• Questions of Order: Confederation and the Making of Modern Canada – A Review

    Peter Price, Questions of Order: Confederation and the Making of Modern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021). Steve Penfold As an historical event, Canadian Confederation is very confusing. Multi-leveled, contradictory, endlessly complex – it has meant, and continues to mean, different things to a ridiculously wide range of scholars, politicians, and citizens. The British… Continue Reading

  • De-sanctifying Written Constitutions

    Review of Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 2021) 502 pp. $35.00. Elizabeth Mancke and Adam Nadeau[1] In the conventional metanarrative of modernity, written constitutions symbolize progressive trends, political events that were considered “benevolent and normally acted as… Continue Reading

  • “What would Lord Durham advise?”

    E.A. Heaman No, “not assimilate your French”: I think he’s been misread. Lord Durham would have better advice than that because he lived in a world not unlike our own. Devastating and state-discrediting pandemic? Check. Disaffected fringe looking to topple the state? Check. Popular American violence lending strength to popular violence everywhere, including Canada? Check.… Continue Reading

  • Entangling the Quebec Act: Transnational Contexts, Meanings, and Legacies in North America and the British Empire – A Review

    Ollivier Hubert and François Furstenberg, eds., Entangling the Quebec Act: Transnational Contexts, Meanings, and Legacies in North America and the British Empire (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). Adam Nadeau In Entangling the Quebec Act: Transnational Contexts, Meanings, and Legacies in North America and the British Empire, editors Ollivier Hubert and François Furstenberg present… Continue Reading

  • Histoire et mémoire du régime seigneurial au Québec

    Olivier Guimond Benoît Grenier (dir.) (coll. Alain Laberge et Stéphanie Lanthier), Le régime seigneurial au Québec : fragments d’histoire et de mémoire (Sherbrooke, Les Éditions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 2020). L’abolition du régime seigneurial, en 1854, a paradoxalement « consacré le maintien de la propriété seigneuriale[1] » au Québec. En effet, la Loi seigneuriale a prévu, pour les… Continue Reading

  • History and memory of the seigneurial regime in Quebec

    Olivier Guimond Benoît Grenier, ed. Le régime seigneurial au Québec: fragments d’histoire et de mémoire. In collaboration with Alain Laberge and Stéphanie Lanthier. (Sherbrooke: Les Éditions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 2020). The abolition of the seigneurial regime in 1854 has, paradoxically, “ratified the maintenance of seigneurial property”[2] in Quebec. Indeed, in addition to a compensation… Continue Reading