Fighting with the Empire

Canada, Britain, and Global Conflict, 1867–1947

Edited by Steve Marti & William John Pratt
Categories: History, Canadian History, Military History, World History
Series: Studies in Canadian Military History
Publisher: UBC Press
Hardcover : 9780774860406, 220 pages, April 2019
Paperback : 9780774860413, 220 pages, October 2019
Ebook (PDF) : 9780774860420, 220 pages, April 2019
Ebook (EPUB) : 9780774860437, 220 pages, April 2019
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Table of contents

Introduction / Steve Marti and William John Pratt

Part 1: Mobility and Mobilization

1 Fathers and Sons of Empire: Domesticity, Empire, and Canadian Participation in the Anglo-Boer War / Amy Shaw

2 Daughter in My Mother’s House, but Mistress in My Own: Questioning Canada’s Imperial Relationship through Patriotic Work, 1914–18 / Steve Marti

3 Postal Censorship and Canadian Identity in the Second World War / William John Pratt

Part 2: Persons and Power

4 Guardians of Empire? Imperial Officers in Canada, 1874–1914 / Eirik Brazier

5 Francophone-Anglophone Accommodation in Practice: Liberal Foreign Policy and National Unity between the Wars / Robert J. Talbot

6 Claiming Canada’s King and Queen: Canadians and the 1939 Royal Tour / Claire L. Halstead

Part 3: Hardly British

7 For King or Country? Quebec, the Empire, and the First World War / Geoff Keelan

8 Anti-fascist Strikes and the Patriotic Shield? Canadian Workers and the Employment of “Enemy Aliens” in the Second World War / Mikhail Bjorge

9 First Nations and the British Connection during the Second World War / R. Scott Sheffield

Conclusion / Steve Marti

Selected Bibliography; Index

This insightful collection untangles the paradox of mobilizing a Canadian contribution to Britain’s imperial wars – and forging a national identity in the process.

Description

Canadians often characterize their military history as a march toward nationhood, but in the first eighty years of Confederation they were fighting for the British Empire. War forced Canadians to re-examine their relationship to Britain and to one another. As French Canadians, Indigenous peoples, and those with roots in continental Europe and beyond mobilized for war, their participation challenged the imagined homogeneity of Canada as a British nation. Fighting with the Empire examines the paradox of a national contribution to an imperial war effort, finding middle ground between affirming the emergence of a nation through warfare and equating Canadian nationalism with British imperialism.

Reviews

Fighting with the Empire is a wonderful piece of scholarship and should appeal to a broad range of academic interests.

- Katelyn Stieva, University of New Brunswick