E.A. Heaman
Editors’ note: This week marks the final series for Borealia after a decade of online public history and conversation. You can read our thank you remarks here, and will be able to access Borealia’s back-catalogue for at least another couple years. Thanks for reading, and thanks to E.A. Heaman, Max Hamon, and Jerry Bannister for this final series, bringing historical perspective to this current moment of nationalism redux and cross-border complexity.
A decade of invigorating conversation around the early history of Canada is the cause and content of my remarks. Borealia began to appear a decade ago, just as I began to make an argument for reconsidering early British North America as an exemplar of “civilization.” That project is done and dusted and so, it seems, is Borealia. We knew, the editors and I, that early Canada is more interesting and relevant for our current perplexities than non-specialists realize. They hoped to provoke vigorous conversation. That was optimistic. Canadian scholarly history, long deemed uniquely “boring,” has been a canary in the coalmine for hostility to academic history (and academe itself, according to David Runciman, who reports that the public loves informative podcasts, so long as they deny university associations). Scholarly history suffers from a right wing attack on “wokeness,” done in the name of a peculiarly white and supremacist version of civilization that Borealia and I both worked to debunk.
We all fought that battle in different ways. My way was to argue that, historically, “civilization” began as neither white nor supremacist. I was finishing a book on tax history from 1867 to 1917 that asked the question: what if Canadian history was really about the money? I showed, at some length, how claims about money and identity were turned into knowledge claims and put to political and constitutional purposes. But much of the formative work for that paradigm occurred before Confederation, with “civilization” as the key organizing concept for knowledge and identity, power and wealth. Now I took the story back to the constitution before the constitution and what I found surprised me. The earliest constitutionalism in British North America was remarkably plural, even anti-racist. It reflected a Francophile and Indigenizing slant within British constitutionalism that could be traced back to David Hume.
Hume popularized the term “civilization” in the mid-eighteenth century, concocting it from disparate constituents of early modern public opinion: English history, Renaissance scholarship, French skepticism, literary culture, the new psychological sciences, and trading relationships. That’s well known; less well known is a distinctly Indigenous constituent. I argued for an Indigenous Enlightening in the European Enlightenment. Hume saw and admired Indigenous uses of and checks upon the state.
This we find verified in the American tribes, where men live in concord and amity among themselves without any establish’d government; and never pay submission to any of their fellows, except in time of war, when their captain enjoys a shadow of authority, which he loses after their return from the field, and the establishment of peace with the neighbouring tribes.
Where Hobbes bolstered state authority against Indigenous statelessness and Locke bolstered resistance to the state with a Eurocentric and dispossessing version of private property, Hume incorporated Indigenous freedom in his arguments for generalized flourishing within and across the divides of state and nation. He excoriated English imperialism (“John Bull’s prejudices are ridiculous; as his insolence is intolerable”) and made civilization a means of checking it. On my reading, Indigenous people gave the modern west an important chunk of its liberties. It’s well-known that radical continental thinkers like Lahontan took up their models. But the view from Canada shows something different: not just Indigenous models but Indigenous peoples joining in a heterogenizing public sphere, exercising their public opinion, and putting real pressure on British-Canadian politics and constitutionalism from within.
Hume’s observation and Canadian perplexities together translated into a mid-century decade of debate and policy designed to recognize non-western versions of civilization that we might meaningfully describe as “woke.” The British were so desperately eager to stop the western border wars, calm French-Canadian insecurity, and construct mutually beneficial trading relations, that they pledged rights to old and new subjects alike, including protection against molestation to Indigenous people and lands along the Proclamation line. They were too weak to do otherwise. Those pledges interwove history and politics as a tag team: Hume’s anti-war essay “on the jealousy of trade” in 1758, the Conquest of 1760, Hume’s depiction in 1762 of the Norman Conquest of 1066, followed by the Magna Carta of 1215 as beginning modern “public” liberties, and the Royal Proclamation and Treaty of Niagara in 1763 and 1764, as beginning modern constitutionalism in North America. American constitutionalism, when it came along a decade later, was not inaugurating so much as it was reacting. And although the Americans proclaimed their intellectual debts to Hume, Hume himself understood that this was more in the nature of a counter-Enlightenment. Where Hume attacked jealous chauvinism and downplayed borders, Benjamin Franklin declared borders intolerable and demanded universal sovereign – and white – command across North America. Donald Trump is reverting to classic American form. In so doing, he’s defying a certain Indigenization and Canadianization of politics dating back to the Enlightenment.
Canada took shape as an alternative to American violence. The late, much-lamented Elizabeth Mancke made that observation central to her work and to conversations that looped in the Borealia editors and me. The Humean project in Canada predated American revolutionary violence, but that violence heightened its appeal. Canadian violence was perforce more discreet, more solicitous of Indigenous and Catholic opinion. Canadian politics became a vigorous debate about how to balance coercion and consensus on terrain that couldn’t be carried by force majeure. But as Canadians seized power for themselves, as a project of vertical equality between English and French, Protestant and Catholic, they erased older pluralisms and increasingly governed Indigenous peoples by force majeure. Even as French and English pundits whipped one another into mutual hatred, prudent politicians built institutions to enable mutual sharing of wealth and power and nationalized them in 1867, in the menacing shadow of the American Civil War. But the generalization of that project across the continent and, indeed, the world, was the work of another “woke” decade: the 1940s.
My current research zeroes in on a Canadian who “got” Hume’s logic and evidence, also “got” Canada as a practical historical exemplar for it, and carried that reasoning into the heart of FDR’s Washington during its “enigmatic” turn to multilateralism. Jacob Viner, a Montreal-born, Harvard-trained, Chicago economist (“the Chicago genius” to FDR’s Treasury Secretary) was also the “greatest” of the historical economists and an important architect of international financial relations between 1934 and 1944. He urged the Tripartite Pact of 1936 that inaugurated the multilateral turn. In October 1940, with compelling economic data, he made the case for what promptly became lend-lease. We will need two institutions, an International Monetary Fund and a World Bank: that was Viner’s advice in the lead-up to Bretton Woods. I see institutions designed to follow Hume’s logic so as to bridge racial, ideological, and all the other kinds of hatred, revive international trade, and get American money into non-American and even anti-American hands. Viner’s Montreal was like Hume’s Edinburgh, Canada like Scotland: places where shared economic benefits might, sometimes, check political jealousies. Hume made himself an insider, colonial critic of the world hegemon of his day, and so did Viner. His views were only “slightly left,” but he put that slight margin to impressive practical effect – not just in the US but also in Canada, where his brief to the Rowell-Sirois Commission, on the eve of the Second World War, helped to legitimate a constitutional reset and economic redistribution in Canada. Later, as American economic opinion lurched rightward, Viner defended the welfare state, warning that if understanding, sympathy, and prudence failed, if the American working classes no longer saw “improvement in it for their children if not for themselves,” demagogy and social violence might well result. “Communism!” was the predictable right-wing reply, much like “Indian communism!” the right-wing reply to Canadian land-value taxation projects.
It is, to a surprising degree, Viner’s work that Trump is undoing. You wouldn’t know that if you didn’t read Canadian history from time to time, and you wouldn’t know the deep roots if you didn’t read early Canadian history. That’s my take, not Borealia’s take; I suspect they aren’t quite so committed to commensurability as I am. But what a pleasure it has been to discuss these things with my friends and colleagues at Borealia during a decade that took seriously historical scholarship, pluralism, and the possibility of sharing wealth and power.
E.A. Heaman teaches history at McGill University
Featured image: Ken Maracle’s copy of the 1764 Covenant Chain Wampum Belt, courtesy of the Canadian Museum of History, LH2016.48.2, IMG 2016-0267-0250-Dm, and of Ken Maracle and The Wampum Shop.
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