny, and the emerging model of the nation-state. David Hume’s theory of history shaped the Canadian imaginary in constitutional documents, much-thumbed histories, and a certain liberal-conservative political and financial orientation. But as settlers flooded across the continent, cosmopolitanism became chauvinism, and the idea of civilization was put to accomplishing plunder and predation on a transcontinental scale. Case studies show crucial moments of conceptual reversal, some broadly representative and some unique to Canada. Dissecting the Seven Years’ War, domestic relations, the fiscal military state, liberal reform, social statistics, democracy, constitutionalism, and scholarly history, Heaman shows how key British and Canadian public figures grappled with the growing gap between theory and practice. By historicizing the concept of civilization, this book connects Enlightenment ideals and anti-colonialism, shown in contest with colonialism in Canada before Confederation.

Other editions

Similar books

  • Civilization: The West and the Rest
    By Niall Ferguson

    Boldly argued and teeming with memorable characters, this is Ferguson at his very best.

  • Civilization: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power
    By Niall Ferguson

    "Civilization" is the definitive history of Western civilization's rise to global dominance--and the "killer applications" that made this improbable ascent possible: competition, science, the rule of law, consumerism, modern medicine, and ...

  • Civilization: The West and the Rest
    By Niall Ferguson

    The answer, Niall Ferguson argues, was that the West developed six "killer applications" that the Rest lacked: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic.

  • Checklist of Civilizations and Culture
    By A. Kroeber

    This classic volume is now available in paperback. No better teacher of general anthropology can be imagined than A. L. Kroeber.

  • The Mainstream of Civilization to 1715
    By Joseph R. Strayer, Hans W. Gatzke

    Traces the history of the world's major civilizations discussing their special characteristics and contributions.

  • Energy and Civilization: A History
    By Vaclav Smil

    Smil describes humanity's energy eras in panoramic and interdisciplinary fashion, offering readers a magisterial overview. This book is an extensively updated and expanded version of Smil's Energy in World History (1994).

  • The Story of Civilization: VOLUME I - The Ancient World
    By Phillip Campbell

    The Story of Civilization: VOLUME I - The Ancient World

  • Civilisations
    By Laurent Binet

    A stunningly ambitious and entertaining novel that gives us a counter-factual history of the modern world, from the author of the international bestseller HHhH. Binet's best book yet- the work of a major writer just hitting his stride.

  • The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century
    By David Fromkin

    America was offering the world a new kind of politics, and new answers to the questions of who should rule and how. On April 30, I 789, George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States.

  • The Renaissance: A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D.
    By Will Durant, Ariel Durant

    Petrarch, Sonnets, tr. Jos. Auslander, 126. 6. Epistolae variae, no. 25, in Whitcomb, Literary Source-book of the Italian Renaissance, 13. 7. Renan, Averroes, 328. 8. Robinson and Rolf, 107. 9. Hutton, E., Giovanni Boccaccio, 3-5. 10.