Civilization: From Enlightenment Philosophy to Canadian History 9780228012870

Table of contents :
Cover
CIVILIZATION
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Good Cop
Part One | The Background and the Foreground
1 Enlightenment, Self-Civilization, and Decivilization: Hume vs Franklin
2 “Am I Your Slave?”: Gendering Civilization
Part Two | The British Reports on Canada
3 Tory Civilization in the 1820s: The Darling Report
4 Liberal Civilization in the 1830s: The Durham Report
5 The Sociology of Civilization in the 1840s: The Bagot Report
Part Three | The Civilizations of the Canadas
6 Democratic Civilization in the 1850s: Joseph-Charles Taché and Political Voice
7 Constitutional Civilization in the 1860s: John A. Macdonald and Confederation
8 History’s Civilization: Daniel Wilson and the End of History
Conclusion: The Politics of Civilization
Notes
Index

Citation preview

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Civilization F ro m E n l i g h t e n m e n t P h i los o p h y to C a n a d i a n H i s to ry

e.a. heaman

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 ISB N ISB N ISB N ISB N

978-0-2280-1148-4 978-0-2280-1167-5 978-0-2280-1287-0 978-0-2280-1288-7

(cloth) (paper) (ep df) (ep ub)

Legal deposit second quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Civilization : from enlightenment philosophy to Canadian history / E.A. Heaman. Names: Heaman, E. A. (Elsbeth A.), 1964– author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220195072 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220195196 | ISB N 9780228011484 (cloth) | IS BN 9780228011675 (paper) | I SB N 9780228012870 (ePDF ) | ISBN 9780228012887 (eP UB) Subjects: lc s h: Canada—Civilization—19th century. | l c sh : Great Britain— Colonies—America. | l cs h: Civilization, Modern—19th century. | l c sh : Enlightenment. Classification: l cc f c95.3.h 43 2022 | ddc 971.03—dc23

This book was typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: The Good Cop 3 Part One | The Background and the Foreground 1

Enlightenment, Self-Civilization, and Decivilization: Hume vs Franklin 39

2 “Am I Your Slave?”: Gendering Civilization

105

Part Two | The British Reports on Canada 3 Tory Civilization in the 1820s: The Darling Report 4

155

Liberal Civilization in the 1830s: The Durham Report

190

5 The Sociology of Civilization in the 1840s: The Bagot Report 245 Part Three | The Civilizations of the Canadas 6

Democratic Civilization in the 1850s: Joseph-Charles Taché and Political Voice 341

7

Constitutional Civilization in the 1860s: John A. Macdonald and Confederation 374

8

History’s Civilization: Daniel Wilson and the End of History 427 Conclusion: The Politics of Civilization Notes

475

Index

587

457

Acknowledgments

This book, and the last, took shape in February 2014 when I read, in the space of a week, Thomas Piketty’s Capital and the Bagot report, and realized that they were speaking the same language, one surprisingly unrepresented in Canadian historiography. It needed two books to do justice to that moment of illumination, the one leading up to and the other leading away from Confederation, but they were always in dialogue as prequel and sequel. The roots are deeper, of course. I have been curious about the fit between philosophy, politics, historiography, and Canadian history since the early 1990s, when I was reading across those fields and arguing with my PhD supervisor, Michael Bliss, about their relevance. The topic was exhibitions, visual discipline if nothing else, and yet a paragraph on the subject with the fatal inclusion of words to the effect of “Michel Foucault says” earned from him the marginal notation: “gobbledygook!” But the addition of “Plato says” earned that same paragraph a checkmark. Michael wouldn’t let me preach to the choir but always forced me to make a better explanation, with more expansive evidence and arguments. Michael Bliss loved history and complex social explanations, and he distrusted the financiers’ accounts of themselves. I learned so much from him and wish I could thrash out this argument, too, with him, like all the others, to better understand where and how we agreed and disagreed. I learned so much from so many other scholars as well. If I’d listened better to Paul Rutherford, I would have been reading Schmitt alongside Plato and Foucault. So many teachers generously shared their knowledge, in seminars, sometimes taken for credit and others where I was a welcomed guest: Clifford Orwin in political philosophy, Trevor Levere, Arthur Silver, and Suzanne Zeller in history, Ian Hacking and William Dray in philosophy, Ann Robson in English. That was in the PhD program at the University of Toronto; long before that I’d taken courses in English and French literature and language, German and Latin, anthropology, sociology, and a huge range of history, ancient, medieval, and modern, at McGill

viii

Acknowledgments

University and the University of Victoria. Nancy Partner’s historiography courses were an opening door, the place where I discovered Hume’s history. This book is a belated answer to her argument that most historians rely too heavily on crude psychologies beholden to Adam Smith. People said then, as they say now, that universities don’t offer intellectual breadth and depth anymore. Don’t believe them; everything is on offer for those who seek. Follow the advice of – once again, the terribly missed – Al Alonso, who said to me one day: “Why not join me and sit in?” A particularly heartfelt thanks to Colin Grittner, Max Hamon, Jeffrey McNairn, Carmen Nielson, Angela Tozer, Michael Borsk, and Denis McKim, who read the manuscript in draft and levelled many searching criticisms. A special thanks to two amazing scholars, Elizabeth Mancke and Shirley Tillotson, who invited me into their big, sshrc -funded projects and enormously expanded my intellectual horizons, as well as my sense of collegiality. I think they’ve done that for the whole Canadian field. Thanks also to the other members of those projects, especially Jerry Bannister (also in both), Jeffrey McNairn, Bruce Curtis, Denis McKim, Scott See, Donald Fyson, Bradley Miller, Ian Radforth, Amani Whitfield, Tom Peace, and Darrin Ferry. And thanks to the many others who heard and debated draft chapters with me, especially conveners David Tough, Brian Lewis, and Elizabeth Elbourne, Cassie Watson, David Edgerton, Martin Petitclerc, Lorenz Lüthi, Jimmy Kennedy and Alan Hallsworth, Julien Mauduit and Jennifer Tunnicliffe, Paula Hastings and Heidi Bohaker, Bradley Miller, Penny Bryden, Carrie Rentschler, Laila Parsons, Don Nerbas, Allan Greer, Catherine Desbarats, Suzanne Morton, Griet Vankeerberghen, Paul Yachnin, Greg Marchildon, John Robertson, Nancy Janovicek, Brian Gettler, Colin Coates, Wilson Chacko Jacob, Hussein Fancy, Michel Ducharme, Danny Samson, Nathan Ince, Andrea Eidinger, Eileen Magnello, John Hall, Gary Knox; belated thank you to Nancy Christie and to the late Jarrett Rudy. Dan Rück and Glenn Walker taught me much about local history, Colin Grittner and Max Hamon about national history, and Jean-Philip Mathieu about business history and slavery. Shawn McCutcheon shared my interest in the Enlightenment in Canada. Much of the thinking through was done in the classroom, in the company of students. I am hugely indebted for all I learned from those conversations, especially to Emma Cornelius and Eyitayo KunleOladosu. Francesca Edgerton and Mackenzie Bleho did research on the project, the latter with funds from the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Thanks to Geoff Wallace, map-maker extraordinaire, for the map. I am grateful to the editors and presses holding copyright on material previously published. Mairi Cowan at the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association kindly let me reprint material from “Constructing Innocence: Representations of Sexual Violence in Upper Canada’s War of

Acknowledgments

ix

1812,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association ns 24, no. 2 (2014): 114–55. Elizabeth Mancke, Jerry Bannister, Denis McKim, Scott See, and Len Husband at the University of Toronto kindly let me reprint material from “Space, Race, and Violence: The Beginnings of ‘Civilization’ in Canada,” in their Violence, Order, and Unrest: A History of British North America, 1749–1876 (University of Toronto Press, 2019). Julien Mauduit and Jennifer Tunnicliffe, and Jonathan Crago at McGill-Queen’s University Press, kindly let me reprint material from “Conceptualizing Democratic Conservatism in 1850s Canada,” in their Constant Struggle: Histories of Canadian Democratization (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). I owe many debts to many librarians and archivists, especially those at McGill University who efficiently and generously responded to my requests for advice, books, documents, and permission to use material – particularly Christopher Lyons, Mary Hague-Yearl, Joseph Hafner, and Lynda Scott. At mqup , Jonathan Crago took a vital interest from the beginning. The McGill-Queen’s team rallied again, especially Kathleen Fraser, Jacqui Davis, and my painstaking copyeditor Scott Howard. Anonymous referees had terrifically useful criticisms, and if I haven’t followed their advice to the letter, I hope I have made the weakest elements less weak. Any errors and omissions remain obstinately mine alone. Thanks to my family, as always, for support and sustenance, as well as spirited debate. Neela, Liam, and Shaun were at the sharp end of those conversations, always demanding better accountings of history and knowledge, not to mention Shakespeare. There can be few pleasures greater than being corrected by your kids in such matters. Extended family, including my brothers and sisters-in-law, Dan and Linda, Andrew and Barb, remain indulgent if occasionally perplexed. My parents, Chris and Isabel Heaman, have, my whole life, been models of curiosity, integrity, and humanity. This book is dedicated to my favourite philosopher, Shaun PercevalMaxwell, who taught me to live in love and hope.

civilization

For all men by nature reason alike, and well, when they have good principles. Leviathan

Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath. The Merchant of Venice

in t ro du cti on

The Good Cop

“Faut-il brûler Sade?”: that was the question posed by an icon of modern feminism, Simone de Beauvoir, of an icon of misogyny, the Marquis de Sade.1 Here, I ask much the same of “civilization,” taking Canada as a case study. Notwithstanding compelling arguments to the contrary, I believe we need civilization as an account of history. Non-European peoples rightly understood themselves as civilized, and European theories of civilization were as enlightened as they were capable of recognizing and integrating those understandings. I make the case through a century of political thought, using Canada to illustrate how to do and also how not to do enlightened politics. Shaped by English and French, American and Indigenous traditions and frameworks, Canada offers an example of cosmopolitan diversity turned into something more national. Canada repeatedly reconstitutionalized itself with other colonies made internal: from the “Quebec” of 1763 to two distinct “Canadas” in 1791, to the united “Canadas” of 1841, to, finally, the modern-day “Canada” constructed in 1867 with its plural jurisdictions. Each regime was an experiment in dissent, division, and solidarity, according to new and debunked ideas about what people did or did not share, what they owed to one another, and how political power worked across space and over time. I trace the workings of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment through those changing arrangements in relation to law, colonialism, and justice. Philosophers from Plato to Alfred North Whitehead have been credited with defining civilization as the victory of persuasion over force. Enlightenment versions of civilization ranged widely, from an aversion to warmongering and preference for commerce and opinion, to material progress and refinement, to a racialized theory of superiority.2 Brett Bowden argues that “some measure of social cooperation and a capacity for sociopolitical organization or self-government among any given people have long been considered key

4

Civilization

characteristics or requirements of civilization.”3 By the nineteenth century, a professional class of jurists took the lead in defining civilization, insisting on full jurisdictional sovereignty as one crucial marker, along with state centralization, bureaucratization, and a monopoly on legitimate violence. Those highly juridical standards dovetailed with economic standards, Ntina Tzouvala has recently argued, seeing an attempt to “universalise the historically contingent coming-together of capital and the state in Europe.”4 The picture is big and complex. Here, I draw on that rich scholarship to explore some key contradictions relating to Canada. Above all, I ask whether civilization was better understood as force majeure or a check upon it. Were the most civilized nations only coincidentally the most powerful ones or was there an element of realpolitik buried in there, a suggestion that might makes right? That question posed a second one: whether civilization should be self-civilization or whether the strong should tutor the weak. To be civilized required knowledge and power, the ability to recognize and make important choices. Civilization was a kind of freedom or liberty that you could only get with good information and good judgment. Politicians, lawyers, and pundits had to be able to defend it in knowledgeable circles of public opinion, such as the press, the salon, or the coffee house. We readily grasp the difference between an ironic reference to Napoleon’s “civilizing mission” in Russia and the more literal remark that such brutalities turned “civilized opinion” against him.5 Public opinion could be divided and discordant, muffled or duped, but it could not be wholly ignored or repressed in any supposedly civilized country. Canada claimed heritage from Britain and France, understood as the “centre” of enlightened civilization, but struggled with a real-world incapacity to conjure agency from its rocky landscape, its diverse population, and its fragile presence in North America. Americans were more powerful and pushed civilization more frankly towards realpolitik. Robert Nichols argues that whereas European politics unfolded in “a social space crowded with prior claims to unequal ownership and status,” American politics seemed more natural than historical: “lacking the traditions and customary institutions of a feudal society, America is future-oriented and unbounded will.”6 People living in Canada, threatened by American will, had grounds to view civilization and public opinion as a salutary check on coercion and violence. They pondered how to negotiate with the indirect power of the world’s and the continent’s greatest hegemons. They reflected not on Nichols’s unbounded will but rather on what it meant to have a bounded will. Where Americans tended to assert, their northern neighbours, Indigenous and settler alike, tended more to persuade. Canadian political purposes had more European and more Indigenous input and influences for longer than American ones did, and that made Canada a little more plural for a little longer. The British imperial state could not hold and govern Canada

Introduction: The Good Cop

5

militarily and directly but had to actively woo the support of the diverse peoples in that region, insisted many commentators at the time.7 Conditions in Canada – a reluctant land and resistant peoples – provoked the kind of practical liberalization, decentralization, and debt to public opinion on the ground that enlightened philosophers advocated as a model of rule in Europe. Indigenous people were well understood by eighteenth-century officials and philosophers to be crucial constituents of the public opinion that the imperial state must woo in order to perpetuate its interests in the region. Historians have discounted the military importance of Indigenous peoples after the War of 1812, with the death of Tecumseh signalling the collapse of the Pan-Indian movement. But once you bring public opinion and social agency into the story, you see a different trajectory. Continuing Anglo-Canadian fear of Americanization made Indigenous nations and their activities, including commerce, war, police, petitioning, and voting, consequential for several more crucial decades. And that influence was felt not just in Canada but also in Britain, at a time when politicians were arguing fiercely about how coercively the state should govern its subjects overseas or at home, even as economic and social changes destabilized their basic fundaments and premises. Aggressive statesmen in both Britain and the United States tried and failed to violently bend the Canadian colonies to their will. The British conquest succeeded where the American one did not, because the British made one concession after another to sensibilities on the ground that Americans were, on a scale of probabilities, unlikely to respect. Both Westminster and Washington learned that in colonial Canada they must lead with soft power. Military and state violence there could be vivid and exemplary but not determinative. That was a victory for a small and diverse congeries of peoples against two great world powers, and also a victory for persuasion over coercion that, over the long term, would work to redefine power. But as colonial state capacity grew, it was used to stoke internal cohesion in increasingly coercive ways. My story has three sections and three chronological stages focusing on the questions that Canada posed to the Enlightenment, to British statesmen, and then to Canadian officials, politicians, and scholars. Firstly, the Enlightenment project of politics by persuasion formulated, roughly, in the middle third of the eighteenth century, heavily indebted to experiences of governing colonies at home and overseas; secondly, the persistence of that view in Britain and Canada in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s; thirdly, its reversal in the Canada of the 1850s and 1860s. But first, in the introduction, I will provide some basic definitions and make the case for Canada as a case study of Enlightenment constitutionalism and civilization. This is a history of political thought that explores the ways power was understood, justified, and exercised according to the theory of the “three faces of power.” That

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theory contrasts “hard” power, or direct coercion and compulsion, with two softer versions that use institutions to exercise power more indirectly, either by channelling and narrowing the range of choices or by getting the governed to internalize the ambitions and wishes of the governing.8 But all of those arguments required, first, David Hume’s discovery of the modern collective action problem. My point of departure is Hume’s argument that laws and contracts worked more by persuasion than by compulsion. Because, he observed, the law-givers were always outnumbered and could always be toppled, obedience was chosen rather than compelled. Hume psychologized the state, the social contract, and even reason itself, showing that these things existed as imaginary constructs rather than as real things in the world. There was no legitimacy for law beyond the arguments that legitimated it, whether by reference to natural law or contract or history, all of them merely persuasive present politics. Political history is the history of choice with all its tensions and contradictions. A utilitarian calculus of pros and cons is at work in those choices, Jeremy Bentham learned from reading Hume. Utilitarianism is constant choosing.9 It followed from Hume’s argument that we are not bound by a social contract because we choose to break contracts when we think that best serves our interests. Thomas Hobbes thought you could irrevocably hand over your power of choice to the state; Hume “gutted” that theory.10 Contractualists mystified ordinary self-interest in much the way priests did, to shore up their persuasive power.11 Law trailed along behind persuasion.12 Law was not just an effect of state power but always a legitimation of state power and a “unilateral action … co-produced” by authors and audiences, according to Annabel Brett. Legitimation “presupposes some sort of public domain, however restricted it may be, with at least some degree of political agency on the part of the relevant public. Where there is no room at all for legitimation, there is no politics.”13 Civilization theory presumed power and information enough for collective choice, and political philosophy pragmatically upheld and legitimated those choices: Hobbes insisted on their innate conservatism, John Locke on their innate liberalism, while Hume, more historically minded, reflected on their interplay and on history as a legitimating agency. Hume’s discovery of the collective action problem had a democratizing effect, one that Hume himself tried to moderate by writing histories that celebrated continuity and stability, as consistent with his observation that men were ruled by authority and antiquity, not reason.14 Sometimes it worked, sometimes it did not. Reactionaries clung to older ideals, liberalizers wrote their own whiggish histories of an evolving freedom, and radicals urged the violent seizure of freedom. That’s a muchtold story of Enlightenment and revolution in America, in France, in Haiti,

Introduction: The Good Cop

7

and beyond. But in Britain and in Canada, Hume’s efforts to create a certain stability with liberal precepts and a conservative historical framework were surprisingly successful. By dint of its French and American presence and proximity, Canada had a special invitation to cast off British oversight and join the Atlantic revolutions. Britain exerted itself to preserve Canada by force and persuasion, with soldiers, institutions, and internalized loyalty. Most of the time, most of the diverse peoples inhabiting the regions of colonial Canada rejected separation, preferring the liberal-conservative British constitutional framework to something more populist.15 That decision – not to become American – was the keynote of Canadian public life, according to Richard Gwyn.16 The choice on offer was between an inherited and ill-fitting British constitutional framework and violent repudiation of that framework in the name of a peculiarly vibrant and North American freedom, inscribed into a new kind of declarative constitution.17 But the decision against Americanization could never be decisive and lasting because there were always pro-America factions, sometimes to the left and sometimes to the right. The next political alliance to gain control of Canada might change its mind; or America might invade; or Americanization might occur by stealthier economic and cultural means. The British state could never let off wooing different elements of the Canadian public, even as some people milked Canada’s precarity to get concessions. Indigenous peoples had reason to prefer British to American rule and Anglo-Canadian statesmen milked that choice as well. Canada was a bit player geopolitically but a crucial exemplar for the debates about how to balance coercion and consent in the modern project of rule. Canada was like Scotland: a liberally governed colony, a test case in the workings of the British constitution and Pax Britannica. But Canada was the more tenuously British, widely expected to secede sooner or later, following an apparently irresistible American trajectory. “Normal” debates in the Canadas were always metaconstitutional ones, for and against the British constitution and its social underpinnings. British policy prioritized trade because Britain owed all its wealth, power, and liberty to commerce, according to Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, who controlled British foreign policy during the three decades before the Seven Years War.18 To privilege opinion and commerce on the British model was to recognize the social and economic power of people who might not vote but could still powerfully shape the Canada of their day. But did the British model go too far in amplifying popular agency amongst people who were culturally not British? How impartial could the Pax Britannica be in such a visibly diverse world? Political necessity and worries about the risks to British authority always had a prominent place in statecraft, and realpolitik dominated during

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the Revolutionary wars, but the more peaceful periods saw public opinion turn against the most egregiously oppressive elements of conservative statesmanship. Historians see a democratizing trajectory in the workings of public opinion from the 1750s and 1760s, albeit squelched by the decades of war that extended military rule.19 Then, from 1815, a Pax Britannica had a new life in Britain, Europe, and North America. Britain remained, for most countries and colonies, the model of modern, liberal power, stabilized by the security of its wealth and property, seen to be widely dispersed through the public. Commerce and opinion ruled in Britain because ordinary people could enjoy them, and that’s what was said to make the British state more moderate and restrained, less piratical. But within Britain, stability seemed elusive, amidst serious social and economic tensions and demands for more democracy and equality. Over decades, an essentially conservative state yielded one liberal reform after another, but also found ways to check and even reverse that democratizing tide. The emerging administrative state effectively contained and channelled the more radical demands, even as the electorate grew. Canada remained closely intertwined with British perplexities and politics during those decades. The reactionary military state of the Napoleonic Wars did not so much dismantle its armies and forts, Boyd Hilton argues, as export them to Canada.20 But that made Canada an Achilles’ heel. Liberal reformers pointed to Canada and exclaimed, “How can you call that well governed?” If Canada was badly governed enough to follow the American trajectory by conquest or rebellion, then Pax Britannica would have failed an important test. And the more that North America seemed or became belligerently American, the more would the British diaspora, seen as a muchneeded check on domestic pressures, become a source of weakness rather than strength. Ideally, British settlers and traders and workers should spread out across the different colonies and regions of the world, with minimal soldiering to protect them, and without reintroducing political jealousies as the Americans had done. Canadians benefitted from imperial trade privileges and fought against economic liberalism, but in the 1840s that conservative plea was lost in Britain at the same time that the conservative argument against responsible government was lost. Both were victories of “public opinion” that seemed to threaten British and conservative rule in Canada. And yet the bigger picture is of a remarkably conservative century for Canada, with ostentatiously conservative politicians largely in control of the state before and after the achievement of responsible government. As in Britain, some people were written into the state and the public, and others were written out. But in Canada the writing-out was more “rabid” than anything seen domestically in Britain. Even as British politicians extended voting rights to Catholics in 1829 and leaseholders in 1832, conservative

Introduction: The Good Cop

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Canadian politicians fought to disenfranchise not just everyone except for white and propertied men, but even many of the latter. Their attempts to narrow citizenship did not go unanswered. The various kinds of “new” British subjects in Canada fought back hard and effectively, and found many allies to support them. Conservative colonial challenges to British political equilibria earned them imperial reprimands. Some important, early uses of civilization during the “age of reform” remained close to Enlightenment principles of liberal enlargement, working more to check than to amplify settler colonial dispossession projects. Inevitably that changed. Forced to regroup, conservatives formulated more ostensibly liberal mechanisms for concentrating power and wealth. They reweighted opinion to become less concerned with participation and more concerned with security of property. It took no small work to construct a conservative administrative state with a conservative civilization project extending to and across the western Canadian frontier, using the full range of soft and hard power. The point of departure for my story is the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that established basic political and legal principles in the areas newly conquered by Britain in North America and extended, in theory, to larger areas that remained under Indigenous control. The Royal Proclamation reflected a certain mid-century “new political history” and a “sociological turn” that was revising ordinary understandings of politics and the state, looking backwards to the Magna Carta and forwards to a new era of peace, prosperity, and free trade. The logic of “public” reason that enlightened historians dated to the Magna Carta dovetailed with the widespread observation that England had become the most wealthy, free, and powerful nation in the world. That discovery was amplified by the Conquest and it shaped understandings of what progressive and powerful modern forms of imperial and domestic rule should look like. No serious observer could ignore the stunning success of this new way of running a country and a hegemon: using soldiers and gunboats, but understanding that the real sources of strength lay in commerce and consent. British and European philosophers debated this new model of hegemony while politicians pondered how far to emulate or defy it, domestically and imperially. The Royal Proclamation was an attempt to extend it into North America. Its authors hoped to see commerce and opinion orchestrate peace, prosperity, and liberty in the areas under British authority or control, especially where authority was most nominal, on the other side of the Proclamation line. Colonial Canada mapped the emergence of international law. The autonomous nation-state of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and Hobbes’s Leviathan of 1649, which contrasted stated societies with perpetual civil war, did not apply to British North America, where much of the region escaped genuine British authority and control. British officials on the ground had

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Civilization

to accomplish their purposes by wooing and persuading people that they generally could not compel, in regard to such big questions as alliance. No one not embroiled in imperial rivalries would welcome the Pax Britannica, but if you were so embroiled it sometimes became your least-worst option, and most places in the world were becoming so embroiled.21 Viewed in the long durée, that made Canada like post-Napoleonic Europe: more stabilized than ruled by Britain’s constitutional-commercial-consensual model. We need to understand the ways that direct authority and indirect persuasion intertwined, in Europe and in North America, according to parallel and interlocking models of power and agency, law and right. We need to recognize the success of the model: the nineteenth century saw real political turmoil and regime change, but no world wars, and remarkable stability of property and wealth at the political centre.22 We can also see early imperialism and anti-imperialism anticipating twentieth-century debates.23 All sorts of people called themselves civilized and demanded the protections of British citizenship, some wanting Americanized versions of those rights, others protection from that Americanization. It wasn’t clear what right of protection a hegemon should or could recognize.24 Civilization was not supposed to be a swaggering and cruel realpolitik, but sometimes achieved that effect by waging war on the supposed enemies of civilization. Racist ascriptions of identity and predatory domination are the Canadian birthright. But so too is anti-racism, visible early on and often appealing to ideals of civilization with deep roots in the different worlds that met in colonial Canada. And some officials responded to the anti-imperial critiques, even if in muddled, weak, and conservative ways. Allyship necessitated translation and brought mistranslation, but the attempts remain instructive.25 Even illiberal British civilization afforded “spaces for dissent and critique, so that evil and barbarism are always under scrutiny, always being questioned.”26 Persuasion as to right and wrong was always possible, and some few people pointed to colonialism and cried “plunder,” much like the little boy who cried that the emperor has no clothes. But colonialism proved harder to debunk than imaginary clothing; debunking was not dismantling. Ideas of political accountability don’t usually persuade the unaccountable; something more is needed for real-world accomplishments. There were modest successes and grievous failures in Canada. I am not trying to whitewash the imposition of “Western Civ” in Canada: the best that can be said of Canada is that it sometimes tried to make itself the “good cop” of civilization and sometimes fended off some unsavoury bad cops. But there were, still, critiques of a more bellicose version of civilization. Progressives shouldn’t erase their own history as eagerly as they do. Civilization ceded over time to something more ironic and predatory, in Canadian, British, and international law. The Royal Proclamation was

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made a ground zero for settler colonialism. That process occurred in the courts and legislatures but also in the writing of history. Yet an “alternative” reading of the Canadian project may identify efforts to construct something genuinely diverse and reciprocal.27 Hindsight shows us Indigenous people under sentence of “dark vanishings.”28 But absent the teleology, it’s possible to see them making themselves founders of a new kind of non-Hobbesian political relationship that had real and recognizable presence in the world. Civilization was dialogical, not monological. To see that requires a certain symmetry of explanation and agnosticism about who was assimilating whom. Symmetry theory emerged from the Edinburgh “strong” school of sociology as an argument that we need to look at the social elements in good and bad, successful and unsuccessful science.29 Here, I use it to challenge teleological frameworks for Canadian history. The emerging Canadian state was always trying to assimilate everyone to new standards of order and productivity. But it was itself being assimilated by multiple complex projects of social orchestration traversing political and ethnic boundaries. The meaning of British subjecthood was transformed as it was “actively chosen, proclaimed, and leveraged by colonial inhabitants.”30 Scholars who worry that Indigenous peoples are assimilated by consensual conversation with the state, or vice versa, don’t understand that freedom evolves ecologically. I extend Shirley Tillotson’s argument that “the working of governing and the activity of social citizenship” constituted one another as mirror images, roughly translating citizenship here into civil-social-political engagement more generally.31 Responsible government saw liberals collaborate across boundaries that many people tried to depict as incommensurable. But collaboration also had strong roots in the Royal Proclamation, which reflected a Francophile strand of British political thought. Canadian history can show not the incommensurability of Indigenous and Eurowestern political philosophies but the beginnings of commensurability. And because British political philosophy after Hobbes and Locke was a pragmatic reflection on and legitimation of real-world political relationships in an expanding imperial field, perplexities and compromises in North America influenced metropolitan understandings of political agency. But commensurability didn’t suit all parties and the incommensurables managed to get their hands on the constitutional levers. The Americans rebelled against unenlightened British rule and the more enlightened version making its way in a new, North American constitutional framework. If we wish to be hopeful about reconciliation, we must be more informed and precise about where, when, and how earlier conciliations failed. The big questions of constitutionalism are not abstract but historical. That’s a lesson learned from Hume, a cosmopolitan philosopher turned national historian. History has been neglected in recent theories of agency

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and interdependence that owe more to political science, philosophy, and economics and dismiss history as merely “contextual” or “anecdotal.”32 But a rising strength amongst authoritarian populists, of late, has made supposedly analytic questions more obviously historical ones and the old debates between liberals and conservatives take on a new relevance for present perplexities. My last book argued that the modestly egalitarian lessons of progressive income tax reform have useful lessons. This one looks for comparable lessons in the modestly democratizing Enlightenment constitutionalism, reasoning between Britain and Canada in a selected few BritishCanadian texts and documents. Francis Fukuyama argues for three broad paths to “sociability” or collective action: kinship, associations, and the state.33 The lack of effective state institutions in North America provoked new Eurowestern theories and experiments, such as the “fishing admirals” in Newfoundland.34 Identity was another kind of solution to the problem, according to Vincent Geloso and Louis Rouanet, who see processes of ethnogenesis – the creation of new kinds of identities, including Acadian and Métis – as effective mechanisms to braid together and coordinate commerce and politics across cultural divides.35 Implanting European state institutions crimped some such innovations but also provoked new ones, as in the United States.36 Where Americans defied a constitutionalized British identity, Canadians preserved that loose framework, sometimes very reluctantly. Such choices were probabilistic wagers about what could and could not be done with strictures and identities, and with historical contingency, that is, circumstances not self-selected but transmitted from the past.37 Much enlightened scholarship identified historical patterns in collective identities: a French tendency to absolutism, an English tendency to commerce, and so forth. Something other than rationality must explain such patterns. Historians turned from dry constitutional histories to look for deeper structuring causes, such as climate, resources, oceanic isolation, or “stages” of economic and social development. My story hinges on two connected sociological turns to scholarship in the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. The Enlightenment “science of society” was the “homeland” for sociological thinking, according to David Carrithers, who pinpoints Montesquieu’s argument in The Grandeur and Decline of the Romans (written to warn the French crown against designs of universal monarchy) that “there are general causes, moral and physical, which act in every monarchy, elevating it, maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground.” Serious analysis must go beyond the superficially rational: “When a law appears strange,” Montesquieu observed, “one must assume that it is more rational than it appears and that it is based upon sufficient reason.” Cosmopolitanism was not relativism: despotic states might have particular uses for torture, but “nature cried out aloud” to

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prohibit a philosophical weighing of them. Hume read Montesquieu early and enthusiastically.38 But where Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought climate shaped national character, Voltaire and Hume attacked the climate thesis and looked instead to social and cultural history.39 Scottish enlightened histories, according to John Burrow, showed a “shift from polity to society,” grounded on “commercial society, seen as the characteristic form of modernity,” and associated not with any one constitution but with “a tissue of manners and modes of social behaviour, sometimes referred to by the new term ‘civilization.’”40 Colin Kidd charts the change from a history grounded in battles and royal lineages towards social, economic, and legal factors. If you attributed the conquest of Canada to one short volley on the Plains of Abraham without reference to underlying factors, you weren’t writing serious history. Because people were more social than rational, philosophical history must compare social and domestic relations amongst past and present peoples.41 A Scottish cohort, most famously Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and Lord Kames, “disdained histories centred on the vicissitudes undergone by the original principles of a constitution, preferring instead to trace the historical interactions of societies with institutions of law and government.” Kidd calls them “sociological whigs.”42 Most Europeans at the time thought, with the two Adams, that cultural and environmental causes could explain “Indian” differences.43 But over time a more biological argument associated with Robertson and Kames took hold. Civilization became an increasingly emphatic set of Eurocentric assertions. Lawrence Goldman dates the change to the 1850s, when “the optimistic and enlightened ideas about race that the nineteenth century had inherited from the eighteenth” became a “pseudo-science premised on the natural inequality of races and the moral right of those supposed superior to control the inferior.”44 Duncan Bell identifies an increasingly hierarchical model of empire and civilization.45 Onur Ulas Ince shows how arguments for “a global engine of liberty, property, civility, and law” were put toward justifying colonial violence and coercive expropriation.46 In America, according to Claudio Saunt, “the civilizing plan was ethnocentric and self-serving.”47 Canadians joined in that AngloAmerican chorus, albeit watchfully and warily.48 Civilization theory, a theory of world-historical agency grounded on the possibility of choice and judgment, became inexorable law that bound strong and weak alike. Midcentury advocates of American manifest destiny proclaimed: “There is a law from which no one can escape, that the weaker and disorganized nations must be absorbed by the strong and organized nations. Nationalities of inferior grade must surrender to those of superior civilization and polity!”49 Hume’s attempt to make social agencies check state injustice only amplified its reach and legitimacy.

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Hume’s philosophical observations should have prevented civilization theories from making that Anglo-American leap of logic. What’s called “Hume’s fork” or “Hume’s guillotine” separates “is” from “ought”: things as they are from things as we think they should be; descriptions from norms. It’s one thing to describe English history, and quite another to describe it as the best fulfillment of human purpose. But much of the time we make imaginative leaps from descriptions to norms, something Hume noted, and something critics of Hume have seen in his work. In identifying that logical leap, in observing that even the most rigorous forms of reason were more like opinion than philosophy, Hume created enduring problems for philosophy and law. Laws were no more rigorous or compelling than human reason could make them, which was to say not very. By psychologizing the usual props to legitimacy – divine will, the social contract, self-constituting authority – Hume weakened them. Not that there was no law or justice in the world, but their ability to command consent had an irreducible note of irrational imagination. People chose whether or not to obey laws. But wasn’t it dangerous to say such things aloud? Scott Shapiro traces post-Humean jurists wrestling with the problem and providing various unsatisfactory answers. In 1832, the Benthamite John Austin argued that the sovereign derived his legal authority only from “his ability to coerce others into conforming to his will.” That theory, that power made right, dominated for a century until H.L.A. Hart dismantled it with something more socially than imperially constructed, based on community-wide recognition for it. Shapiro rejects both models as failing Hume’s test and constructs his own.50 Shapiro doesn’t notice that Hume had his own fix for the problem, namely, the writing of history. Hume’s model of law is recapitulated by David Lewis’s account of “convention without convening.” Conventions, for Lewis, are socially enforced norms that cannot be imposed by force. They must be arbitrary and that arbitrariness must be common knowledge.51 People must be able to choose whether to adhere to or renege on conventions, according to a calculation as to others doing the same. “Convention turns out to be ‘a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules.’”52 Conventions did not require formal agreement: Hume likened convention to two men rowing a boat and falling into a rhythm. Conventions could rest on habit, or on spurious grounds, as Lewis observes: “If yesterday I told you about people who got separated in the subway and happened to meet again at Charles Street, and today we get separated in the same way, we might independently decide to go and wait at Charles Street. It makes no difference whether the story I told you was true, or whether you thought it was, or whether I thought it was, or even whether I claimed it was. A fictive precedent would be as effective as an actual one in suggesting

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a course of action for us, and therefore as good a source of concordant mutual expectations enabling us to meet.”53 Hume thought partisans were writing dangerously false and divisive histories, thereby undermining collective conventions that more impartial histories should reaffirm. Each agent in a convention “has a decisive reason to do his own part if he is sufficiently confident in his expectation that the others will do theirs.”54 History could stoke the necessary confidence and conformity. British constitutional history was riddled with conventions, as Hume was neither the first nor the last to notice. The British constitution was “unwritten” because it was widely dispersed in case law and rested on rules considered more binding politically than legally: not subject to courtroom enforcement. Noah Cox argues that conventions of executive prerogative rose to a high-water mark in 1867, when Walter Bagehot “drew attention to the gap between appearance and reality in the constitution of his own day.”55 Hume considered such conventions as better preserved than debunked.56 Liberty was not just agency but “appropriate agency” or “propriety” in Duncan Kelly’s account of the Scottish Enlightenment, requiring people to respect unwritten as well as written conventions. Propriety, effectively historical convention, was a kind of scaled-down version of virtue accessible to most people.57 Yet people made and make bad choices not just individually, but socially and collectively. Drawn in by impassioned and partisan speeches, they fell into widespread errors that Hume roughly categorized as barbarism, superstition, and faction. A diversity of interests and identities was good, but not when carried into the open factionalism and warfare that Hume wrote to diminish. His six-volume history of England ended in 1688 with the remark: “extremes of all kinds are to be avoided; and though no one will ever please either faction by moderate opinions, it is there we are most likely to meet with truth and certainty.” Hume condemned not political parties but only partisan excesses as leading to enforced uniformity and superstition. Alas, Hume’s version of civilization became itself a kind of superstition. Eurocentric theories of history and collective agency became weapons to delegitimate customary laws and norms as barbaric. The purportedly “uncivilized” were described as lacking individual and collective reasoning powers. Collective agency from below was made invisible, a process identifiable in the history of the Haitian Revolution, only recently credited as a modern founding revolution like the others.58 Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that the perception of isolated incidents persisted before and after 1791: each case of unmistakable defiance, each possible instance of resistance was treated separately and drained of its political content. Slave A ran away because he was particularly mistreated by his master. Slave B was missing because he was not properly fed. Slave X killed herself in a fatal

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tantrum. Slave Y poisoned her mistress because she was jealous. The runaway emerges from this literature – which still has its disciples – as an animal driven by biological constraints, at best as a pathological case. The rebellious slave in turn is a maladjusted Negro, a mutinous adolescent who eats dirt until he dies, an infanticidal mother, a deviant.59 To the more sociologically minded, resistance amongst the enslaved, in Canada as elsewhere, was systematic, systemic, and as conventional as law.60 Recent scholarship of a major slave revolt in Jamaica in 1760 depicts slavery as always a form of warfare.61 The British put their institutions on a quasi-war footing, to protect themselves from violence, theft, and reversals of ownership from within as well as without. Thomas Hobbes had made insecurity and a desire to ward off death the universal incentive for the authoritarian state, reasoning between personal and national life. The reader, “when taking a journey … arms himself and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be laws and public officers, armed, to revenge all injuries that shall be done him.” But the Hobbesian state did not rest on its domestic laurels. It joined a race to empire through coercion and dispossession on an unprecedented scale. The more that it coerced and brutalized and dispossessed, the more it made itself a kind of warfare state, according to Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker: “From the beginning of English colonial expansion in the early seventeenth century through the metropolitan industrialization of the early nineteenth, rulers referred to the Hercules-hydra myth to describe the difficulty of imposing order on increasingly global systems of labor. They variously designated dispossessed commoners, transported felons, indentured servants, religious radicals, pirates, urban laborers, soldiers, sailors, and African slaves as the numerous, ever-changing heads of the monster.” The literary incarnation of that confrontation was in Shakespeare’s Tempest, where the “savage and deformed slave” Caliban rebelled against his aristocratic master, Prospero, making his own claim to the land and to Prospero’s daughter.62 Max Hamon recently challenged the “resistance” reading of Indigenous and Métis agency in Canada. Louis Riel, he argues, saw himself not as a resister but as a founder. Reasoning from Métis and Indigenous relations around Red River that yoked kinship to state formation, Riel thought of the state and civilization as something he could wield to build bridges across regional and racial divides.63 Here, I build on Hamon’s insight and apply it more broadly. The American-or-not question was always so immediate, urgent, and significant that it shaped all the other choices Canadians made, such as state or not-state, liberal or conservative. But if I am right, if Gwyn and Hamon are right, then Indigenous, Métis, and Black peoples were

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always already in on that great and important choice, always thinking politically and consequentially. Canadians could only ward off Americanization with their help for most of the nineteenth century. For historians, a choice is a cause: where people exercise choice, there can historians assign a causal role, whether it’s Hitler’s decision to remilitarize Germany or Macdonald’s decision to recommend Confederation.64 Subjugated peoples had and made choices that caused modern Canada. British political truths after Hobbes were always makers’ truths, constructed by willing agents, including unenfranchised peoples. Hobbes bolstered state authority against Indigenous statelessness and Locke bolstered resistance to the state with a Eurocentric and dispossessing version of private property.65 Hume incorporated Indigenous freedom in his arguments for generalized flourishing within and across the divides of state and nation. The argument that Indigenous agency evaporated after 1815 rests too much on the model of history that would attribute the Conquest to a volley on the Plains of Abraham. I disagree on a number of grounds. First, there could be no simple binary of Indigenous and non-Indigenous in territories where people had coexisted, captured, intermarried, adopted, taught, and networked for centuries. British North America was everywhere a “socially and politically fluid landscape,” inhabited by “diverse, entangled peoples” who did not bend easily to imperial political purposes.66 Second, traditions and conventions of Indigenous political thought informed Eurowestern political thought in ways that shaped larger conceptions of community, collaboration, and interdependence. Third, much of Canada remained under practical Indigenous and Métis control well into the nineteenth century.67 Fourth, even where Eurowestern settlers began to outnumber Indigenous inhabitants, the British military state reckoned with the latter as useful adjuncts for international and domestic purposes so long as Wellington was around to influence it, and Wellington died in office as chief military commander in 1852. Fifth, Indigenous and Métis peoples voiced claims upon the land, the market, and the state that prompted first-order reckoning with those constructions and institutions and demanded their reconceptualization. Sixth, Indigenous and Métis peoples continued to transgress the border in ways that defined not just the border, but notions of political choice and constitutionalism. Joseph-Charles Taché, the intellectual progenitor of the Canadian constitution of 1867, understood that Indigenous and Métis political choice was philosophically and politically on par with Eurowestern political choice as an account of Canadian history, and he wrote that understanding into his plan for Confederation. Serious observers such as Taché, and others considered here, understood that Canada could only perform civilization by leaning on Indigenous collective agency. It’s a discovery being continually remade as the levers of national power and progress get remade.

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Timothy Mitchell argues that the age of coal gave workingmen power to demand democratizing concessions that the twentieth-century age of oil then negated.68 But the age of oil had its own similar discoveries, ranging from the opec price-fixing in 1973 that made even the richest country feel “vulnerable to actions of distant states” who were typically seen as powerless, to the more recent Wet’suwet’en pipeline blockades in western Canada.69 That’s not a new discovery in Canada, but an old one renewed. It’s not just that Indigenous peoples retained a great deal of political power, on terms that Canadians understood as unambiguously political, as something to be wooed; it’s that that model of how power must be wooed was generalized as a key constituent of politics, and identity. The discovery in regard to North America dated back to the turn of the eighteenth century when the British competed with the French for Indigenous trade and alliance and decided that they must “mimic French practices” of friendship and “harmonization” to prevent defection.70 The French had only been able to expand westward, into the Illinois territory, by enlisting local collaborators who similarly “used the French opportunistically to pursue their goals as a powerful, almost imperialistic people in their own right.”71 So, too, the British inability to impose and consequent need to woo persisted after the Conquest and the American Revolution, lasting as long as the Americans seemed to threaten British investment in Canada. The discovery coincided with the more directly political truth of the 1830s and 1840s that in a parliamentary system, minorities could rule majorities by holding the balance of power. The most powerful statesmen in the world, the very Wellingtons themselves, must go begging not just to Irish Catholics but even their Canadian counterparts for a show of support. Powerful hegemons that relinquished martial rule for something more civilized discovered that they had empowered conquered subjects to grieve abuses of imperial power and get a serious hearing at the very centre of hegemony. Edward Gibbon had seen such things in the classical Roman Empire – the problem worsened rather than resolved by the extension of Roman citizenship to all free subjects throughout the empire in 212 ce – and now Britain was learning that lesson anew. Identity, observes Peter Marshall of the early British Empire, was “a problem, rather than an automatic auxiliary of state expansion, colonization and the ideologies of nation.”72 But close readers of history knew that these were old complexities. Every sizeable nation was a congeries of communities and regions more or less gradually or brutally drawn into a national ambit. Every modern nation-state had an element of classical Rome embedded within its makeup, with some interplay of persuasion, brutality, and, Ernst Renan observed, “forgetting.”73 Imperial England was like and unlike Rome in ways that fascinated scholars. Britain had a long history of legal pluralism: a dizzying variety of distinct regional and specialized

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jurisdictions including, for example, religious, naval, and chancery courts. But England also had a very distinct history of unusually effective centralized royal administration amidst that pluralism. English law took the shape it did, from the late Middle Ages, because the crown enjoyed much more centralized agency and administrative capacity than its European counterparts.74 But, as Hume noted, seventeenth-century English traditions were fertilized by classical Greek and Roman ideas of freedom, including a vogue for neoclassical history.75 The Roman Empire was, famously, a legally plural empire. Lacking the means or the incentive to impose Roman law on conquered subjects, it recognized and legitimated local customs – as when the Sanhedrin instructed Pilate that he alone could condemn Christ to death. Historian Ari Bryen sees conquered subjects using Roman courts to demand recognition for their customs and draws a remarkable conclusion that can be applied to the British in Canada: “the eastern provincials relied on a concept of law which was something substantially new in Roman legal thinking concerning the governing of subjugated peoples. This vision of the law was founded on the idea that there existed a disembodied world of rules that transcended even the emperor himself, and that these rules could be accessed by the skilful manipulation of authoritative legal texts in the context of courtroom encounters structured by proper procedure.” Where we might see legal pluralism and a “disembodied world of rules” as incompatible, Bryen sees them operating in tandem, reflecting Rome’s need to draw maximal resources with minimal military cost from a particularly fertile region of the empire.76 So, too, British statesmen widely deferred to local customs and cultivated legal pluralism for geopolitical reasons, remaking the meaning of law in the process.77 Hence the need for something like an updated Magna Carta that offered impartial recognition of local law and politics on each side of the Proclamation line. At a moment of war-driven constitutionalism,78 Britain began a new experiment with political consent. In North America, that experiment saw informed theories of Enlightenment and Indigenous standards of freedom and autonomy saliently combined. Institutions of imperial governance seemed to amplify rather than dampen down colonial grievances, customs, and histories. Canadian questions always had a powerful historical grounding because Canada’s Britishness and Americanicité overlay an Indigenous and French past with persistent outcroppings, like the giant boulders left standing on the Canadian Shield by retreating glaciers. Canadian political landscapes were always landscapes of remnants. British officials recognized local customs because colonized subjects demanded it of them. Colonized peoples were ubiquitous in the British Empire and they inscribed a real ambivalence about imperial power into its exercise and legitimation. Adam Smith, like Hume, was a Scottish-born

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critic of British imperialism. His experience of Scotland and London convinced him that colonials were “more indifferent and impartial spectators of the conduct of all” than those at the “centre of the empire.”79 Hume concurred: “John Bull’s prejudices are ridiculous; as his insolence is intolerable.” Joanna Innes remarks that English discussion of government “immersed itself in the particularities of English statute law, and the debates to which that had given rise. The Scots wrote more philosophically.”80 Ince argues that for Smith and Hume, “the empire, particularly in its territorial and extractive variety, was nigh irredeemable from a liberal economic perspective.” But it was still “less illiberal and oppressive” than its continental rivals.81 Civilizing stories recounted by conquerors were self-serving and monological, tending to impose truth from above and to glorify wealth and power. Civilizing stories told by the conquered were more oriented towards persuasion than imposition. No small partiality remained: disorder and fanaticism were normal in Hume’s account of Scotland and Ireland, and anomalous in Hume’s England.82 But the underlying project was to discipline both power and resistance in metropolises and colonies, the governing and the governed. Hume focused on England to circumnavigate a Scottish historiography seen as too religious or rebellious.83 The very Anglocentrism of his account made it useful for attacking English chauvinism. Scottish theorists transferred ideas and arguments across the borderlands between colonized and colonizing. But reforms still required popular agitation against English imperial insolence. Colonized and racialized peoples belong at the centre of liberty’s history.84 Priyamvada Gopal argues for a process of “reverse tutelage” in an imperial dialectic.85 Cecilia Morgan shows Indigenous people in a broad North Atlantic context, advocating their claims in Britain and Canada alike.86 There were, historians have observed, demands for a universal standard of civilization, dating back to the Enlightenment, to be defined and imposed by the European centre of that civilization.87 But Hume’s version of civilization was not universal. Tracing Hume’s influence it is possible to see a cosmopolitan resistance to universalism, predicated on the capacity for a complex public to “assimilate” those universal standards by getting its arguments into opinion, politics, and law. British parliaments could never quite silence those pesky voices from below, though they got better at it over time. If, as Hume argued, the English had no national character, then it wasn’t Englishness that drove England’s accidental and non-teleological progress, but the complex interactions of institutions, whose social promiscuity was one of the most progressive things about them. Hume’s version of civilization was designed to recognize and accommodate heterogeneous and heterodox forms of authority. Nonetheless, the move from barbarism to civilization required a certain repudiation of brutality, the kinds of notorious

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atrocities that had checkered English history but that must be denounced by any self-styled civilized observers and reporters. Hume made that kind of analysis central to his history, as, indeed, would Norbert Elias. Imposing homogeneity on a heterogeneous world was never easy, but some places and times were harder than others. Canada posed problems because the land was reluctant and the people were resistant. Indigenous people remained crucial power-brokers everywhere, while settlers successfully inserted local interests into imperial politics, with the very real threat of Americanization lending weight to their demands. The problem for the British imperialists wasn’t just that Canada was hard to dominate, but also that the difficulties of domination were rebounding back upon domestic politics, according to the kinds of processes noted by Bryen for Rome. Colonial complaints created domestic as well as imperial problems for a patrician state trying to be as unresponsive as possible in the face of tremendous social and economic changes, while still admitting the need to perform responsiveness. To write history in the wake of Hume was to interrogate the complex interactions between institutions, opinions, and liberties, always understanding that intentions were not outcomes and that modern liberty and prosperity had generally come into the world at cross-purposes with the stated intentions and machinations of the statesmen. It was to understand that civilization was ironic, not to say allegorical: always alienated from its most flamboyant standard-bearers.88 But shocking colonial atrocities were provoking a new metropolitan humanitarianism. Jessica Whyte remarks of twentieth-century international relations that “no major Euro-American nation would subject itself to Third World institutional scrutiny and critique of its human rights performance.”89 But the early Victorian British Empire found itself in something like that position. If there were, as John Austin argued in 1832, no external – international – checks on British choices and acts, then there must be at least nominal internal ones.90 A British empire of civilization must either respond to or silence its colonial critics. Britain chose different strategies for different regions, depending on the calculus of strength and weakness, but the unravelling of imperialism from within began with the decision to free itself from Canadian demands and pressures. Responsible government freed both jurisdictions from heterogenizing and democratizing pressures. Imperial reporters could reap the rewards of writing narratives of British civilization; colonial ones could reap the greater rewards of predation and dispossession. The ironic distance between them would narrow in the later nineteenth century as civilization became more thoroughly racialized and its “enforcement” more feasible.91 Here, I do not try to write Indigenous alterities but, instead, scrutinize the way some Indigenous arguments got taken up by some authoritative insiders who saw justice in their demands and tried to reconcile them with

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official channels for governance. I do not claim any accuracy in these insiders’ renderings of Indigenous thought. Their version of accuracy was like Eric Auerbach’s realism: a philosophical and literary style.92 Theories of representation also changed in response to democratizing pressures, around the turn of the nineteenth century, to privilege the process of the representation over the thing represented, following arguments by Edmund Burke (amongst others) for the autonomy of the elected politician.93 But at least in principle, some Eurowesterners recognized that Indigenous political and diplomatic strengths had philosophical and political consequences, and they rethought the social contract in the process. I don’t focus on them in order to reverse the recent turn towards Indigenous agency in Canadian history. But we should not replace one monologue with another. The study of history from below cannot explain how powerful states act.94 Indigenous people were joined in conversation not with an unchanging “crown” but with a complicated set of political players in a complex world, amidst mechanisms of sovereignty and legitimacy stretching “from the neighbourhood to the summit of the state.”95 We need to understand how arguments about civilization reflected experiences and the opportunities that dialogue itself created. This is an intellectual history, not a larger social history, but it is an intellectual history of social history. Recent histories recount how social history was written into Canadian history; this one recounts how it was, once upon a time, written out. I survey the idea of civilization on the model of Arthur Lovejoy to study not so much “what happens to ideas as what happens with them.”96 I zero in on a few people who “got” Hume’s brand of historical analysis and understood that chauvinism was the enemy of civilization, but whose cosmopolitanism obscured their work to national historians in Britain and Canada, neither of them highly cosmopolitan.97 Scrutinize the early debates about how to govern Canada and the cosmopolitanism leaps off the page. Callow jingoists abounded but they met pushback from some educated insiders who struggled to reconcile ideals of mutual flourishing with ugly historical reality, and whose perplexities resonate. It’s not hard to explain how or why domination occurred. It’s harder to explain how and why, in some circumstances, resistance to domination took philosophical and practical shape – how, in the words of Hugh MacDiarmid, in spite of all the mercenary violence, “some elements of worth with difficulty persist here and there on earth.” Hume wrote establishment philosophy but his arguments destabilized many norms and principles which “being no longer supported by the settled principles and opinions of men, will immediately dissolve.”98 Mixed monarchy was one of those norms, which Canadian reformer Etienne Parent witheringly mocked as “magical action.”99 The establishment could not incorporate Hume’s truths without substantial changes forced upon it by

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broad social pressure. In the collision of theories, arguments, and practical events and capacities for governing, I look for what sociologist Thomas Kuhn called an “essential tension,” reasoning by analogy between science and politics. Kuhn argued that science always has debts to tradition and innovation that existed more as conventions than as “explicit rules.” Scientific and political revolutions both “aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favour of another.”100 Textbooks and research epitomized the old and the new for Kuhn; crisis was the point of transition. I explore the ways that popular demands for reform won some victories amidst the persisting conservatism of institutions and teleologies. But where Kuhn saw a gestalt shift from one set of institutions and explanations to another, I see substantial continuity.101 Civilization had a history in Canada, but it also had what Kuhn called a paradigm in his account of knowledge as clustering around institutions and ideas. Civilization orchestrated knowledge as well as consent. To be civilized was to be guided by knowledge, at a time of tremendous ferment in the claims and institutions of knowledge. Civilization theory was a little like germ theory, in that respect, and also like, say, Medicare, in that it was also a policy. Broad and airy theories in Britain had to be more technically defined and legally calibrated in Canada. The study of civilization emerged alongside the universities as both cause and effect. You didn’t study “Civilization” at McGill or the University of Toronto the way you studied “History” or “Natural Philosophy,” but those disciplines were scarcely more specialized or professionalized in pre-Confederation Canada. If civilization did have a special home or genre, it was the report commissioned by the Colonial Office, and it figures prominently in reports on colonial Canada. I scrutinize history curricula and Colonial Office reports as paradigmatic loci for civilization, seeing exemplary theoretical and creative practical reasoning by highly educated, well-placed people who chose their words carefully. Content and form must alike reflect the intellectual and policy landscape: local knowledge of conditions and subjects; imperial knowledge of how to get a policy through Parliament, and a specifically civilizational knowledge of political philosophy and universal history. Hobbes’s argument for a state mandated to protect people required a new kind of state and a new science of man. Political theorist Emily Nacol argues that “the question of what counts as proper knowledge is perhaps the question of Hobbes’ corpus.”102 But where Hobbes dreamed of a mathematical science of man, Locke, Hume, and Smith looked instead to probabilistic reasoning, all of them reckoning with Hobbes’s theory that insecurity drove statecraft and public opinion in an Age of Risk. The theory of association of ideas “made the mind a kind of counting machine that automatically tallied

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frequencies of past events and scaled degrees of belief in their recurrence accordingly.” For Hume, not reason but experience and repetition conjoined “to heighten the vivacity of a mental impression, each repetition being ‘as a new stroke of the pencil, which bestows an additional vivacity on the colours.’” But Hume thought Hobbes exaggerated fear, and he preferred to emphasize sympathy and custom as the centrepiece of public and private judgment.103 Although his philosophies alienated the pious, his histories were widely read, ubiquitous in all kinds of discourses and practices, in what Daniel Woolf describes as “the social circulation of the past.”104 I here focus on only a few key claims by Hume as particularly influential for Canadian statecraft over the following century. For my purposes: first, Hume argued that all government in the modern world was government by opinion; second, he argued that opinion was a progressive and moderating agency; and third, he made an empirical argument against economic chauvinism or “jealousy” and for mutual benefit achieved through commercial sociability. These mutually reinforcing arguments were grounded on his early, skeptical theories of human understanding. When he argued that reason was more like opinion than like logic, he was degrading reason but dignifying public opinion, as something that could be channelled in sound and stabilizing directions by popular essays and books, of the sort that Hume wrote.105 He borrowed from France the word “civilisation” that Samuel Johnson refused to admit in his dictionary.106 The term captures Hume’s argument for a non-teleological definition of progress in material and moral matters, one centred on the well-being of the middling people. It also reflected older traditions of political philosophy, in particular Machiavelli, that pitched “civility” as the form of government that was not despotism or liberty but satisfactory to subjects as between the two. Such civility was always hard-won because, in the Machiavellian world, men incessantly competed against one another for power. In the words of Sir William Drake: “for some men desiring to have more and others fearing to lose what they have already, they proceed to war and destroying one another.”107 Civilization was just an idea, a description of the world meant to engineer a better world. Plunder and predation, violence and massacre, were widespread. The question was what the new enlightened men of letters and the modern state they sought to engineer would do about such things. Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind argue that “an inquiry into the ideal economic conditions to promote political stability and peace more strongly connects Hume’s entire corpus of writings, from his Treatise on through to his History of England and posthumous Dialogues, than anything drawn specifically from his epistemology or metaphysics.”108 If religious logic could not banish hatred and cruelty, then secular arguments must do the job.109 Again turning to Kidd as a close scholar of what was new: “Hume’s ultimate

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goal seems to have been to furnish an ethic appropriate to the stability and commercial needs of modern society. To this end he criticized the classical virtues and Christianity. In their stead, he believed, an understanding of the history of civilization was a necessary foundation of modern ethical prudence.”110 You couldn’t improve human nature, but you could improve human institutions and the basis of human judgment by grounding them in disciplined self-interest. “Interest,” Hume explained in his Treatise, referred to the “avidity” for acquisitions of any sort, including goods and reputation, for oneself and one’s friends. It was morally neutral, but could be directed to support the social conventions on which society depended. Hobbes required a state and shared citizenship to end a natural state of civil war between men “in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators.” Hume thought commerce and opinion sufficed to do the job, enabling us to “count on a service from another, although he bears me no real kindness.”111 Hume’s argument against trade “jealousies” was a philosophical but also a partisan one. It criticized the self-styled “patriots” and mercantilists who presumed “a zero-sum global economy, occupied by warring states forever fighting over market access abroad.”112 But it also took sides in a dispute between tories and whigs, the former seeking freer trade with France and the latter warning of its dangers. Yet if some openly lobbied for war, John Shovlin argues, statesmen in both parties, rotating in and out of power, sought to reduce the provocations for war that seemed to be expanding alongside the global opportunities for trade.113 These were pragmatic partisan arguments, but they also invoked Enlightenment ideals, aiming at less coercion, less violence, less poverty, and more efficient collective action, that would engineer public opinion and the state in a “liberal” direction. “Officials and writers together were participants in an Enlightenment project to ameliorate the social world,” writes Shovlin.114 That’s the deep background of the sociological turn. But during the late eighteenth century, war and violent predation seemed to be everywhere increasing. Even Hume’s critical analysis of unenlightened rule was, it turned out, practically a how-to manual for the aspiring autocrat, which was put to work remarkably quickly to defend and orchestrate warfare, atrocities, and plunder. Arguments for a “doux commerce” with a transatlantic slave trade at its heart legitimated the crimes they denounced. Hume excoriated slavery but also suggested there was something “natural” about it.115 The Seven Years War, the American Revolutionary War, and the Napoleonic War militarized the world, blocked reforms, and silenced reformers. After 1815, liberalizing public debate revived, as arguments against violent domination percolated upwards. There was not just a deep background but also a deep foreground to those pressures: the intimate experience of domination in households where patriarchs had real governing powers over wives, children, servants,

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apprentices, and slaves. Political and patriarchal domination intertwined in ways that male philosophers rarely noticed. Philosopher Annette Baier described them as reasoning between equals, like fellow members of a club, focused “single mindedly on cool, distanced relations between more or less free and equal adult strangers,” and mostly worrying “that each member could read his Times in peace and have no one step on his gouty toes.” They didn’t notice that trust requires equality and those without equality, including women, proletarians, and slaves or ex-slaves, “cannot ignore the virtues of watchful distrust, and of judicious untrustworthiness.”116 The best example of such club-like philosophizing is Allan Bloom’s account of Plato’s Symposium, where “among the participants, there is an atmosphere of perfect equality and a kind of democratic trust in one another. Their speech is both frank and exquisite. There is no aristocratic formalism and no democratic vulgarity.” But, Bloom notes, “there are no slaves and no women present.”117 Such exclusions were not incidental but foundational for conservative theorists and practical politicians, who demanded equality amongst men with political “virtue” and patrician powers for those men to rule everyone else.118 Historical example proves that “an enslaved person could never have faith in a slave trader”: William Hayden, born into slavery in Virginia in 1785, entered into an agreement with his owner to purchase his freedom, but when the owner needed cash, he tried to renege and sell Hayden while keeping his payments; it was only because Hayden kept receipts and found white allies that he could buy his freedom.119 Hume only “half faced” those contradictions in liberal morality, according to Baier. And yet trust is more natural than distrust because, Baier argued, we grow up trusting our mothers. Even Hobbes argued that you could trust mothers’ milk. But philosophers scrutinizing the social mechanisms of trust seemed to be politicizing sub-political relationships and, moreover, finding them everywhere, as so many invitations to obstruct solidarity. Baier makes that point in reference to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. “Hume said that ‘to perform promises is requisite to beget trust and confidence in the common offices of life.’ But performing promises is not the only performance requisite for that. Shylock did not welsh on an agreement, but he was nevertheless not a trustworthy party to an agreement. For to insist on the letter of an agreement, ignoring the vague but generally understood unwritten background conditions and exceptions, is to fail to show that discretion and goodwill which a trustworthy person has.”120 As Uday Mehta observed, behind “liberal” ideals of universal human capacities “there exist a thicker set of social credentials that constitute the real bases of political exclusion.” Thus did British conservatives appeal to an exclusive inheritance to prefer the “Rights of Englishmen” over the “rights of man.”121 And thus, for David Nirenberg,

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harkening back to Shylock and the workings of early modern debt and love, did a Christian ethos triumph over a Jewish one, a triumph that “consists in knowing not how to keep the oath and its symbolic forms but when, in the interests of love, to let them go.”122 Indigenous peoples and Catholics were also unequal enough to be watchfully distrusting, never fully at home in the Canadian state. They too fought for trust and accountability in the intangible realm of discretion and goodwill, across its many different forms.123 But my bigger point is that le tout Canada also belongs on that list. All the peoples in Canada were liminal, with weak purchase on constitutionalism and civilization. As a weak power in the shadow of stronger powers, Canada seemed continually in danger of state failure and/or conquest. Klaus Richter and Heidi Hein Kircher, specialists in the decline of the Hapsburg Empire, see specific perplexities in the strong/weak state juxtaposition.124 For a state so situated, threat of failure was twofold: it could fail to meet minimal standards of law, administration, and the like; and it could be both discredited and endangered by the proximity of a powerful, effective neighbouring state. Canada looked small, poor, weak, and vulnerable compared to the United States. Anyone seeking to govern Canada had to be watchfully distrustful and to find strong allies. But Canadian institutions for determining which people could be considered – as Shylock was not – interchangeably bound and yet not-too-bound by law were being aggressively reconstructed to get greater parity amongst clubbable men and lesser parity between them and everyone else. The end of the Napoleonic Wars was a highly Hobbesian moment, when a small number of “recognizably modern states” swaggered while others cringed in fear and grasped at sovereignty for themselves, feverish for a statehood measured by domestic capacity and international recognition. According to Theodore Christov: “Double-faced, with their domestic face looking inward as a sovereign over its subjects and their external face gazing outward as a sovereign among other sovereigns, states took the place of previous transoceanic empires of distinct ethnic and linguistic communities and eventually came to populate the entire globe.”125 Colonial Canadians also well understood that, however much they were free agents internally, still “a people can only be free insofar as an outside condition is satisfied too.”126 Amidst real weakness they sought external confidence in their stability and political purpose. They sought a constructed strength, an “orchestrated solidarity of the right-minded”: Robert Ferguson’s description of Paine’s project also captures Canada’s very different project.127 But the orchestration threw up losers as well as winners. Britain and America built up mighty empires, grounded in power, law, and persuasion, that clashed spectacularly. Americans chose to be American

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rather than British, while the British fought two wars on the position that no such choice was possible. Canada was drawn into both wars for continental hegemony. Everyone knew the Americans coveted Canada and many predicted eventual annexation, notwithstanding expensive fortifications. Both Westminster and Washington saw themselves as uniquely powerful and uniquely civilized; both unleashed armies to enforce their views. The people living in the nominally British parts of America, generally in large territories with small military forces, could not offer more than auxiliary support to force majeure. Perforce, they sought non-violent means to their political ends. Where Americans embraced violence as intrinsically good, according to Elizabeth Mancke, Canadians preferred comity. They wanted the things that Americans enjoyed but to obtain them with commerce and persuasion. That was a tall order and yet, Mancke observes, they did manage to abolish slavery, get responsible government, and resettle the continent largely without war.128 There was still a lot of violence, including orchestrated mass violence, and exemplary state violence. But we see less war-like violence in Canada compared to the United States. According to Mancke, Jerry Bannister, Denis McKim, and Scott See, “British North Americans consistently demonstrated a lower threshold or tolerance for overt violence than was the case with their southern neighbours, although this sensibility did not preclude subtler manifestations of violence and coercion.”129 Likewise, John Reid observes that “Indigenous dispossession was carried out by force of the demographic and environmental kind – with, of course, the active complicity of the nascent settler colonial state – rather than principally by the application of direct physical violence.”130 Alan Taylor observes: “Compared to their southern neighbors, Crown officials usually understood that there were more cost-effective ways to dispossess Indians than by killing them.”131 Canada has its Andrew Jacksons as it has its Donald Trumps, but they have been less likely to rise to the highest political offices. John A. Macdonald governed Canada for many years in part because he seemed to offer a check on cruder Jacksonian impulses. But America was also a neighbour, to be respected as such, especially in negotiations around mutual interests in trade and law. Canada was under more pressure than Britain to recognize legitimate American claims, not least to secure reciprocal recognition. Civilized nations must respect only other civilized nations.132 Along the Canadian border, Bradley Miller observes, Canadians largely Americanized their legal relationships. Representatives brandished the language of “civilization,” describing themselves as liberal, enlightened, humanitarian, and constitutional, according to well-understood diplomatic, legal-political standards. “Civilized states afford an inviolable asylum to political emigrants,” declared an English parliamentarian in 1815. But the disagreements threatened to widen when Canadian reformers

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applied that language to escaped slaves: “coloured men in slavery are all political men,” declared Upper Canadian John Rolph in 1839. Conservative Canadians and British statesmen circumvented the problem with various techniques, for example by cultivating ignorance as to whether a given refugee had been enslaved or not. That was a huge concession to American slave interests. Over time, a certain legal continentalism took shape, grounded in neighbourly trust.133 Beneath an imperial veneer, Canadians Americanized themselves, by means of “expansive and rhetorically purposive discussions about civilization and international good faith and justice” that had no English counterpart.134 Miller focuses on criminal justice, but an Americanization of British North American institutions could be seen in many different areas, including popular culture, consumerism, education, and constitutionalism. The Scots remade British imperialism from within and the Americans remade it from what became without. They weren’t the only colonies to do so, but they were the most salient for Canada. But these were also generalizable models for international relations in an increasingly interconnected world. Hume praised English and British liberties but also, according to Kidd, advocated a “scientific and impartial understanding of those liberties” to “educate the English to appreciate their liberties by replacing their exceptionalism with a pan-European historical experience,” and demolished a “hubris fed on immemorialism, ancient constitutionalism and Gothicism.”135 Scottish philosophy and Canadian history offered some slight hopes of disciplining English and American exceptionalism, by recommending mutual benefit rather than domination.136 All nations rested on commerce and consensus, all were well governed where the ordinary people flourished, as English people did on Hume’s assessment. All would quarrel over how much crime, poverty, and violence should and did occur. New disciplines and institutions sprang up to better bind together state and society around such criteria. The bigger picture was of a “British Age” of “interpolitical” or international law, dominated by Britain’s lead in expanding the “European state system into a global State system.”137 “International” did not yet exist: Bentham coined the term in the early nineteenth century to describe the Congress of Vienna and concert of Europe. For Bentham, utilitarianism and conventionalism enabled internationalism: “the end that a disinterested legislator upon international law would propose to himself would … be the greatest happiness of all nations taken together.” International law could exist because utilitarian choices and conventions that served the flourishing of all could exist. But Bentham’s influential disciple, John Austin, rejected the slippage from law to convention, insisting that there was no such thing as international law, merely national ambitions speciously described.138 European diplomacy after the War of Spanish Succession, ending in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 wherein France

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ceded Acadia and Newfoundland, rested on a “balance of power” between the major powers, described in that treaty as “an equal Weight of Power, so that many being united in one, the Balance of the quality desired, might not turn to the advantage of one, and the Danger and Hazard of the rest.”139 On this vision, Britain would itself serve as the “balancing factor in European politics, dampening potential political conflicts by switching sides if one bloc threatened to overcome the other.” But by mid-century, the balance seemed under threat from revived French ambitions for domination, not just in Europe, but even in a Britain made vulnerable by Scottish disaffection.140 Hume responded to those debates in an essay of 1752 that applauded “the maxim of preserving the balance of power,” but also urged moderation on the British public: “above half our wars with france , and all our public debts, are owing more to our own imprudent vehemence, than to the ambition of our neighbours.”141 Stella Ghervas argues that the policy was so effective that Britain “is still the only European power to have found itself on the winning side of each great alliance since the war of the Spanish Succession.”142 Similar balancing objectives shaped British colonial policy, likewise tasked with aligning and coordinating international and national law in relation to peoples it could rarely govern more directly. In the early Victorian Colonial Office, Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford see an emerging new “middle power” model of persuasive rule, whereby officials “in distant colonies self-consciously responded to perceived crises of order by modelling new systems of rule for wider application. These efforts sometimes reacted to and often prompted explosive conflicts over governance, subjecthood, jurisdiction, and the regulation of commerce. The forces of legal change unleashed by such conflicts shaped the structure of the empire and guided its position on all major issues of the day,” including slavery, crime, autonomy, and rationales for conquest. Imperial law was eclectic and ubiquitous and it did not, Benton and Ford argue, resolve into a simple binary struggle between liberalism and autocracy. Rather, “the imperial constitution emerges as a fluid vernacular – articulated by very different groups for myriad ends and resolving, in scattered locations, into calls for the imperial center to safeguard legal pluralism, truncate some and bolster other privileges of colonial legal subjecthood, ensure minimal procedural fairness, and, increasingly, oversee the professionalization and content of colonial law.”143 British colonial officials had continually to negotiate their way between local populations determined to cast off British rule and British governors and magistrates behaving like so many tyrannous Captain Blighs. They also had, “where British naval or political control was elusive, powerfully opposed, or too costly to covet,” to negotiate a “legal force field of uneven effect to urge multiple sovereignties to recognize, tolerate, or even support British intervention and commercial exploitation.” The appeals to British civilization

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enabled negotiation across fissures in the field, but they also, according to Benton and Ford, endorsed stronger centralized power and sharper hierarchies. Ordering was also ranking according to the “standard of civilization,” with a great deal of jockeying amongst rival colonies and countries. Those complex logics of imposition and persuasion, hard and soft power, had some of their earliest elaboration in Canada. Three chapters focusing on British analyses of Canada written during the three decades after 1815 – the Darling, Durham, and Bagot reports – examine fights to demilitarize the state, get constitutional and economic reform, and govern the social constituents of public life. All three reports were by imperial insiders, had debts to Hume, and sought to reason across cultural and political boundaries, to connect British and Canadian norms and kluges, and to make Canada more visible, legible, and governable. But they foundered on the challenges of diversity, with its possibilities for exploitation. All three noticed and grappled with the thorniest problem of Canada in those decades: relative poverty. Why was Canada manifestly poorer than the United States? And why were the people who predated British occupation – the French and Indigenous peoples – poorer than the Britons flooding into the country? Poverty was an intense point of dispute in post-Napoleonic Britain. Liberals and radicals accused successive Conservative governments of impoverishing the nation, while conservatives blamed poverty on the poor. A whig-liberal coalition rode popular disaffection into power, only to become itself the target of intensified popular complaints as poverty eluded liberal-political fixes. British battles over the measure and meaning of poverty shaped my three Canadian reports. Henry Charles Darling saw that “the Indian problem” was a poverty problem that indicted predatory settlers and lax government. Lord Durham made the same criticism of English-Canadian governance of French Canadians, and British governance of Canada more generally. The Bagot Commission brought new, state-ofthe-art statistical reasoning about poverty into its criticisms of the Canadian Indian Department and lax British oversight. All three realized that poverty in Canada was political and racial. They acknowledged that Britons in Canada were aggressively stripping everyone else of their rights and resources, behaving more like medieval barons – or even Bad King John himself – than like enlightened statesmen. Colonized peoples in Canada knew that they were becoming poorer and the British newcomers were becoming richer, and they said so. Indigenous people saw their customs and traditions of sharing, reciprocity, and deliberated agency breached, notwithstanding treaty protections, and demanded how such things could be described as justice or civilization. All three British reports saw truth in the grievances and advised the Colonial Office to remediate them, as a matter of enlightened self-interest. The Durham report of 1838 recommended responsible

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government. The two reports on the Indian Department, the Darling report of 1828 and the Bagot report of 1844, reaffirmed the old alliances, the spirit of the Royal Proclamation, as a check on Americanization from without and within. There was, in short, a tory tilt to the early arguments for civilization, seen as a check on the worst excesses of settler colonialism. But it followed that as the Canadian reformers achieved self-government in the aftermath of the Durham report, they were deeply invested in dismantling state alliances with and protections for anyone deemed reactionary, including Indigenous peoples. Reformers preferred “liberal” political allies in Canada as, indeed, in Britain, where Durham had spearheaded middle-class enfranchisement and working-class disenfranchisement. As Canadian conservatives fought to regain control of the state by wooing centrist liberals into a new alliance, they sacrificed their older allies. The third section turns to that process of Canadianization of civilization, with three interlocutors who show the dwindling influence of the Scottish Enlightenment in Canada. I chose Joseph-Charles Taché, John A. Macdonald, and Daniel Wilson because all three were cosmopolitan enough to recognize that Indigenous people were being badly governed. But their solutions, all of them intertwined with larger nation- and knowledge-building projects, ranged from merely inadequate to actively predatory. They oversaw and legitimated a racialization of Canadian Indian policy that repudiated sociological reasoning for something more biological and racial becoming paradigmatic in its turn.144 According to Robert Romani, “if a single general view, endorsed by authors from all quarters, marked the years 1850–1900, it would be the view of liberty as a state of mind, the role of institutions being accordingly played down.” Where Hume had repudiated any notion of a British national character as irrelevant for political and philosophical thinking,145 Canadians remade themselves as racial essentialists, rallying around a view expressed in an Ontario newspaper in 1871: “There never was found a nation, tribe, or society, however small, of white savages. The civilization of whites is indigenous – part of their natures congenial with their race.”146 And yet that view, too, owed more than a little to David Hume’s belief that “there never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white,” a position he only slightly modified by a substitution of “scarcely” for “never.” As Anglo-American civilizational thinking became increasingly triumphal, a “phalanx” of historians took front place in projecting a “grand, westward sweep of racial destiny.”147 Canadian historians took up that torch. For Donald Creighton, a prominent historian of twentieth-century Canada, “history is the record of an encounter between character and circumstance.” Where enlightened philosophies had obviated sermons about goodness, Victorian philosophies espoused them. Indigenous people deemed not personally virtuous

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by state officials would be silenced and subjugated by a series of laws and administrative orders insulated from accountability. The Canadianization of civilization was conservative. Canada had a broadly conservative long nineteenth century. Canada was a counter-revolutionary project, peopled and framed by refugees from the American and French revolutions who lost property and family to the revolutionaries.148 Hume’s most conservative and counter-revolutionary arguments, shaped by reflection on the English revolutions and the Scottish uprising of 1745, fell on attentive Canadian ears. For most of the century, governors, executive councillors, premiers, and prime ministers imposed a conservative reading on British-Canadian constitutionalism, carefully unpicking liberal reforms. And Canada was not a political backwater. It had some exceptionally able and strategic politicians whose successes, seen from the twenty-first century, look like a paradigm. What Corey Robin calls “gonzo conservatism” – putting constitutional bulwarks to conservative purposes, seen in pre-1832 Britain and Donald Trump’s America – was the Canadian political playbook.149 Canadian history is a synecdoche of the Pax Britannica that reveals its conservative undercurrents. Its colonial governments found ways to stabilize complex social, economic, and political relationships to yield the benefits of “American civilization” without such heavy social costs. But they pushed the Pax Britannica firmly to the right. British politicians remained at the liberal end of negotiations at Versailles in 1919, but only as liberal as land-grabbing in the Middle East permitted. The “White Dominions,” especially South Africa, Australia, and Canada, reinforced that stance, often in alliance with the United States, against decolonizing arguments from Marxists, from China and Japan, and from the Pan-African Congress.150 The League of Nations’ founders elected to “protect” non-autonomous Mandate countries much the way the Dominions “protected” their Indigenous peoples. Susan Pedersen’s observation of the League recapitulates Canada’s history: “Here, ‘civilizational’ thinking did its most pernicious work, for how could petitioners presumed to be ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ have standing?”151 The Mandate commissioners realized their job was not to persuade the subjugated that subjugation was justice but “to enlist the great powers in a drama of public accountability that would legitimate this form of alien rule before a sometimes critical, newspaper-reading Western public.”152 Opportunities for sympathetic readings of subaltern voices were weak avenues to justice. Canadian scholars also lent their scholarship to reactionary imperialism. McGill economist Stephen Leacock was among the “realist” scholars advocating a Hobbesian model of perpetual warfare.153 McGill University was a conservative, AngloProtestant bastion, a focus for hostility at a moment of heightened social and ethnic tensions.154 Here, I focus on the colonial period to show how the

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British model ceded to something more American in Canada, not amongst people ignorant of or hostile to the Scottish arguments for cosmopolitanism, but amongst those most fully informed by and sympathetic to it. John A. Macdonald and Daniel Wilson were parallel figures, the last pressings of the Scottish Enlightenment in Canada. Both understood its special promise for Canada; both finally relinquished that promise for something else. French Canadians successfully “assimilated” the British constitution to seize the rights of the British subject for themselves. They modified the meaning of state and society to accommodate their interests. Indigenous peoples did not. They tried, and their efforts were noticed and welcomed by some British and Canadian, francophone and anglophone, public figures. But for every liberalizing action, there was a conservative reaction. French Canadians were admitted into the state according to the same logic that wrote Indigenous peoples out. Settler colonial racism was a factor, but so too was a conservative reconstruction of public opinion more generally. Hume’s model of civilization through commerce and conversation or “converse” had always privileged the propertied end of the public, and the emphasis and privileges increased over time. Hume’s politics of persuasion was too indeterminate for the highly propertied, who wanted better security for that property and worked to insulate it against democratization. They reconstructed the colonial state, enhancing its administrative capacity to create a “colonial leviathan” to do that work. But they also racialized and financialized the meaning of property and opinion, and narrowed their histories accordingly. British and Canadian politicians saw themselves as making informed, rational, and modern choices, and clawed back choice from peoples likely to disagree with them. Charles Taylor and Ernest Gellner argue that it’s impossible not to choose modernity because modernity is itself constant choosing.155 Once Americans had chosen revolution, Canadians could only pretend that they were not also always choosing. To choose to be British was to cleave to custom in a Humean way; to choose to be American was to innovate in defiance of Hume. But because Hume’s criteria were instrumental, because greater power and wealth lay with Americanization, Canadians repudiating that choice seemed to court weakness, poverty, even conquest. The paradox of a choice that might undermine choice troubled Canadians’ musings about civilization. Voltaire, Hume, and Montesquieu – not Rousseau – looked to knowledge to resolve the problems of government. But knowledge always fails. Hume pointed out that the thing we call knowledge is shaped by our minds and interests more than by the real world.156 He psychologized knowledge: our minds produce certainty because they are structured to do so. If that became too terrifying to contemplate, Hume found reassurance in the patterns and pleasures of domestic life. But Jean-Jacques Rousseau obviated that choice

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in his 1759 treatise, Emile, or On Education, which wrote a rationalist, utilitarian reconstruction of the domestic self into child-rearing by demanding that parents or tutors invisibly guide children’s choices. Children must feel themselves free, bound only by nature and reality, never by the will of other people, which we always experience as shameful subjugation. Parents must engineer not amour propre but amour de soi: not self-interest formed by domination but self-interest formed by objective reality. Emile modelled a highly masculine freedom.157 Rousseau’s account of childhood bore as much resemblance to ordinary domestic relations as his “noble savage” to the Indigenous person of the Northeastern woodlands: both models obliterated women’s agency and history. Hume’s account of sociability encompassed domestic and female agency as well as the institutions that we create to moor us. We need good history in our moorings. Americans saw in their founding the earliest attempts to base “nationhood solely on Enlightenment values.” Alexander Hamilton claimed America the first “to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable … of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”158 In the early twentieth century, H.G. Wells described the American constitution of 1787 as “a real, deliberate creation of the English-speaking intelligence.”159 But from the Canadian perspective, Americans were so many Emiles, flouting enlightenment with their unbounded will and unguarded passions.160 Theirs was an act of rebellion against an enlightened constitution already in place in North America that aimed to supplant jealousy and violence with peaceful flourishing. That choice cast a long shadow, and so did Canada’s checkered meditations on it.

pa rt o n e

The Background and the Foreground

1

Enlightenment, Self-Civilization, and Decivilization: Hume vs Franklin

i: t h e a r g u m e n t agai ns t jealousy

My just-so story of civilization in Canada starts with the Royal Proclamation of October 1763 and the beginnings of enlightened constitutionalism. Linda Colley argues that the unprecedented demands of the Seven Years War for recruits and funds drove a new constitutionalism amongst the countries drawn into it, beginning in Corsica in 1755.1 The Royal Proclamation was a constitutional framework aimed at establishing peaceful relations along the western frontier of British settlement in America, where the embers of the Seven Years War sparked Pontiac’s War. Elizabeth Mancke puts it at the vanguard of written constitutionalism, a new beginning in British imperialism with distinctions between kinds of subjects: those directly governed and then those indirectly governed as clients.2 It became and remains fundamental law in Canada and subject to fundamental debates.3 Scholars note its debts to an existing corpus of negotiations – “treaties of peace and friendship, military alliances, trading partnerships, land cessions, mutual guarantees of rights, and seasonal parlays” – to which it lent political and constitutional heft, creating a “body of inter-societal law” that Indigenous people respected, even if the crown did not.4 On one hand, it “contained an implicit promise that Indigenous law would continue unimpaired” in their unceded territories.5 On the other, it restricted the way they could use their land and used “Aboriginal political structures to make the substance underpinning those rights – land – disappear.”6 Mark Walters argues that it was intended as a stopgap, to be replaced by a “Plan of 1764” that the Board of Trade drew up immediately after completing the Proclamation. The plan reiterated the main provisions of

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the Proclamation but also created administrative and regulatory mechanisms for the fur trade, criminal justice, and political relationships with Indigenous communities that explicitly recognized “Aboriginal self-government and customary laws of governance.”7 Here, I embed the logic of the Royal Proclamation in the Scottish Enlightenment’s discovery of public opinion as a civilizing power. Even before defining its territorial range – the newly conquered lands of North American not already subject to European rule – the Proclamation made its essential point: that the king wanted “all Our loving subjects,” in the kingdom and in America, to speedily enjoy the “great Benefits and Advantages which must accrue therefrom to their Commerce, Manufactures, and Navigation.” The best avenue to trade was English law, which, the Proclamation asserted, would be applied to the newly conquered territories: Quebec, Florida, and Grenada, directly or by delegation of authority. The territories would be ruled in the proper and usual way, according to the legitimately constituted opinion of the inhabitants, in the conquered and settled areas and in the unceded Indigenous territories, by whatever process commanded consent. To prevent Indigenous peoples from being molested or disturbed, as well as to prevent fraud, British protections would apply to them, and land transfers must be public not private, occurring through the state on the European side, and in public meetings with British authorities present on the Indigenous side. There remained many technical details to be worked out. The Board of Trade expected more British immigration to the region and for representative assemblies to be formed relatively quickly, rather than nearly three decades later.8 As regards Indigenous land, the long-term project was clearly to provide for land transfer.9 But the premise was mutual economic flourishing across colonial boundaries and state protection against molestation on both sides of the Proclamation line, regulated as a public matter. The transfers and the territories would be governed by political consensus, and there would be no incursions on Indigenous property without some form of legitimation in reference to that consensus. The trade would be “free and open to all our subjects whatever,” but still subject to licensing on the British side, to protect public interests and avoid violent run-ins. A movement towards civic and legal equality that William Sewell sees occurring in France after 1750 through political economy – as finance ministers tried to reduce fiscal privileges and make the tax system the mirror of the marketplace10 – animated the Royal Proclamation. In Proclamation territories, it didn’t matter whether those people had such legal privileges as subjecthood: all needed and were given protection, whether from state-sponsored or private encroachments and enslavements. “Protection” already had a history by the mid-eighteenth century, as something states offered to their citizens and imperial powers extended to non-citizens as a way of framing

1.1 | The Royal Proclamation of 1763. Hastily written, crammed onto one sheet of paper, the Proclamation inaugurated a new form of enlightened constitutionalism in British North America. Library and Archives Canada, Wikipedia Commons.

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“interpolity relations,” that is, for negotiating between “inside” and “outside” interests and identities.11 Not just the unhyphenated and unprivileged inhabitants of British North America shared that interest in peaceful trade; so did a financially exhausted Whitehall. Where public injury, such as robber baron colonies, was restrained, there private interest and the market would reconcile different interests better than anything statesmen could connive. But you had to keep political jealousies out of reason of state. You had to resist incentives and connivances to create new jealousies and privileges, new kinds of fiscal-military states. Classic histories have tended to see, behind the political events, imperial versus democratic impulses doing battle. But if you take Hume’s Magna Carta and the Royal Proclamation as asking and answering the big political questions, you see something different. Hume thought that, in such a violent, imperializing age, people wanted governments that protected them from private and state encroachments: molestations and public injuries. That people were apt to be agnostic about how absolute or how republican the government that delivered those protections should be, so long as they did actually enjoy that shared public interest and that protection. After all, even the best philosophers were egregiously wrong about the workings of consent, interest, and national identity; and that was before intense religious and party propaganda added their own layers of distortion. A certain precocious royal authority had been the best offer of protection and justice in Henry II’s England and could be again in a British North America as diverse and ungoverned as that twelfth-century polity. This was a remarkable position to take in 1763 at England’s statecentral. The Proclamation effectively repudiated Britain’s recent record in the Northeastern woodlands, where houses and crops had been burned and Acadians deported en masse.12 It reflected a wider turn towards freer British trade, including admission of French and Spanish planters and merchants to free ports in the Caribbean.13 It also confirmed the trend towards greater centralization of authority over the settlement frontier, seen from the 1740s onwards as a response to Indigenous grievances of illegal, violent encroachments on their lands. A royal commission in 1743 had confirmed Mohegan sovereignty and possession of their lands in Connecticut, and in the 1750s, the colonies were stripped of their authority in regard to Indigenous relations. Instead, two royal superintendents, one for the northern and one for the southern districts, would take over negotiations.14 The Proclamation also repudiated the recent French and British race to the Pacific Ocean.15 Instead of rivalries, warfare, and domination, the Royal Proclamation posited consensual governance through the workings of public opinion. We can see a desperate response to dramatic events that was really a sovereignty-and-power grab. But we can also see the early stirrings

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of an Enlightenment project to find mutual accommodation across national and cultural differences. Vincent Harlow saw 1763 as marking the beginnings of a “Second British Empire” concerned more with commercial expansion than territory, as a beginning for free-trade imperialism.16 But commerce remained firmly under the empire of public and political authority. In that respect, the Royal Proclamation was like the Magna Carta of 1215, to which it has often been compared. Both the Magna Carta and its “public” quality had a particular meaning in 1763, one derived, to no small degree, from enlightened histories of British liberties, especially Hume’s History of England. His account of the Magna Carta, published in 1762, argued that it contained no new courts or magistrates or senates, no new distribution of powers and no innovation in the political or public law of the kingdom. It only guarded, and that merely by verbal clauses, against such tyrannical practices as are incompatible with civilized government, and, if they become very frequent, are incompatible with all government. Men acquired some more security for their properties and their liberties. And government approached a little nearer to that end, for which it was originally instituted, the distribution of justice, and the equal protection of the citizens. Acts of violence and iniquity in the crown, which before were only deemed injurious to individuals, and were hazardous chiefly in proportion to the number, power, and dignity of the persons affected by them, were now regarded, in some degree, as public injuries, and as infringements of a charter, calculated for general security. And thus, the establishment of the Great Charter, without seeming anywise to innovate in the distribution of political power, became a kind of epoch in the constitution.17 The Royal Proclamation was like the Magna Carta in that it read “public injuries” into violence and fraud. It promised to refrain from and protect against such things, thereby enabling “doux commerce” to build up mutual advantage. Commerce, liberally defined, would be protected from political jealousies, but it would also be prevented from undermining the public interest and the workings of public consensus. Once you understood how the Magna Carta could be read and used for purposes of Enlightenment, it became possible to replicate it and its effects. The crown was Britain; the barons were the colonies; and the commoners hovering in the background in 1215 were the mixed population on the ground defending its ancient liberties against as well as with the new constitutionalism. The crown would respect ordinary political conventions and local treaties but it would also protect the people from (baronial) colonies, many

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of them chartered by the crown before 1688 and claiming ancien regime royal powers. History would look very different if the Royal Proclamation had genuinely been upheld as a Magna Carta for all the different peoples of the Americas, recognizing and protecting basic principles of political deliberation and freedom of trade. In hindsight, it’s obvious that there were not enough protections for Indigenous politics and property. Sharpening distinctions between public and private, national and international, European and Indigenous, would sweep them away. But if we peer past those later binaries, we see, in North America much as in Europe, an infinity of polities and peoples that were widely orchestrated into large-scale political and economic alliances and that could usefully be pacified or stabilized by whatever passed for international diplomacy and law. We see a premise that different kinds of collective agents could negotiate their way towards a common economic interest that was already shaping law and politics on the ground. Like Harry Potter conjuring a patronus spell, diplomats and statesmen realized they could do it because they had already done it: created a “zone of politics” that was “in some sense governable, and governable not by God, nor through nature, but by men.”18 But the relationship between peace, commerce, and opinion was itself being destabilized by the new ideas about them. Distinctions were sharpening between the public and the private, the one associated with collective life and government power, the other with family, civil society, and the market economy.19 Hume was advocating a more bounded and accountable form of political authority, its workings made visible in English history, while still shoring up the right and ability of the state to protect the property and lives of its subjects. But if political economy was a useful check on the state, the state also needed to check the commerce-led and atrocity-ridden activities associated with the Dutch and English East India companies, the Atlantic slave trade, and the wars of dispossession in the Americas that were beginning to scandalize public opinion.20 And yet, even as it dissolved the East India Company and abolished slavery, that same public opinion legitimated the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in British North America. The state became increasingly unable and unwilling to stem that popular movement either in America or in Canada. Mutual accommodation was allowed to become racialized discrimination and white supremacy. But there was nothing inevitable about that outcome; it reflected particular, strategic choices, always made against well-understood, more “civilized” choices. From the Royal Proclamation onwards, some key players understood “civilized” to mean the more or less artificial construction of mutual benefit and accommodation that secured properties and liberty for all through the workings of trade and consensus. It was not a naïve project even if it was, in the end, a

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failed one. Enlightened theorists pitted against a supposedly “natural” desire for domination an equally “natural” sympathy and sociability.21 We may know, now, that failure would ensure, but must still prefer contextual to teleological accounts of what happened. We still need to think our way into the constitutional and political reasoning of the day.22 The Royal Proclamation had deep roots in Britain and North America in its appeal to opinion. For all their differences, interlocutors on both sides saw themselves as essentially free because governed consensually. Indigenous consensus and freedom were grounded in face-to-face debate, whereas the British had representative political institutions orchestrated by the state. In fact, those different traditions had been drawing closer together for some time.23 The Royal Proclamation genuinely reflected a meeting place of European and North American traditions of legitimacy. Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes and key British political advisors fought and negotiated their way to some degree of mutual understanding, initially articulated in the Royal Proclamation and then confirmed the following year in the Treaty of Niagara. Both sides recognized that political and public consensus could achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. The British government eagerly sought to reassure the nations gathered around Pontiac that their interests and political forms would be respected; that it recognized the political logic of Turtle Island. The discovery of that Indigenous political logic was part of what made it enlightened, including the discovery that you did not need states or laws to get political consensus. Opinion and convention sufficed to orchestrate collective action, demonstrably and fearfully effective in Pontiac’s War. However you understood public opinion, it was impossible not to recognize some version of it operating amongst North American allies and enemies, preserving their control of the back country. England could no more conquer Indigenous peoples there than imperial Rome could conquer the German tribes. But that discovery was relatively new to British consciousness. Before Pontiac’s uprising, the British had taken the French military state – with its Indigenous allies – to be the great barrier to British expansion, much as its continuing presence had made the Acadians seem so unreliable. But with the French suddenly gone from 1760, British and colonial statesmen had to consider how to secure the consent of the former French allies, and drew on the latest theories of political philosophy. If you were unenlightened, then you thought that subjects obeyed kings in fear and trembling. If you were enlightened, you understood that fear was only a small part of loyalty and deference to rule of law, and that self-interested norms were the more important constituent. That much the British constitution did at home; what of the colonies? The French had proved that the western lands could not be held militarily. Some sort of demilitarization and consensual government must suffice. The

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British must build or renew relations with Indigenous communities in the face of their repudiation by Pontiac, or admit that their authority was mere deceitful scratchings on a map. The trick of Enlightenment was in the cosmopolitan recognition that trade and opinion were the basic governing principles in both Indigenous and European polities. Indigenous people had known that for many centuries, but it was a new thing in Europe, beginning with Hume’s argument, published in 1741, that “all government rests on public opinion.” Hobbes had argued that “the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people” and had tried to minimize instability by persuading citizens “to alienate their judgments to the sovereign” in controversial matters.24 But it was still persuasion all the way down, for Hume. Scholars who were fixated on how regimes shaped mores should, he argued, reverse the priority. Nothing appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of Egypt, or the emperor of Rome, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or prætorian bands, like men, by their opinion.25 Power was always a dialogue, never a monologue. For Hume, liberal societies openly acknowledged the state’s debt to opinion and ruled men “like men, by their opinion.” Britain was well governed because “the Legislature has not force enough to execute the Laws without the Goodwill of the People.”26 But Hume also criticized vulgar whigs who exaggerated English liberties. The French, too, were differently but equally civilized, he argued, against English whigs and French philosophes. Hume’s argument for rule by opinion corroded older theories of power and restraint. Power, on this understanding, ruled hegemonically, according to some “elusive mixture” of opinion, coercion, and legitimacy.27 It was and remains hard to peel the latter apart because, as E.H. Carr observed, “coercion is a fruitful cause of consent.” He conceded that British and American rule relied more on consent and less on coercion than German or Japanese forms, but only because the former were grounded in “long and superior enjoyment

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of superior power” that created its own convenient morality.28 But a naked fist provokes resistance; better to seem to rule by opinion. Theories of hegemony allowed slippage between coercion and consent, allegiance and alliance. They allowed a degree of agnosticism around questions of territorial sovereignty and control in the backwoods and the settled parts of the colonies. Everywhere a very few soldiers and Britons ruled large numbers of non-Britons, in areas characterized by recent and intense imperial warfare, and with none of Carr’s “long enjoyment of superior power.” On both sides of the Atlantic, the new theories of public opinion seemed dangerously destabilizing. If the classic checks on public opinion, such as censorship and the courts, rested on opinion, then what stopped opinion from running riot – from democratizing itself, for example? Hume saw a number of stabilizing factors. He applied Jacob Bernouilli’s law of large numbers, framed in 1705 as lending greater certainty than small numbers. So, too, politically: “What depends upon a few persons, is, in a great measure, to be ascribed to chance, or secret and unknown cases: What arises from a great number, may often be accounted for by determinate and known causes.”29 The public was more stable and predictable than a capricious prince. Ordinary, everyday virtues were the most solid foundation for morality and statesmanship. Ordinary people, given enough liberty, pursued a self-interest that was generally innocent and productive of industry and betterment. But Hume also thought that ordinary public opinion was upwardly emulative. “In a civilised monarchy, there is a long train of dependence from the prince to the peasant, which is not great enough to render property precarious, or depress the minds of the people, but is sufficient to beget in every one an inclination to please his superiors and to form himself upon those models, which are most acceptable to people of condition and education.” Refinement in the mechanical and liberal arts improved together, Hume argued, making men “more social … They flock into cities; love to receive and communicate knowledge; to show their wit or their breeding; their taste in conversation or living, in clothes or furniture. Curiosity allures the wise; vanity the foolish; and pleasure both.” Clubs were formed, and men and women met in an “easy and sociable manner” and improved their tempers and behaviours, thereby acquiring (and not just from learning) “an encrease of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together, and contributing to each other’s pleasure and entertainment.” Sociability, left to itself, engineered progress. England was well governed because commercial sociability was well represented in Parliament, which had become the most powerful branch of government for that very reason. Some combination of ambitious men seeking patronage and “honest and disinterested” statesmen resisting it made for a healthy diversity of opinions and arguments for and against the existing executive.30 That wasn’t virtue as the priests defined it, but statesmen

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weren’t priests. It had become clear to serious thinkers by the early eighteenth century that people did not make their workaday decisions according to religious precepts.31 Not heavenly rewards, but principles of self-interest and secular justice (the latter derived from the former, according to enlightened thinkers) were better explainers and predictors of human behaviour. Ordinary motives and incentives, under a good constitution, should engineer a stable, moderate, and happy society. A certain realism about human vices and virtues, written into institutions and constitutions, should channel those vices and virtues in mutually beneficial directions, reinforced by a certain political moderation amongst statesmen and men of letters. Moderation was not “a synonym for indecisiveness or lukewarmness, but rather a bold virtue for courageous minds.” It was also an argument for pluralism over either monism or Manichean binaries.32 There would always be extremists with immoderate opinions – people like Hume himself whose views on religion and race were, and remain, immoderate.33 But immoderation could be contained, made nugatory, by a public opinion orchestrated, which is to say balanced, around interests rather than passions. Civilization as refinement of manners was one useful backstop against public opinion running riot. Another was civilization as a theory of history. From its earliest written form, history had described how empires rose, became corrupt, and then declined, in perpetual cycle.34 But civilization theory saw something more like evolution towards stability. History was not simply a continual recurrence of events but a record of conventions and proscriptions. Some events and choices became authoritative and conventional because people agreed to let them serve as a terminus a quo for legitimacy. The Revolution of 1688 was one such convention, as was the Magna Carta. But their authority was historical rather than transcendent or sacred. Andrew Sabl carefully explains Hume’s logic: Magna Charta, like all fundamental conventions of authority, became fundamental over time as the product of repeated political experience. Its validity was established through recurrent appeals to its principles. Different actors in English history invoked the Great Charter against their powerful adversaries because its principles were flexible enough to be useful in a variety of historical circumstances, while always representing limits, ever clearer and more solid, on what would otherwise have been arbitrary authority. In a happy accident of strategy and history, the Charter’s provisions were just broad enough that actors throughout society (and despite shifts in the structure of society) could find advantage in rallying to defend them. As a result, Magna Charta’s became the kind of convention that could serve everyone in society and whose validity was therefore acknowledged by everyone.35

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But British historical conventions were too distant to stabilize so well in many colonies. You couldn’t make the Magna Carta apply to Canada without considerable spadework. The concept of civilization was a mobile version of history, able to do some of that work. If you weren’t civilized, then you must be barbarian or savage. People were highly motivated to describe themselves as civilized, citing such evidence as constitutionalism, built landscapes, literature, flourishing farming and commercial sectors, the treatment of women, or any other kind of refinement. Civilization was performative and anyone could perform it. Indeed, all the different peoples of North America described themselves as civilized. All saw themselves as free and prospering enough to model political choice and agency, to be masters of their fate. A theory of civilization both described and persuaded, wooing people to commercial and civil sociability. It was far from satisfactory as a check on horrors and atrocities, but in a world where opinion alone governed, it was the only check. Civilization was a historical convention, but so, too, according to Hume, was reason itself, and what Hegel, on reading Hume, described as the “cunning” of reason in history. Scrutinized closely, as Hume scrutinized it in his early philosophical writings, reason didn’t look very rational: an observed repetition over time and an expectation that the future would resemble the past. Reason was mere opinion because it conflated post hoc with propter hoc: things that followed with things that must follow causally. That B followed A was taken as A having caused B. But nothing, Hume argued, in the idea of A necessitates the idea of B: we simply notice that they had coincided and expect them to do so again. Empirical knowledge was never really true, only more or less persuasive. Such things could themselves be rigorously rather than persuasively stated, because they rested on the mental process of “association” that, for Hume, was “the psychic equivalent of Newton’s physical ‘gravitation’: a basic force, intrinsic to human nature, whose laws governed the mind’s bringing together of ‘simple’ perceptions into ‘complex’ ones and separating them back again into ‘simples’ in the process of thought.”36 Complex truths had simple ones at their heart, based on simple sense impressions, common to all humans. Philosophy could discover and shore up good ideas. Public opinion was no more rigorous than reason itself, nor was history as a mode of reasoning. But if you scrutinized reason and history as a huge and complicated mass of decisions and deeds over time, carefully relating earlier, later, and coinciding events, you could see instructive patterns. “The historian traces the series of actions according to their natural order, remounts to their secret springs and principles, and delineates their most remote consequences. He chooses for his subject a certain portion of that great chain of events, which compose the history of mankind. Each link in

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this chain he endeavours to touch in his narrative.” Some things he cannot know, some he must conjecture. But “always, he is sensible that the more unbroken the chain is, which he presents to his readers, the more perfect is his production. He sees that the knowledge of causes is not only the most satisfactory, this relation or connection being the strongest of all the others, but also the most instructive; since it is by this knowledge alone we are enabled to control events and govern futurity.”37 Careful scrutiny could reveal patterns and even a progressive arc. History, reason, and identity itself were arbitrary assemblages of fleeting qualities, a point that Hume made in a letter to his cousin, Henry Home, Lord Kames, in the spring of 1746, while sitting in Portsmouth waiting to join a military expedition to Nova Scotia. Hume praised Home’s theories of identity: “As to the idea of substance, I must own, that as it has no access to the mind by any of our senses or feelings, it has always appeared to me to be nothing but an imaginary centre of union amongst the different and variable qualities that are to be found in every piece of matter.”38 Bad weather scuttled the expedition and so Hume went to France instead. But the phrase, “an imaginary centre of union,” captures something of reason, of history, and of Canada itself. Such things exist in a shifting penumbra that lack extra-historical certainty or authority, but can be, nonetheless, stable and strong enough to carry us through our national existence and our daily routines, with what Nancy Partner describes as “the same little lurch of faith that takes us out of bed each morning brashly confident that the floor will be where we left it.”39 Skepticism is a welcome check upon specious certainties, but itself usefully corrected by the ordinary banalities and repetitions of everyday life. Hume denied England a national character, given its mixed government, its tolerance of religions, and its preference for rule by opinion rather than by coercion.40 There was no philosophical or substantial centre of union but there was a historical one. It shifted and altered with the times rather than resting on eternal human virtues and choices, just like the self. Hume’s intellectual heirs would try to calculate it, beginning with Bentham’s calculations of the greatest good for the greatest number. Hume’s argument in favour of rule by opinion as true and civilizing became political orthodoxy, a core precept of such philosophers as Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and William Paley, who rendered “Hume’s paradoxes into Establishment Whig platitudes.”41 According to Paley in 1785: “In all cases, even in the most popular forms of civil government, the physical strength lies in the governed … civil authority is founded in opinion.”42 Niccolò Machiavelli had admired popular political reason as a bulwark against domination by the few,43 but Hume made that reason less rational and more commercial. First, he argued that not reason but passion guided human deliberations, with reason and morality merely an auxiliary. Reason

1.2 | Portrait of David Hume with laurel wreath, the emblem of peace, by David Basire. Engraved in 1765, after he completed his History; he would decline invitations to extend the narrative beyond 1688 on grounds that he was “too old, too fat, too lazy, and too rich.” © The Trustees of the British Museum 1861,1012.2626.

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could not make you prefer the scratching of your finger to the destruction of the universe. Only self-interested passions could determine the preference; and only informed and disciplined passions could prefer longer- to shorterterm benefits. If you wanted to hold property, for example, you should refrain from seizing the property of others: it was on that principle that justice took shape. But if justice secured property in theory, only allegiance and authority secured the person, according to Sabl’s reading of Hume’s History.44 Liberty required a foundation of authority to prevent the barons running riot. Second, where political passions tended towards jealousy, commercial self-interest could ease jealousy with mutual benefit. Pursuit of gain was a lesser vice that could be used to check a greater one.45 It’s that complicated Humean argument, for popular economic virtues as checking political rivalries, that we can dimly perceive in the Royal Proclamation, as in Hume’s Magna Carta. Neither the barons nor King John had sought the liberty or well-being of the nation: these were predatory plunderers vying to outdo one another. But their very quarrels created principles and processes of legal and political accountability to the governed that proved useful, over the centuries, in checking despotism. You could only see that historical arc in hindsight, but that’s what philosophical history delivered: an observation of progress in distorted beginnings and unintended consequences, thereby debunking the unphilosophical and politically partisan accounts emanating from Whigs and Tories.46 Hume’s essays sold slowly in the 1740s, and then, reissued in cheap format in 1753, very well. By the 1760s, his six-volume History of England published between 1754 and 1761 (starting with the Stuarts, then going back to the Tudors, and then to the earlier period) began to dominate the public market and history-writing. According to Murray Pittock: “A history was born which found a mass market by linking its narrative of progress towards civility with aspirations towards economic, linguistic and career progress among its target audience. History had found its comfort zone.”47 In fact, there were intense debates about whether England’s narrative arc showed progress or decline. The early years of the Seven Years War, when British forces suffered serious setbacks, saw real anxiety about whether commercial virtue was good enough. John Brown blamed Hume for the decline of British virtues, and warned that French conquest might come to England as well as America. But as the Conquest of Canada in 1760 turned the tide, so did the historical debate turn to such questions as what rights came from conquest, with the Conquest of 1066 closely scrutinized as a precedent.48 The Royal Proclamation occurred two years after Hume finished publishing his History of England, but the Conquest of 1760 preceded his account of 1066 and 1215. The Magna Carta could model a “public” interest amidst the privatized political and economic relations of feudalism, but Hume also

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saw a unifying “public” interest in the broad-bottomed political alliances prompted by the demands of the Seven Years War. The fruits of that alliance, including the peace settlement and the Royal Proclamation, informed Hume’s reading of English history. According to Hume, unchecked royal authority enabled a centralized administration and justice, but so did the restraints imposed by the barons and, later, the Commons and the public. Back and forth, governing and governed fought over the definition of constitutionality and law, always in reference to the “ancient” constitution and its supposed liberties. Only the alternation of royal and aristocratic “parties” enabled the Magna Carta to take effect over time. But something changed, at the start of the seventeenth century, when “the minds of men throughout Europe, especially in England, seem to have undergone a general but insensible revolution.” Arts and letters revived, travel became secure and agreeable, and politics became “more enlarged and comprehensive.”49 European princes with standing armies centralized their countries. In England the love of freedom acquired new force, through more enlarged views and a cultivated understanding amongst the well bred and well educated, who read Greek and Roman as well as English history. The mixture was more innovative than traditional and the consequences were new standards of liberty. Hume attributed the new liberties to the growing prosperity, liberty, and importance of the “middling rank of men” whom he described as “the best and firmest basis of public liberty,” based on their demands for equal laws to preserve themselves and their property against kings and robber-baron aristocrats.50 Thus had England become “civilised,” according to Hume, through a series of unpredictable but admirable events. If plundering princes and aristocrats had had their way, they would remain as predatory as ever, but they were gradually brought under the rule of law. Max Skjönsberg sees Hume aspiring to an “impartial” political analysis, impressive for its ambition as well as its idiosyncrasy. Hume took Pierre Bayle’s view that “the very perfection of a good history is to be disagreeable to all sects and to all nations.” That meant avoiding doctrinaire party arguments to weave the best claims together in a larger narrative.51 Impartiality did not mean non-partisan, according to Skjönsberg, but preferring parties based on interest to parties of affection, that is, irrational loyalty or superstition. Impartiality required practice: Hume discovered his own early writings were riddled with whiggish bias. Where once he thought that the Stuart kings had tried to “stretch” the royal prerogative, he later concluded the Tudors had been the greater tyrants, and the Stuarts had merely failed to adapt to the new ideas of liberty.52 Happily, broader statesmanship prevailed. Hume reserved his strongest praise for statesmen such as the Marquess of Halifax, who “affected a species of neutrality between the parties” and/or

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marginalized their extremists. That left the remaining Jacobites too few to disrupt politics. Hume was appalled by the Jacobite uprising of 1745 in Scotland, having recently gone on record to argue against any such possibility. British politics must be stabilized by cool, impartial history that checked excessive romantic projections, amongst Tories to the past and amongst Whigs to the future. The only legitimacy was “the present established practice of the age.” Hume concluded his history with the observation: “An acquaintance with the ancient periods of their government is chiefly useful by instructing them to cherish their present constitution, from a comparison or contrast with the condition of those distant times. And it is also curious, by shewing them the remote, and commonly faint and disfigured originals of the most finished and most noble institutions, and by instructing them in the great mixture of accident, which commonly concurs with a small ingredient of wisdom and foresight, in erecting the complicated fabric of the most perfect government.”53 Constitutions could only enable, not guarantee, liberty and progress; parties must agree to respect them, in some balance of liberty and authority. The Royal Proclamation was only a constitutional beginning. Indeed, the ink was hardly dry on the first newspaper printed in Quebec before one of the “king’s new subjects” invoked the Magna Carta to denounce imperial taxation of the colony, initially delicately and ironically, then with growing frankness, in language that owed a great deal to Hume.54 But promises are only as strong as the interests that defend them. Terrible tyrannies still lay ahead, both in the England of 1215 and the Canada of 1763. Such tyrannies were unconstitutional. They breached the Magna Carta’s ringing guarantee: “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised [dispossessed] or exiled or in any way destroyed nor will we go upon him or send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”55 Mark Walters summarizes late Victorian understandings of English rule of law, according to A.V. Dicey: “First, no one can be punished or deprived of liberty or property except for a breach of law established in the ‘ordinary’ legal manner before the ‘ordinary’ courts,” such that the rule of law was inconsistent with “the exercise by persons in authority of wide, arbitrary, or discretionary powers of constraint.” Secondly, no man was above the law, and thirdly, the general principles of the constitution existed in judge-made case law, rather than in executive fiat.56 Dicey conceded that it should but did not apply in the colonies.57 British rule of law and the Canadian constitution, working together, enslaved and dispossessed, while obstructing legal redress. The language of civilization was a rhetorical weapon for but also against such predations. “We were not the savages,” insists Mi’kmaw historian Daniel Paul. The Mi’kmaq welcomed the British with “generosity and respect … in line with the strictures of their civilization,” only to confront an exterminating

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“uncivilized savagery.”58 Elders everywhere, like Paul, described themselves as civilized, well equipped with social, political, and diplomatic institutions for treatying, for managing violence, and for cultivating the general welfare. Heidi Bohaker observes: “The Anishinaabe had built a civilization through braiding together difference – different doodemag, different people, and different ideas – where all the parts remained intact but contributed to a stronger whole.”59 If we discard the language of civilization, we erase Indigenous self-understandings. Civilization was the language of law and consensus and collaboration, like the language of the “tax-payer” that, Shirley Tillotson has shown, reflected the full spectrum of political choice.60 Métis peoples claimed that their double heritage made them doubly civilized. Max Hamon’s close archival study of Louis Riel shows him, as a student at the Sulpician seminary in 1864, championing civilization in the end-of-year public debate against a Rousseauian interlocutor who preferred noble savagery. Hamon advises: “we must also seek Riel ‘at the centre’ of Canadian constructions of civilization; scholarship that ignores this tends to marginalize him. Riel was there, representing and speaking for civilization.”61 The English working classes likewise heard accusations of “savagery” and likewise called themselves civilized. J.A. Roebuck, who was born in India and educated in Canada, entered Parliament in 1832 on a radical platform that denounced conservatives as uncivilized and urged that the enjoyments of “civilized life” be widely disseminated.62 The language of civilization was an obvious tool to anyone who saw themselves as civilized, as everyone did. But Roebuck also argued that “the successful civilization of the white man” must necessarily “kill out” “Brown” men and “Indians … and the more rapidly the better.”63 Such words as civilization and enlightenment have a bad odour nowadays because they were used to justify slavery and dispossession. Those arguments were more pronounced in the later eighteenth century but were visibly emerging earlier within a natural history framework.64 And Hume was no preux chevalier. In a famous footnote inserted in 1753–54 to his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume declared himself apt to suspect “the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.” Slavers quickly seized upon the argument to legitimate their claims, while critics quickly denounced Hume for conflating capacity with context, inner ability with external constraints.65 Silvia Sebastiani argues that Hume’s “analysis of national characters in sociological terms was limited by a polygenetic perspective to the European peoples alone.” She suggests that Hume took this lesson from Carl Linnaeus, who identified Homo sapiens as two species (sapiens and troglodyte) and four varieties: American, European, Asiatic, and African.66 Hume was also corresponding with Montesquieu on such questions. Because Hume’s science of man could not, Aaron Garrett argues,

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fully account for human differences, Hume presumed a prior, natural difference based on strength, like the difference between men and women, but exacerbated by historical separation.67 Sebastiani argues that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas appeared in Hume’s schema as a thought experiment, where a strong species met a weak one, “of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment.” Because American peoples could not resist European encroachments, Europeans abandoned justice, restraint, and humanity and “transformed into little tyrants by their habit of exercising unlimited power over their fellow human beings.”68 If relations between Scotland and England showed how ordinary converse and commerce could reduce inequality amongst nations, relations between Europeans and Indigenous peoples of the Americas showed the devastating effects of extreme inequality, as did the development of the Atlantic slave trade. Europeans had civilized themselves by discarding age-old “hatred and violent rivalry” and must do so again.69 Montesquieu and Burke shared Hume’s assessment of “timorous” and conquerable North American peoples, but where Montesquieu naturalized it by vesting it in climate and Burke apostrophized it as a theory of power, Hume’s focus on moral and historical causes mandated reform.70 Because European superior power was the cause of the tyranny, reform must begin there, on the theory (made by R.G. Collingwood, leaning upon Hume) that causes are things under the control of empowered political agents, whether individually or collectively.71 Hume’s agnosticism about what passed for knowledge in his day can be applied to his own work. He knew that the historical record was mostly dark. His problem remains our own: how to turn a record of violence, plunder, and dissimulation into a foundation for mutual flourishing and enlargement – what Sabl calls Hume’s “liberalism of enlargement.”72 How to weave straw into gold? Hume catalogued the weaknesses of existing knowledge and then rewrote it on stronger grounds that took intellectual and institutional hold. He made a sophisticated and strategic argument for a “civilizing” public opinion as an escape from tyranny, violence, poverty. Some of Hume’s lessons were atrociously tory, such as his approval of Edward, the “hammer of the Scots.” He distrusted democracy and preferred slow reform of unjust customs to principled justice. But he still offered a philosophical argument for reform and in practice supported political reformers working to expand the franchise and check the powers of kings, bishops, and landowners.73 I need not agree with all Hume’s conclusions to use his methods. I survey Canadian interlocutors, decade by decade, much as Hume surveyed medieval and modern kings, for lessons in state logic and capacity on a shifting political landscape.74

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History as a way of knowing and a record of knowledge provided the closest thing to certainty. According to Hume in 1748: “History, experience, reason sufficiently instruct us in this natural progress of human sentiments, and in the gradual enlargement of our regards to justice.”75 The lessons of history enabled people to prognosticate the consequences of political choices.76 We all cheer liberty and hiss at tyranny but when was a ruler so obviously tyrannical that violent resistance was rightly advised? For Hume the answer was a question of degree and likely outcomes. A disputed succession might lead to a civil war, as seen in both Hume’s and Shakespeare’s Richard II. Shakespeare, writing at a time when Elizabeth’s imminent demise betokened real uncertainty of succession, wrote a “prophetic warning” against Henry of Bolingbroke’s usurpation of Richard: And if you crown him, let me prophesy: The blood of English shall manure the ground, And future ages groan for this foul act …77 But uncertainty could be preferable to oppression. Impossible not to approve the overthrow of tyrants in retrospect, observed Hume: “Those who took up arms against Dionysius, or Nero, or Philip the second, have the favour of every reader in the perusal of their history; and nothing but the most violent perversion of common sense can ever lead us to condemn them.”78 Richard II, too, deserved his fate, Judith Shklar observed: “Richard II complains incessantly about what fortune has done to him, but Bolingbroke, Shakespeare, and we know that he has only himself to blame.”79 To read history was to learn how to discriminate between justice and injustice, laudable and vicious uses of self-interest, violence, and reason of state, as well as the unintended consequences that might flow from such choices. Even if you approved the Revolution of 1688 as history, you might be appalled in real time by the American or French Revolution, as Edmund Burke was, arguing that the faults of the state must be approached as “the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude.” He likened revolutionaries to people who hoped to regenerate a parent by cutting them up and cooking them in a kettle.80 Burke judged political truths by their consequences: “What in the result is likely to produce evil, is politically false: that which is productive of good, politically is true.”81 England became a great and a free nation more by commerce than by conquest, on Hume’s telling.82 Historians have seen much violence in the commerce. Sven Beckert argues for the foundational importance of “war capitalism” in modern history. But he also notes that the modernizing nations usually had to eschew war capitalism at home, saving it for imperial frontiers.83 Englishmen at home, at the time Hume wrote, enjoyed a unique

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degree of prosperity and liberty, and therein lay better grounds for distinguishing good from bad governance than mouldering archival documents. The country enjoyed a peculiar standing, according to Hume, “above any nation at present in the world, or that appears in the records of any story,” because it had more national wealth distributed more evenly through society. Artisans had “full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt, but such an equality is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less from the happiness of the rich than it adds to that of the poor.”84 The English had created an admirable feedback loop between popular prosperity and political accountability. Hume focused his story on England. That’s not to say he dismissed the colonial perspective: this was, after all, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the greater good of Scotland was always a priority. Hume’s best hopes for Scotland were in getting English liberty and prosperity to Scotland by allaying political jealousies that might obstruct them. In 1758, the essay “Of the Jealousy of Trade” argued that as equality within the nation served the general welfare, so did equality between neighbouring nations. This essay also built on his earlier “balance of power” argument and Montesquieu’s argument in 1748 that “the natural effect of trade is that it leads to peace.” Montesquieu explained: “Two nations negotiating together make each other reciprocally dependent; if one has interest in buying, one has interest in selling; and all unions are founded on mutual needs.”85 Economic interest could negate political jealousy and there was a natural balance of wealth as well as political power. If England’s neighbours prospered, all the better for England’s industrious artisans who would have a good market for their wares ready to hand. England would be better off if Scotland and Ireland were richer than they were. Happily, Hume believed, that process was occurring naturally by the differential of wages. Cheap wages in poor countries attracted capital from rich ones, according to a process visibly at work in Scotland, and better trade was a better path forward than the hapless Jacobite rising of 1745. Comparative advantage in trade resulted in mutual benefit. The phrase “comparative advantage” was formulated half a century later by David Ricardo but, according to István Hont, the key precept can be seen in Hume’s attack on mercantilism: “The increase of riches and commerce in any one nation, instead of hurting, commonly promotes the riches and commerce of all its neighbours.” The essay ended in a ringing, cosmopolitan peroration: “I shall therefore venture to acknowledge, that, not only as a man, but as a british subject, I pray for the flourishing commerce of germany, spain, italy, and even france itself. I am at least certain, that great britain , and all those nations, would flourish more, did their sovereigns and ministers adopt such enlarged and benevolent sentiments towards each other.”86 “Of the Jealousy of Trade” nurtured a critique of jealous nationalism.

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According to John Shovlin, “Hume sought to rise above party prejudice and the lobbying of special interests to develop an impartial and philosophical account of political economy, while gleefully exploding many of the shibboleths dear to politicians, among them the Whig nostrum that trade with France could not be beneficial.”87 But Shovlin tempers the picture of Humean exceptionalism. Hume didn’t really oppose tariffs in toto and he had profound debts to “long-established arguments emphasising the disadvantages of closure.” French and English trading relations had been seriously damaged by late seventeenth-century politics, provoking worrying consequences that statesmen in both countries struggled to counteract: diminished trade and expensive wars that threatened to weaken both England and France in relation to continental rivals. There were also arguments against conquest, as more weakening than strengthening national well-being. But reciprocal trade negotiations failed in 1713 and again in the 1740s, with Hume himself close to the Scottish politicians supporting the deal. His Essays in the 1750s repudiated the recent War of the Austrian Succession that accomplished little but increased public debts. “Jealousy of Trade” reflected Hume’s dismay at the outbreak of the Seven Years War, “the negation of almost everything Hume stood for politically,” and especially his dismay at the policies of the new prime minister, William Pitt, the “wicked madman” determined to “smash” France’s naval and commercial power once and for all.88 During the course of the Seven Years War, the public debt nearly doubled, from £75 million to £132 million.89 But Hume’s pamphlet was more than a partisan political argument. Much as Montesquieu tried to make it harder, if not impossible, to defend torture in “civilized” public debate, Hume tried to do the same for hatred or “imprudent vehemence.” He wrote the essay at a time of serious anti-Scottish and anti-French discourse, but the point was generalizable. After 1758, it was always possible for an informed statesman or writer, confronted with a warmongering patriotism, or oligarchic state capture, or a predatory ethnic nationalism, to say in response: “Yes, but I have a theoretically and historically well-grounded argument that suggests mutual toleration leads to better prosperity and security for all.” That argument was made at some crucial moments in British and Canadian history. In any wide-ranging public conversation, some people will seek to be as racist as possible and others as rigorous as possible. But both racism and rigour are contextual, requiring careful local analysis to identify their conventions. People who eschewed political jealousies and pursued mutually beneficial commerce might escape the historical cycle of rise, corruption, and decline. English history showed that it could be done. Internecine history was natural; civilization was artificial, but it could be engineered, like justice, as a triumph of long-term over short-term interests. The philosophes, David Wootton observes, were not naïve about the ubiquity of greed and love of domination

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in recorded and observed history. Enlightenment lay in careful orchestration of public opinion to check rather than amplify those impulses.90 Hobbes advocated a powerful state to protect people from insecurity, but all liberties were owed to state prerogative. Locke tempered that state by inalienable rights to religious liberty and property.91 Hume made the state more subsidiary to the social. Wootton observes: “Hume sought to understand morality by studying what people believed to be good and bad, right and wrong; but the whole point of his enquiry was to subtly alter people’s moral beliefs by explaining them to them and thus to change their behavior; and these new moral beliefs were embodied in new locations – the Bath Assembly Rooms, for example – where a new type of social interaction took place.”92 Emily Nacol observes that Hume turned from writing arcane and corrosive philosophical essays on the impossibility of knowledge, to popular, conversational essays that enjoined and embodied trust between thought and experience, writer and audience. He styled himself a diplomat between the dominions of “Learning” and “Conversation,” and applied comparative benefit there as well: “The balance of Trade we need not be jealous of, nor will there be any Difficulty to preserve it on both Sides,” with learning as a kind of manufacturing and common conversation as primary material.93 Converse and commerce offered at least some prospect, however slender, of mutual solidarity and flourishing. It was a self-civilization project, an attempt to woo people to greater moderation, much like the “civilizing process” discovered two centuries later by Norbert Elias in response to the Nazi appropriation of “kultur.”94 You couldn’t just tell murderous princes to restrain themselves, but had to make them accountable to a public opinion that had refined itself through the arts, culture, and trade. You had to supplant political sociability with a more pacific commercial sociability that had a self-civilizing effect. Hume did not use the “invisible hand” metaphor of his friend Adam Smith, but the concept of a self-regulating economy appeared first in Hume’s work. Donald Winch remarks that, “following in Hume’s footsteps, Smith had treated commerce and manufacturing as ‘silent’ revolutionary forces that had overcome feudalism and established that security under rule of law which constituted liberty in the modern sense.”95 But as imperial wars widened, Hume was more worried than Smith by the reinvigoration of political jealousies through an insidious combination of warmongering princes and financiers who threatened to take Europe and Britain out of civilization and back into history. Jealousy between England and France, New England and New France, had prompted the Conquest of 1760. France, fearful of growing British naval and commercial hegemony in America and the Caribbean, turned westward to protect its territorial and commercial interests there, and especially in North America with its rapidly growing agricultural population

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and demand for industrial products (which absorbed 6 per cent of British exports in 1700 and 26 per cent of the much-larger sum of exports in the 1770s). By mid-century, the present and projected North American market was widely understood as the most important economic interest in play for imperial rivalries.96 But France could not sustain the commercial or the military competition. From the Anglo-American perspective, once the French military state had been ousted, enlightened commerce could now spread across the French-Catholic and Indigenous regions to the western edge of the continent. In the absence of a militarized border, war capitalism might become peaceful flourishing. Hume was trying to engineer enlightened and scientific truths into being, at a time when scientists no longer described truths but engineered them in laboratories.97 Hume, too, aimed to engineer real-world outcomes. The historian decided what people needed to hear and then wrote to persuade. Michel Foucault sees Hume as building on Bishop Berkeley’s argument of 1709–10 for the connection of ideas, but carrying the logic from divine to secular connections. “The knowledge that divined, at random, signs that were absolute and older than itself has been replaced by a network of signs built up step by step in accordance with a knowledge of what is probable. Hume has become possible.”98 With that understanding of probability, with the “looping effect” of history, it became possible to engineer consciousness. Ian Hacking, a Foucauldian, famously argued that descriptions of behaviour can become normative categories for behaviour. Pascal’s wager made the case, based on the theory that faith is catching.99 We wager that God does or doesn’t exist and tailor our behaviour accordingly. Leibniz thought that Pascal recommended hypocrisy: “‘those who do not believe in God should act as if they did.’ Pascal would add: because they do so, they will in due course come to believe.”100 If we behave as if a certain kind of identity exists – Christian, Englishman, woman – the identity and behaviour tend towards self-fulfilling prophesy. Knowledge and identity, identity and behaviour mutually construct one another, binding people to conventions. Perhaps moderation could be made as catching as faith. The Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution were Pascalian wagers. Having corroded older conventions, Hume constructed new ones as enlightened consensus and wrote them into English history. The Magna Carta was no more than a convention but it orchestrated and channelled expectations and confidence, so that rule of law evolved as England evolved. By writing moderate political histories, Hume might moderate the “unwritten” English constitution. A constitution, too, was an “imaginary centre of union.” A good history could become as influential a constitutional document or framework as a Royal Proclamation or a Magna Carta. Hume’s History of England could not guarantee anyone either enlargement or prosperity but it could serve as a resource for a liberalism of enlargement.

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Hume’s History was a pageant of good and evil statesmen, intermingled personal and political choices, embedded in a larger framework that tilted towards repudiating the evil. It deftly wove together precepts and facts from both liberal and conservative political camps to embrace larger political truths beyond their compass. No political party and no government commanded a unitary truth: “Governments, especially those of a mixed kind, are in continual fluctuation: The humours of the people change perpetually from one extreme to another.” Because both political parties admired some parts of Hume’s History and attacked others, it could not be reduced to a party platform and could become a convention in its own right. At least, that’s what happened to Hume’s History of England and, later, to Durham’s report on Canada. In writing narrative history aimed at bolstering confidence in private agency and property, Hume made political relationships more like commercial ones and more accountable to them. The modern nation had two imaginary centres of union: the constitution and public credit. In the modern commercial economy, relations of trust were political and economic, and credit was a crucial mechanism of sociability for individuals and the state. Polonius was never more sententious than when intoning “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” National credit underpinned the expansive commercial economy for Hume: “Public credit is the soul of commerce.” Widespread lending and borrowing knit interests together in relations of trust that must be grounded on observed and reported experiences. When national governments took on “public incumbrances,” they lent security to commerce and industry. Investment by merchants into national debt, securely backed, created a commercial public that was “half-merchants, half stock-holders.” Hume’s England was a new kind of “nation of creditors,” resting on a double confidence in the debtor and the debtor’s faculties.101 According to P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, bankers enjoyed close relations “with those who controlled the machinery of state. Once in the charmed circles of power, bankers gained both immediate profit and entry to a network of contacts and information that opened up additional prospects; as their connections multiplied, so too did their prestige and authority.”102 You didn’t need mercantilism or even conquest if you commanded confidence and credit. A vast literature marvelled at England’s success in sustaining its credit, described as a “major part of a linked and complicated jigsaw that combined to fuel England’s rise as a major commercial, military, and finally industrial power.”103 Rebecca Spang remarks that “public debt in the modern era owes something to constitutions and representative institutions, but it has been shaped much more by the volatile force of public opinion.”104 For Daniel Defoe, credit was “neither visible nor invisible; it is all consequence, and yet not the

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effect of a cause; it is being without matter, a substance without form.”105 New cultural practices must manage and stabilize commercial as well as political public opinion.106 The seventeenth-century “credit revolution” that made credit networks more public and impersonal reflected new epistemologies of knowledge, opinion, and trust, nurtured by the new witnessing techniques of the Scientific Revolution, the expansion of capital punishment for property crimes,107 and the writing of history. Noel Jackson observes: “Hume offered a mode of historiography that catered to the needs of a credit economy that depended for its own prosperity upon the image of a stable and largely secular future.”108 Commercial truths, like political truths, were not simply true or false, but what you made of them. Credit, according to Charles Davenant, an important source for Hume, was imaginary and fantastical: “of all Beings that have Existence only in the Minds of Men, nothing is more fantastical and nice than Credit; ‘tis never to be forc’d; it hangs upon Opinion; it depends upon our passions of Hope and Fear.”109 But defenders of credit argued that its use “actually depended upon behaving creditably.”110 Because credit must rest on confidence, it could not be coerced, only wooed, a point argued by Edmund Burke: “Interest, habit, and the tacit convention, that arise from a thousand nameless circumstances, produce a tact that regulates without difficulty, what laws and magistrates cannot regulate at all.”111 According to Emma Rothschild, “freedom was an opinion of security; industriousness was the outcome of a set of opinions about the security of property. It was English legal institutions, and the information that individuals possessed about the administration of these institutions, which together constituted the foundation of English industry.” The “public notoriety” of English government finance and the quantity of parliamentary information about it supported England’s immense credit, according to French finance minister Jacques Necker in 1781. Necker was one of many French advocates for peace and a looser, freer-trade French trading empire, rather than territorial trade wars.112 The series of French imperial defeats and concessions after Acadia in 1710 made them, in many respects, natural advocates for a commerce-and-credit form of imperialism that might let them continue to trade in their former colonies, not so much emulating as emulated by British liberalizers. Monetary theory, which Hume adopted early on, saw money as lacking intrinsic value and only as good as its credit, in relation to other forms of exchange including mortgages, bonds, promissory notes, and bills of exchange. Practical experiences drove that lesson of pragmatism home, from debates about currency fraud and national fiscal probity in the 1690s that singed John Locke, to the South Sea Bubble of 1720 that taught a generation that confidence was irrational, to newer debates about a national sinking fund designed by Robert Walpole to be a mathematically calculated

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and prudential response to the instabilities of public opinion.113 The Jacobite uprising of 1745 was another such experience. To Hume’s horror, the Jacobite rebels did not just capture Edinburgh and invade England, they “threw a prodigious Alarm into the Capital itself, the greatest City in the Universe; they shook and rent the whole Fabrick of the Government, and the whole System of Credit on which it was built.”114 Hume aimed to check such reversals by engineering moderation in commercial as well as political opinion. Sober economic reason must debunk false rumours by shady brokers and counteract “popular madness and delusion.”115 But governments, too, must be disciplined. France overstretched its credit during the Seven Years War, as Hume knew well because he served as secretary to the ambassador to France between 1763 and 1766, and oversaw the restoration of metallic coins in Quebec to replace paper money.116 But even England could overstretch its credit. Hume saw “precarious” early Hanoverian governments propping up their weak regimes through debt that dangerously overextended the nation’s credit.117 National credit was a Pascalian wager, either stabilized and improved by large numbers drawn into it and pledged to uphold it, or dragged down by excess and abuse. But debts that propped up weak or bad kings were as problematic as the kings themselves for the same reasons and more. Hume made the poor man’s repayment of a debt to the rich man an exemplar of the collective action problem: you had to take the long view to see justice. He seemed to grow less attached to the argument over time, argues Annette Baier, but he also vehemently denounced the alternative to debt repayment seen under weak and bad medieval kings, namely, greedy and hateful persecution of Jewish money-lenders: better Henry II’s protection than Richard I’s repudiation.118 Hume projected a stabilizing, progressive narrative arc to history, to replace the random readings of a Berkeley with Foucault’s network of probabilistic signs. He constructed it as theory and as public-facing history, the better to bring as many people as possible into the community. In a Parliament representing a commercially minded people, able to understand that history informed but did not bind, a new kind of probabilistic knowledge could flourish. Members of Parliament, “men of an independent genius and large views, began to regulate their opinions more by the future consequences which they foresaw, than by the former precedents which were set before them; and they less aspired at maintaining the ancient constitution, than at establishing a new one, and a freer and a better.”119 At the kernel of the political project, a kind of unmoved mover of civilization, was a specifically English financial project capable of uniting different peoples, even different pieties, into functional unities. Robert Wokler argues that for the philosophes, “it did not follow from the moral specificity of our disparate cultures that persons from one community were unable to grasp the values of

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another, still less that their differences must render them enemies. Religious and moral diversity, they believed, did not entail dreadful crusades against infidels. Rather, they thought it possible for the whole of humanity to engage in peaceable assembly, like the traders at the London Stock Exchange, each a faithful follower of his church, but also capable of dealing with other men as if they were of the same religion.” Even Presbyterians could work with Anabaptists under that circumstance – but not where they were politically supreme, as in Scotland, observed Voltaire.120 Merchants, financiers, and statesmen built up complex networks to check and reinforce one another, and they stabilized the unpopular Hanoverian regime at home and the larger British influence abroad.121 Public credit and the modern fiscal-military state emerged together to replace older imperial forms that were too reliant on state corporations, such as the East India Company or the Hudson’s Bay Company, to represent royal and national interests where the early modern state had been too weak to assert itself. Earlier “anemic” states became, during the eighteenth century, fiscal-military states better able than corporations to mobilize the credit needed to protect trading interests around the world.122 This was an assertion of public interest over private violence and enrichment.123 Good facts and reputation, commercial exchange and a constitutionalized state, were together seen to be cosmopolitanizing and civilizing. But the public and the private, the state and commerce, continually collided and converged around particular problems of credit and security for property. Commerce, too, could become the stuff of political supremacy and jealous superstition. John Shovlin identifies a “jealousy of credit” animating rival French and British financiers in the 1720s, characterized by both imitation and denigration of the other’s public credit, and persisting through the century amidst fears that “French Credit and French Commerce” threatened Britain more than their fleets and armies.124 Powerful tensions imbued the development of credit and, in an imperial political economy, they took on an imperial bias. As property relations evolved in tandem on both sides of the Atlantic, credit and security were made to privilege the most influential lobbyists in the most powerful legislature.125 Credit underwrote the expansive early American economy and, because the Navigation Act of 1660 restricted British colonial trade to British ships, that credit had to come from Britain and had to be well secured for the creditors.126 But both credit and value in early America rested primarily on land, and land traditionally could not secure commercial debt in Britain or in the parts of America that followed that British precedent. Slaves, too, were protected from forfeit for “unsecured” debt. British creditors complained that American colonists strategically sunk their money into land and slaves to renege on British debts. They lobbied and got the Debt Recovery Act of 1732, which allowed slaves,

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houses, and lands to be seized and sold to pay those debts. Claire Priest remarks: “In England, the property law shielded land and protected inheritance from unsecured creditors. In the colonies, creditors’ claims trumped the interests of landowners and heirs and made slaves highly vulnerable to being sold when their owners faced financial distress.”127 Still, many Americans welcomed the new law because it made British money more widely and cheaply available. Some sold slaves to keep the rest of their estates intact, while others managed to cling to entail.128 By contrast, the Stamp Act of 1765 posed a far greater threat to American instruments of property and credit because it taxed and centralized them. Financial relationships were not so much an alternative to politics as they were political and partisan in their own way.129 These were partisan debates about whether national credit and the government backing it reflected intrinsic value or something frothier and more psychological. Conservatives argued that the value of stocks traded in Exchange Alley were based on real knowledge of real economic worth and mathematically calculated payout. Whigs also believed that “the value of stocks was a function of society’s collective confidence in their worth and in the nation’s commercial well-being,”130 but invoked social and economic complexity against conservative mathematics. In 1713, John Oldmixon attacked Charles Davenant’s mathematizing by appealing to commercial calculations: “I will lay him as much Money as he is worth, that he cannot fit out a Ship for Newfoundland, nor make out an Invoice for Virginia.”131 Outfitting was a risky business, as Shakespeare’s Antonio could attest, and the different eighteenth-century wars made the Canada trade particularly risky.132 But political and economic logics diverged as well as converged in the new early modern corporate forms, according to David Ciepley. The new joint-stock corporations, while seeming to reproduce older forms of “joint governance” amongst member-owners, actually severed corporate bodies from investors, making the latter mere “purchasers of a financial instrument with limited rights.” The result was the “stockholder’s metamorphosis, from an informed, responsible, long-term investor to an uninformed, irresponsible, short-term stock speculator.”133 Hume praised “large views,” but enlargement was at threat wherever people were rivals for wealth, power, and reputation. Reputation was a useful mechanism for assessing and managing risk but reputation is always competitive, always embedded in a status economy. State capture by wealthy, propertied men ensured that the state was never impartial. Nor was emulation, for all that Hume, and Elias, tried to make it so.134 Many people weren’t upwardly emulative and many found their path blocked by obstacles and privileges. The propertied and unpropertied, the governing and the governed, had their own moral economies, which were often on a collision course. Burke tried to soothe the rivalry by describing great wealth as a

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ballast that protected all property, including that of the poor. But it was a conservative argument that only convinced conservatives. Many people saw the mutual protections of the state and wealth as oppression and violence. Hume’s theories had a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde quality: now put to democratizing and now to oligarchizing purposes. That was inevitable given Hume’s decision to incorporate and represent the range of opinion. But it also reflected a growing conservative worry that political liberties were being sacrificed to commercial ones.135 Debts weren’t just fraught relationships superimposed across social and spatial divides, but also fraught relationships superimposed over time. Debts bind the past to the future, something a conservative might applaud. But Hume worried, as seen, about too much destabilizing debt, especially when owed to international rather than domestic creditors. As Britain and France fought one imperial war after another, Hume denounced the rising national debt. The Seven Years War cost Britain nearly 20 per cent of gross domestic product. In 1764, Hume warned that “the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation.” War financiers were growing rich on wars and, by delaying the financial reckoning, they insulated the government from taxpayer accountability, always a powerful interest for peace. Financiers, for Hume, were “men, who have no connections with the state, who can enjoy their revenue in any part of the globe in which they chuse to reside, who will naturally bury themselves in the capital or in great cities, and who will sink into the lethargy of a stupid and pampered luxury, without spirit, ambition, or enjoyment.”136 Eventual repayment could force high taxes: first on luxuries, then on the necessities of the poor, and finally on land. Historically, the landed interests had fought off such taxes but now seemed to be strangely “supine.” Political jealousies and trade wars threatened British hegemony and must be restrained. The Royal Proclamation was an attempted restraint on war that presumed and engineered a more peaceful trust across national divides. It was far from obvious that Canada could become a highly trusting society and yet, by the twenty-first century, it records higher levels of trust than Britain or the United States.137 Hume laid the groundwork for that outcome. He was a lifelong Francophile and his anti-chauvinist model of convention welcomed the diverse participation of anyone seeking commerce and converse, including Indigenous people. They had embraced the seventeenth-century consumer revolution by increasing their market-oriented activities.138 Pagans or not, you could do business with them, more than with fanatical Savonarolans who piled up bonfires of the vanities. The Hudson’s Bay Company had commercialized Rupert’s Land without much politicking or militarizing on the ground. Perhaps a state diluted in the image of that Honourable Company of Adventurers would better serve the westward expansion of the frontier.

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Hume was not the only theorist of radical peace at the end of the Seven Years War: Jean-Jacques Rousseau was debating his own version with Hume. But many different public figures were trying to find peaceful commercial resolutions to international tensions. Hume socialized with such statesmen, joining continental diplomatic missions in the 1740s and befriending Scottish mp s, including Gilbert Elliot of Minto, William Mure of Waldwell, and James Oswald of Dunnikier, the last “an important sounding board for Hume’s political-economic ideas, and from 1752 a member of the Board of Trade.”139 Others with particular influence over Canadian governance and constitution-making include Edmund Burke, James Murray, and Lord Shelburne, all of them born in the home colonies and all early advocates of “jealousy of trade” arguments. From Burke’s earliest publication in 1754, the rising young Irish writer and statesman was an early if critical admirer of Hume’s ideas (not his party connections), and it was probably Burke who favourably reviewed Hume’s History of England in the Annual Register in 1761.140 In 1757, Burke co-authored with his brother William an account of the British-American settlements that contrasted excess Spanish “jealousy” and “excessive regard to the security of their possessions” with the haphazard British Empire that rightly relied more on natural advantage and comparative benefit than on war or protectionism. French attacks and encroachments must be repelled and checked, but commerce and industry, not a heavy-handed state, could best hold North America. It followed, for the Burkes, that the Hudson’s Bay Company should lose its outdated monopoly.141 In the early 1760s, Edmund Burke also urged economic liberalization in Ireland and Newfoundland.142 All the while, the Scottish-born James Murray was applying those precepts on the ground. He fought alongside James Wolfe at the siege of Louisburg and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, became military governor of Quebec upon Wolfe’s death, and in October 1763 became civil governor of the colony. Murray and his older brother Patrick, Lord Elibank, were friendly with Hume from earliest days. Elibank was much closer to Hume and Kames: the three men were regarded in Edinburgh as “a literary triumvirate, from whose judgment in matters of taste and composition, there was no appeal.”143 But James Murray was also an old and “good” friend. In 1761, the older brother, Patrick, wrote to his younger brother: “David Hume values him selfe on prognosticating your greatness. I wanted him to write to you but he thought it might appear forward, tho I assur’d him had you conquered the old world as well as the new his correspondence would a been acceptable.”144 Elibank received further confidential correspondence from his brother in Quebec complaining that lack of civilian oversight of the troops must unleash “natural jealousies” and military oppression.145 Where Elibank was a tory sometimes suspected of Jacobite sympathies, another

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Murray brother, Alexander, was openly Jacobite, jailed a decade earlier for inciting violence. Scottish political tensions were intimate experience for James Murray, as was commercial instability, as his father had lost a large sum in the South Sea Bubble. Well might he understand the need for a strong executive power to uphold toleration and stability. Murray opposed petitions from Anglo-Protestant merchants to create a religiously exclusive legislature for Quebec: that their demands, couched in the language of British liberties, smacked more of jealousy would have been obvious to anyone with a nodding knowledge of Hume’s Scotland-friendly arguments. Murray also worked to calm what he saw as the two major sources of concern for the inhabitants – fear of losing Catholicism, and the paper money that French administrators had circulated.146 He successfully recommended JeanOlivier Briand as Catholic bishop for Quebec and obtained declarations of monies owed that went to Hume’s scrutiny in France. Confronted with a shattered city, a want of fuel, food, or money, and a distrustful population who had been told that the English were “worse than brutes,” Murray reached for a Scottish solution to the problem, as he reported to the Duke of Newcastle: “I propose establishing a paper currency, and endeavour to give it all the credit I can.” He issued a “kind of proclamation” to borrow £8000 for six months at 5 per cent interest from the Fraser Highlanders (one quarter of the sum coming from the non-commissioned officers and privates).147 His efforts to raise credit for habitants to rebuild their buildings was less successful. Generally, Murray applied “optimistic” Scottish solutions to Quebec problems, and set a precedent for conciliary government that became “a pattern for crown colony government throughout the British empire over the next century.”148 But it took more than another century for the “treaty” that Murray signed with some Wendat men days before the fall of Montreal in September 1760 – an agreement promising them all the protections extended to French Canadians – to gain constitutional recognition in Canadian courts (wrongly so, according to some historians).149 Back in Britain, Adam Smith was also recommending against jealousy of trade: “It were happy, therefore, both for this country and for France, that all national prejudices were rooted out, and a free and uninterrupted commerce established.”150 He was a university student in the 1740s when he read Hume and became a lifelong advocate, interlocutor, and friend. His Wealth of Nations of 1776 carried the logic for commercial sociability to new heights. The two differed on many points but Smith was an outspoken advocate for Hume’s “jealousy of trade” argument and implanted it in an Irish-born statesman, William Petty, Earl of Shelburne (and later Marquess of Lansdowne) who presided over the Board of Trade that produced the Royal Proclamation. Petty, the great-grandson of the seventeenth-century demographer William Petty, attended William Blackstone’s lectures on law at

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Oxford before joining the army, where he served under James Wolfe before the latter’s departure for Canada. But Petty acquired his political principles during a long carriage ride from Edinburgh to London in 1760 in company with a “Mr Smith of Edinburgh,” whose views had made “the difference between light and darkness through the best part of my life.”151 Shelburne widely and vocally advocated “free trade and fair equality … Let every market be open.”152 In 1761, newly ennobled as the Earl of Shelburne, he “unexpectedly proffered friendship and patronage” to Hume.153 Shelburne had good grounds to resist anti-Scottish prejudice because he served under John Stuart, Earl of Bute, erstwhile tutor to and favourite of George III, and the first Scottish prime minister of Britain in 1762–63. Bute was attacked as much for his nationality as his tory politics, with John Wilkes’s North Briton at the forefront, the name itself a jibe at Bute’s Scottishness.154 During his short stint as president of the Board of Trade in 1763, power of policy was transferred into Shelburne’s hands. He worked out details for draft projects of rule in the newly conquered territories in America drawn up in June, and drew up the draft proclamation in August that the king signed on 7 October, even though Shelburne was by then out of office: dislodged by George Grenville’s administration, itself soon dislodged by the Rockingham whigs. He insisted on conciliatory government, protective of French rights and Indigenous trade and lands.155 Shelburne was back in as southern secretary under William Pitt in 1766, with power of policy transferred back from the Board of Trade, and he probably helped draft the Quebec Act of 1774 that recognized in law the liberties extended by James Murray and Guy Carleton (an Ulsterman) on the ground. In 1767, he advised Carleton that “it is the general Nature of Trade to regulate itself,” and opposed “strict Regulations” on commerce.156 Thus did a certain argument against political jealousies find its way into British-Canadian constitution-making.157 And in 1783, Shelburne joined with Rockingham who promptly expired from influenza, whereupon the king named Shelburne prime minister in his stead. Still believing that peace and commerce best served British interests, after failing to negotiate a “Dominion” status for the American colonies, Shelburne signed a peace treaty based on jealousy of trade arguments considered so excessively “generous” as to topple him from power amidst a patriotic backlash. (But this was also a fight over the king’s heavy-handed use of royal prerogative in naming Shelburne.) That’s not to say that Shelburne meekly applied either Smith’s or Hume’s arguments, argues John Shovlin, who sees rather “a selective appropriation of ideas by politicians, who often graft them on to new and alien agendas.” Shelburne primarily sought to prop up British commercial imperialism on the cheap, more concerned with “better or cheaper protection” than genuinely free trade, always reflecting “realpolitik.”158 Everyone was reasoning with American economic growth and

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commercial independence, itself a major element of the “free trade revolution” of the eighteenth century. But Smith and Hume lent philosophical weight to those pragmatic arguments. Hume’s theories of history and commerce were available as intellectual resources at a crucial moment for Canadian history. They enabled some public figures to see erstwhile and present enemies as future allies and clients. The dean of Gloucester, Josiah Tucker, published a pamphlet in 1763 that asked: “Do you envy the Wealth, or repine at the Prosperity of the Nations around you?” If so, you “hope to have only Beggars for your Customers.”159 If you could keep jealousy at bay, interests and identities could be reconciled. It was a big if, but there it was nonetheless: the possibility of grounding shared interests in British North America on sympathy and consensus. This was not liberalism per se: that word wasn’t used for another half century, when it began to circulate as a term of abuse by critics, only to be taken up by self-styled liberals as a source of pride.160 And Hume’s liberalism was always decked out with conservatism. Hume so distrusted rationalist projects for reform that he embedded his “large views” in a profoundly conservative respect for traditions and customs. He saw in such customs a steadying check against “whiggery” and the unintended consequences of even the bestlaid plans of mice and men. Reforms should be “gentle alterations.”161 But if the status quo did not accommodate your rights, then Hume’s “large views” felt like jealousy. Catharine Macaulay, who wrote a whiggish eight-volume History of England, published from 1763, argued that Hume “made every reformer a traitor.”162 But others took very different messages from Hume. Some radicals saw an easier path to denouncing the state and some conservatives saw the urgent necessity of strengthening the state. If the state rested on persuasion, terror could be a great persuader. Eighteenth-century Britain saw a massive increase in capital crimes, the “bloody code.” Some brutalities were repudiated, including torture: from 1752 violent desecrations would be inflicted on dead rather than living bodies. But judges and legislators kept for themselves considerable powers of discretion, effectively handing the power of life and death to party and class politics, according to Douglas Hay.163 Eighteenth-century British liberalism was narrow and aristocratic.164 Utilitarians, with Jeremy Bentham at their head, called for something more impartial: sentencing should be more moderate and rule-governed to enable greater predictability. Bentham, having derived his calculus from Hume, tried to insinuate mechanisms of disciplined calculation into public and private life. His Panopticon project for prisons was the image and transcript of the Pascalian wager: if you could manipulate people’s bodies so as to elicit disciplined behaviour, then their mind might follow, and better behaviour result. Foucault describes Panopticon techniques as a generalizable mode of rule. But power is always dialogical.165 And Panopticon techniques must

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be all the weaker in the vast and under-soldiered British possessions in America, where governments must rely more heavily on the carrot than the stick. Militarized coercion was fantastical. Hume applied Occam’s razor to theories of governance that conditions in North America had applied to their practice. But that liminality of power, its debts to social power, offered new opportunities for expansion and legitimation. If power is dialogical, then a British pedigree for the Royal Proclamation cannot account for it. The pro-consensus momentum emanated from the fact of Indigenous military supremacy in North America, but, as Brian Slattery observed, it also reflected their norms and demands.166 The Proclamation was a stopgap British response to pan-Indian rebellion led by the Oddawa chief Pontiac but it also channelled other grievances across the British frontier. Allies from the Seven Years War demanded recognition for their persisting control of the Great Lakes region, and were joined by other nations resentful of British settlement, including Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Wyandot, Delaware, Shawnee, Sandusky Huron, Miami, Tsonnontouan, and Chippewa peoples.167 Their grievances were conveyed by the superintendent of the Indian Department, William Johnston, long hard-pressed by the Six Nations in New York to redress settler encroachments on their land that were being upheld in New York courts. There were spurious cession documents signed by children with no rights to the land; French forts being improved rather than dismantled; and a speculative project for settling hundreds of families on the Susquehanna River in unceded Seneca hunting grounds. The Seneca rallied around Pontiac, and so might other Confederacy nations. In the end, Susan M. Hill observes, the Royal Proclamation proved more grievance than remedy for the Six Nations because it protected against future encroachment but did nothing to redress previous ones.168 Johnson wrongly understood the terms and nations confronting him, thinking all the different communities were already represented in treaties at Detroit in 1762. A theory that allowed a certain agnosticism about national boundaries could be both useful and treacherous. When Johnston learned his mistake, he pushed hard for conciliatory policies. Other negotiators, such as Thomas Gage, an Irish viscount’s son who assumed the governorship of Montreal in 1760, took the view that “it is right at all Times to treat the Indians on the Principles of Equity, Moderation, and Kindness.”169 But Gage still blamed the military collisions on “collusion betwixt the Canadians and the Savages.”170 The Treaty of Niagara, signed in July 1764, did not end the war because Pontiac and other belligerents weren’t present. The chiefs and warriors who came to Niagara came to renew the trade in their region. Alan Corbiere quotes a speaker from the Oddawa of Michilimackinac, who did not join the Ojibwe attack on that fort: “We are in great want of Trade. Our families

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in much distress. We beg you will permit us to trade as we have some furs and that the Trade may be reasonable.”171 But the protections that William Johnson gave at Niagara went a long way to meeting Pontiac’s concerns, and enlisted further signatories at subsequent signings. The result was, Shiri Pasternak observes, “a mutual agreement, made between more than two thousand chiefs from twenty-four nations and the British Crown, that followed the legal protocols of Indigenous diplomacy on these lands. The wampum at Niagara represents the mutually affirmed relationship of peace, friendship, and non-interference set out in the two-row wampum presented there.”172 Anishinaabe scholar John Borrows argues that the Proclamation and the Treaty of Niagara constitute “a treaty between First Nations and the Crown which has never been abridged or repealed, and which stands as a positive guarantee of First Nations self-government.”173 Behind the signatures at Niagara stood well-organized and orchestrated political alliances that made the Indigenous peoples masters of the situation. The difficult inland landscape that could only be traversed with Indigenous help and the lack of bureaucratized states meant that Europeans could not impose military control.174 The Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Wendat, and Wabenaki Confederacies were remarkably broad, powerful, and consensual, grounded in kinship relations that stretched across thousands of miles of hunting territory.175 Susan Hill argues that the Great Law and the ceremonies of kinship and condolence that provoked the Six Nations Confederacy and the Covenant Chain were offered to the European newcomers: “The Great Law established a framework within which peoples of different blood could become family. Building upon that ideology, familial relations were extended to Haudenosaunee allies in the same way. The idea that the British had become brethren to the Haudenosaunee through their treaty relationships was taken very seriously by the Haudenosaunee. It was seen as an extension of the Great Law, which directed that family members take care of each other and assume responsibilities for each other.”176 Likewise, the Anishinaabeg were cultural brokers on a very broad scale and told British officials in 1760: “All the Indians in this Country are Allies to each other and as one People.”177 Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade was present at the fall of Fort William Henry in 1757 and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759 (possibly firing the fatal shot at James Wolfe), only to turn around and defend the British against Pontiac in 1763, against the Americans in 1777, and then to take up arms against the Americans again in 1794. He also had extensive trading networks across the region and, settling down in Wisconsin area, became a “white” founder.178 There were no simple binaries but, rather, shifting alliances that sometimes united and sometimes divided kin and community, according to calculations of probable outcomes. Kinship was both familial and “fictive” or adopted, and Europeans – who

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1.3 | Ken Maracle’s copy of the 1764 Covenant Chain Wampum Belt, another constitution or “Indigenous Magna Carta” that shows political alliance amongst equal and sovereign peoples. Courtesy of the Canadian Museum of History, lh2016.48.2, img 2016-0267-0250-dm, and of Ken Maracle and the Wampum Shop.

had their own kinship relations – were invited to join the networks. Heidi Bohaker sees in such negotiation of political relationships an Anishinaabe constitutionalism.179 Large stretches of “British” North America were in the hands of free, consensually governed people who must be recognized as civilized because they were in a position to demand it. The French had done as much and the British needed to as well, lacking any credible claim to the continent otherwise.180 The British had to behave as if they were enlightened and civilized peoples in the 1760s in matters of trade and diplomacy, and in crime and punishment. Mark Walters has shown in a series of papers on covenant-chain constitutionalism and criminal justice that it was not a hybrid middle ground but, rather, “located at the Indigenous end of the normative field upon which legal traditions met.”181 And because Indigenous communities organized discipline and loyalty through kinship rather than the state, the British imperial state, in negotiating with them and meeting them partway, found Hume’s arguments for commerce and converse particularly useful. The deeper content of Indigenous political philosophies is well beyond the scope of this study. Aaron Mills argues that it’s not possible to have inaakonigewin, a conception of Anishinaabe law, without internalizing the larger “lifeworld: the set of ontological, cosmological, and epistemological understandings which situate us in creation and thus which allow us to orient all our relationships in a good way.”182 He believes that the “unrooted” or “instrumental” element of liberal constitutionalism weakens its understanding of something more grounded and its ability to live with others “in a good way.” Mills conveys principles of Anishinaabe law and constitutionalism, learned from elders and reflected in the Royal Proclamation and the Treaty of Niagara, as antithetical to a binding contractualism. Contracts, he argues, are fictions that would make zombies of us all, independent and autonomous, incapable

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of negotiating with one another. “Contract was never alive and as the breeding ground for certainty and perpetuity – for permanence, in which change, the pulse of life has been negotiated out – it yields only undeath in its participants.” Claims of freedom let individual autonomy “masquerade as the whole of it.” Mills argues that on a better understanding of Anishinaabe constitutionalism, people come together to share gifts rather than to resolve rights claims through contracts. “Treaties aren’t legal instruments; they’re frameworks for right relationships: the total relational means by which we orient and reorient ourselves to each other through time, to live well together and with all our relations within creation.”183 A growing body of literature provides opportunities to reflect upon and benefit from Indigenous constitutionalism. Dakelh, Nak’azdli Whut’en historian Allan Downey’s prize-winning The Creator’s Game shows lacrosse, too, as a form of constitutionalism, enacting and exemplifying legal conventions and diplomacy and enabling people to join together in forms of sociability imbued with both rivalry and consensus. But Eurowesterners in Canada formulated their own “civilized” version of lacrosse: more rigid, authoritarian, and violent. They jealously banned Indigenous players from their leagues, though they admitted them back when receipts fell too far. Even at the nadir of Indigenous rights in Canada, when Indigenous and Eurowestern peoples met equally nowhere else, Downey observes, they played lacrosse on an equal footing.184 You could learn from lacrosse, as much as from Frank Knight or John Rawls, that equality was a kind of game, more or less rule-governed. Lacrosse exemplified and taught conventions of equality and non-jealousy for men, less so for women. The civilized version was taught in the residential schools as a path to assimilation, but proved instead a practical avenue to resistance, self-assertion, and national organization. There was no one form of customary law in North America applying uniformly across the different nations, but some elements were shared with customary law beyond North America. African or Islamic customary laws also demand reciprocity and accountability. Lawrence Rosen remarks of Islamic understandings of corruption found throughout the Arab world and Southeast Asia: “To be corrupt is to fail to share in whatever comes one’s way with those with whom you have forged bonds of interdependence.” Clientelism can be a way of preserving interdependence and sharing against state impunity: “To bribe an official or favor a relative is not corrupt if it actually acts as a check on their power – indeed on the power of the state, which needs you as part of this system to work … It is when officials do not need to rely on a host of people engaged in such conduct, when they receive large amounts from a few people and summarily dismiss all the others, that they begin to ‘eat’ the largesse without sharing it and true corruption, with all its attendant incivility, spreads.” Rosen argues that for early

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Islamic commentators, “the state is unreciprocity incarnate.”185 That was the point of the Hobbesian state. Hobbes wanted something less contingent and more authoritative than what he saw in America, where life was, he said, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. He sought to persuade citizens to alienate their judgment and repudiate future non-state or anti-state persuasion.186 And an economy based on commercial credit must do much the same, wrenching obligation out of local and social relations and into something more formal, contractual, and narrowly financial.187 In 1767, Scottish author James Steuart redefined “Political Oeconomy” to make “reciprocal” wants and relations much less moral and more mechanical.188 The modern state and modern economy both rested on social meanings but also sought greater determinacy and less democracy in their workings.189 The greater the centralization and zombification of political and economic relations, the more they must be upwardly rather than downwardly emulative, avoiding the kinds of concessions made by Rome in 212 ce . The history of constitutionalized treaties and debts in Canada is a story of reciprocity made unreciprocity incarnate. It becomes two stories, neither of them purely reciprocal or unreciprocal, but with a widening gap between one which sought to enhance and the other which sought to reduce reciprocal and accountable relations. I urge the reader to consult the flourishing Indigenous works of history, philosophy, politics, law, and literature.190 My modest goal is to make the Eurocentric observation that some elements of inaakonigewin, however poorly translated by Europeans, began to influence their political-constitutional thought during the eighteenth century. Across the contact zone, European explorers, missionaries, traders, and state officials heard the message voiced succinctly by a Kanien’kehá:ka at Albany in 1697: “Brethren, you know that we have no forcing rules or laws amongst us.”191 Again in 1850, Ojibwa George Copway or Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-Bowh, in a history of the Ojibwa, used language reminiscent of Hume: “Among the Indians there have been no written laws. Customs handed down from generation to generation have been the only laws to guide them. Everyone might act different from what was considered right did he choose to do so, but such acts would bring upon him the censure of the nation, which he dreaded more than any corporeal punishment … This fear of the nation’s censure acted as a mighty band, binding all in one social, honorable compact. They would not as brutes be whipped into duty. They would as men be persuaded as to the right.”192 We cannot take such descriptions as unambiguously true. Isabelle Bouchard’s research on “political systems” amongst the Kahnawa’kehró:non at Kahnawá:ke and the Abenaki at Odanak shows that their claims to be free and consensually governed peoples were rhetorical arguments to prop up their own forms of authority against the encroachments of settlers and the colonial state. Chiefs needed recognition from the

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colonial state to bolster their authority and their control of resources, just like everyone else, and everyone used that language of freedom and consensus.193 Copway himself dreamed of securing a “new Indian territory” of 30,000 acres in Sioux lands to be named Kahgega, after himself.194 The European Enlightenment was also an Indigenous enlightening. That intellectual movement began with earliest contact and it informed and transformed European philosophy. A rich body of observations and scholarship stretched back from explorers and settlers André Thevet and Samuel de Champlain, through Jesuits François de Charlevoix and JosephFrançois Lafitau, and many more.195 Where some scorned the “bestiality” of North American humanity, others marvelled to discover that Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies were also legal orders.196 Lafitau’s Moeurs des sauvages amériquains, compares aux moeurs des premiers temps, published in 1724, argued that the Haudenosaunee had laws and oral culture to engineer “a certain uniformity,” comparable to European written culture.197 But where Lafitau put his findings to confirming European state and religious law, the military officer Baron de Lahontan, at the turn of the eighteenth century, turned his experiences in 1690s New France into a radical and democratizing critique of repressive European statehood, norms, and laws.198 Above all, he insisted upon the rationality and the liberty of “the savage” and especially Kondiaronk, a Wendat chief, whom he knew well. Adario, as Lahontan rendered Kondiaronk, systematically debunked European religious and political beliefs, insisting his people were “free and joint Brethren, who are all equally Masters; Whereas you are all Slaves to one Man,” namely, the French king. “Thy Body, as well as thy Soul, are doom’d to a dependence upon thy great Captain; thy Vice-Roy disposes of thee; thou hast not the liberty of doing what thou hast a mind to; thou’rt afraid of Robbers, false Witnesses, Assassins, &c. and thou dependest upon an infinity of Persons whose Places have rais’d ‘em above thee … thou choosest rather to be a French Slave than a free Huron.”199 There is disagreement about the accuracy of Lahontan’s rendering but it would be Eurocentric to see only European ventriloquism. Lahontan delivered an influential, widely read critique of European authority that reflected Indigenous norms. His New Voyages recognized the inhabitants of the Northeastern Woodlands as free and highly civilized, and challenged thoughtful Europeans to do the same. It wasn’t just Greek and Roman ideas that provoked new ideas of liberty, but also ideas emanating from west of the west. Lahontan put his newfound pluralist perspective to work as a kind of caustic, to undermine the authority of the state. But if Hume began with a similar perspective, he later applied it differently, reflecting Scottish understandings of common sense as more solder or glue. That was not for any lack of familiarity with French skepticism. Lahontan was translated into English

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in 1703, but Lahontan’s skepticism was more influential in France where Hume spent the mid-1730s reading French philosophical skepticism and writing his own profoundly skeptical Treatise. His biographer, James Harris, laments the lack of notebooks to trace his reading during those years, but argues, “it may be supposed that his interest in modern skepticism deepened and broadened while he was in the country of Montaigne and Pascal.” He almost certainly read Lahontan at that point if he hadn’t already read him in Scotland (possibly in conversation with Henry Home).200 But where French thinkers like Lahontan aimed to deconstruct authoritarian state and church models of social cohesion, Hume was agnostic about God and more worried about preserving than debunking, even preferring to keep rather than discard a state church. Hume’s model of natural sociability was more like popular than philosophical versions, and also perfectly compatible with and derived from Indigenous models. The Treatise was explicit: states were necessary during war but not during peace, as seen in North America. 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. This authority, however, instructs them in the advantages of government, and teaches them to have recourse to it, when either by the pillage of war, by commerce, or by any fortuitous inventions, their riches and possessions have become so considerable as to make them forget, on every emergence, the interest they have in the preservation of peace and justice. Hume saw statelessness as entirely natural and the state as existing only to prop up inequality of wealth. “The state of society without government is one of the most natural states of men, and may subsist with the conjunction of many families, and long after the first generation. Nothing but an increase of riches and possessions cou’d oblige men to quit it.”201 Indigenous people chose how much government to use, increasing it or decreasing it according to the needs of war or property. Pace Hobbes, why couldn’t Europeans do the same? And if the lesson that Indigenous people were free, yet collectively formidable, came slowly through philosophizing, it came more sharply through diplomacy. There could be no peace that did not cater to Indigenous priorities. The sharpest point came in 1754, when Benjamin Franklin accompanied the governor of Pennsylvania to treaty negotiations with the Six Nations at Albany. Franklin was powerfully struck by the united strength of that Confederacy: “Our Enemies have the very

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1.4 | Benjamin Franklin’s famous woodcut, join , or die , was published in 1754 to encourage British settlers to unite or be ruled by powerfully federated Indigenous nations. Courtesy of the United States Library of Congress.

great Advantage of being under one Direction, with one Council, and one Purse.” He intensified a call for colonial union, with a famous woodcut of a cut-up snake bearing the motto “join, or die .”202 Franklin discovered an urgent comparative collective action problem. Social orchestration gave Indigenous peoples powerfully unified agency, a substantial centre of union, that the British colonials lacked. They must construct something with the state that their Indigenous rivals for land and power needed no state to accomplish – or lose to them. Similar tensions pervaded negotiations around criminal justice. The British system, designed for maximal use of terror and subjugation, was extraordinarily ill suited to diplomatic negotiation with proud, free peoples. Brett Rushforth argues that the original spark for Pontiac’s War was a botched British reaction to a murder near Detroit by escaped slaves. The Oddawa turned the culprits over to British authorities and welcomed their punishment as eagerly as the British. But Henry Gladwin, the commander of Detroit, failed to distinguish between free and enslaved “Indians” and was determined to teach them all a lesson in British majesty. “To equate free Ottawas, Ojibwas, or Potawatomis with these slaves was among the

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worst insults Gladwin could have given. Detroit’s free Indians feared that the British ‘meant to make slaves of them,’ because Gladwin and his colleagues had already drawn the equation in their speeches surrounding the slaves’ execution. This affront explains Pontiac’s rallying cry during the councils immediately before his attack on Detroit, in which he condemned the ‘insults which he and his nation had received from the Commandant and the English officers.’” Ojibwa war chief Minweweh told Alexander Henry at Michilimackinac in 1761: “Although you have conquered the French, you have not yet conquered us. We are not your slaves.” Two years later Minweweh joined with Pontiac and “throughout the West, Indians would invoke similar words to claim that they joined the war to frustrate British attempts to enslave them.”203 The British had to recognize and adapt to Indigenous freedom to maintain alliances and peace along the western frontier. William Johnson struggled to convey that lesson. He came to Kanyen’kehà:ka or Mohawk lands initially to manage an estate, then learned the language and married Molly Brant, Konwatsi’tsiaienni, sister to Joseph Brant, or Thayendanegea, a Kanyen’kehà:ka chief. Johnson took up office as an agent for New York and then, in 1756, became superintendent of Indian Affairs for the northern colonies. He became a major landowner, as did Joseph Brant, whose wealth did not stop him from criticizing Britons for preferring property to freedom.204 Alan Corbiere notes that Johnson studied previous treaties and informed the Board of Trade that Indigenous peoples owned their lands and demanded and must receive a genuine treaty process, documented with wampum belts and signed promises to guarantee “a Free Fair & open trade, at the principal Posts, & a free intercourse, & passage into our Country, That we will make no settlements or Encroachments contrary to Treaty, or without their permission. That we will bring to justice any persons who commit Roberys or Murders on them & that we will protect & aid them against their & our Enemies & duly observe our Engagements with them.” These were the terms of the Treaty of Niagara and the “precepts of the Royal Proclamation.”205 The British must check the chauvinism of a Henry Gladwin, or a Jeffrey Amherst who demanded extirpation of “the whole Race of Indians.” They must also uphold the language of freedom and kinship, which is to say, social and personal obligation. Kinship was the primary mechanism for upholding norms and disciplining bad behaviour, as distinct from the impersonal constitutionalism of Eurowestern traditions. Europeans looked down on Indigenous material civilization – even though these people were more equal and better clothed and fed than the average English subject.206 But perhaps one need not choose between equality, freedom, and generalized prosperity. And perhaps the whole process of commerce and converse across political and cultural boundaries could be an education in tolerance and respect.

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Norbert Elias’s “civilizing process” also emerged from cosmopolitan mixing of different peoples, whether distinguished by region, class, or gender.207 It began with etiquette books recommending table manners that could better enable different peoples (courtiers and provincials, for example, or aristocrats and bourgeois), to eat together and avoid revulsion at the dinner table, so that difference – such as eating at the common pot – could not derail commerce and converse. Indigenous and Eurowestern peoples were widely repulsed by the behaviour, diet, habits, and beliefs of the other. Negotiations required cosmopolitan toleration, an education in diversity that must not be read as pathology.208 There’s no one path towards consensus and cohabitation, but such negotiations are always an invitation to live right together. Stuart Carroll argues that “Eurocentrism, Whiggishness and an exaggerated view of the reach of the state may make the civilising thesis seem outdated,” even as he admits a new civility, freer codes of conduct, and more female voice.209 But a less Eurocentric, whiggish, and statist version might be got. Rob Boddice dismisses the accusation of whiggishness: published “at the high-point of everyday brutality, fear, paranoia, and repression, the end point of civilisation did not look, to Elias, very civilised at all.” But he also observes that, even if we reject Elias’s theoretical explanation for change, still, the central truth of the narrative “must stand: the way people feel is inherently tied to the way people practise (bodily and socially), and the way people practise is inherently tied to the prescriptions of the powerful. That power may or may not come with the threat of real or symbolic violence.”210 Again, Charles Tilley and Douglass North improved Elias’s thesis by making it less teleological, according to Ari Bryen, while “keeping the basic insight that institutions – both formal and informal – can lower incentives for actors to ‘defect’ (to cheat or use violence) in transactions, and thus promote stability, safety, and growth. To say that institutions can control violence is not, of course, to argue that they necessarily succeed in so doing.”211 Again, that would have been very obvious in 1939. Even if we can see, in Lovejovian style, diverse ideas of civility and freedom converging in the Royal Proclamation, a more contextualist approach tempers the findings. The Royal Proclamation had real effects on the ground in North America. It restrained the violent and unlawful encroachments along the western frontier of American settlement and ruptured its networks, while enhancing and expanding Indigenous and French networks: one quarter of Catholic marriages in the Illinois country between 1763 and 1800 counted at least one spouse born in the St Lawrence River Valley.212 But the philosophical and political arguments for civilizational pluralism were marginalized across the Anglo-Atlantic world. Vast intellectual and political resources were, as Jennifer Pitts has shown, being put to explain why even such great and ancient civilizations as the Chinese were not really civilized

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and need not be politically and legally respected.213 Europeans described non-Europeans as uncivilized for self-interested reasons. They were asking a modern-day version of the question that Frederick Barbarossa had asked his twelfth-century legal experts: “Am I the lord of the world?”214 And where Barbarossa’s experts had divided, European jurists largely agreed around an affirmative answer and a Eurocentric reading of lordship that justified despoliation of the “uncivilized.” There was too much power and wealth at stake for Indigenous norms to transform Eurowestern norms in their image. Jealousy would win out. Jealousy was never simply racial: wealth provoked stratification and caste-like distinctions everywhere. But Eurowestern claims to “civilization” were particularly brazen claims for the right to commit appalling crimes. Those closest to the negotiations were often the worst offenders, because best able to see and seize the opportunities and resources that accrued from calling people uncivilized.

ii: t h e a r g u m e n t for jealousy Tremendous wealth could be got from turning Indigenous land into European property. English property existed primarily in the common law tradition, a congeries of statutes, decisions, and opinions accreting over centuries. For all the legal messiness, English property ownership merited the descriptor “despotic dominion” applied by William Blackstone, in a series of lectures given in Oxford in 1753 and published from 1765.215 Blackstone sought to strip away the mystifications of law and reconcile it with Scottish common sense philosophy.216 His was the first academic account of English law: legal education was previously administered from the old law guilds, the Inns of Court. The phrase “despotic dominion” reflected the close relationship between property, the state, and justice. Only a state could secure property during a privatizing and dispossessing era that John Locke legitimized with his famous argument that private land produced more food: “he that encloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniences of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to nature, may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind.”217 By contrast, in 1754 Rousseau considered property theft: “you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”218 Hume was closer to Rousseau than to Locke: “Reason tells us, that there is no property in durable objects, such as lands, and houses, when carefully examined, in passing from hand to hand, but must in some period have been founded in fraud and injustice.”219 Property was as conventional as law, both of them expressions of sympathy and self-interest alike, which brought people together and created government and justice.220 But they were only as legitimate as opinion in

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their favour. People were not bound to government and justice by their promises: promises – however bolstered with rituals and symbols of loyalty – were mere superstitions that a clear-sighted self-interest would flout where necessary or even desirable. Artifices of justice made self-interest and the common good coincide, and made us prefer a long-term to a shortterm outcome. But it was convention, not contract, and needed no state to congeal it. Hume, as seen, viewed statelessness as entirely natural and the state as existing only to prop up inequality of wealth. Property, he argued, was at the origins of justice, but only in transferable goods and services, and even there it was wholly conventional. Pace Locke, not mingling labour (for example with wool to make a jacket) created ownership but only “accession,” effectively the practical power to mingle labour, with the labour itself merely a “needless circuit” like a contract.221 We need justice to uphold claims to property and its transfer, and we need government the more as property shades into wealth. But these things were artifices, only as useful as they served our natural interests and sympathies. According to Annette Baier: Hume seems to require that, for something to be a moral obligation, it must first satisfy the test of self-interest which convention imposes; in addition, he seems to require that the public interest be served, and that these interests be ones whose precedence over other components of private and public good can be impartially approved. This is a tough test, and yet Hume seems confident that some version of property rights, and of their transfer by consent, can satisfy it. Only if the moral test is satisfied will there be any moral reality to the rights that are exchanged in barter. They may have only social or conventional reality derived from “the sentiments of the mind” that are not yet moral sentiments. Serving self-interest and the public interest are necessary but not sufficient conditions for a cooperative scheme giving rise to moral obligations.222 Where Locke pulled property towards liberal individualism, Hume understood property as irreducibly social, grounded in shared morality. Hume’s was not a proto-Malthusian argument for hardening your heart against sympathy. Commercial sociability was built, parasitically, atop sympathy. We need things from each other – not just sympathy but actual things – and our mechanisms for negotiating their transfer reflect our natural sympathy and sociability. Sympathy was not just natural but also social: unlike compassion or pity, it conveyed a sense of “shared feeling among social equals,” and reference to it increased markedly from the mid-eighteenth century.223 Fabian Klose argues that not rights but Hume’s sympathy, worked up by

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Smith and Rousseau, underpinned the successes of nineteenth-century humanitarianism, including abolition and legal internationalism.224 Hume made property parasitical upon sociability and sympathy, and the well-being of a cosmopolitan all. He lent no cover to dispossession. His version of “human nature” incorporated Indigenous forms and ownership of land, which could only be legitimated by prescription, that is, long ownership. Possession was not a real thing but a psychological construct, upheld by a sentiment and custom: “Possession during a long tract of time conveys a title to any object. But as ‘tis certain, that, however every thing be produc’d in time, there is nothing real, that is produc’d by time; it follows, that property being produc’d by time, is not any thing real in the objects, but is the offspring of the sentiments, on which alone time is found to have any influence.”225 As Henry Yu has observed in regard to Canadian property: “In the parlance of petty thievery, we are using fenced goods.”226 David Armitage sweepingly notes: “Hume’s sceptical Whiggism led him to doubt that there was any historical link between the peculiar constitutional and legal character of the British state and the success of its overseas trade, and generated a subtle but sweeping critique of the whole enterprise of empire up to the mid-eighteenth century, and with it, of the emergent conception of the British Empire itself. He questioned the very juridical basis upon which the English, the Scots and hence the British after 1707 based their territorial claims, especially in the supposedly ‘waste’ lands of North America.”227 Again, John Robertson argues that Hume brought Enlightenment to Scotland, defined as “a coherent, unified intellectual movement of the eighteenth century, whose adherents engaged in original enquiry into the fundamentals of human sociability, and were committed to the cause of bettering the human condition in this world without regard for the next.”228 Robertson argues that Hume’s early interest in moral philosophy ceded to a later interest in commercial sociability for strategic reasons of “selling” Enlightenment. Hume knew his Epicurean theories were more irreligious than the Scotland of his day could accept. His return to Edinburgh (necessitated by his brother’s marriage) coincided with a new focus on political economy as the best way to promote civility and betterment. He might prefer a society of atheists or pagans to a society of Christians or deists, but he couldn’t argue the case. Instead he could circumvent religious questions with the argument for commercial sociability, to pit history and enlargement against imperialism.229 But other philosophers argued for an imperial chauvinism, especially applicable to North America, at Hume’s very dinner table. British rule in America resembled royal rule in medieval England, with a centralized but feeble grasp that must negotiate with local power-brokers. Not disciplined self-interest but a more violent, grasping, and bloody version continually

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marked the frontier. Violence profoundly shaped the early modern expansion of commerce and the “great land rush.”230 A representative example was Captain Robert Gray, one of the earliest Americans to trade along the western coast of Vancouver Island in 1792. Sailing first into Clayoquot Sound, then into Nootka Sound, he left bloody destruction behind, destroying the Nootka village of Opitsat, then murdering seven Nootka traders and taking their sea otter skins “when the natives would not agree about the rate of exchange for furs with the Europeans.” As competition for the skins drove up prices and “an uninformed shipmaster like Gray found prices increased, he forgets the principles of justice, thinks that his operations cannot be checked, and makes use of force for his own advantage.”231 Indigenous people were embedded within their social norms and restraints. Europeans were not so embedded, where the state’s reach was limited. They behaved badly, and then organized themselves into new kinds of company-states and colonial states to carry that bad behaviour to new heights. Popular, organized, and state violence worked to transfer furs and supplies, people and land, into European possession. Once there, reconstituted as property, they became the thing that the Eurowestern state existed to protect, itself remade through the process of protecting them. And in Europe and America, philosophers defended that reconstitution as a civilizing process. The arguments were complex and varied around such questions as the meaning of “common sense” or the different “stages” of history. Conservative Scottish scholars, calling themselves a “common sense” school, denounced Hume’s impiety even as they conceded the liberal point of departure: that all humans reasoned essentially alike, with innate moral abilities that could direct their choices towards social harmony.232 Hume had argued that the French were like the ancient Greeks and the English like the Romans. Socially, too, according to Aberdonian Thomas Reid, in judgments of first principles, “the philosopher has no prerogative above the illiterate, or even above the savage … The learned and the unlearned, the philosopher and the day-labourer, are upon a level, and will pass the same judgment” when not misled by some bias or taught to renounce their understanding from some mistaken religious principle.233 But for Reid, if the only standard of truth was widespread acceptance and consent, then the individual must yield to the many. Hume’s skepticism was vainglorious, wrong, and corrosive. And scholars trained in Reid’s tradition would fill Canadian universities.234 But worldlier Scottish thinkers repudiated common sense, insisting that “savages” lacked rationality. They saw superstition in pagan religions, where Hume saw it in all religions.235 And if property, law, and national credit were abstractions, like all the highest ideas, then Indigenous people must be too literal-minded to grasp them.236

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Stadial history stood somewhere between uniformity and difference. Theorized by Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Henry Home, all friends of Hume who found his account of progress too amorphous, it proposed clearer distinctions between progressive and unprogressive forms of sociability.237 Smith identified distinct stages of development based on economic modes of subsistence: hunting, pasturing, agriculture, and commerce. He was lecturing in that vein by the early 1760s and probably in the 1750s. According to Jennifer Pitts: “His account was almost certainly highly original, rather than derivative of any other such theories, and also itself likely exercised great influence over many of the others through his Glasgow lectures.”238 A universal disposition to trade and barter drove progress, especially European progress, but Europe’s preeminence was historical, not racial, and anybody could emulate it. But stadial history was never impartial. Applied to North America, it privileged European property norms and history. Peter Marshall observes that “it was an axiom of Enlightenment historians that the savage nations themselves had no history, none, that is, until their ‘discovery’ and documentation by literate Europeans made possible the production of ‘evidence’ and the examples of civility and morality that could lead them into modern time.”239 Stadial theories emerged in France around the same time as in Britain and from similar sources, that is, replete with references to Huron and Iroquois.240 Smith drew on that French literature to loop Indigenous peoples into his understanding of economic progress. He concluded that they had the same mechanisms of moral judgment as Europeans, including an “impartial spectator” supposedly looking over their shoulder. In The Wealth of Nations: “In every age and country of the world men must have attended to the characters, designs, and actions of one another, and many reputable rules and maxims for the conduct of human life must have been laid down and approved of by common consent.”241 For example, in one story from Charlevoix about a hunting community in Canada, a woman who found some wampum that she wanted to keep was shamed into relinquishing it because she did not want to acquire a reputation for avarice. Smith argued that private property was not unthinkable for Canadian “Indians” but was consciously averted. Indigenous people chose to restrain individual property and rapacity, sometimes by the quiet killing of a purported thief, for example.242 They were tilted towards progress, like everyone else, Smith argued, but held back by their lack of agriculture. That was a patently false claim, albeit a widespread and ultimately long-held one.243 Stadial history figured in the published work of Hume’s cousin Kames in 1747, but later, more developed versions reflected Smith’s influence, though Kames posited more stages. Kames shared Hume’s theory of property as only a mental conception, not inhering in the thing itself. Yet for Kames, the sense of property was not conventional but an innate moral sensibility

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that was itself stadial. Any sense of “land-property” came only after agriculture began; earlier understandings were more like usufruct. It followed that only settlers could genuinely own property and resent its loss.244 Kames also wrote his historical account of law into a treatise, Principles of Equity, published in 1760, that drew from both English and Scottish law. If common law of property was essentially case law, worked out in judges’ decisions over many centuries, equity (which first arose as the “conscience of the king” where the law seemed to fail justice), was all the elements of law not reducible to common law. In Kames’s words: “equity, in its proper sense, comprehends every matter of law that by the common law is left without remedy.” Shaped by what it was not, lacking any central rules or logic, it was, for Kames, “the juridical embodiment of the society’s progress in its moral self-awareness.” Equity was a stadial moral history that justified dispossession of the uncivilized.245 In trying to explain how one stage ceded to another, stadialists posited an inside and an outside of ordinary historical processes. History occurred within each stage but could not account for transition to another; for that you needed some sort of supra-historical agency. Stadialists posited rupture where Hume posited uniform historical processes, Vulcanists to his Neptunism. Hume wrote a deus ex machina out of society that stadialists wrote back in, to make Europeans civilization experts able to tell everyone else how to get progress. One self-styled liberal philosopher after another fell prey to stadialism, including James Mill and John Stuart Mill, who wrote largely with India in mind.246 The many imposed Eurocentric modernization projects that followed confirmed Hume’s warnings against unintended consequences.247 Kames and Robertson gave a particularly racist tilt to stadialism, reworking Hume’s notorious footnote.248 Robertson’s History of America, published in 1777, saw no capacity for collective agency: “Their political union is so incomplete, their civil institutions and regulations so few, so simple, and of such small authority, that men in this state ought to be viewed rather as independent agents, than as members of a regular society. The character of a savage results almost entirely from his sentiments or feelings as an individual, and is but little influenced by his imperfect subjection to government and order.”249 Robertson’s arguments played to triumphal American political purposes. But so did Hume’s, in complicated ways, mined by loyalists and rebels alike.250 Alexander Hamilton’s reading of Hume decisively shaped his constitutionalizing, his political economy, and his heroic construction of American credit.251 Hamilton’s response to Shay’s Rebellion in 1781 channelled the conclusion of Hume’s History: “In a government framed for a durable liberty, not less regard must be paid to giving the magistrate a proper degree of authority to make and execute the laws with rigor than

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to guarding against encroachments upon the rights of the community.”252 But Hume’s arguments were also applied in a more paradoxical way to accomplish a massive dispossession of Indigenous peoples, in breach of the Royal Proclamation. Hamilton was deeply implicated in that project, for example by helping engineer clear title for foreign, Dutch ownership of land still held by the Seneca Nation.253 Here, I tell that story with a focus on Benjamin Franklin, a key intermediary between Hume, America, and Canada. Franklin was a friendly and regular correspondent of Hume who dined and argued with him circa September 1759 and again in 1771; he was also friendly with Shelburne and Kames. Between 1732 and 1758, Franklin was the leading advocate of American commercial civilization in his Poor Richard’s Almanack.254 He was also an early popularizer, in the Almanack, the press, and his shop, of Alexander Pope, whose Essay on Man (1733–34) held that passion – even hatred – was the “being, use and end” of man, and as God-given, sociable, and reasonable; That reason , passion , answer one great aim; That true self -love and social are the same. Unlike Quaker writers who worried that dangerous passions caused wars, Franklin only worried about the dangerous passions of America’s “domestick enemies”: the “wanton and unbridled Rage, Rapine, and Lust of Negroes, Molattoes, and others, the vilest and most abandoned of Mankind.”255 Franklin also never took his eyes off Canada as an asset. In 1760, on the heels of the Conquest, he wrote an influential argument, grounded on historical analysis, that urged British statesmen to keep France out of America, while in 1776 he went to Montreal to publish a newspaper and stir up revolutionary passions. For all the friendly tone of their letters, Hume described Franklin to Adam Smith, in a letter dated February 1774, as factious: “I always knew him to be a very factious man, and faction, next to fanaticism, is of all passions the most destructive of morality.” Hume further deprecated “the factious Part that he has all along acted” in relations between Britain and America, and in pushing for a premature emancipation.256 Factious is not a word Hume used lightly and it bespoke anti-Enlightenment. Franklin seems to have grasped an unintended corollary of Hume’s philosophy of history. Hume believed that if you wrote the right kind of history, you could get the right kind of political and legal outcome, grounded in natural human sympathy and enlargement. But if you wrote a different kind of history, you could get a different outcome. If Hume was correct, and neither the original contract nor the accumulated centuries genuinely legitimated political rules and norms, if there really were only a more or less present-minded vividness and utility that, acting through public opinion, made law lawful and the constitution constitutional, then couldn’t

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you rewrite political and social obligation by telling a particularly compelling story? If everything really did come down to opinion, then you could, by appeal to public opinion, legitimize quite a lot. That’s how the Tudors had behaved, on Hume’s description of them. Henry VII had “consistently weakened the political power of his subjects through law,” while Elizabeth had more resembled a Turkish sultan than a European crown.257 But the Stuarts took the fall. So, too, could a factious account of George III as wallowing in ancient illiberties be made a majoritarian one in the colonies. Franklin’s views aren’t easy to tease out because he wrote strategically to veil religious and political dissents. According to Joyce Chaplin: “After brashly advertising his skepticism in his youth, he thereafter masked it. He nevertheless managed to make it into the centerpiece of his political arithmetic, his analysis of population dynamics in British America, which eventually underpinned his boldest objections to the centralized governance of the British empire.”258 His point of departure was the “political arithmetic” of William Petty, the seventeenth-century philosopher-politician, who speculated in Irish real estate, violently cracked down upon it, and developed new theories of populations as physically malleable. Petty believed you could move people around like men on a chess board: sending Irish women forcibly and en masse to English husbands, for example, as a means of pacification.259 Such arguments would justify deporting the Acadians in 1755. Franklin cited Petty from his earliest days, published local urban statistics in the 1720s, built up his expertise by further reading and analysis, and, by the early 1750s, was overturning cautious European demographic predictions (the scholarly Earl of Morton believed it would take more than ten centuries to “people” the west260) with more expansive American ones. According to Jill Lepore, “with the exception of Franklin, who anticipated Malthus, the men who met at Philadelphia could scarcely have imagined that the population of the United States, less than four million in 1790, would increase, tenfold, by 1870.”261 America, Franklin argued, with its “room and business for unborn millions,” could naturally people the continent without any further help from English emigration, doubling its own generation every twenty years, so long as non-European immigrants could be excluded, French imperialism could be checked, and Indigenous populations could be declined. But perhaps the biggest threat to his projections of an English population greater in America than England was slavery and the slave trade. Slavery drove down wages; only white labour could drive up value and prosperity. Franklin and Hume agreed that slavery had weakened Rome, and Hume lauded Franklin as a better American product than slave-produced commodities.262 America would be better white, and Franklin defended his partiality for “the Complexion of my Country” as “natural to Mankind.”263 In 1751 Franklin wrote those arguments into Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, “a colonial

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protest against imperial politics” and projection of unrestrained growth.264 He published it in London in 1754, the same year that he advocated “Join or Die.” Both those perspectives – demographic potential and union – were written into his new essay in 1760, The Interest of Great Britain Reconsidered, to which Franklin attached as an appendix the Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind.265 He projected dispossession and erasure as natural and easy, if widely taken up amongst the public as the work of “collective imagination,” much like the belief in circulating specie, as something that could be stoked and managed by anyone with a printing press.266 Franklin, like Hume, saw money not as a real thing but as a commodity whose value “depended ultimately on the confidence that participants in the market economy accorded it.” Where John Locke tried to tether money to silver, to prop up fragile social trust, Franklin, who printed money for the government, wrote arguments for paper money that he turned into gold by attaching it to land, in the manner of a mortgage.267 Confident prediction and projection begat prosperity. Adam Smith was an early convert, seeing in the history of the English in North America that “the colony of a civilised nation which takes possession either of a waste country, or of one so thinly inhabited that the natives easily give place to the new settlers, advances more rapidly to wealth and greatness than any other human society.”268 Sometime between late 1758 and September 1760, Hume and Franklin met, most likely in London and possibly in Edinburgh in September 1759. Franklin spent six weeks in Scotland, including several days with Kames in his country mansion. In a letter dated September 1760 Franklin praised Hume’s arguments against jealousy of trade and hoped to see them moderating English relations with America: “I hope particularly from that Essay, an Abatement of the Jealousy that reigns here of the Commerce of the Colonies, at least so far as such Abatement may be reasonable.”269 Franklin expressed similar hopes in The Interest of Great Britain Reconsidered. Where Gordon Wood sees in that essay a high point of Franklin’s loyalism and royalism, Vincent Harlow suspects Franklin’s tongue was in his cheek as he argued that encouragement for expansion “was the best way to prolong American dependence.”270 I see an early fruit of what Mark Spencer notes: “Hume’s approach, which demoted the British constitution from its lofty pedestal to merely a patch-work product of various, but mostly recent, historical developments, was powerful propaganda for a cause that wanted a decisive break with Britain.”271 Hume’s political theories stripped the state of historical grandeur and reverence.272 Perhaps the world was ready for a redo of the Magna Carta or the Glorious Revolution: a new challenge to the executive and a new political order, indebted to the Iroquois Confederacy, but pitched against both crown and calumet. Where Hume attributed liberty to the fruits of a venerable constitution, Franklin fanned open rebellion.

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In 1760, Franklin disavowed any possibility of rebellion. Critics had denounced his pitch for colonial union in 1754 as likely to provoke rebellion. Franklin knew he would face the same criticism again, and especially from the London mercantile interests who preferred keeping Guadeloupe to keeping Canada, and who insisted that only the French menace kept the Americans loyal to Britain. Franklin took special pains to rebut the accusation in 1760. American colonies were too “jealous” of one another, so that, “I will venture to say, an union amongst them for such a purpose is not merely improbable, it is impossible,” unless Britain stooped to “the most grievous tyranny and oppression.” That, he insisted, could never happen. But for Franklin it had already happened. He knew that England recognized no accountability to the colonial public. In December 1754, corresponding with William Shirley, governor of Massachusetts, Franklin had declared that it was “an undoubted Right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own Consent given thro’ their Representatives.” In 1757, sent to London to plead Pennsylvania’s right to tax its major proprietors, Franklin was “stunned” to be told, summarily and abruptly, by Lord Granville, president of the Privy Council, that “the king is the legislator of the colonies .” When Franklin invoked the consent of the colonials, “He assured me I was totally mistaken.”273 Franklin didn’t buy it: not in 1754, not in 1760, and not in 1765, when, questioned in Parliament, he warned that the Stamp Act would cause “the total loss of the respect and affection the people of America bear to this country.” Franklin voiced his views with his habitual camouflage and caution. But hostility to anyone who would check the right of the free American man, thereby making him a “slave,” punctuates his oeuvre as a whole.274 By the 1770s, friends and family were surprised by the extremity of his views of British rule and shocked when he betrayed private confidences to stir up violence. But an unphilosophical and violent language of faction can already be seen in the earlier writings. I see Hume’s history turned against his politics. Hume – along with Smith, Burke, and Bentham – had no small sympathy for the colonial criticisms of unaccountable imperial rule.275 Hume and Franklin also opposed slavery, Franklin especially after visiting a school for Black children in 1763 and acquiring “a higher Opinion of the natural Capacities of the black Race, than I had ever before entertained.”276 He made it a fault of British imperialism rather than American law. But his hunger for Indigenous land did not abate. Between 1765 and the early 1770s, Franklin sought but never received imperial approval for a fabulously enriching proprietary colony, “Vandalia,” of 20 million acres in the Illinois territory. Other claims were even grander,277 but Franklin perhaps best exemplifies the way that the Enlightenment language of civilization became plunder and predation in America. Hume and Franklin both admired Indigenous political

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conventions but derived different lessons from them. Hume realized that you could orchestrate conventions to check the state by easing political jealousies and their war-mongering. Franklin realized that the more war that you mongered, the more easily orchestrated the body of citizens under an aggrandized local state. Franklin’s vision of unprecedented economic and demographic growth, a wealthy people on a continent seized by passion that made reason its slave, became not just a prediction but an entitlement. Franklin’s predictions and projections were naturalized in subsequent years, in a host of publications, speeches, and laws. The sociable “self-love and social” love of Pope’s poem was written into American romantic and familial relationships: Americans bred so numerously, it was argued, because their wives loved their husbands more fully and freely than wives elsewhere. And they fought and subdued the enemies of that fertility, including pinching British policies and their American defenders. The causes of the American Revolution were many and complex, and remain contested. One leading contender was British imperialism, whether unreconstructed or reconstructed by “authoritarian reformers” such as Shelburne to be more economically extractive.278 Julian Hoppit tallies forty-two economic acts aimed at the American colonies between 1763 and 1776. That was a small fraction of eighteenth-century economic legislation (already a “torrent before 1760” but an “explosion” afterwards), but a real change was occurring. Most economic legislation was local and reflected local interests rather than central policy. But imperial legislation was less local and lent a centralizing momentum to economic legislation that enlightened philosophers began to conceptualize and organize as a kind of system: “it took Adam Smith’s analytical imagination and rhetorical brilliance to construe this as a general ‘mercantile system,’ which was later morphed into ‘mercantilism.’”279 Wealth was centralizing and so were taxes that followed wealth, including in Scotland and America, but colonial lobbying and pamphleteering against taxes also increased. Part of the enlightened critique of empire was what Burke described, in reference to famine in India, as imperial “drain of wealth.”280 These were disputes among white men on either side of the Atlantic, each styling themselves as the more credible protectors of property.281 Both sides sought power while paying homage to Enlightenment. But the American project was more exacerbation than check on authoritarianism, seen from the perspective of peoples whom it aimed at subjugating, including Canadians. Taxes always rouse resentments, but where Hume argued that the alternative to moderate and regular taxes was irregular exactions, Franklin advocated that slaves be assessed at three-fifths a person for purposes of taxation and representation. And where Hume argued for cosmopolitan commercial sociability across political borders, Franklin argued the reverse: political borders were too dangerous to permit

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in North America. Something like universal monarchy must prevail in a continent stripped of internal borders. British-American settlers could never be safe, Franklin argued in 1760, so long as the French remained in America, because the border attracted bad people and bad behaviour. “If the French remain in Canada and Louisiana, fix the boundaries as you will between us and them, we must border on each other for more than 1500 miles. The people that inhabit the frontiers, are generally the refuse of both nations, often of the worst morals and the least discretion, remote from the eye, the prudence, and the restraint of government. Injuries are therefore frequently, in some part or other of so long a frontier, committed on both sides, resentment provoked, the colonies first engaged, and then the mother countries.”282 The frontier exacerbated internal as well as international tensions. But the real driver of violence was Indigenous liminality. The wide extended forests between our settlements and theirs, are inhabited by barbarous tribes of savages that delight in war and take pride in murder, subjects properly neither of the French nor English, but strongly attach’d to the former by the art and indefatigable industry of priests, similarity of superstitions, and frequent family alliances. These are easily, and have been continually, instigated to fall upon and massacre our planters, even in times of full peace between the two crowns, to the certain diminution of our people and the contraction of our settlements. And tho’ it is known they are supply’d by the French and carry their prisoners to them, we can by complaining obtain no redress, as the governors of Canada have a ready excuse, that the Indians are an independent people, over whom they have no power, and for whose actions they are therefore not accountable. Surely circumstances so widely different, may reasonably authorise different demands of security in America, from such as are usual or necessary in Europe.283 European lawlessness was bad; Indigenous lawlessness was worse because it was “independent.” There must be no more independence, save the Franklinian variety. Franklin wanted an America that looked more like England, secured not by negotiated borders but by coastlines that had, in Hume’s History, conduced to wealth, liberty, and population.284 Britain must secure property, person, and presence in America: “1. A security of possession, that the French shall not drive us out of the country. 2. A security of our planters from the inroads of savages, and the murders committed by them. 3. A security that the British nation shall not be oblig’d on every new war to repeat the immense expence occasion’d by this, to defend its possessions in America.”285

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The sense of a threat was legitimate grounds for a just war.286 Hobbes had made insecurity the grounds for his authoritarian state, reasoning between personal and national life. Hume had rejected a fear-based state, but Burke, always worried by French ambitions for universal monarchy, reanimated it.287 Yet Burke also denounced the Acadian deportation as unjust war.288 Franklin wanted a post-dispossession landscape, secured by universal British sovereignty, to enable natural American demographic growth to swamp the few French and Indigenous peoples. Franklin’s was an argument for political jealousy and against economic liberalism. It outraged critics who saw absurd “phantoms of a piece with such as hatched by old women to frighten children in the nursery”289 and the sinister subversion of international conventions: “To desire the Enemy’s whole Country, upon no other Principle, but that otherwise you cannot secure your own, is turning the Idea of mere Defence into the most dangerous of all Principles. It is leaving no Medium between Safety and Conquest. It is never to suppose yourself safe, whilst your Neighbour enjoys any Security.”290 Where Hume tried to ramp up solidarity amidst difference, Franklin tried to ramp up difference amidst solidarity. Seen from the perspective of commercial sociability, Indigenous people were natural trading partners. To seize their land was to make them enemies. But the land-seizers didn’t want to admit distinct provocations, or casi belli provoking wars with distinct nations. They didn’t want histories of wars grounded on international law. Enlightened theorists of international law were debunking mere right of conquest as a right to enslave and dispossess: writing during the Seven Years War, Emer de Vattel denounced European “usurpers” in the Americas with their “equally unjust and ridiculous” pretext of civilization.291 The appeal to civilization made all “Indians” enemies of property and progress. It bypassed ordinary rule of law where “savage” peoples fought guerilla wars. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson denounced both “merciless Indian savages” and the king who incited them, aiming thereby to ignite a general conflagration to drive out the British and seize Indigenous lands.292 Civilization must be upheld through atrocities because the ends justified the means. That was the logic behind the Acadian deportation, Cornwallis’s scalp bounty, Amherst’s biological warfare, Wolfe’s scorched earth policy, and other atrocities. But similar claims of uncivilized, guerilla warfare legitimated atrocities in Scotland after the Jacobite uprising of 1745.293 Americans saw themselves decreasing the quantity of domination in the world by reining in Europeans who arrogantly sought, Hamilton observed, to dominate the rest of mankind. According to Stephen Wertheim, they sought to create an expanding zone “exempt from power politics, whether in the form of balance-of-power rivalry or exploitative domination.” Thus did they reject the concert of Europe for something more peaceable, as they

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saw it: “the concepts of public opinion and world organization were poles apart, and American internationalists chose the former.”294 That was a blinkered vision of public opinion in North America, where Britain maintained real power by its capacity to organize hemispheric resistance to the United States, even as it became, historians remark, increasingly disinclined to do so.295 But Americans saw something like Trouillot’s Haiti: an absence of collective agency in non-American opinion and politics that made American history a narrative of unchecked willing. European civilization rested on security of property and the state.296 But Americans demanded security for their projections as well as their holdings. When Franklin imagined and predicted expansion westward, that expansion became an American entitlement. Locke’s conceptual monetization of Indian lands – the unenclosed hundred acres that could feed more people once privatized and cultivated – misrepresented the Indigenous commons, which was a cultivated and regulated space, not an open-access race to the bottom.297 But once someone had calculated and projected an increased value on the land, anyone who failed to rise to it became the enemy of promise and progress. Whether on or off the market, all land could be conceptually, if not yet practically, implicated within market-oriented schemes of expansion. Ambitious French entrepreneurs likewise “sweet-talked, lobbied, bullshitted, bullied, and wheedled their way into the chambers of power” to garner attention and support for their Atlantic ventures.298 But where the French failed, the Anglo-American projections succeeded. A new western race was underway to wring the greatest possible wealth from America’s “waste” lands. Where Hume construed a “credit economy” with the “image of stable and largely secular future,” Franklin construed dazzling prosperity that had very little of stability about it. The more dazzling the prosperity projected, the more did Lockean instrumentalism privilege it over security and stability. But on that formula, the more traditionally you used and held any given piece of land, the less securely you held it. Opinion and value would gravitate to the more dazzling projections. The argument anticipated and legitimated not just Indigenous dispossession but a broader legal-commercial instrumentalism that overturned classic British “despotic” ownership of property, initially in the United States and then in Canada.299 British traditions described by C.B. Macpherson as “possessive individualism” yielded to emerging American traditions described by Thomas Pangle as “possessive acquisitiveness.”300 Such pressures, preferring productivity to prescription, were felt across the world, in China as in France, but with the United States widely recognized at the vanguard.301 American legal philosophy, expressed in Henry Wheaton’s much-reprinted Elements of International Law, first published in 1836, recognized “public law” only amongst “the civilized and Christian people” of European descent, and asserted that “the occupation

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by uncivilized tribes of a tract, of which according to our habits a small part ought to have sufficed for them, was not felt to interpose a serious obstacle to the right of the first civilized occupant.”302 But the new instrumentalism owed a lot to Hume. If interest governed the decision whether or not to abide by law and contract, then a more glittering opportunity was more naturally attractive. Hume tried to persuade the English reading public that you could have custom and tradition and wealth and freedom, so long as you settled for a moderate, civilized version of freedom and disciplined self-interest. But he admitted that a “sensible knave” might well prefer “an act of iniquity or infidelity” to convention-upholding virtues.303 Franklin’s reply to Hume was: why should I settle for half measures? If property isn’t legitimated by anything but possession, if I have no duty other than my own interest, then why shouldn’t I pursue as much wealth as possible, understanding “justice” as little more than a mystification that serves others better than myself? Hume’s answer – you threaten to destabilize venerable norms and make all property insecure – carried little weight, not just in America but in European colonization more generally. Impossible not to notice that British and French statesmen themselves preferred commerce to imperial coercion only when necessity forced their hand, whether in India or America, from the 1760s to the 1780s. Land speculators discovered that they could relax protections for property in racially specific ways, thereby not weakening but strengthening their own hold on their property, and carrying with them the landless and poor, usually a threat to wealth, away from seaboard politics and towards western expansion. Franklin championed an expansive political and demographic project with the language of secure possession of property: no possession without acquisition. His growing outrage at British containment would burst forth as the American Revolution. Americans used the language of civilization and self-protection to justify robber baron-style predation. But to shore up “stolen people on a stolen land,” as legal property, you needed a state. Only a European-style state could accomplish legal closure for property and call it justice. But the British state was too protective of tradition and property to suit Americans, who needed a local state that they could control. Allan Greer argues that the Thirteen Colonies were the first “settler colonial” states because they were the first to organize around dispossession of Indigenous lands. New Spain preferred labour and New France preferred trade. Only the Thirteen Colonies made dispossession their fundamental attribute and purpose.304 Daniel Hulsebosch observes that in looking westward from New York, the founding fathers sought “to control a space by law that could not possibly be controlled by men.”305 And they got what they wanted: local control of land according to its most local form – allodial land title.306

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The British state tolerated a great deal of colonial predation, including slavery and a measure of dispossession. But rising violence along the western frontier predicted expensive border wars. The Royal Proclamation was designed to lessen the threat by restricting colonial encroachments on Indigenous lands. Not ordinary settlers but elite investors in Virginia and Pennsylvania with large western land claims had the most to lose.307 In 1774, the Quebec Act, another “enlightened” act that “respected the rights of the conquered,”308 transferred control of the region from London to Quebec. Some have argued that the intent was to create an administrative structure to manage sale and privatization of land. But American expansionists had lobbied against it, seeing only a check on their ambitions in a colony still governed coercively, without a legislature of its own.309 Franklin called the Quebec Act “slavery” and demanded American control of Canada.310 The Quebec Act seemed to confirm the Royal Proclamation, much as King John’s successors had reaffirmed the Magna Carta: Henry III alone confirmed it four times. The Royal Proclamation was becoming a fundamental convention of Anglo-American governance, one that convened British and Indigenous interests and politics, and reflected emerging standards of international law hostile to American expansion westward. And even if Americans could and did lobby Parliament, they had less influence over British courtrooms, and property was only as strong or weak as the arguments in a courtroom. The law was in the hands of a judiciary committed to “British” traditions of property and personhood that jarred with emerging American understandings. Blackstone’s Commentaries described slavery as “repugnant to reason, and the principles of natural law,” and declared: “The law of England abhors, and will not endure the existence of, slavery within this nation.” English law could not uphold slavery, and any “slave or negro, the moment he lands in England … becomes a free man.”311 Blackstone argued that English law governed wherever England governed, and probably applied to “conquered or ceded” plantations in British America.312 Slavery in British North America rested on weak and illegitimate claims and much false documentation that might not survive English legal challenge.313 Blackstone’s logic of English repugnance was confirmed in 1772 in the famous case of Somerset v Stewart, when James Somerset, transported to England, emancipated himself from Charles Stewart under a writ of habeas corpus, to which Stewart responded with a writ of trover or theft. Chief Justice William Murray Mansfield was reluctant to make any general claims for or against enslavement, but nonetheless declared that “so high an act of dominion must be recognized by the law of the country where it is used … The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law.” Somerset was freed and

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Stewart was simply out of pocket. Scholars dispute the precise legal consequences of Mansfield’s decision and its application to American political logic. When Nikole Hannah-Jones argued, in the “1619 Project” in 2019, that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,”314 she met a furious backlash amongst conservative historians.315 To understand the stakes, we must consider the security of property not only from political, legal, and administrative perspectives, but also in relation to Hume’s public opinion. Not only the legal security of slavery was at issue, but also its value as a measure of that security. The prospect that a piece of property might dissolve itself as property by legal petition must affect its value. Anyone who wants to hold people in slavery must be able to command impressively powerful legal and political influence. In Montreal during the 1790s, when enslaved peoples absconded, a Mansfield-trained judge refused to return them to slavery, and allowed public opinion to do the rest. Value in slaves immediately plummeted. The state and law were only bit players in that sequence of events: public opinion, self-interested behaviour, and modest legal respect for natural justice effectively dissolved enslavement in Lower Canada.316 In Upper Canada, which saw itself as more British, a newly arrived, British-born governor determined to make the colony correspond to British norms and pushed through a law that prohibited any increase in slavery (even as it confirmed existing slaves in their bondage). The evidence from Canada comes after the American Revolution but it had a certain predictability. Behaviour that might be justified on a frontier could not be justified by settled peoples who saw themselves as civilized according to English traditions of legitimacy and constitutionality. American expansionists and slave-owners needed forceful repudiation with a state of their own, or they were in danger of watching the value of their investments dissipate, by an advance guard of public opinion. Franklin, reasoning as a demographer and investor, chose dispossession of a dwindling racialized population over enslavement of an increasing one. His erstwhile host, Lord Kames, was an invaluable ally to that project. Kames argued that Indigenous peoples had no sense of land-property or equity worth respecting. He also followed Scottish rather than English traditions in positing a “positive” rather than “negative” sense of property ownership that extended “up to the inner side of a notional fence (if one visualises a plot of land, for instance),” rather than the negative right to exclude encroachments from broaching the fence. Scots envisioned ownership as “dominium, an absolute and principal entitlement against everyone,” as against “the English notion of title, a relative entitlement, whereby the strongest of competing titles prevails.” Only the English need posit borders and calculate their legal claims. Blackstone, and other British jurists with him, repudiated Kames’s

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legal theories as unorthodox and rash, but Americans embraced them, because Franklin circulated Kames’s Principles of Equity amongst friends immediately on its publication in 1760.317 Federalism with its “multiple and adjacent sovereignties” complicated the pitch for speculative land projects but, Michael Blaakman shows, speculators soon learned to engineer competition between governments to drive up prices and elide legal and political uncertainties of title. The North American Land company, the largest land trust in America, created in 1795, worked to “obscure the very real risks” to ownership on western frontiers and “substituted spin and fabrication in place of actual knowledge about land.”318 The speculators aggressively sold investment in American lands abroad as safer than European investments in uncertain political times, and they also “sold” American models of tenure. Feudalism was abolished in France in 1789 so the French could “follow the example of English America,” to become a nation of “property owners.”319 But Americans felt insecure in their property because it was blatantly unconstitutional by historic and established standards. The slippage between possession and acquisition created a feedback loop: mere possession required something more dynamic and expansive to be secure but that expansion also made possession less secure because subject to a wider range of threats and enemies. True security of property, person, and presence in North America was equated with continental sovereignty – the antithesis of Hume’s jealousy of trade argument. No doubt, the average American frontier household was less secure than the average European border household. Dispossessing and enslaving your neighbours always makes you insecure. But in applying Hume’s logic for social stability to get radical instability, the Americans insinuated those dynamics into every element of their social life. They could never not worry about the threats against their persons and property. Heads of household needed ever more authority over errant slaves, apprentices, children, and wives, seen to imbibe the uppity mores of the frontier. Magistrates needed ever more authority over the marketplace, which was always more unruly, dispersed, and decentralizing than was quite comfortable or pleasing to self-styled authorities. The construction of a regulated marketplace in America was done at the expense of Black, Indigenous, and female traders, concentrating legal and commercial agency in white, male hands.320 Americans dismantled extrinsic standards of law and made profit, predation, and “relentless change” their leading conventions.321 But it followed that the propertied men governing families, polities, and trading ventures always needed just a little more domination than they currently enjoyed. States, you could learn from Hume, didn’t really have any kind of transcendent authority; they simply gathered up the momentum of public opinion and channelled it in particular directions to put a stamp of legitimacy

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and closure on things. They were never really legitimate if you went deeply enough into their philosophical underpinnings, but they were no more illegitimate than property or reason. That was good enough, for most purposes, when it fell in with public opinion. Hume tried to put those historical lessons to check violence and promote mutual flourishing and to make commerce, consensus, and the British public a powerful agent for enlargement. British reform movements gained momentum from the 1760s and might have done the same in America.322 But the temptations to plunder and predation were too great, under conditions that promised legal impunity for certain kinds of racialized encroachments. Other peoples behaved much like Americans.323 But the American use of political philosophy was a game-changer. Hume’s unmasking of state authority as no more than consensus and made-up history, and justice as no more than made-up property-confirmation, gave the American founders warrant to unleash a new, post-Enlightenment political project on a massive scale. Violence and predation would propel Americans towards permanent warfare against anything or anyone hemming them in. The continent, with its enormous wealth, belonged to anyone with the vision and “virtu” to seize it in the name of “civilization.” This was not justice but Polemarchus’s parody of it: help to friends and harm to enemies. Having an American state did not obviate enlightenment. Americans were deeply divided politically and constitutionally. Slave-owners struggled to insulate their property against a liberalizing public opinion that become a mass abolition movement, by hamstringing the federal state’s taxing powers. “True ‘conservatism’ meant absolute sanctity of property rights.”324 Senator Henry Clay argued in 1839 that American slave property was worth 12 hundred millions. This property is diffused throughout all classes and conditions of society. It is owned by widows and orphans, by the aged and infirm, as well as the sound and vigorous. It is the subject of mortgages, deeds of trust, and family elements. It has been made the basis of numerous debts contracted upon its faith, and it is the sole reliance, in many instances, of creditors within and without the slave States, for the payment of debts due to them. And now it is rashly proposed, by a single fiat of legislation, to annihilate this immense amount of all property? Clay dismissed the “visionary dogma” and “speculative abstraction” that denied property in slaves.325 Jacksonian democracy became, by mid-century, a “homegrown American conservatism,” determined to conserve the fruits of white progress against the “fanatics” who would reverse it.326 For Jacksonian Democrats, “passive obedience” not to zombie contracts but to zombie rights, more uniform than discriminating, posed the bigger threat to American civilization.327 American law, politics, and constitutionalism must carry

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the protection of property deep into the realm of public opinion. Hume’s more open-ended model of an enlightened politics of persuasion was anathema without constitutional security for property. The greater the pressure for political liberalization and democratization, the greater the need to shore up extra-political securities for property, to get as much closure as possible. Canada also had its champions of the “sacred” rights of property, but greater deference to Britain and diversity on the ground made the debates more contested. British officials more carefully guarded their influence in Canada, and wooed cooperation from French Canadians, Indigenous peoples, and later Black Loyalists to perpetuate it. The Quebec Act of 1774 upheld French rights of property and agency that British governors on the ground had declined to undermine. Defying pressure from English merchants and settlers who wanted something more frankly American, they had protected Catholicism and traditional French civil law institutions. Peter Marshall argues that, because they saw French Canadians as conservative and deferential, “the British were bound both on grounds of justice and of self-interest to respect the ingrained prejudices of their subjects and to ease them only gradually into the modern commercial world.”328 But toleration was a red flag to British chauvinists. Hume rebuked a whiggism that was too anti-French and too anti-Catholic, but in Canada, Nancy Christie observes, such concessions “reinvigorated a radical Whig discourse, one which became more decidedly inflected by a rabid ethnocentrism bent on extinguishing all claims to political subjectivity by the French and Catholic majority.”329 Christie sees in post-Conquest Quebec a “northern Bastille” or prison-like project of domination. Lisa Ford similarly sees in the Quebec Act a “waxing crown,” that is, a new model of empire by royal prerogative, legitimated by the need to protect French Catholics.330 Donald Fyson argues for a process of “mutual adaptation,” whereby a British-controlled state learned to govern a heterogenous community by a complicated series of concessions, even where British institutions supplanted the French. It lacked the capacity to impose obedience. Hume’s liberal enlargement was no less real for being ironic. In criminal law, French Canadians readily turned to the new English forms to negotiate relations with family, neighbours, property, and violence. By compelling the state to respond to their needs and interests, they remade it from the bottom up, as an early form of Gopal’s “reverse tutelage.” The Quebec Act, another “Magna Carta of French-Canadian liberties,” was also made up in the field, by popular engagement, as much as at state central.331 Where imperial law could not penetrate social norms and regulations, it must recognize and empower them, whether amongst French or Indigenous populations, on something like the model of accommodation that Bryen saw in Roman Egypt. But if the Quebec Act was seen to protect Indigenous land from American settlers, it did no such thing in

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Quebec. There, it recognized only French-Canadian rights and made no reference to Indigenous peoples. When Wendat diplomats at Lorette in July of 1773 complained that settlers were encroaching on their hunting grounds and priests were selling their reserved lands, they asked that “we may be supported in the right and privileges granted us by our present Royal Sovereign and father by his proclamation of 7th October 1763.” The British reply came back that, because the Wendat, too, had migrated to the region, they must “submit & conform themselves to the Laws Forms & Customs of that Nation or Government.”332 Readings and uses of the Proclamation and Quebec Act became more contested and contradictory. The contradictions stretched from the lowest to the highest institutions of British rule. When the conservative government of Lord North passed the Quebec Act in 1774, the Rockingham whigs opposed it. Burke, elected as a Rockingham whig in 1766, was renowned as an advocate of liberal trade and a critic of political jealousies. He criticized imperial oppression in Acadia and Ireland, America and India. But, Richard Bourke argues, Burke only objected to the incomplete conquests. Where conquest could be complete and assimilation imposed, there Burke was ready to see a civilizing process. Indigenous peoples of the Americas were “no longer a people in any proper acceptation of the Word – but several gangs of Banditti scattered along a wild of a great civilized empire.”333 Yet Quebecers were scarcely better. In 1774, Burke demanded complete anglicization of laws in Quebec, civil as well as criminal.334 He argued that the Conquest had already erased French-Canadian institutions so that the real innovation would be to reintroduce them. The claim was untrue, obviously subservient to Burke’s partisanship and American sympathies. It contradicted his more usual defence of prescription and custom as “the most solid of all titles” to property and politics. Either a decade of conquest could obliterate prescription so that it had no real weight, or prescription legitimated custom in which case French Canadians should keep their laws. Burke, too, resembled Polemarchus. “Who but a tyrant … could think of seizing on the property of men, unaccused, unheard, untried, by whole descriptions, by hundreds and thousands together?” he would ask, in 1789, of the abolition of feudalism in Revolutionary France.335 Burke’s critics had made exactly that point in response to his demand for abolition of feudalism in Quebec in 1774. Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn had argued that conquest afforded no other rights than “regulating the political and civil government of the country, leaving to the individuals the enjoyment of their property, and all the privileges not inconsistent with the security of conquest.” Chief Justice Lord Mansfield had also said, on the eve of the Royal Proclamation, that to overturn the laws and customs of the conquered was “rash and unjust,” and he applied that logic to a Grenadan case in 1774.336

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Canada challenges John Pocock’s binary between Scottish commercial liberalism and virtue-minded civic republicanism, both of which demanded reconstruction of French and Indigenous economies and virtues. Virtue was a humbug, useful for keeping preachers and moralizers busy and for criticizing corruption, but it was not going to make Canada prosperous and English. Something more secular and sociological was needed to govern in British North America. The state acquired secular capacity to claw back freedoms from the frontier. The 1790s saw legislatures created in the Canadas, much later than the Maritimes, to amplify and channel public opinion, but accountability still rested in the British Parliament and public. Frustrated Canadian reformers demanded accountability to colonial opinion. The quarter century of war between 1789 and 1815 strengthened the fiscal-military state, but after 1815 public opinion demanded reform of the state on both sides of the Atlantic. Would Canadian public opinion take its lessons more from Hume or Franklin? Subsequent chapters explore how those debates played out in the political debates for and against liberalization. If Hume was the answer to Hobbes, America was the answer to Hume, as a place where fortune favoured the bold. Some Canadians admired American methods but others feared becoming more prey than predator. In a world threatened by American subjugation, the different kinds of people in Upper and Lower Canada had much in common. Indigenous, French, British, and American peoples, politics, and sociabilities bounced off one another, albeit tethered to a British constitutional framework and public sphere.337 Because Hume’s logic lingered in British literary and political culture, it lingered in Canadian literary and political culture. And if the United States was the answer to Hume, Canada was, to some degree, the answer to the United States, a place where enemies to the American “common cause” abounded and resisted.338 Canada owed more to French and Indigenous voice and agency for much longer. French Canadian and Métis, Abenaki and Wendat, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and Cree, and many more remained important interlocutors both locally and imperially. They had their own forms of social, diplomatic, and military power and they put them to excellent use. The broad alliances of the 1750s and 1760s persisted into the 1770s and 1780s, when British defeat by the Americans forced the British allies out of lands that the Royal Proclamation supposedly protected, in what they experienced as a betrayal of shared war goals. Thousands of Loyalists were given passage to and lands in British North America from the Maritime provinces to the Great Lakes, prompting a series of treaties to secure southern Ontario for their relocation. These were mixed peoples with mixed political views, largely repelled, Elizabeth Mancke has argued, by the American violence and seeking more pacific and British conventions.339 Through the treaty negotiations, the friendships and alliances confirmed at Niagara were re-pledged at intervals

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and reanimated in the War of 1812, which saw a pan-Indian alliance under Tecumseh renew them with General Brock. But these were deeply uncertain years, demanding watchful vigilance, mutual trust, and much persuasion. Indigenous, settler, and British choices were limited by necessity as well as by treaties and charters.340 Persuasion was the enemy of certainty. Hume understood that certainty was spurious in a world where reason, substance, and identity were “nothing but an imaginary centre of union.” But people often prefer a spurious certainty to indeterminacy. In North America, the two greatest securities for wealth and power were the state and racialization. Identities were explicitly racialized in ways that made property more certain when held in white hands and less certain when held in non-white hands. Hume’s project amplified more than it checked that feedback loop. His History had its own unintended consequences, put to work to justify an Anglocentric triumphalism that proclaimed itself the true end and motive of all history. Nostalgia for historic English forms to restrain state overreach in England justified that overreach where Englishness was aspirational. The barons ran away with the show. But the Royal Proclamation and Hume’s History of England retained in Canada a lingering epistemological and constitutional presence.

2

“Am I Your Slave?”: Gendering Civilization

“Am I your slave?” That’s the question posed, in Lahontan’s telling, by the unnamed daughter of the Huron chief Adario. Adario came to visit with his daughter who, he complained, was “about to marry, against my will, a young man that’s as good a warrior as he’s a sorry huntsman. She has a mind to’t; and that is enough in our country” – unlike in France where children obeyed their parents. The remonstrations provoked an impassioned cry from the daughter: “What do you think Father! Am I your Slave? Shall I not enjoy my Liberty? Must I for your fancy, Marry a Man I do not care for? How can I endure a Husband that buys my Corps of my father, and what value shall I have for such a Father as makes Brokerage of his Daughter to a Brute? And how can I have an affection for the Children of a Man I cannot love?”1 Adario has championed Indigenous freedom against European constraints. Now the argument turns against him in his own household: will he allow a young woman the same freedoms that he wants for himself? And for all the grumbling, the answer comes clearly back: if an unruly daughter is the price of liberty, Adario will pay that price. Of course, we don’t know whether that conversation really happened. But if we take Lahontan at face value, here is another moment of European Enlightenment and Indigenous enlightening: an argument for companionate marriage and loosening restrictions on sexuality.2 Men have got the credit for eighteenth-century sexual liberalization, but a young woman from the backwoods of Canada anticipated their arguments. This chapter will explore women’s role as agents and objects of civilization. Women’s bodies and discourses were a “battleground.”3 The eighteenth-century sociological interest in sub-political agency posed new questions of private and domestic relations. Women’s rights were liminal, in public and in private, and in British and colonial spaces. Intimacy and domination combined in ways that differed according to place and identity, but with substantial overlap.4 This chapter shows how a project of liberal

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enlargement ceded to conservative concentration. It anticipates my larger argument, as a reconnaissance of a reconnaissance.5 Eighteenth-century women had a great deal of social, economic, and political agency, generally more persuasive than coercive. But where “feminist” philosophers celebrated that agency, others saw it as obstructing their own will and ability to command resources, including opportunities to monetize or “make Brokerage” of women themselves as resources. Generations of women, especially Indigenous women, were silenced and dispossessed. Europeans in the northeastern woodlands of America were shocked by the extent of women’s power. Indigenous women upheld the kinship networks that underpinned politics and economics. Karen Marrero observes of relationships in the American-Canadian borderlands during the eighteenth century: In Indigenous North America, people interacted with one another first and most importantly as kin, in a system that designated the performance of roles depending on the specific relationship in a particular nation. Acting according to these rules grounded in the larger concept of family, individuals then took on other social, political, economic, or religious roles. Every level of connection was infused with the notion of the familial … Exchange of goods and services flowed along the lines of family. Among the Wendat, politics, sexuality, and the social interaction that facilitated economic production were all tied to matters of kinship. Among the Anishinaabeg, kinship structured spiritual, economic, and political aspects of society. Each person with whom they engaged in any type of exchange had to be made “kin-like” so that the activity in question could be properly conducted and understood.6 Bruce Trigger argued that because Wendat power followed matrilineal lines and husbands married into their wives’ households, wife abuse was impossible.7 Heidi Bohaker identifies women’s roles in Anishinaabe kinship relationships across the eastern Great Lakes region.8 Women did that same work of kinship and cultural brokerage in the fur trade, connecting Indigenous and Eurowestern networks.9 Métis kinship and economic networks, emerging through the nineteenth century, orchestrated collective action: “femalecentred kin networks governed the composition of wintering settlements and the spatial distribution of residences within them.”10 Only some of these societies were matrilineal: the Illinois, for example, were patrilineal and patriarchal. An Illinois woman who challenged her father, as Marie Rouensa did in 1693 at Kaskaskia, according to Robert Cavalier de la Salle, was likely to be punished. Chief Rouensa insisted she marry a much older fur trader, Michel Accault, and forced her, naked, from his house until she complied. Brutal violence might be inflicted on adulterous Illinois women by angry husbands,

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while men faced no such sanctions.11 The confrontation reflected worsening conditions for women in Illinois society, as polygamy, sexual assault, and enslavement increased and so did conversion to Christianity amongst the women themselves, including Marie Rouensa. But a handful of women converts and priests were no match for the men, who quickly prohibited their daughters from attending mass and enlisted lay French officials and traders to discipline the priests. A negotiated settlement resulted: Marie would marry Accault but he, and Marie’s parents, would renew their support for Christianity.12 Women had varying degrees and mechanisms of agency in the different Indigenous communities, some of them invisible to Europeans, and they upheld them in whichever political or legal institutions best served them, whether French, Indigenous, or English.13 Women had much agency in Europe too. Scholars emphasize just how “vital female business management and familial networks were to English family life, the politics of patronage, and social structure.” Women had de jure ownership of property of all sorts, and often de facto ownership or managerial responsibilities in firms and families.14 But their legal agency was restrained under the doctrine of coverture that made them minors in male-led households. And the more that the modern state was formally organized as institutional power, the more it became exclusively masculine: in 1875 an influential German book on the state by Johan Kaspar Bluntschli asserted that “the state is humanity organized, but humanity as masculine, not as feminine.”15 Women kept much normative agency: Amanda Vickery sees no drastic transformation in Georgian England, even as women tended to spend more time at home with children and men to garner more institutional recognition and reward. The women saw themselves as “profoundly conventional,” which is to say that they valued and upheld social norms that protected and legitimated the family, the public, and the state.16 And some “feminist” philosophers, including Hume, recognized and applauded that agency. Part of what made modern public opinion civilizing rather than decivilizing was women’s participation in converse and commerce. They increased their market-oriented labour, bought useful or refined goods, and joined in public conversations. Women’s choices were as enlightened or jealous as anyone else’s. Many settler women in Canada, for example, demanded political enlargement but only for white women, on grounds of racialized civilization.17 But, for lack of political power, many of those demands relied on softer powers of persuasion. Propriety mediated between soft and hard power. Being respectable was like being professional: it insulated you from direct collisions with men and direct, coercive governance by the state, while offering the reward of protection. Men were also governed by respectability, especially in North America where, James Whitman argues, “Respectable persons found themselves in prison less frequently in the United States than they did in continental

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2.1 | Zacharie Vincent, Two Women with Figure in an Infant Carrier (undated). One woman tends to the carrier, and the other works a moccasin while a male figure watches in the background. Vincent was a Wendat chief and may be showing the installation of a new chief under a Tree of Peace. Courtesy of the Château Ramezay.

Europe.” Liberty in America was impunity: “freedom from fear of imprisonment for respectable persons.”18 But the pressure on women to be respectable was intensified by the pervasive threat of sexual violence. According to Fitzjames Stephen, a prominent Victorian jurist, submission and protection were “correlative.”19 Women who flouted respectability could be described – for example in a rape case – as having refused protection or courted wellknown risks. Probabilistic reasoning around such risks as rape tended to confine women to the household, even though the domestic sphere was no protection against rape.20 Robin Grazley shows that the Canadas were less concerned with female respectability than the metropolis, that the law protected women vulnerable to accusations of behaving loosely, and that men, too, suffered from accusations of impropriety.21 But she also sees increasing pressures for propriety in the mid-nineteenth century in a strengthening separate spheres ideology that seemed, to the Victorians, a civilizing process. Norbert Elias and Hume both allotted women a special place in the

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civilizing process.22 Hume argued that when women resisted conquest, they broke male confederacy and came to “share with the other sex all the rights and privileges of society.”23 But many men resented female restraints on their choices and responded with Franklin’s aggressive forms of self-protection. During the nineteenth century, the exclusion of women from politics was made a measure of civilization.24 Women’s liminality made them vulnerable to such attacks and also made those attacks lucrative. The places where women mediated economic relationships, owned land, or claimed political or religious influence were vulnerable to encroachments not just against the women but also the social networks they sustained. Indigenous women’s challenge to Eurowestern norms helped to fuel a brutal backlash that dovetailed with a settler colonial project of dispossession and erasure. The Eurowestern household was a small-scale replica of the polity and the economy: big and small battles for its control replicated one another. The king governed the public like a father; the father governed the household like a king.25 Nicole Eustace remarks that “where hearts were tendered, authority was acknowledged,” but also that expressions of love were understood “to veil exertions of power, yet not to end them.”26 Entrenched power was understood to vitiate consent, in sex as in hegemony, usefully and beneficially so. Marriage was a chosen form of legal domination, and women, even in conservative Catholic societies, enjoyed considerable autonomy of choice.27 Medievalist Antony Black observes: “One can hardly overestimate the social importance of freedom to choose one’s own spouse.”28 Much literary and legal thought pondered the parallel between household and polity. Shakespeare often made plots turn on how responsive men were to women’s advice and needs. In Measure for Measure, a would-be tyrant who used his (borrowed) political powers to demand sexual favours from a devout woman received his comeuppance. Much Ado About Nothing favourably compared Benedict, taught by love to heed a woman’s advice (even when justly bloody-minded), to his callous friends. The Merchant of Venice showed a disguised woman advising men how to restrain a bloody quest for vengeance in a money-lender who was also an overbearing father. Othello was so jealous that he demanded a tyrannical accounting of Desdemona’s very handkerchiefs, technically his property but generally supposed to be beneath manly dignity.29 Men must not be churlish but Kate, too, needed to learn that lesson in The Taming of the Shrew. Kate was a philosophical heroine who refused to be ruled by convention but, on discovering the real limits of her agency, moderated her ambitions. On the other hand, Coriolanus carried his heroic revolt against conventions of authority and balance of power much further before finally, tragically, bowing to their wisdom. In The Vicar of Wakefield, a novel of 1761–62 by Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Primrose described his household as the “little republic to which

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I gave laws.” But they weren’t really laws, according to Karen Harvey, so much as “habitual practices … Patriarchy was not a rigid system of male governance but a flexible ‘grid of power’ in which several different groups attained status and authority”30 as part of an orchestrated “oeconomy” for managing and maintaining the household, morally and materially.31 There was much room for moral, commercial, and discursive agency on that model, especially if the marriage was companionate. But love was also a highly contingent mode of rule, as the hapless King Lear learned. Many men took good care to retain their powers of coercion, law, and violence. Many households in British North America included indentured servants and, before 1834, enslaved people. Slave-owners in the American South adopted a new paternalist tone without reducing their brutality.32 The institutions that braided together state and society permitted terrible oppression domestically, nationally, and internationally. Indigenous slavery was very old, in the regions now called Canada, but the newer forms were more highly monetized and legally bound. The act of enslavement had no legal foundation save as just warfare against enemies or as punishment. Indigenous traditions memorialized such acts of enslavement while Eurowestern ones occluded them, the better to legitimate the slave as an exchangeable commodity. Adario’s daughter knew she might be enslaved by a conquest, something white slave-owners did not fear: the point of racialized chattel slavery was to exempt white Eurowesterners from it. But she could not have anticipated the extent to which bondage would be racialized, gendered, and commercialized in the coming years. Brett Rushforth’s tally of “individually identifiable Indian slaves” in New France, by date of first appearance, shows that before 1710, slaves were few in number and mostly male (ninety male to fourteen female). In the eighteenth century, the numbers grew and feminized: 752 men to 892 women, including, in the last decade of French rule, 183 men to 299 women.33 Rushforth sees a commercialization of slavery: nations that had always killed or sold men but adopted women and children increasingly sold women and children as well, and put them to labour rather than to renewing kinship ties and alliances. Such peoples as the Illinois and Anishinaabeg worked kinship as an “inclusive political strategy” to create strong political alliances between nations and families.34 But commercialization of slavery reinforced “ethnic distinctions among the Indians of the Pays d’en Haut, countering early French efforts to cluster all of the region’s Indians into a single category.”35 It also aligned men around predation on women. Across and beyond the North Atlantic world, an invisible hand orchestrated a domination of women too lucrative to resist. The introduction of Eurowestern distinctions of sex and gender enhanced that process, everywhere denouncing Indigenous peoples as uncivilized because unchivalric.36 Travellers’ tales bristled with stories of female agency or oppression.

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The earliest Jesuits were especially blind to and therefore jealous of women’s networks, their hostility often reciprocated; later ones grew better at exploiting women’s increasing alienation.37 Refusal to see women’s agency became a marker of modern masculinity. European historians wrote masculine histories that celebrated autonomous reason and agency, on the model of Thucydides who was widely read and emulated as the “father” of political history. Women’s worlds and historical analyses crossed over often, but with dwindling public space for women. Conjectural histories defined female refinement as antithetical to politics and criticized Indigenous anomalies. William Alexander’s History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time, published in 1777, made the domestication of women a measure of refinement lacking in “savage” societies.38 Women were the first “people without history” in European history. To have history was to be able to speak in ways that could shape public and policy outcomes, that is, to achieve collective agency. In the 1690s, Lahontan could hear women speaking politically and consequentially in public in Europe as well as North America. Eighteenth-century educated women engaged in political conversations and wrote political commentary that they circulated amongst friends and published anonymously or posthumously. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu visited Turkey and wrote letters in 1724, published after her death in 1761, that described baths where cloistered women gathered, naked, as “comparable to the male-only coffee houses of London.” Refinement, she concluded, was “as different, in different climates, as morality and religion. Who have the rightest notions of both, we shall never know till the Day of Judgment.”39 Montesquieu took note of her arguments and also patronized the weekly salon of Anne-Thérèse, Marquise de Lambert, whose writings, published posthumously in 1747, took the view that “men keep women in subjection through force, and keep them ignorant in order to preserve their domination.”40 Karen Green observes that many women criticized commercial sociability, including Émilie du Châtelet, who translated and criticized Bernard de Mandeville for treating women as “pawns to be exchanged for the sake of dynastic aspirations, or objects for sexual use by men.”41 Across Europe, women were connected by kinship, sociability, and writing, their libraries stocked with one another’s works; they also extensively criticized women’s financial dependency on men. But women’s participation in the public sphere was impugned as impropriety and immodesty. Some patriotic male writers defended their learned ladies,42 but many more saw learned and loquacious women as disgrace and decline. The polite journals of the day, much read and imitated in North America, denounced women’s political activity on grounds that it made them ugly, ridiculous, and dangerous to public order.43 And even private chatter could interfere with proper deference to men and the proper duties

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of women. In the 1730s, Benjamin Franklin published a series of satires on ladies’ tea tables as “extravagance and slander,” better replaced with spinning wheels.44 At age sixteen, he published essays under the obviously made-up byline “Silence Dogood,” that “tamed” women’s unruly speech to make it “rational social criticism.”45 More genteel and masculine trappings would come with time and prosperity. Gentlemen had a peculiar monopoly on public speech and truth-telling because their identity was a guarantee of their veracity and because they alone could uphold their word by means of the duel. Duels were illegal but also conventional, protected from legal consequences by male legislators, judges, and jurors. Informal male violence upheld formal male privilege. To doubt a gentleman’s word was a kind of violence that no gentlemen could allow to pass unchallenged. But only gentlemen could be so trusted, no one else. Indigenous peoples were often described as “nature’s gentleman” but also as incorrigible liars.46 Women lied too, in ways peculiarly dangerous to men’s freedom and honour and lineage; hence the need to restrict their voice by means of propriety. Respectable women performed their delicacy and refinement at all times and places. To challenge convention was to court shame and disgrace. In public spaces, men told women who they were, what they could talk about, and what they deserved. Women’s voices were generally amplified when they deferred to those ascriptions and checked when they challenged them. Women were constrained from breaching some discursive spaces and broaching some discursive topics. “Separate spheres” can be exaggerated: they were long-standing, partial, and often not legally binding. Women worked, argued, brawled, and drank in public spaces.47 But their activity became invisible to emergent professional discourses, including history and political economy, both of them highly masculine in form and content. Economists long ignored women’s unwaged labour in their calculations of economic activity, effectively approving the many restraints on women’s economic agency that keep their wages low, about 65 per cent of men’s wages on current measures. The idea of separate spheres worked to channel women’s voice and agency away from direct rivalry with men. Separate spheres saw culture step in where law could not to check women’s agency, and never more intensely than at times of crisis.48 Separate spheres reduced women’s agency to individual and household action, rather than the kind of public, collective agency identified by historians. A “public man” was a prominent and influential one; a “public woman” was a sexualized one, the fact of her sexualization trumping the content of her remarks.49 I will lay out the eighteenth-century debates about sexual civilization and show how they played out in the nineteenth. Sexualized narratives of civilization – whatever civilization consisted of, “whore” was a clear antithesis – worked to subjugate women and enhance

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men’s claims to command, if not own, women as resources. The language of chivalry and separate spheres was an avenue to conquest and dispossession. Indigenous women could only inform Eurowestern civilization indirectly, through interlocutors like Lahontan, who appropriated that voice for their own purposes. Lahontan’s account of Adario’s daughter as a willful agent seeking sex, love, and autonomy on her own terms – never lasciviously, he insisted – was as much an attack on Jesuits as a defence of women. Lahontan’s gendered critique of European civilization was followed in 1720 by Montesquieu’s more developed version in his Persian Letters. Uzbek, a Persian visitor to France, speaks the language of enlightenment in arguments with the French but also keeps a harem back home. In the harem, a highly sentimentalized language of love veils despotic and dominating relationships which break into open rebellion in Uzbek’s absence. His most beloved wife, Roxane, betrays him sexually and politically, in ways that suggest that men and women have similar aspirations to freedom: “How could you have thought me credulous enough to imagine that I was in the world only to worship your caprices? … No, I have lived in servitude but I have always been free.” Like Adario’s daughter, she refuses enslavement to her full ability. Montesquieu was making several points at once. The harem was a metaphor for despotism: Uzbek governing his harem from Paris resembled Louis XIV governing France from Versailles. Montesquieu believed that the greater the distance between governing and governed, the more despotic the relationship. But he was also criticizing patriarchy. Michael Mosher sees “a French subject in rebellion against overbearing kingship, a Persian princess rebelling against the court/harem of her husband and, just possibly, in an anticlerical reading, a Christian woman tortured by convent life” – but, above all, “a sequestered woman who has much to say and no one to say it to.”50 Montesquieu agreed with Lahontan that liberation could not be only for men but must encompass women. In 1748, he made the case on a broader stage in The Spirit of the Laws. He repudiated Hobbes by sexualizing sociability. Society was born of the universal desire not for domination but for sex. Only despotic societies ruled women despotically. In Europe, men’s desire for women had taken three forms: sensual delight, which had led to despotism in ancient Rome; delight in love, which had led to exclusivity in ancient Greece; and the modern European delight in women’s good opinion: “the desire to please them because they are quite enlightened judges of personal merit.” Men made political judgments, women made moral judgments, and the two added up to a moderating balance of power. For Montesquieu, men’s willingness to submit to the judging gaze of women was the criterion of a free society.51 Hume also began his theory of society with sexual desire. Men and women came together for sex and love, but also to share the burden of child-caring, a burden that was still better shared more widely with other kin and neighbours.

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Writing women into sociability solved some problems that Hobbes and Locke had left unanswered. Their self-willing liberal subject seemed to spring to life fully formed, owing nothing to anyone else. But people come into the world helpless and needy. Hume portrayed sociability in his Treatise of 1738 as grounded in utility and delight in the company of others.52 We learn who we are by looking at other people, seeing a kind of mirror, and we have a natural sympathy for them, unless there’s some countervailing interest or passion to make them rivals or enemies. For Hume, men and women were bound together by sympathy and shared much the same passions, morals, and “nature.” Like Montesquieu, Hume privileged women’s taste, describing them as “much better judges of polite writing than men of the same degree of understanding,” such that “all men of sense” had “more confidence in the delicacy of their taste, tho’ unguided by rules, than in all the dull labours of pedants and commentators.”53 Women joined in the conversation about their civilizing powers, as well as those of Hume. Some excoriated his impiety and politics, while others quarrelled with his historiography, for example by vindicating Mary Queen of Scots or Elizabeth I against his criticisms.54 Hume’s emphasis on convention broke down the boundaries between the public and the private, law and society. But many rushed to shore them back up. To see a civilizing power in women’s taste was to see a check on power, because taste does not defer to power. Taste, Kant learned from Hume, was always subjective and free, never coercively elicited. Private aesthetic judgment could not be forced, any more than private religious judgment.55 The very idea of taste, thus, was a lesson in freedom but also in sociability and commercial exchange, because taste demands communication.56 A model whereby culture ruled through taste – where poets were, in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous phrase, “unacknowledged legislators” – suggested that men and women were essentially free. But the distinctions between taste and coercion, social and political power, raised troubling questions. Taste was widely seen to be concentrated in the elite classes: Voltaire argued that it belonged “to a very small number of privileged souls,” none of them bourgeois.57 Women who patronized men were elevating themselves above those men and imposing a kind of bondage on them. That’s a point made by Samuel Moyn about Elias’s civilizing process: “Violence did not decline; it went inside. Is self-regulation better than physical violence, if it involves policing ourselves as if ‘a garrison in a conquered city’”? No advantages are unmixed, Moyn draws from Hume.58 Allan Bloom preferred that women rather than men bear the burden of sexual policing.59 But women, more assaulted than assaulting, bear the costs of a male freedom that lets men say what they think and grab what they want.60 Jean-Jacques Rousseau preferred original freedom to refinement’s disciplines. He spent much of his life seeking autonomy under modernity: how a constitution, or education, or sociability, or solitude could conduce to

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freedom. But this was very much men’s freedom that came at the expense of women’s freedom. Rousseau’s noble savage was autonomous and solitary, owing nothing to kinship, and Rousseau’s very definition of womanhood was the antithesis of the autonomous individual. In 1759, his Emile argued that if you were to have education, it must vest itself of any hint of domination according to a sexual double standard. The vast bulk of the book was devoted to describing the complex non-subjugating education of a young boy, Emile, as the only path to liberty in a corrupt world. The final few pages introduced Sophie, who could serve Emile as a mate only if she was not herself educated for liberty. Every lesson Emile learned, Sophie must learn in reverse. Emile must learn to defy opinion, Sophie to conform to it. “When a man acts well, he depends only on himself and can brave public judgment; but when a woman acts well, she has accomplished only half of her task, and what is thought of her is no less important to her than what she actually is … Opinion is the grave of virtue among men and its throne among women.”61 Rousseau distinguished between authentic and inauthentic selves and made responsiveness to public opinion the distinction between the two, his views hardening along with his growing personal hostility to Hume. To be ruled by opinion is to be inauthentic, an argument that Charles Taylor recently revived in favour of a politics of recognition. The self, Taylor argued, is formed dialogically, in conversation with the world, and needs recognition from the world when it is at its most authentic.62 But taken literally, Rousseau’s authenticity was only for men and could only exist where women were inauthentic. And many conservatives who despised Rousseau saw much to admire in his views on women. Emile coincided with the Conquest and lent momentum to another kind of conquest. Over the next century, wherever women’s rights were debated, Rousseau was sure to crop up as an authority. PostRevolutionary conservative thinkers such as François-René de Chateaubriand and Louis de Bonald could agree with Rousseau that women, properly restrained to the domestic sphere, were “the glue holding the whole of civil society together.” In 1801, du Bonald’s widely read Du Divorce denounced women who left their husbands as enemies of the state.63 Feminists generally despised Rousseau. Octavie Belot, an impoverished widow who wrote novels and translated Hume’s History of England into French between 1763 and 1765, remarked of Rousseau’s political writing: “I don’t know why Mr. Rousseau promotes to such an extent absolute independence … The situation of dependence in which we live together, is a tie which unites us, rather than a chain which oppresses us.” She rejected both forms of amour as embroiled in opinion.64 Other feminists demanded authenticity for all, instrumentalism for none. A 1739 pamphlet by “Sophia,” entitled Woman Not Inferior to Man, ridiculed circular reasoning: “Why is learning useless to us? Because we have no share in public offices. And

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why have we no share in public offices? Because we have no learning.”65 Mary Wollstonecraft also spent a lifetime attacking chivalry and urging women’s education on a par with men’s, drawing on her own education by Dissenters.66 Like Catharine Macaulay, whom she admired as contending “for laurels whilst most of her sex seek only for flowers,” Wollstonecraft preferred masculine virtues to feminine refinements and attacked Burke and Rousseau, not obvious bedfellows but both advocates of chivalry and measuring women’s rights by their modesty and beauty.67 Wollstonecraft agreed with Hume in attacking chivalry as a kind of concealed authority and disguised contempt.68 If sociability checked power, then it was a power grab. If women stopped men from doing what they naturally wanted to do – theft, rapine, the usual suspects – then men were not really free. It was one thing to posit an impartial spectator to teach self-regulation, as Adam Smith did, and quite another to give it female interests. Such a spectator could not be impartial where men’s and women’s interests collided, as they often did. A moral spectator should not have a material interest in outcomes. To centre material self-interest was unwomanly, incompatible with maternal instincts and the civilizing process. Male state capture was put towards laws to restrain what women could do and say, in the courts, the workplace, and the family. Where women could speak, they often confirmed the logic. Margaret Oliphant, cousin to Daniel Wilson, admitted natural antagonism between rich and poor, but no such antagonism between the sexes, and therefore no female right to challenge men’s rule of women.69 Men’s and women’s interests were particularly fraught around sex, as a place where men were most empowered and women most silenced. Cécile Vidal observes: “Obtaining consent for sex from any woman, including white women, was not considered a major issue in ancien regime societies.”70 But eighteenth-century men were meeting serious pushback from uppity women in philosophy and literature and in the courts. The most spectacular collision of men’s and women’s wills was Samuel Richardson’s Pamela of 1742, the first commercially successful novel. Pamela recounted, through letters, the first-hand experience of a humble and virtuous serving girl pursued by her wealthy and powerful employer. When all his attempts at seduction and rape failed, he married her. Justice rewarded the lowly woman and disciplined the entitled man. Carolyn Steedman observes that Pamela’s “letters make clear that his sexual attitude derives from his social, economic, and political power,” which Pamela combats with a doctrine of inalienable human rights, combining “assertions of legal-self-possession with the fundamental principle of equality in God’s sight,” stretching to “juridical questions of rights and obligations, of equity, common law, and self-ownership. A self-dramatizing fifteen-year-old represents some pretty grand ideas and

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makes an acute analysis of England’s administrative and confessional state.” “Operas, play texts, parodies, chapbooks, children’s books, conduct books, sermon-collections, painted fans, decorated tea-cups, prints, paintings, and engravings, carried her story into the furthest reaches of the British Isles and beyond their shores. Nineteenth-century fiction pullulates with Pamela and her (fictional) daughters.”71 Rousseau responded to Pamela with a sentimental novel of his own, La Nouvelle Heloïse. It prompted Germaine de Staël to use Rousseau as a springboard for her own writing which, pace Rousseau, became increasingly public, political, and influential over time.72 In fact, Rousseau could be read as ironically as Hume. Emile advised the true freedom-seeker to defy opinion. A woman might read herself into the story as Emile rather than Sophie; the structure, with its late discovery of gender, invited just such a reading. A woman reader didn’t know until the ending that she was different, by which time she was well-equipped to flout Rousseau’s own conventions. Women had a steeper climb to freedom than men, but to read Emile ironically was already to be on that alpine path. Indeed, the real slave, Rousseau came to realize, was an Emile so invisibly yet so thoroughly governed by a Sophie who, in an unfinished sequel, liberated herself from Emile, to catastrophic consequence. Julie, of La Nouvelle Heloïse, was a more philosophic and free heroine.73 Some women demanded liberty and voice on equal terms with men; others deftly pondered just how much agency respectable women could exercise. Jane Austen, a close reader of Hume, wrote novels that performed risk assessment of the choices open to them.74 These novels advised not individual autonomy but social and familial connection: women empowered themselves by marrying propertied and responsive men, defying familial and social pressures where appropriate. Pride and Prejudice shows us five sisters making five choices: refusal to engage (Mary), failure to engage (Kitty), timid engagement (Jane), repugnant shamelessness (Lydia), and the philosophical choice of the heroine (Elizabeth) who also shelters her sisters from the worst consequences of their choices. She holds her own in spirited debate with her inadequate parents and the personification of society, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who wants Fitzwilliam Darcy for her niece and tries to shame Elizabeth into submission. Like Adario’s daughter, she insists on her right to choose and the propriety of her choice. Persuasion shows another heroine self-consciously modelling Hume’s politics. Anne Elliot is persuaded to give up the man she loves by well-intentioned people who misjudge him; they also try to marry her off to another man whose superficially pleasing manners hide a callous and calculating character “very deficient both in justice and compassion.” Anne resists the second and wins back the first suitor, who must himself come to prefer persuasion to unbounded willing, understanding this as a choice between “the steadiness of principle and the obstinacy

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of self-will, between the darings of heedlessness and the resolution of a collected mind.” These were always social and political choices, posed differently as well as similarly by many novelists. Dorothea, the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (written in the 1870s but set in 1832), learns through trial and error, including a fatally unselfish and unhappy first marriage, how to pursue her own interest and happiness. She too must free herself philosophically from shame. She was never shameless, but circumstances made her preferred choice seem shameful in local Middlemarch opinion. Hovering behind the dangers of shame were always the dangers of rape. Where Richardson’s Pamela averted seduction and rape, the heroine of his second novel, Clarissa, was raped and died from grief and shame (the common fate of respectable women75). Such stories were an argument for civilizing brutal passions. Readers sympathized for literary heroines in ways that must make male predators nervous. Over the next century, many of the most famous and shocking literary rapes, from Hermsprong to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, attacked libertinism and rape culture. Some men responded with open defence of rape culture. Henry Fielding’s Shamela invoked, obviously hypocritically, “my vartue, my vartue.” The Marquis de Sade carried the logic of self-willing, other-dominating, masculine agency to its greatest excesses in life and literature. But he went to prison for it. Any jury that sighed for Pamela or Clarissa might well convict Clarissa’s attacker. Wealth and power normally insulated such men but might actually provoke underdog-sympathy for a female victim. Rape trials were a place where men and women fought over the rules and the norms of sexual propriety, often attracting crowds to applaud or grieve the verdict.76 A moving and plausible story could, in principle, check male domination in the courts, as in the novel. Legal and verbal agency made it at least possible, if not probable, that women could speak openly against men on terms that undermined domination. Where opinion had the final say – whether the opinion of the jury, the reading public, or the electorate – you could never fully protect property or reputation or privilege from a reversal of fortune. King George IV discovered that when he inherited the throne in 1820 and tried to divorce his wife, Princess Caroline, by passing a “Pains and Penalties Bill” that proved so wildly unpopular it had to be withdrawn. A print by Isaac Robert Cruikshank in 1820 entitled Public Opinion showed the king and all his financial and ministerial resources on one side of a scale, outweighed on the other side by a diminutive Queen Caroline cheered on by John Bull and soldiers.77 Wayne Booth, a scholar of metaphor, explains how such reversals can work. A lawyer friend of mind was hired to defend a large Southern utility against a suit by a small one, and he thought at first that he was doing fine. All of the law seemed to be on his side, and he felt that he had

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presented his case well. Then the lawyer for the small utility said, speaking to the jury, almost as if incidentally to his legal case, “So now we see what it is. They got us where they want us. They holding us up with one hand, their good sharp fishin’ knife in the other, and they sayin, ‘you jes set still, little catfish, we’re jes going to gut ya.’” At that moment, my friend reports, he knew he had lost the case. “I was in the hands of a genius of metaphor.”78 So, too, women could find allies amongst jurors and judges. Women readily turned to the courts for protection and advantage, according to Donald Fyson’s analysis of criminal justice in Lower Canada during the century after the Conquest, and they had higher success rates than men. They won nearly all bastardy cases up until the 1790s when such cases were ruled out on a technicality and disappeared from the record.79 In a world governed by opinion, men’s powers still rested at some crucial moments on their powers of persuasion. Not unnaturally, they sought to strengthen their hand there. Propriety was supposed to protect respectable people from state and social violence alike. Respectable women were not supposed to get raped, just as respectable men were not supposed to go to prison, especially in America, where fewer concessions to gentility were made in comparison to Europe.80 But a rape charge might challenge impunity. Respectable men were often in contact with women under circumstances that might provoke a rape charge, as when they employed them as domestic servants, for example. Where we might see such circumstances as dangerous for the women, jurors were apt to see them as dangerous for the men’s reputations. The possibility of a rape charge against a respectable man was a hostage to fortune and a practical test of the accountability of power. In principle men were accountable for their crimes. But in practice, male sociability protected them from rape charges much as from charges of murder after a duel. This is not to suggest that men everywhere sought a harem-like despotic dominion over women. But the desiring self is always a demanding self and consensual demands shade into coercive ones, handkerchief by handkerchief. James Mill expounded that point in an 1820 article for the Encyclopedia Britannica on “Government.” To desire things, Mill argued, is to desire them from other people. And because our desires for things are “boundless,” so is our demand “of power over the acts of other men.” Government facilitates but also checks the exercise of that power over others. But Mill still advocated unchecked British power in India, and masculine power in the household, where women had only slight protections of property and personhood. No husband could rape a wife, because marriage was itself a form of consent that the wife “cannot retract,” according to English legal logic articulated by Matthew Hale in 1736, and applied to Canada until 1983, England until

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1991. In an English case of 1888, when a man infected his wife with syphilis, the woman argued that consent was vitiated by fraud or deception. The judge disagreed: a theory of vitiated consent could too easily turn all sex into rape.81 Similar readings pertained in British North America. Ian C. Pilarczyk observes that in Lower Canada, before and after the Conquest, the courts “gave wide latitude to violent husbands, intervening only in cases deemed notorious or life-threatening,” and the law “enshrined the rights of husbands over their wives and of parents over children, deeming acts prosecutable only if they resulted in permanent injury or risk of death.”82 English and French judges upheld what Chief Justice Sewell described in 1818 as the husband’s right “to keep his Family in subjection,” including slaps and kicks to respond to a taunting wife. Law and its officers could lend women some protections, by holding a violent husband in gaol for a stint, but these were more like negotiating tactics than solutions.83 John Stuart Mill argued in 1869 that women’s position under English common law was worse than slavery under ancient Rome and described the family as a “school of despotism.”84 His motion for enfranchisement was overwhelmingly rejected. The London Times declared the thing impossible because women’s “weaker mental powers” gave them an instinctive “tendency to submit themselves” to men’s control.85 Many saw no connection between radical politics and women’s rights.86 Margaret Oliphant argued that it was a gentlewoman’s privilege to be admired for endurances and slights that would be despicable in a gentleman.87 For Mill, such arguments showed women to be dominated as much mentally, by public opinion, as they were dominated physically and materially by violence and poverty.88 Because women were liminal – neither fully enslaved, nor fully free – their debates about freedom and agency could transgress and complicate simple binaries between governing and governed. If they could talk their way out of their iron or silken bonds, then their value as symbols and artifacts of male wealth and power was diminished, as was the calculus of that wealth and power. Men sought protections for their investments in women’s labour, property, and person, as for any other. The peculiar vulnerability of property in people – that it might escape, might mount a legal challenge of trover or habeas corpus, might plead excess brutality – applied to women. If opinion made property less secure, then that was good grounds for beating back opinion as a mode of rule. Persuasion, the centrepiece of Hume’s public opinion, posed threats to the outer defences and inner stability of wealth and power, in a world where domestic and public power propped one another up. Brutal as well as consensual forms of “persuasion” persisted: “the fact that a woman is not beaten every day does not mean that she is not dominated by her husband on the days that she is not beaten.”89 Better that soft power shape (or “socially construct”) women’s ambitions and desires, but hard power remained always on call.

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Women, as Adario’s daughter noted, had “value.” They had resources and they were resources to be brokered. A woman was not precisely the kind of resource that you could slap a mortgage on, but people did calculate probabilistically on the profits of female subjugation. Rape was prosecuted as an encroachment on a father’s investment in a daughter. Wives and daughters had no protection for their property: Mary Wollstonecraft’s father forced her mother to hand over her inheritance to him. Women could not protect their wages from husbands, even those who refused to provide for them. “Oeconomy” was as likely to be jealous and violent as not. Legal mechanisms to protect women’s property, such as dowry and community of goods, often fell short in the courts. Speculating on women’s property that you almost owned was a little like speculating on land that you almost owned on the other side of the Proclamation line: it happened and it provoked new legal and political forms of legitimation. Enlightenment was made to strengthen men’s liberties at the expense of women’s. Women joined in Pontiac’s uprising to defend their property and agency, but that agency was invisibilized by the European response to that uprising. The stadial histories of Hume’s friends and frenemies were highly patriarchal and blamed sexual relations for the failure to leave behind hunting in the Northeastern woodlands.90 Robertson described women as “slaves” to their husbands. Ferguson argued that women farmed but had no political voice, so agriculture could not work its civilizing power. These were blatant falsifications of women’s status in farming, trade, and politics. In farming nations, such as the Wendat, women were the usual farmers; in the fur trade, they provided necessary equipment and support. Everywhere, women were power-brokers and mediators that connected communities across the region. But stadial accounts of civilization that wrote women out of politics and property effected the silence that they purported to challenge. Where women became more visible for fighting battles and making political choices, historians romanticized their interventions as done by so many lovestruck Pocahontases.91 Everywhere Indigenous women had power and wealth, they were vulnerable to a masculine, statist revision and fiscal transfer that became male-centred history.92 This was not “seeing like a state,” but state, commerce, and scholarship all seeing like a man. Women’s social worlds were invisibilized so as to subordinate them to more formally male networks. And sometimes more brutal methods were used. In the Wabash Valley, George Washington used scorched earth and kidnapping tactics, as on 7 August 1791, when 523 men descended on the village of Kenapakomoko (near present-day Logansport, Indiana). They killed nine people and kidnapped thirty-two women and children, also burning the fields and houses: “Brutality, death, torture, kidnapping women and children, and burning villages became central to successfully carrying out an ‘Enterprise against the

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Indians from our Country.’”93 Chivalry had no place where men and women competed against one another, as they did in the “Indian Wars.” Better to describe the “squaw” as too degraded and servile to merit chivalry.94 But ascriptions of delicatesse could be put to the same silencing and dehumanizing purposes. When, in 1819, a Beothuk woman, Demasduit, was violently abducted, her husband murdered, and her baby taken away, the local press insisted that this was an act of chivalry, done to defend a “delicate” and “sensible being” from “a murderous savage.” Kristina Huneault sees in that depiction “an almost hallucinatory inversion of the violence [Demasduit] had so recently experienced.”95 It took a willing suspension of disbelief to believe that Europeans did not abuse women. Their norms did not so much protect women as muffle their grievances and blame them for those grievances. If respectability failed to insulate women from poverty and violence, they were doing respectability wrong. If a husband brutalized a wife, she must have failed to civilize her husband with the proper Rousseauian tact. A particularly egregious case might be won by a woman in the courts, but banal violence and female poverty were acceptable collateral damage. Law and justice must balance sympathy for women’s sufferings with hard-headed concern for masculine despotic dominion. Punishment was made less degrading in Canada as in England, where women were the first to be exempted from the stocks; but women were also the last to be exempted from torture, as the practice of burning women outlasted the drawing and quartering of men.96 But into the 1860s, public executions were defended as virile and masculine, not just by conservative peers such as Lord Malmsbury who argued against “the natural sentiments which civilization prompts,” but even by John Stuart Mill who defended not public but still private executions against an “effeminacy in the general mind of the country.”97 For many, shame remained a powerful instrument of persuasion. Thomas Malthus would have liked to see English entitlements to poor relief abolished entirely, but accepted that they be made so demeaning and “discreditable” that only those “really in distress” would stoop so far.98 Women were more likely than men to need relief. But women were not supposed to flourish as individuals anyways; they were supposed to embed themselves in a domestic relationship to orchestrate better flourishing for the family and the larger society. Men tended to see women as auxiliaries for the exercise of male power: either instrumentally useful or an obstacle. The fiercer the competition between men, the more women were instrumentalized as auxiliaries. Duels were fought over women, not by women.99 And long after duels died off, male economies of prestige continued to instrumentalize women. At the turn of the twentieth century, Thorstein Veblen, a “great admirer of Hume” and theorist of social power par excellence, explained how male rivalries persisted

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as conspicuous consumption. Men no longer fought with weapons but now with goods, to display not “simply the successful, aggressive male” but the wealthy and powerful, the leisurely and discriminating male. He consumed wastefully because for consumption “to be reputable it must be wasteful.” The best exemplar of that wastefulness and conspicuousness was a leisured wife who devoted her days to making purely aesthetic choices – most of them appallingly bad in Veblen’s opinion. Wasting women’s energies upon domestic frivolities was the point of the modern, aestheticized exercise of power, understood as masculine rivalry.100 McGill economist Stephen Leacock, who studied with Veblen, popularized his theories in best-selling novels that portrayed women as utterly frivolous beings. In Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, elite Montreal women could, at best, aspire to enough wisdom to prefer the real pleasures of ice cream over the pseudo-profundities of poetry or oriental philosophy. (Leacock’s theory of the female mind was a derogation from that of McGill’s Victorian-era principal J.W. Dawson, who held that “great mental endowments and special genius” were “not limited by sex.”101 But in practice, Dawson exercised as much sexual segregation as he could, the better to preserve the social prestige of a McGill degree.) Men had a remarkably clear field to tell women who they were and what they deserved, without much danger of reply. They put it to political, economic, and sexual purposes and sometimes to all three at once, a point that can be made in reference to the perpetual threat of American conquest of Canada. To conquer was a masculine imposition of will over fortune, the “Fortuna” that Niccolò Machiavelli had famously likened to a woman. He advised daring young men that “if you want to stay on top of her you have to slap and thrust.”102 The binary of male and female was between an aggressive subject and a passive one that did not challenge male virtue but, rather, rose to meet it willingly. Conquest could turn resistance into consent, sexual violence into sexual consensus.103 The Burkes had argued in 1757 that North American conquest justified itself. Conquerors had a natural aptitude for conquest, and the conquered had a natural aptitude for concession and deference that could “palliate the guilt and horror of a conquest.”104 But such arguments were excruciating in British North America. Canadians and Americans used distinctive languages of conquest and sexual violence, reflecting distinctive political cultures. Americans, as would-be conquerors in North America, conflated sexual and military conquest and saw consent in them.105 Canadians, as the would-be conquered, saw things differently. Where Americans boldly seized what they wanted and put rape talk to those purposes to organize a popular and patriotic war, Canadians counselled restraint and muffled references to rape behind references to property. Master or be mastered was the stark American choice that Canadians sought to moderate and mitigate.

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American patriotism was based on the claim that you could choose your loyalties. Americans refused loyalty to the English crown in 1776 and in 1812 they renewed that claim in response to British press gangs claiming the right to impress anyone born British. After 1815 there would be no more such impressments: American citizens would choose their identity. But they also fought to choose the identities of others as well. The Revolutionary War saw them blast through British, Canadian, and Indigenous defences, and the War of 1812 saw them renew the attack in pursuit of continental supremacy and security. Americans had no clear legal, political, or constitutional claim to the continent, but if they could seize and hold it by force of arms, didn’t that make it legitimately theirs? They fomented war on British, Black, and Indigenous peoples, both internal and external enemies as well as those ambiguously in between. In 1812, Southern “war hawks” in Congress coveted Florida as well as western and northern expansion, led by two of the foremost champions of slavery, Henry Clay of Kentucky and John Calhoun of South Carolina. They confronted a powerful pan-Indian alliance, led by Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief, building upon an earlier pan-Indian movement led by Joseph Brant stymied by British withdrawal from occupied regions. But as Americans pushed westward, in 1808 Tecumseh came to Canada to shake hands with British officers and rally support from Indigenous nations there. He led first hundreds, then thousands of troops into some of the earliest battlefield victories against the Americans. But Tecumseh’s death at Moraviantown in 1813 created a leadership gap that the Indian Department officials perpetuated by intriguing against an adopted son of Joseph Brant, John Norton or Teyoninhokarawen, well understanding that the pan-Indian claims and their own interests were uncomfortably far apart.106 A new appeal to masculine bellicosity followed from the War of 1812. Tracts advised men to be more manly and women to be more womanly. William Galperin notes that such tracts prompted a new novel by Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, that began to reckon with history: the national crisis, the dimming prospects for women, and the insubstantiality and insincerity of a domestic life more obviously parasitical upon public events, more like a play. Men long to act in ways that complicate women’s work of discerning their character.107 In North American war narratives, women figured as something to be fought over by men. Americans depicted women as the civilization that men fought for, against the nefarious designs lurking in the hearts of such enemies as Hessian mercenaries, Canadians, Catholics, Britons, and Black and Indigenous men.108 People with mixed ancestry were some of the greatest fictionalizers of unitary American identity.109 Such warfare against so many made women everywhere seem susceptible to retaliatory violence. Articles, pamphlets, and novels warned that “Indians” waged war on women and children;110 that Black men, free or enslaved, threatened white womanhood;111

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that Catholic priests threatened Protestant womanhood as they were said to do in Canada. The threat from foreign soldiers to American women circulated widely in the 1770s, as did images of Britain ravishing America.112 But already in the 1740s Franklin had warned Pennsylvanians against “the wanton and unbridled Rage, Rapine, and Lust” of “Negroes,” “Mulattos,” Indigenous peoples, the French, and Spanish privateers.113 During the lead-up to the War of 1812, Canadians had worried about “liberties that may be taken with the weaker and unprotected sex” by “unlicensed Banditti.”114 Americans and Canadians both claimed to fight for civilization but the Americans denounced the British for using Indigenous warriors. After the surrender of Detroit in 1812, President James Madison excoriated “ruthless ferocity” and torturing “known to spare neither age nor sex.”115 Accusations of barbarism intensified in the spring of 1813 when the British navy plundered and burned settlements along coastal Maryland, and Americans plundered and burned Niagara and York. Hardly a house escaped American predation, according to many witnesses.116 But the many accounts of the invasion are almost universally silent on the question of rape. Published accounts, private correspondence, petitions for compensation and damages, and patriotic addresses recounting sufferings fail to mention rape by Americans, though rape by a British soldier does figure.117 Historians conclude that the Americans displayed “generally correct behaviour” towards civilians in Canada.118 Meanwhile, American sources told a different tale of the British depredations. On 23 June 1813, British troops raided Hampton, Virginia where the “Canadian Chasseurs” (actually French deserters) murdered, looted, and reportedly raped five or seven women in isolated farmhouses.119 A cavalry captain named Cooper reported to the lieutenant governor of Virginia that women were being “ravished” and, pressed for details, he expanded graphically: “Mrs Turnbull was pursued up to her waist in the water, and dragged on shore by ten or twelve of these ruffians, who satiated their brutal desires upon her, after pulling of her clothes, stockings, shoes, &c. Another case – a married woman, her name unknown to me, with her infant child in her arms (the child forcibly dragged from her) shared the same fate. Two young women, well known to many, whose names will not be revealed at this time, suffered in like manner. Doctor Colton, Parson Holson, and Mrs. Hopkins have informed me of these particulars.” A letter to The Enquirer by “P” confirmed Cooper’s story by questioning one of the victims: “When I had convinced her of the object I had in view in visiting her – that it was dictated by no impertinent curiosity, but a desire to know the whole truth, to enable me, on the one hand, to do justice even to an enemy, or, on the other, to electrify my countrymen with the recital of her sufferings, she discovered every thing which her convulsive struggles between shame and a desire to expose her brutal assailants would

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permit.” She insisted that some of her attackers wore red and spoke correct English. “P” instanced some other rapes confirmed by Mrs Hopkins, of “young and respectable women who suffered.”120 Forty years later in 1853, when the Toronto-based Anglo-American Magazine debunked the claims of British rape at Hampton, an American account, Benson J. Lossing’s The Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812, insisted that Hampton’s women had been “abused in the most shameful manner, not only by the soldiers, but by the venal savage blacks, who were encouraged in their excesses.”121 The differences between American grievance and Canadian silence cannot be attributed to different standards of morality or shame. The account by “P” suggested that reported cases were the tip of the iceberg: “Women will not publish what they consider their own shame, and the men in town were carefully watched and guarded. But enough is known to induce the belief of the existence of many other cases.” Nor can the differences between Canadians and Americans be reduced to the presence versus the absence of rape. Even where rape did not occur, American propagandists described it as narrowly averted. After the Battle of New Orleans, which saw the city defended against British attack, a Republican politician named George Poindexter argued in a letter to the Mississippi Republican that the British password for the day of battle was “beauty and booty.” He continued: “Had victory declared on their side, the scenes of Havre de Grace, of Hampton, of Alexandria … would without doubt have been reacted at New Orleans, with all the unfeeling and brutal inhumanity of the savage foe with whom we are contending.” The British unequivocally denied any use of the phrase; Federalists denounced it as a Republican forgery; but, as Nicole Eustace argues, “the story of ‘Beauty and Booty’ soon spread across the country, inspiring pointed commentary wherever it spread. It seemed the tale was simply too good to let go.”122 Americans excoriated rape to provoke military ardour. In the spring of 1813, Americans needed an atrocity story to rouse martial ardour that tended to flag as their soldiers crossed the border into Canada. The correspondent to The Enquirer, “P,” addressed the “Men of Virginia! Will you permit all this? Fathers, and brothers, and husbands, will you fold your arms in apathy, and only curse your despoilers? No, you will fly with generous emulation to the unfurled standard of your country. You will learn to command; to obey; and, with ‘Hampton’ as your watch word – to conquer.”123 The eyewitness accounts, preserved in the American Congressional Record, put rape to work as reason of state. The bayonetting of unborn children was likewise trumpeted as a crime against American fertility. Canadian political culture had less use for rape narratives that did not conclude with moderation and equipoise. Racialized rape fantasies characterize John Richardson’s fictional character Wacousta, but the veneer of civilization prevailed.124 John Sunday, an Ojibwa chief, claimed in 1847 that no Indian had

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ever raped a white woman in Upper Canada.125 Rape became reason of state only later in Canada: in the 1860s, when John A. Macdonald justified capital punishment as protecting white women from Black men,126 and in the 1880s when specious rape stories justified violent repression at Battleford.127 But the Upper Canadian colonial elite were too conservative to encourage popular rape narratives. Newspaper editors who were not conservative tended to be American and to fill their papers with American content: they returned to the United States at the outbreak of the war and Upper Canadian press dipped considerably.128 The Montreal press, largely in the hands of Scottish immigrants, picked up some of the slack, especially the Montreal Herald, which provided much lively editorial content. One vitriolic series of letters criticizing British military mistakes earned the printer and the editor, Mungo Kay, charges of criminal libel in 1815. The Herald spoke frankly of rape occurring in Europe during the spring of 1814 and less frankly of outrages committed against women in Upper Canada. In January 1813, the Herald described how at the battle of Queenston Heights, “the Indians rescued and protected to their own homes, two helpless women, who had on that day unfortunately fallen into the hands of some ferocious savages, who then disgraced the situation of officers in the Amer. Army.” Another article instanced an American attack on the Delaware mission at Moraviantown, burned during the Battle of the Thames in October 1813: “The Americans killed two old Indians and a squaw – one of the men aged 85 years they ran a stake up his body, and planted him in the public road after scalping him. A poor woman on the same day underwent so much cruelty, that she was left on the spot for dead.” She was rescued and restored to her friends in Burlington, “a living witness of the barbarity practised by those who profess Christianity.”129 (This may be “an Indian sister, Eleonora, who was murdered below Fairfield,” according to one source, but Robert Gourlay’s Statistical Account of Upper Canada argues that no Moravian women were killed, distinguishing between “Sister Elonora, reported to be killed but afterwards seen alive,” and “one Chippewa woman killed and scalped.”130) But these were oblique hints and overshadowed by an emerging party line that denounced Americans primarily for their mistreatment of property, and of women and children only incidentally to that mistreatment of property. The plundering and razing, begun in York, intensified in December when Newark, capital of Niagara district, was burned, forcing hundreds of people into the bitter cold. Amidst mutual accusations of atrocity, a letter appeared in the Herald in the spring of 1815 as a response to Thomas Jefferson’s complaint that the British burning of Washington was an act of barbarism. Not so, according to the letter; this was justice. The British waged war “in most forbearing manner” while the Americans committed “atrocious acts of violence.” Claims of British atrocities were carefully scrutinized, including the

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“cruelties exercised at Hampton, Virginia.” Here, the correspondent admitted, “some depredations were committing by the Foreign troops,” but the men were provoked by seeing comrades “cruelly massacred” in the water as they fled two captured ships, and “before any material damage was done they were remanded on board.”131 The letter’s author, John Strachan, was the leading conservative ideologue of Upper Canada, as well as an investor in the Montreal Herald. He carefully and strategically erased sexual assault from Upper Canadian public memory of the War of 1812. Strachan was a Scottish-born clergyman and schoolteacher who moved from Cornwell to York in 1812 when named official clergyman to the colonial legislature. General Isaac Brock created the post in hopes of encouraging the legislature to vote for funds for the colony’s defence. Strachan’s inaugural sermon in August 1812 urged a restrained, Christian form of soldiering “neither animated against his enemy by hatred nor revenge.”132 When British officers abandoned York to American occupation in the spring and summer of 1813, Strachan stepped forward to negotiate the terms of surrender and protect the women and children. The episode catapulted his public career upwards. Strachan’s mission extended to the Loyal and Patriotic Society of Upper Canada, of which he was a founding officer in 1812, and under whose authority he signed his letter to Jefferson (also publishing it in the society’s final report). The society collected subscriptions to relieve suffering families, carefully recording their losses – sending such reports to the press under Strachan’s byline – and the sums dispersed. The society’s records speak of plunder, suffering, and loss of clothing; they occasionally refer to violence, as in the case of Samuel Glasgow of Niagara: “taken prisoner, farm pillaged during his absence and his wife, when she complained, treated with great brutality.” The Glasgows received twelve shillings tenpence. The records do not speak of rape. The reference to an absence of “material damage” in Hampton, Virginia, reflects a hard-headed calculus of material suffering alone. But Strachan had another, more personal context for such a reflection. Strachan’s wife Ann was at York during the first American occupation. To spare her, now pregnant, from such an ordeal again, he sent her to Cornwall late that autumn “for safety. It unfortunately happened that she reached Cornwall a few days before it was entered by the enemy and suffered on that occasion some loss of property but much more in her feelings for herself & children,” Strachan explained to the military authorities in early January 1814, begging leave to go to her. Historians argue that Ann Strachan was probably raped; certainly she was left “in such a state of emotional and physical collapse that her family and friends despaired of her life.”133 A letter by Strachan, written to the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, Francis Gore, reflected bitterly that “the war has now assumed a more terrific aspect

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since the system of burning commenced –  it was begun by the enemy at Niagara with circumstances of peculiar atrocity.” But Strachan tempered his bitterness, worried that a public letter might hurt “the cause which I am anxious to assist for I should have been compelled to censure many of the measures adopted during the two campaigns, but my pamphlet would have fully justified the ministry.” He desired to see better conduct of the war and a greater “military fire & vigour of decision,” but refrained from saying so publicly for fear that such a statement might not be “agreeable” to Gore.134 John Strachan loved his wife too much to turn her sufferings into fodder for his career or his country. Strachan’s sermon of Thanksgiving for the end of war, given in 1814, mentioned women only as relicts of fighting men, that is, as widows and orphans, joyfully relieved by Christian charity. He dwelled on the pleasures of a banal, unsensationalized patriarchy restored and reaffirmed, all tensions between governing and governed dissipated: “The people will denominate these their enemies, and not their friends, who busy themselves in exaggerating the faults of Rulers and Magistrates; nor will they longer hear with avidity the declamations of self-named Patriots, which serve no other purpose but that of degrading their superiors. Taught by severe experience, that these are the methods used by designing men to raise themselves into consequence, they will behold them with a just suspicion. A greater perfection in Governments will not be expected than is seen in the regulation of private families.”135 John Strachan understood that popular resentment threatened conservative, paternal rule. All governing classes had faults that might be translated into grievances, but such faults were outweighed by the pleasures, security, and dignity of British rule. The War of 1812 did make Strachan more responsive to the problem of managing public opinion – he came around to public schooling – but this was to be an opinion carefully shaped from the top down.136 He understood that any attempt to unleash a popular patriotism to match that of the Americans would irresistibly work its own process of Americanizing the population. Canadian conservatism was strategically less sensationalist and less public than American patriotism.137 American patriots revelled in the extraordinary new possibilities of print culture; Upper Canadian patriots feared its dangers. With the Revolution behind them and a whole continent stretched out before them, just beyond the British-held borderlands, American sovereignty rested in the willingness of American men to resort to violent seizure of what was not but could become theirs. For a John Strachan, by contrast, Canadian sovereignty could only be upheld so long as American men and American ways of thinking could be kept at bay by restraining popular outrage and agency.138 Rape talk was a useful exhortation to violence in the United States, but a more dangerous one for the conservative ideologues of Upper Canada who feared Americanization from without or within.

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Americanization from within was a real danger to the Upper Canadian establishment because the colony contained many recent American migrants of questionable loyalty, especially around Niagara. David Secord, who owned 600 acres around Niagara, was one of eighteen of the “most wealthy and influential” residents in the region who signed an address to coax the reluctant military authorities to impose martial law, on those grounds. Many others confirmed the disaffection towards Britain and towards local elites in Niagara, including General Brock and William Dummer Powell: “little reliance is to be had in the power of the well disposed to repress and keep down the turbulence of the disaffected who are very numerous.”139 Joseph Willcocks, an Irish-born, American sympathizer, who lived and published a newspaper in Niagara from 1807 to 1812, joined the American war effort in July 1813 while still a sitting member of the newly burnt provincial legislature, and urged the burning of Newark. To what extent was disaffection gendered? It’s possible to detect hints of a fear no less haunting than that of male political turbulence: female domestic turbulence. What, after all, was disaffection but affection seen from a different perspective – affection for American rule, American institutions, and, dare it be suggested, American manhood? A Scottish doctor who settled and practised in the Niagara peninsula after the war, John Howison, argued in 1821 that the American soldiers who invaded Canada “were entirely destitute of moral principle, or any sense of decency, and often exhibited a wanton and unblushing profligacy, which in Europe would have received chastisement from the law. A good deal of this was communicated to the peasantry of Upper Canada, and the influence of the infection is not yet entirely destroyed.”140 It is unclear what was spread to the Canadian “peasantry”: whether indecency or infection consequent on that indecency. But the inflammatory passage (which was excised from the second edition the next year) unmistakably suggests some sort of illicit congress on the part of Upper Canadians. So does a sermon given immediately after the war by Robert Addison, the Anglican minister in Niagara, who observed a great deal of the local suffering and had distributed relief on behalf of the Loyal and Patriotic Society. Addison urged relief for bereaved families so as to prevent men from descending to desperate means, and even to help “wretched, unhappy, misguided females, lost to virtue and respectability by the bribe of money to overcome monetary want, and in either case what is their inexpressibly miserable end – remorse and ignominy.”141 Again, American invasion apparently provoked sexual demoralization. A complaint of rape carried dangers for patriotic Upper Canadians. American men, confronted with a charge of rape, argued that consent had been given – that they had been seducers rather than rapists.142 A polemic around rape threatened to shame Upper Canadians and to bolster American

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arguments that their invasion met nominal refusal that would inevitably become enthusiastic consent. Americans imagined a feminine Canada “panting” for American possession: “When will the bleak and boreal, icy and frosty, and brumal regions of cold Canada come into our impatient paws, prepared, and as it were panting for possession? When will northern Columbia, septentrional Fredonia, freed from the fangs of the British Lion, escape ‘with dewy fingers’ frozen, to the warm embrace, the congenial copulation of a more callid clime?”143 Such language came naturally to American pundits and terrorized Canadian ones, casting them into the role of a helpless, twittering female, unable to speak in consequential ways, unable to treat fortune boldly, as bold men treated women. There lay the Canadian dilemma during the colonial period. How to reconcile a discourse of civilization that rested on soft power with the recognition that soft power could not stop violent compulsion where a real imbalance of power existed, as it did between women and men and Canada and the United States? English politicians pretended that they ruled by soft rather than hard power but colonial rule debunked that claim. In 1839, when William Gladstone argued that Britain ruled India by consent, historian T.B. Macaulay corrected him: “It is by coercion, it is by the sword, and not by free stipulation with the governed, that England rules India.”144 Macaulay argued that England must be ruled only by opinion but that uncivilized colonies required more coercion. Canadians were torn between Gladstone’s and Macaulay’s readings of authority. If Britain did not protect Canada, the colony must bend to rough conquest. But if Canada was a garrison, it already bent to rough conquest. Of course, these were theoretical poles; reality was more complicated. The diverse peoples living in Canada together resisted and repelled American conquest, including British soldiers, anglophone and francophone settlers, and Indigenous warriors, all of them crucial participants in decisive battles. A military record enhanced the prestige of some rising families, such as the Tachés of Kamouraska, according to Jean-René Thuot, while securing crucial patronage for others.145 The War and Colonial Office rewarded Indigenous as well as Eurowestern men with office, and the Indian Department bore the stamp of those debts for three decades.146 The War of 1812 was in many respects a victory for soft power in colonial Canada. But was it possible to flourish in North America by that soft power, or was the American model the only one bound to succeed? Hume or Machiavelli? How to make the balance of power apply in North America without multiple great-nation partners? Britain might still be a balance amongst nations if it counted Indigenous nations, but the ignominious ending of the War of 1812 saw Britain repudiate those diplomatic relationships as tending to unite settler communities against them to become a

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belligerent American universalizing power. Without a realistic threat of war, Britain could not stop the Americans from preying on smaller nations any more than it could stop the great European nations from preying on small European states. Americans were setting new standards for national political ambition and capacity. They were not just more powerful than Canada, they also governed their domestic populations with violence that the British tended to reserve for colonies. Canada’s mixed population looked dangerously unsubjugated by American standards, and likely to reduce Canada’s willful purposiveness. Too much civilization was feminizing, too much feminism was decivilizing. Did a Canada that embraced social and ethnic métissage make itself vulnerable to American domination? Precisely because the threats to an independent Canadian volition were so great, manly Canadians must assert themselves. The half century after the War of 1812 would see a concerted political effort to remodel political agency in Canada, with a distinct strain of Anglo-American apologetics for the concentration of formal and informal power in propertied white men. Civilization could only be a convention against violence amongst people and nations in a position to choose, as Thucydides’s Athenians had been and his Melians had not. Domestic and imperial civilization paralleled one another. And just as marriage laws handed over women’s properties and consent to their male masters, so the “right” reading of civilization handed men the property and bodies of feminized races. This was a generalized dispossession project uniting the interests of the most empowered men in the Old World and the New. The nineteenth century saw the attack on women’s agency grow as a calculated effort of identity politics across the public and private spheres. Hume’s socially and sexually promiscuous public would be carefully disentangled. Indeed, his secularizing project had made women’s moralizing work all the more crucial. Women mediated between the sermons preached in the church and the menfolk who often preferred to congregate outside, drinking and gaming.147 British North American men and women insisted that women’s civilizing agency be moral and private. In 1833, the Montreal Gazette quoted the English poet Felicia Hemans on the proper boundaries of women’s speech: “She can never, with consistency, appear in the forum or the pulpit – in the senate or at the polls – still, without disparagement of her sexual character, or infringement upon those hallowed feelings which the delicacy and loveliness of her nature have cast around her, she may devote her leisure to the pallet and the pen, and send forth the emanations of her soul, to enlighten and to bless.”148 In 1841, Congregationalist minister James Ambler in New Brunswick greeted the birth of a royal princess by advising “woman” to elevate men with their pure minds, kind hearts, and wise counsels and without complaining that she was “confined to the more domestic walks of life; here is the place, the theatre, where her greatness and worth

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are known and felt.”149 In 1853, the Toronto Leader denounced women who spoke in public – the “whole tribe of unwomanly women who disgrace themselves, their progenitors, and associates” – as causing and embodying modern folly and wickedness.150 These were norms, not laws, and many women breached them, as Hemans did when she left her husband to pursue a career. She also wrote such historical poems as “The Meeting of Bruce and Wallace on the Banks of the Carron.” But at a time when history slowly gravitated away from literature, women’s writing remained more in debt to Walter Scott’s romantic novels than to masculine political history. Like Scott, Hemans was a conservative, romantic writer, more invested in the moral than the political side of the “lost cause.” Scott’s 1816 novel The Antiquary showed both chivalric history and dry, scientific history severed from contemporary relevance.151 Hume and Burke had repudiated a constitution that existed “in rotten parchments under dripping and perishing walls,” and T.B. Macaulay defended reform in 1832 by exclaiming: “Sir, we are legislators not antiquaries.”152 Burke (whom Catharine Macaulay mocked as an antiquarian) aggressively heterosexualized his historical subjects and made the stadial model of history a gendered dichotomy of right reason and feeling. Praise for “manly” statesmen became ubiquitous in all sorts of authoritative histories and textbooks. And when historians began to head off to work in history departments, “historical novelists and Romantic historians found themselves staying at home with the boys.”153 Anna Jameson, an Irish-born writer who toured Canada in 1836, shows us how a liberal feminist reasoned across the sexual, racial, and imperial divides. She joined her husband, Robert Jameson, named to the Court of Chancery in Upper Canada, as a late and failed attempt at reconciliation between an unhappily married couple. Anna Jameson had previously supported herself as a writer and, after eight months in Canada, returned to her English career. Among her monographs was a study of Canada, a study of Shakespeare’s heroines, and a study of Celebrated Female Sovereigns heavily indebted to Hume.154 Jameson’s account of Canada, published in 1838, showed cosmopolitan refinement put to pluralist purposes. Indigenous people varied amongst themselves, she argued, like Europeans. “There may be a general equality of rank among the Indians; but there is evidently all that inequality of condition which difference of character and intellect might naturally produce; there were rich wigwams and poor wigwams; whole families ragged, meagre, and squalid, and others gay with dress and ornaments, fat and well-favoured.” Jameson especially admired the “neat and commodious” wigwam of one woman who had abjured male companionship. She thought mobile, open-aired wigwams healthier than the houses they were being urged to settle down in: “I never heard of any attempt to

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make them stationary and congregate in houses, that has not been followed by disease and mortality, particularly among the children; a natural result of close air, confinement, heat, and filth.”155 Jameson believed civilization necessary but also difficult to accomplish: “In our endeavours to civilise the Indians, we have not only to convince the mind and change the habits, but to overcome a certain physical organisation to which labour and constraint and confinement appear to be fatal.” She was not an unambiguous ally, even if a consistently anti-imperial one: “Poor Ireland! The worst Indian wigwam is not worse than some of her dwellings.”156 She despised chivalry and demanded education for women to enable them to earn their living. She repudiated a sexual double standard, insisting that women must bear the price of their infidelities, but she also attacked the instrumentalization of sexual morality: “If the chastity of women be a virtue, and respectable in the eyes of the community for its own sake, well and good; if it be a mere matter of expediency, and valuable only as it affects property, guarded by men just as far as it concerns their honour – as far as regards ours, a jest, – if this be the masculine creed of right and wrong – the fiat promulgated by our lords and masters, then I should reply that there is no woman, worthy the name, whose cheek does not burn in shame and indignation at the thought.”157 Jameson saw the language of dirt and degradation, smut and slut, put to imperial and predatory purposes, but still saw European but not Indigenous women as self-governing and self-civilizing. Some male readers welcomed or tolerated or patronized women writers but others excoriated them. Allan Greer identifies openly sexist bullying in a rhetorical attack on Queen Victoria by a radical merchant, in Contrecoeur, Lower Canada, who resented her coronation in 1837: “It is painful to have to sing the Te Deum for the damn queen, damned whore with her legs in the air.”158 Whore, Nancy Christie notes, was the all-purpose insult against women.159 Respectable women became “whores” when they breached propriety. Calling a woman “whore” made it easier to prey upon them for labour, property, or sex. Powerful men wanted security not just for what they had, but also, like Franklin, for what they wanted. They wanted immediate security for the taking of possessions that, Hume argued, could only come through long ownership. The more that men won freedoms to exercise their will, the more they insulated that will against upstarts who might challenge their claims. The “age of reform” was an age of female disenfranchisement and silencing. Liberal reformers often trampled women’s rights and possessions to get power. Poor, marginal, and racialized women were particularly vulnerable. Before the 1830s, some British, Canadian, and Indigenous women could and did vote. Elaine Chalus surveys a number of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century examples, as well as examples of campaign speeches actually

2.2 | The frontispiece for Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, first edition, published in New York in 1852, foregrounds a woman alongside two men and a rough-hewn cabin. The verse asserts that from pain and experience come property. Courtesy of W.D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections Library, Queen’s University.

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aimed at women voters. But increasingly they appointed men to vote in their stead. Then the Reform Act of 1832 wrote women out of formal electoral registration, though women still engaged in much semi-public political activity.160 As well, their political demands were increasingly framed in reference to the feminine mission of uplift, whether against slavery or sati in India or corn law repeal. They could not easily advocate for their own material interests as women; women weren’t supposed to be governed by material interest. And the more violent the confrontations, the less hospitable they were to women. Historians chart a widespread “women’s withdrawal from politics after the mid-1840s.”161 So, too, across British North America, one colony after another disenfranchised women. In Lower Canada, where women could and did vote, historians see an aggressive and concerted campaign to push women into the private sphere.162 Bettina Bradbury describes an imperial “civilization” aimed at abolishing dowry and separate property regimes that “left most married women in all the colonies without any claim on their husband’s properties and hence dependent on men’s wills.”163 And wherever women banded together in associations, as Carmen Nielson shows with a study of the Hamilton orphan asylum, their choices were policed to prevent them from acting independently.164 According to Robert Sweeny, in Montreal the political silencing and spatial segregation of women coincided with a massive transfer in the value of property from men to women.165 The kinds of goods typically held by women declined in value while those typically held by men, especially land, increased dramatically. The masculinization and the increase in value occurred together as a twofold process. Property in land was torn out of social relationships for easier exchange on the marketplace. The more visibly secure and masculine the property, the more valuable it was. Women’s property tenure in such historic forms as dowry was negated for market purposes. Women could only protect their property in the courts, where attorneys had become a sine qua non, the profession generally not open to women in the nineteenth century. Time and again men paid to represent women sheared them.166 Women everywhere were dispossessed but Indigenous women especially so. Land held in matrilineal communities was doubly vulnerable. At Brantford, for example, widow Ester Hill leased her land to a white man, John Wilkes, initially in 1823 for twenty-one years, subsequently converted to a 999-year lease in 1826. In 1829 when the town was laid out and the land’s value soared, Wilkes simply stopped paying rent, “thereby impoverishing the Hill family.” Superintendent of Indian Affairs Samuel Peters Jarvis found the case troubling, but, Sidney Harring notes, for the Indian Department “the critical issue was not title but whether a squatter was productively farming the land.”167 A white man who married into an Indigenous community had no legal claims upon his wife’s property but skullduggery could enable him to alienate and

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commodify it. Research by Michael Borsk shows one Ebenezer Allen doing exactly that in the 1790s, first in New York, and again in Upper Canada. Allen married into a Seneca community and then demanded his wife’s and daughters’ claims to land lost by their marrying out. He promised the land would not be alienated but promptly alienated it, all the while notoriously brutalizing the women themselves.168 Similar skullduggery prompted grievances and lawsuits across the Canadas. At Kahnawá:ke, Charles De Lorimier, who married two Kahnawa’kehró:non women (serially), accumulated cattle, wood, and land – 107 acres by 1801, prompting attempts to evict him.169 Likewise, in 1809, the band council at the Six Nations Reserve on the Grand River recorded that John Dochesteder and John Huff, two white men who had married into the community, had illegally sold land given them for the use of their children, the former also having used a fraudulent land survey to extend the tract given him.170 Others did not even bother with fraud; they simply took. Such “plunder” was predictable enough to provoke petitions asking that colonial authorities strip women who “married out” of their Indian status.171 A law so passed in 1850 was not reversed until 1985, notwithstanding its brutally impoverishing effect on those women and their children.172 Indigenous women, especially at Lorette and Kahnawá:ke, according to Daniel Carpenter, “signed separate petitions earlier and more frequently than White women, and Indigenous women’s practice of signing memorials alongside men was quite rare among White North Americans until the 1830s.” Women at Lorette submitted five petitions between 1823 and 1850: “Their grievances were real, so too their radicalism.”173 Colonial authorities chose the most conservative mechanism for redressing the grievances, the one least conducing to women’s agency. They silenced women, enriched men, and masculinized the public sphere. Emigrant guides and travellers’ tales reinforced the degrading identities ascribed to Indigenous women, as they peered into Indigenous households more freely than white households, and described what they saw as dirt and dysfunction. Aspirant women writers like Jameson could claim expertise in such matters. The Strickland sisters, Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill, drew very different conclusions: while Moodie denigrated Indigenous women and their homes, Parr Traill praised them, just as when the two strolled together, one tottered in high heels and the other treaded sure-footed in moccasins.174 Amidst much mention of “swarthy” neighbours, both women took an ostentatiously un-American line: Moodie insisting on racial unity and equality before God, and Traill insisting on the modesty and refinement of two Chippewa teenagers.175 But both did the work of dispossession. The privatization and dispossession in colonial Canada reflected wider processes: globally, men still own over 80 per cent of arable land.176 In early nineteenth-century Britain, the most valuable property was concentrating in men’s hands, while women’s traditional protections and supports were

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being dismantled. Poor law reform in 1834 reflected concerns dating back to Malthus that English poor relief was higher than in any other European country. But the poverty problem was a sex problem: too many poor people were breeding too much. You couldn’t really blame the men for that excess sex, it was argued, because it was natural for men to pursue it. Malthus thought the uncivilized races particularly liable to uncontrolled breeding and in need of forcible restraint.177 Women were the civilizing agency and they must be the ones to restrict sex, with state coercions or incentives if need be. In 1834, “for the first time in English history, single women were made legally and economically responsible for their illegitimate children.”178 And John Stuart Mill was among the many liberals who supported the new law as imposing civilizing sexual disciplines.179 The decline of bastardy cases worked to shift costs from putative fathers to local authorities, and now local authorities shifted them to the women concerned. The law treated the poor in cruel and degrading ways, to encourage greater discipline regarding work and sex. Widespread revulsion at the many cruelties of the new poor law provoked debate. In the Quarterly Review, an assistant poor law commissioner in Kent, Francis Bond Head, defended the workhouse disciplines. Local vestries urged: “Gentlemen, as Britons, let us be liberal; as Englishmen, let us be profuse. Shall it be otherwise?” But generous allotments of meat days corrupted the public. They prompted labouring sons to relinquish their mothers to better care than they could provide, and unwed mothers to hand over their children likewise; they enabled too liberal an access to the sexual services of wives that a pauper must voluntarily relinquish. Women must learn to say no both in and out of wedlock. To give a seduced woman a “second chance ” was unnatural, a breach of nature’s law. Consider the matter, Bond Head argued, like a business transaction. If women won rewards for protecting their “female virtue,” should they not also be “the sole sufferer for its loss? Could any better arrangement be invented?” To make women’s honour “the joint-stock property of the sexes” must hasten bankruptcy. Bond Head admitted men and women were rivals for her “treasure”: “Universally adored as woman is, yet it is an anomalous fact which no one can deny, that in every climate under the sun man appears as her open, avowed enemy – and strange as it may sound, the more he admires the treasure she possesses, the more anxious he is to deprive her of it.” The “arrangement” that let women be governed by their enemies might be “incomprehensible to us,” but happily “we” could rest assured that it was both benevolent and just.180 The new poor law pushed the rivalry out of the public and into the working-class household.181 Women who made bad choices must bear the resultant poverty and violence, so that the state need

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not. The poor law individualized poverty and its social costs and placed the greater burden on women. Economic law and biological sex made such things mere misfortune, not injustice.182 The civilizational stakes were generally even higher in colonies where female promiscuity threatened miscegenation, seen as economic and racial decline.183 Describing women’s “treasure” as their “virtue” conflated interest and ethics. Men could treat women’s “virtue” as a material interest, but respectable women must see not material interest, only questions of virtue and shame. The separation of spheres encompassed spheres of opinion, with real consequences for the politics of value. Women had a special capacity for determining moral value and men for material value. They had to be insulated from one another, so that an “impartial” colonial or female spectator could not impair material value. But the public opinion to which Rousseau handed women was becoming a credit economy jealous of other kinds of value claims, including custom. Bond Head aggressively targeted anything – family love, sympathy for the poor, bastardy provisions, foundling hospitals – that might thwart the workings of a material-minded opinion and, worse yet, trick “very honest men” into a marriage with tainted female goods.184 And material value, unlike moral value, turned Lockean visions of projected wealth into a kind of ownership of that wealth, in the family as on the frontier. Shame transferred the social costs of illicit sexuality and rape to women and made them suffer in poverty and silence. For Caroline Norton, whose husband beat her, vilified her, and kept her from her children, “Property, not morality, [is] the thing held sacred.” From the 1830s to the 1850s she wrote pamphlets to demand access to her children, reform of the custody laws, and reform of the divorce laws. British justice should not lend to such angry and mortified men so much “despotic power .”185 Anna Jameson, who was friends with Francis Bond Head, argued that women should be “the sole responsible guardians of our own honour and chastity.”186 She criticized Upper Canada’s Seduction Act of 1837 for transferring the costs of illegitimate children to putative fathers.187 Upper Canada had no poor law provision, so the state did not need the same legal protections against improvidence. But in Canada, too, the big picture is an increasing separate spheres morality that left women economically and sexually unprotected. It also left Indigenous women particularly vulnerable, sphereless except on an assimilation model. If their society was not progressive, they must be to blame for it, as well as for degrading the white men who consorted with them.188 The language was horrifically dehumanizing: they were “travelling harlots” and “carrion birds” who turned white men into diseased slaves, according to one representative article in a British Columbia newspaper.189 Segregation on

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reserves became one solution to cross-racial promiscuity, sometimes on the presumption that women off reserve must be prostitutes.190 Residential schools became the solution to their supposedly pernicious maternal influence.191 White men claimed to be more enlightened, rational, and purposive than everyone else, providentially suited to govern them all, with any deviation from their model understood as social, personal, and political pathology. “Civilization” was put to attacking precisely those qualities that cosmopolitan Europeans had admired as accomplishing social orchestration without the prolix gruesomeness of the bloody code. Hume’s point was not unlike that of Georges Canguilhem two centuries later: diversity that does not kill is not pathology.192 Michel Foucault, Canguilhem’s student, carried the analysis into the emerging administrative state’s governance of medicine, madness, punishment, and sexuality. In fact, communities on both sides of the contact zone saw difference as error, dysfunction, and dirt. Anthropologist Mary Douglas famously argued that dirt was “matter out of place.”193 Where norms and mores differed, accusations of filthiness proliferated, with women writers at the forefront of the complaint.194 If they did see a tidy “wigwam” it was usually as dramatic foreboding, with a later visit blaming dirt and disorder on the demon drink.195 But Douglas’s observation worked both ways. Indigenous observers of settler households also saw dirt and disorder. In the early 1840s, Chief Kimewon of St Raisin told Superintendent Anderson: “your cooking is not clean, your kettles are all dirty, and everything about your houses is unclean.” When Anderson laughed at such an outrageous claim, Kimewon continued: “but do not your women wash your kettles at all times, do not they cook at all times, do not they stay in the same house and even sleep in the same bed at all times, and is not this sufficient to make any cleanly Indian’s stomach ache? we always turn our women out of doors at certain times.”196 Accusations of dirt were always a cultural reflection on how people mismanaged or mismattered their environment.197 Alexis de Tocqueville seized upon the genre in his tour of North America in 1831. Mandated to study the prisons, he saw prison-like mechanisms of popular opinion throughout the country. John Patrick Diggins argues that Tocqueville sought ethics “in the study of social relations, not in how people looked up to church and state but in how they gazed upon one another,” in a state largely designed for that purpose because heavily influenced by Hume’s theories of opinion.198 Americans had freed themselves from ancien regime forms of domination only to bind themselves to new ones. Tocqueville read larger social processes into households. In northern Michigan, still scarcely more than an outpost, the English settler transported into the wilderness “his laws, his habits, his customs and, if he can, even the niceties of advanced civilization,” while on the other side of the stream, lying on a blanket in a smoky hut, “the Indian regards with scorn the comfortable dwelling of

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the European,” preferring his “barbarian independence” to “useless riches.” Perched uncertainly between savagery and civilization were the remnants of French settlers: the almost-indigenized French hunter easily mistaken for an Indian, living in a “cabin of boughs,” and the “Métis” living in a “rustic cabin, more comfortable than the wigwam of the savage, more rude than the house of the civilized man.” But here was no viable middle ground: Tocqueville’s Métis was torn between freedom and civilization: “Not knowing how to guide himself by the doubtful light which illumines him, his soul struggles painfully in the web of universal doubt … and he reaches the end of his career without having been able to untangle the obscure problem of his existence.”199 People either died out or fell in with a peculiarly uniform American civilization. But Tocqueville’s reasoning from Métis households is utterly unconvincing. In one, he described an Indigenous woman, dressed in French peasant style albeit with loose hair and feet, seated on a mat, simultaneously sewing moccasins and rocking a child “whose copper skin and features proclaimed its double origin.” This was a well-ordered domestic space. The most specious readings of Indigenous women were always the most likely to be taken up, while the many ways in which kinship, market exchange, and cultural influences connected Indigenous, Métis, and European women on a mobile and heterogeneous frontier simply disappeared from such histories.200 How to prove that Indigenous women were both civilized and civilizing? That challenge was gamely taken up by Kahkewaˉquonaˉby or Peter Jones, an Ojibwe chief with a European father and Anishinaabe mother, determined to prove that Indigenous men and women were fully civilized according to European and Indigenous standards. He welcomed the Bible, the plough, and sobriety (he was almost killed as a child by drunken neglect), but he also understood that civilization was a performance art, and that women, too, must be seen to perform it. In 1830, Jones made a series of surprise visits to private households to assess and record their state of cleanliness. On a visit to Grape Island in 1830, he recorded: “Joseph Skunk’s. – Floor clean – cupboard poor – table good but dusty – beds tolerably good. A woman was making light bread like a white woman. James Indians. – Floor rather dirty – one curtain bed – cupboard poor – one woman making light bread.” Several pages describe women at work: sewing, making brooms, making baskets, boiling pumpkins, splitting spruce roots to fasten birch canoes; only very occasionally was one described as idle. According to Jones, “The object of my going around and making remarks, was to stir the Indian sisters in cleanliness and in industry,” and to prove that Indigenous women were as much “improved in the arts of civilized life” as the men.201 But he never really convinced himself. Jones became an early, influential advocate of residential schools to remove Indigenous children from demoralizing

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environments. They may have seemed like boarding schools, able to create strong and politically consequential social bonds. Jones wanted those residential schools to be under Indigenous control, the better to preserve Indigenous culture from such alcoholism and the decline of deference to elders. But it was still a vote of non-confidence in Indigenous women that more confirmed than debunked the attacks on them. The greater the imbalance of power between women and men, the greater the likelihood of routine abuse and violence, including sexual violence. We don’t know how often men beat and abused women but historians agree that known and litigated cases were the tip of an iceberg. Complaints of rape that did get before juries were often treated as gladiatorial combat between men and women, or as spectator sport for the public. The politics of respectability were at their sharpest point in a rape trial, because men could get all charges dismissed if they could show their accusers were degraded: intrinsically unreliable witnesses with no honour to protect. It followed that anyone who could be described as degraded, especially a poor and racialized woman, was particularly easy to rape with impunity. Some rape trials in the 1850s show that dynamic in play. Ellen Rogers, a French-Canadian woman abandoned by her husband and living in Toronto, made do, as many did, by selling sex. Did that give local youths the right to gang rape her in her own home? It did and it didn’t. The presiding judge, Henry Eccles, remarked that, while Rogers was protected from rape by the law, her testimony could command no confidence, especially in a case involving respectable young men and a death penalty: “I would urge that although she was entitled to the protection of the law, she was not entitled to credit, and no jury would convict upon the bare statement and assertions of a woman who, while telling her story, admitted that she was of the lowest grade of character … Any man is liable to be prosecuted at any time by women of this character. They might come forward whenever they pleased, and say that they had been violated. And where was the protection in such an event? Nothing but the security of the jury.” The jury quickly found the young men not guilty, a verdict greeted with cheers.202 Public opinion not being “security” enough, judges often reinforced it with instructions against conviction.203 Women were “not entitled to credit” in what was effectively a credit economy of law that privileged reputation. For men, security of property, of self, and of reputation all stood or fell together. And many men wanted that security, however badly they behaved. They pushed their demands and found some arguments more convincing than others. Sometimes the model stretched to encompass Black suspects.204 Military networks worked to protect many men from such accusations; forensic science would bear much of the later burden, as the place where professional men claimed objective authority, denounced women’s subjective accounts, and perpetuated the old argument

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that male sexual domination and female submission were natural. Such claims imbued medical writings in 1820s Quebec and psychiatric writings in Toronto in the 1950s and 1960s.205 Where men can speak unchallenged, they read consent into rape.206 Credit was the model for trust and men benefitted by refusing to extend it to women. The benefits were commercial as well as sexual and political. Ellen Rogers had scant and degrading choices because men trusted and credited one another in ways that tended to concentrate both power and wealth in their hands. If the work of governing was really done in the realm of opinion and commercial sociability, then to deny women credit made it easier and cheaper to exploit and abuse them and wrote them out of the speculative gains to be made from the gendered credit economy. Womenheld property was more likely to be the stuff of pawnshops than rising land values. Women investors could benefit alongside men in theory, but in practice, they tended to be shunted to the less secure and lucrative investments or be defrauded.207 Another rape trial around the same time as Rogers, in Victoria, shows that race was also grounds for denying women credit in the courts. The Daily Colonist reported that a policeman, Joseph W. Carey, was accused of attempted rape by Kat-e-kah, a “squaw” married to a Hawaiian man or Kanaka. Carey arrested the husband for selling liquor, then returned and told two women in the house to leave, as well as another looking through a broken window, at whom he waved a stick. He then promised to release Kat-e-kah’s husband in return for sex, and pushed her down. “I resisted all I could; I did not cry out.” Formal complaint was lodged by two other Kanaka men. Each side produced witnesses, but they were not viewed as equally credible. Attorney General G.H. Cary asked the jury: “do you believe the simple evidence of the three Indian women? If you do, you must find a verdict of guilty. The whole case hinges on their evidence.” The jury returned a verdict of not guilty “without leaving their seats. The spectators, of which there was a large number present, fairly shook the building with their applause, and many pressed forward and congratulated Carey,”208 who later became mayor of Victoria. Trials around men and women’s sexual choices were openly politicized in ways that made for large audiences – crowds in the courtrooms, large newspaper-reading publics – as performances of accountability to a rowdy, masculine public opinion. Rape charges in the Eastern Townships in the 1850s often pitted class and ethnicity against one another and stoked popular outrage that found expression in petitions or rough violence, much like election brawls or religious riots. Historian Jack Little sees a “legal arm of the state that was responding to public opinion in such cases, not vice versa.”209 Similarly, in Upper Canada in 1826, the justification for tarring

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and feathering George Rolph, a clerk of the peace and brother to a reformers, was the presence in his house of a married woman with whom he was rumoured to be having an affair. Charivaris were rarely directed against women, but in 1841 when a crowd demonstrating against a mixed marriage in Cobourg refused the Black groom’s offer of a payoff, his bride was gang raped. The Cobourg Star attacked the mob as “yclep’d anti-abolitionists” and claimed that the “whole community” abhorred the foul deed. But three months later a Cobourg crowd reacted to rumours of another mixed marriage by murdering the first Black man they came across.210 Isolated instances of extreme violence shored up less visible violent intimidation that policed racial and sexual identities and ambitions across colonial British North America. Irregular marriage and miscegenation worried Canadian crowds and Malthusians at least as much as the sex life of paupers. They fought for narrowly orthodox church marriage and demanded everyone else conform. Reformers pushed through a more impartial law in 1829, but accused the governor, John Colborne, who opposed the bill, of delaying its approval purposely to demonstrate “that the Executive of a Colonial Government was not depending upon the people, but could, whenever it choosed to do so, resist their wishes and interests.”211 This was Douglas Hay’s political discretion in capital punishment made more banal and intrusive, rendering many people insecure in their social and property relations. There was always some room for legal autonomy, for a compelling Pamela-like story. The 1867 case of Connolly v Woolrich must have seemed like a slam dunk for settler colonialism. The case pitted a first Indigenous wife and family against a second Eurowestern one. The first family insisted on its legitimacy, notwithstanding the lack of Church rites, and the judge agreed with them. The case caused shockwaves.212 It showed the need for better protections for Eurowestern property and relations, which soon followed. In 1869, Ontario courts rejected a claim of marriage between John Robb of Kingston, who had been married to Supul-Catle, the daughter of a K’ómoks chief, in a ceremony marked by feasts and presents. Robb claimed he was legally married but his heirs contested the claim. Judge Thomas Robertson ruled that a pagan marriage, done in the vicinity of Eurowestern institutions, was not valid, but that there might have been a real marriage after all, given the proximity of magistrates and clergy.213 He gave judges the discretion to recognize any marriage they liked, while rejecting Indigenous marriages as binding. But a more general protection for Eurowestern property came in the 1888 St Catharine’s Milling case, resolved in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which determined that no such thing as Indigenous law existed at all. The Enlightenment observation of collective Indigenous agency was invisibilized by Victorian-era law, philosophy, political economy, and history.

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If Indigenous people had no law, they could have no marriage. Ugly insinuations of illegitimacy trailed behind prominent frontier couples, including William Johnson and Molly Brant (aka “Brown Lady Johnson”214), and Donald Smith, Lord Strathcona and Isabella Hardisty. Kanyen’kehà:ka writer Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake, was outraged by such reasoning and rebuffed it in a short story published in 1893, “A Red Girl’s Reasoning.” A happily married white man, suddenly seeing his Indigenous wife through the eyes of acquaintances, decides she must be illegitimate because her parents had not married in a church. Her angry response: “Law? My people have no priest, and my nation cringes not to law. Our priest is purity, and our law is honor.” If her husband could declare her people’s laws illegal, she could do likewise: “I tell you we are not married. Why should I recognize the rites of your nation when you do not acknowledge the rites of mine.” She flings off her wedding ring and leaves him.215 We see an Indigenous woman shrugging off Eurowestern laws. A law that did not recognize the traditional sexual choices of an Indigenous woman was illegitimate. The most important truths were forged between men and women in defiance of legal trumpery and shallow opinion. Johnson’s story was written at a time when the federal Department of Indian Affairs was striving to regularize Indigenous relations and property on Eurowestern models; to make marriage exclusively monogamous and permanent. It attacked not just what Canadian politicians described as “lax notions … with regard to the relations between the sexes,” but also the kinship networks that sustained Indigenous politics and law. It used a language of protection to dismantle older protections, as had occurred in colonial Canada.216 The colonial legislators began to introduce new forms of protection for women’s property, including equity laws and married women’s property laws, realizing that they had left women and children too unprotected from male violence, abandonment, and predation.217 But Indigenous women remained uniquely unprotected. Amongst the Secwépemc in British Columbia, Ronald and Marian Ignace argue that from the 1860s, intermarriage became an effective mechanism of dispossession. Lands were preempted by “white sons-in-law, some of whom subsequently separated from their Secwépemc wives and then sold the land that their Secwépemc in-laws had trusted them to look after for the benefit, in the Secwépemc custom, of their wives and children.” In the early twentieth century, one Secwépemc grandmother advised her grandchild that when the time came for marriage: “Don’t ever wish to be with a white man, no! They will make you a slave! When the master is through with his slave, he will throw you away. It will be like that. Like a worn out shoe that you throw away. That is what he will do to you.”218 White women observed the same thing. Francis Herring, who emigrated from England Canada in 1874 at the age of twenty-three,

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wrote a novel in 1904, In the Pathless West, that described two Indigenous women who were beaten and raped on refusing the advances of white men. She too saw “young women who had been taken from their tribes, and supposed they were the proud possessors of white husbands, only to find themselves ruthlessly put aside when occasion or fancy dictated the dastardly action.”219 But, Eurowestern men insisted, Indigenous treatment of women was worse. According to John Macoun, field naturalist with the Geological Survey of Canada, writing in 1882: “All Indian women are slaves, and they know it and act accordingly. The will of the man is supreme, and no woman ever thinks of opposing him in the slightest. Men, as a rule, take as many wives as they can feed, and too often, when they are tired of them, ‘throw them off.’ This is the universal custom, and is practised from Lake Superior to the Pacific.”220 Arguably, no women were ever freer in Canada than Lahontan’s Wendat interlocutor and none ever more “enslaved” than her counterparts in the centuries to come: made exceptionally vulnerable to exploitation, violence, theft, rape, and murder. Violence that is so targeted and predictable becomes “socially sanctioned.”221 Amnesty International blamed the “heightened” violence against Indigenous women on an “expectation that societal indifference to the welfare and safety of Indigenous women will allow the perpetrators to escape justice.”222 But was such violence a “public injury” in breach of Hume’s Magna Carta? Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, a professed enemy of “sociology,” saw no general problem of missing and murdered Indigenous women but only individual instances of crime that were not, he remarked in 2014, “high on our radar.” Indigenous women fought back to show sexism and colonialism aligned in ways that indicted bad governance.223 Lee Maracle, Pam Palmater, and Audra Simpson have used the language of sociology to connect opinion and outcome, callousness and violence, as did the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 2008–15 and the Commission on Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, appointed by Harper’s successor, that reported in 2019.224 It found the role of Indigenous women as “carriers of life and teachings” had been “nearly destroyed by the colonial actions of Canada.” The Pauktuutit Inuit Women of Canada, cited by the report, argued that the attack on culture and tradition weakened the sense of “control over individual and collective destiny” and provoked spiralling violence as well as a more general vulnerability.225 It’s just good risk assessment, the first job of knowledge, to know when death becomes statistically and socially predictable. Knowledge that doesn’t deliver a calculus of security isn’t really knowledge at all; that was Hobbes’s point. Early British observers of colonial Canada understood that their job was to identify predictable violence and poverty, and they did. So must any serious observer notice Simpson’s “sturdy sociological” data on Indigenous

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women: “Their lives are shorter, they are poorer, less educated, sicker, raped more frequently, and they ‘disappear.’”226 Impossible to forget the haunting case of Helen Betty Osborne, a young Cree woman who was walking down a street in Le Pas, Manitoba in 1971, when she was seized, raped, and murdered by four men who, shielded by local collusion and indifference, escaped trial until 1987. Emma LaRocque argued that Osborne’s “attempts to fight off these men’s sexual advances challenged their racist expectations that an ‘Indian Squaw’ should show subservience, causing the whites to go into a rage and brutalize the victim.”227 Redress now as in Hume’s day remains in the hands of a jury more sympathetic to the victim than the aggressor, and a public more outraged by miscarriage of justice than greedy for its spoils. Murderous violence against women can only be a “public injury” if it has a certain calculability. But calculations of agency and freedom, the assessment of risk, are made harder by serious trauma, whether personal or more general and genocidal. Philosopher Susan Brison, who survived a murderous sexual assault, observes: “I thought I had made a certain sense of things until the moment I was assaulted.” But trauma “shatters” conventional narratives “by introducing an event that fits no discernible pattern.” Anyone who has survived assault, sexual or otherwise, knows how the world suddenly seems very different, much more threatening. And sometimes victims blame themselves, because that may enhance the feeling of control.228 Serious reckoning with violence and trauma, in short, poses challenges to simple or triumphal narratives of agency and purpose. Harper’s choice not to see public injury and social pattern was, for a long time, Canada’s choice. Canadians preferred a narrative of agency and autonomy, but that choice forced the experiences and traumas of the people who suffered the most in that process into the background of experience and history, as Renan’s process of forgetting. Deeper explorations of that trauma in recent years struggle to integrate them in the Canadian narrative, amidst much cognitive dissonance as well as conservative attack. Christopher Champion, a conservative historian with a PhD in history from McGill, defends the residential schools and advocates a history centred on “men and ideas and their place in history, as opposed to imposing sterile doctrines of race and ‘gender.’ As my old Latin teacher was fond of saying, ‘he who marries the Spirit of the Age will be a widower in the next.’”229 Champion reserves his highest praise for the thirteenth century. But to weigh the pros and cons of the residential schools and to appeal, over the sufferings of such one-time students as Helen Betty Osborne, to the priority of “men and ideas,” is to fail to hear nature as Montesquieu heard it, crying “out aloud” against brutality. The Enlightenment, even the Magna Carta itself, demands a better accounting of knowledge than to shield atrocities committed against those made the poorest, weakest, and most abused.

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The debates over violence and women’s agency continue.230 Authorities no longer laugh dismissively, as Kenora town council did in 1978 when asked to fund a rape crisis centre, but still defund them on grounds of austerity.231 Women write their own accounts of experience and interest, sometimes with delicate nuance as in Alice Munro, and sometimes as forthright political manifestos as in Margaret Atwood’s brutal, post-apocalyptic The Handmaid’s Tale, which depicts enslaved women stripped of sexual and reproductive choice. Where Atwood sees an apocalyptic future, Black and Indigenous writers have seen unacknowledged debts to past crimes exercised against racialized women. Black and Indigenous women’s writing is enjoying a deserved new prominence and success in the twenty-first century, a broadening of public culture and literary sensibilities. It is often enriched by wider literary circles and connections, connecting African and Asian women’s experiences, for example. This is a new Canadian culture, squarely aimed against the exclusions of the old. But, on my reading of Canadian history, it retains some elements of continuity with its predecessor. Some strain of subaltern and Indigenous enlightening, reverse tutelage, already inhabited the classic stories of heroines trying to find a way for themselves, in defiance of legal trumpery and shallow or predatory opinion. When a Lucy Maude Montgomery, for example, constructed a slew of Austenesque heroines seeking happiness and security in a cold world replete with male violence and female poverty, she was pushing back against the conservatism of her day, including that of Stephen Leacock, whose female characters always behaved as frivolously as circumstances permitted. Montgomery wrote what she knew and leaned on stereotypes where she did not, but her stories still help girls find their will and their way. Anne of Green Gables was an orphan saved from real bondage through an accidental and self-interested choice that became sympathy and love, which Anne reciprocated by sacrificing her chance for education. Her daughter Rilla, who never knew deprivation, had a different kind of struggle against frivolity. But cruel parents who ruled girls by shame must be repudiated. In The Blue Castle, Valancy Sterling realized she should not sacrifice her happiness to a selfish mother. So she took a job, defying familial shame, by caring for a dying, unwed mother, Cecily Gay, and again by proposing to a man just because she wanted him. Sex was a good thing that women could choose for themselves, even as they were warned that sex out of wedlock remained dangerous. Writing was another good thing in Emily of New Moon, again pursued in defiance of Emily’s family. Jane of Lantern Hill had to defy familial shame to discover that she could run a happy household where kin and friends could flourish. Montgomery’s heroines recognize shame as a toxic enemy of choice and they mitigate the harms it inflicts upon women who, like Cecily, lack the material or psychological resources to bear the consequences of their choices. Montgomery

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calculated very precisely her doses of shock and empathy. The Blue Castle was shocking enough to be removed from bookshelves in the 1930s. It was a late-written manifesto that shouted, “I am not your slave.” Montgomery’s portrait is ridiculously overdone for cultural studies purposes. But it’s not the cultural studies experts who kill themselves for shame, but young girls and women, the Amanda Todds and Rehtaeh Parsons. Sexual assault and “slut-shaming” still discipline and silence women, even as they provoke new expressions of feminism.232 One French feminist, Virginie Despentes, who suffered a violent assault, discovered that women still get blamed for such things: “maybe she was ‘too drunk,’ or else a nympho just pretending not to like it. If it ended up happening, then the girl must have, at some level, consented. Never mind if they had to hit her, threaten her, get several guys to hold her down, never mind if she was crying before, during, and after. In most cases the rapist comes to an agreement with his conscience – there was no rape, just a little slut who didn’t know what she wanted, and for whom a little persuading was all that was needed.”233 “Woman” remains a byword for submission to forcible persuasion. But Despentes found an answer in Camille Paglia’s argument that rape was “an inevitable danger, a danger that women need to take into account and run the risk of encountering, if they want to leave their homes and move around freely. If it happens to you then pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and move on. If that’s too scary for you, then you’d better stay home with mommy and manicure your nails.” Despentes felt first angry, then liberated by the argument that turned “unspeakable horror” into “a political circumstance, something we had to learn to cope with.”234 Paglia explained to her that, “on campus in the 60s, the girls were shut into their dormitories at ten p.m., whereas the guys did whatever they liked. We asked, ‘Why should we be treated differently?’ and they explained, ‘Because the world is dangerous, and you might get raped.’ and [sic] we replied, ‘well, we want the right to risk being raped.’” Valancy Sterling never had to dust herself off after a rape. But she shocked her friends by staying out late at a rowdy, drunken event where she narrowly escaped explicit sexual assault. Montgomery knew that when you trust your own judgment and assert yourself in the world, you run the risks of rape and shame. But she wrote her manifesto for a calculated freedom just the same. To the end of the century and into the next, calls for shame and austerity renewed. Political philosophers heavily influenced by Rousseau, especially Allan Bloom and Harvey Mansfield Junior, led the argument during the 1980s and 1990s, followed by reliably antifeminist newspaper columnists and men’s rights activists, and by pandering politicians who target “gender studies” programs as a threat to traditional feminism. In Canada, Margaret Wente argued that Canadians should “spend the next 25 years trying to

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put the fear and guilt back into young girls. It’s a dreadful thing to do to them. But the alternatives are worse.”235 Women still fight back with all the resources of popular culture – the 2007 film Juno, about a verbally fluent sixteen-year-old coping with an unwanted pregnancy, is an argument for shameless solidarity – and of feminist philosophy, with heavy debts to Simone de Beauvoir. They attack a version of masculinity reducible to “aggressiveness, combined with promiscuousness in sex”236 and a version of femininity reducible to submissiveness, even as they recognize that submission has a certain sexual allure.237 Francis Fukuyama tries to meet the #MeToo movement halfway, describing it as seeking not concrete political or economic equality but the symbolic “respect” of Rousseau and Charles Taylor.238 But that’s not what Adario’s daughter or Ellen Rogers wanted. They wanted to reject a man’s demands and to make a home for themselves.239 Homemaking and family-making remain our best weapons against violence and predation; without them, there remain only terrible sociological caricatures of connection such as orphanages and residential schools. Anyone can make a home and any home is, like any political regime on Hume’s estimation, as valid as any other, so long as it is protecting and protected against tyranny, violence, and want. But there should be no jealous repudiation of women’s voice, no instrumentalization of their needs. Hume thought that a history that emphasized opinion and persuasion could make us more free and reasonable. The world was a better place when men heeded women’s opinions. But when he made women civilizers, he made them targets for decivilizers. Men used their freedoms to restrict women’s freedoms, with brutal, stigmatizing conventions that they shored up with violence. Powerful people and nations claimed that they merely rose to their masculine destiny when they compelled submission from the “naturally” submissive and monetized its the fruits. A socially eclectic masculinity backed those discourses internationally with wars of conquest and domestically with riots and charivaris, rapes and lynchings. Not old-fashioned reason of state but a new American version of civilization could legitimate such things. Mansfield’s student Bruno Maçães imagines a new, post-Western-Civ version of civilization, following no path, but making a new one and extending Hamilton’s claim for government by reflection and choice to a global scale.240 But modern freedom has always enabled ad hominem attacks on women as shameless sluts deserving of something rougher than “credit.” Women expressing fairly harmless opinions, for example that Jane Austen should be on British currency, are told not just “You deserve rape,” but “I will cut off your head and rape it in front of your children.” Charles Taylor’s politics of recognition cannot resolve such problems. Recognition, as Dene professor Glen Coulthard argues, is a detour from genuine empowerment because it defers to oppressors’ opinions. He argues that the oppressor

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doesn’t demand recognition but, rather, land, labour, and resources.241 But the powerful do demand recognition. Recognition is a kind of glory, and glory, for Hobbes, was a power that enabled one to attain objectives.242 Everybody wants recognition; no one wants to be challenged on their self-evaluation. But a Lockean version of recognition carries it into aggression. To demand recognition for the authentic self is to conflate Rousseau’s two versions of amour. The slave-owner commands admiration for his invisible robes.243 Canadian history has sometimes done the same thing. Donald Creighton, trained in British historiographical traditions, found Jane Austen’s writing flat and one-dimensional, blind to “the subterranean pulses, the obscure and wonderful forces that exist beneath every period.” His earliest writings masterfully wrote social and cultural identity into Canadian politics, beginning with tax disputes of the 1820s. But, by the end of his career, to uphold a conservative account of Canadian history he had to write out social history and the Enlightenment. Creighton made himself a weak reader of the parallels and connections between public and private, much like Stephen Harper. Amplifying a broader range of voice and experience and grappling with trauma’s disruptions makes Canadian history more complicated and less triumphal. But the story also becomes more faithful, interesting, and capacious, better equipped to resolve our most persisting political and social problems. In Brison’s words, narrative “facilitates the ability to go on opening up possibilities for the future through retelling the stories of the past. It does this not by reestablishing the illusions of coherence of the past, control over the present, and predictability of the future, but by making it possible to carry on without these illusions.”244

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Tory Civilization in the 1820s: The Darling Report

I’ve argued for a theory of civilization as a model for history that found stability in commerce and opinion. Hume provided a particularly consistent and comprehensive theory and explained how to make it work as historical analysis. He made commerce and converse a convention to reinforce social agency and check excessive inequality and state capture. Orchestrated social power could insinuate some principles and practices of accountability in public life that could take institutional form and lend protections to the vulnerable. And Hume’s writings were widely read in scholarly and polite society. Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind show his “nonpareil” influence in philosophy and economics from Quesnay and Turgot to Hayek and Rawls.1 Enlightened thought trickled into national and local politics in the late eighteenth century. Joanna Innes identifies currents of reform in voluntary organizations and local institutions, reflected in more than 500 parliamentary laws over the century, that could be put to general enabling purposes where authorities desired. For example, Gilbert’s Act of 1782 to enable poor law unions across multiple parishes was taken up by some thousand parishes before the 1830s and served as a model for similar legislation in regard to the night watch. But there were brakes on national reforms in the workings of local opinion, institutional autonomy, and the courts.2 Ancien regime liberties were corporate-institutional ones reflecting local autonomies. Yet in the later eighteenth century, reform ceded to something more martial, as Britain fought all-out wars against revolutionary America and France and their allies while cracking down on traditional liberties and autonomies at home. Soaring military expenses, regressive taxation, political hatred, and trade jealousies prevailed. Throughout it all, between 1775 and 1815, according to Annalien de Dijn, “the whole of the Atlantic world talked constantly of freedom.”3 But

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if freedom was both commercial and political, so was oppression. Hume had tried to make commercial sociability and violent domination incompatible, but commercial sociability was never so peaceful as the Enlightenment thinkers portrayed it. The emerging international trade networks rested on slavery, dispossession, and war capitalism. According to a German noble, Count St Julien, in conversation with John Quincy Adams in 1812, slave merchants were “the cause of all these wars, without ever taking part in them or suffering from them … they have no country but their counting-houses, no God but gain … It was nothing to them who was victorious or who vanquished. They made their profit with equal indifference out of all.” Adams could not disagree, knowing himself “the champion of the merchants.”4 International trade and industrialization rested to an extraordinary degree on popular demand for cotton. But the lucrative cotton industry drove slavery, dispossession, and war capitalism abroad, and drove mechanization and factory labour in Britain with profound social costs, including widespread unemployment in some trades and proletarianization in others, along with the emergence of new industrial cities and slums. British working peoples experienced the new international and industrial economic order as a kind of de facto enslavement and dispossession. In the British factory towns, wages were so low and economic choices so narrowed that, in the forty years after 1820, life expectancy stalled and children’s heights actually declined.5 Industrialization, financialization, and war capitalism increased wealth but also concentrated and centralized it, provoking intense debate about whether that concentration was the result of mere market activity or whether the state and the law were exacerbating it. Who or what did the state serve anyway? According to Steven King, “the period from the 1780s to the 1830s was one in which ordinary people increasingly sought to engage with and confront the local and national state through rioting, rural unrest, petitions to Parliament, rallies, machine-breaking and innumerable acts of everyday resistance.”6 Frank O’Gorman sees “a political nation” coming into existence, with petitions numbering dozens in the 1770s, rising to 5,000 for repeal of the Test and Corporation Act in 1824, and to 20,000 for Catholic emancipation in 1829.7 So, too, across North America, Daniel Carpenter sees broad pressures for democracy voiced through thousands of petitions, often with thousands of signatures, emanating from a diverse public, much of it disenfranchised by gender or race, poverty or enslavement. Especially between the 1820s and the 1850s, “petitioning verged toward the more democratic, widespread, popular, radical, and massive.” And Anglo-American governments responded with concrete reforms. Carpenter insists on a dialogical reading: “As either movements from below or elite parchment economies from above, single-sided understandings of the petition mislead us. The

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aperture must be widened to capture a dual reflection, a feedback between people and situated power.” The public, including non-voters, “shared in government as never before.”8 Aristocrats vied to put themselves at the head of the movement as champions of enlightened ideas and local institutions. The Earl of Shelburne, for example, remained an mp and a patron of reform until his death in 1805, one who patronized and indeed radicalized Jeremy Bentham, and hired the radical scientist Joseph Priestley as a tutor.9 Shelburne’s applause for the French Revolution earned Burke’s loathing. Shelburne’s second son, Lord Lansdowne, having been “dosed from an early age with Bentham and Adam Smith,”10 entered the Commons in 1802, rising to the Lords in 1809. He was briefly chancellor of the exchequer in 1806, then served as Lord President of Council during the three whig ministries of Lords Grey, Melbourne, and Russell between 1830–41, and reprised that office in 1846–52. He also wielded an important social influence and, perhaps in honour of his ancestor, William Petty, served as the founding president of the London Statistical Society in 1834. Another Statistical Society stalwart was Lord Ebrington, second Earl Fortescue, a grandson of George Grenville, who demanded abolition of slavery in his maiden speech in 1814, and was still serving as lord steward to Russell in 1850.11 University scholarship also connected eighteenth- to nineteenth-century liberals. Thomas Reid, the common sense philosopher who succeeded to Smith’s chair in moral philosophy at Glasgow, taught Dugald Stewart, who succeeded Adam Ferguson as professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh from 1785 to 1810. Stewart taught that Hume and Smith had inaugurated a new science of politics and history, previously seen as cyclical but now made progressive, on the pragmatic understanding that “good morals were the effect of good law rather than a precondition for them.”12 Stewart gave Edinburgh a liberal orientation that shaded into perfectibilism and providentialism that, scholars note, Hume would have made short work of. Still, his students were “about as well equipped to become experts in political economy as it was possible to be in the early 1800s.”13 Stewart taught Lord Brougham and James Mill, founding editors of and prolific authors in the Edinburgh Review (1802) and the Westminster Review (1824) respectively. At Oriel College in Oxford, Edward Copleston taught Stewart’s liberal philosophy from 1802, his students including Richard Whately, John Henry Newman, and the soon-to-be member for Oxford University, Robert Peel, on whom Copleston rained “laissez nous faire” advice.14 Some more radical strains of Scottish thought persisted as well. Thomas Beddoes, an Edinburghtrained chemist, physician, and education reformer forced out of Oxford in 1792 by reason of his sympathy for the French Revolution, tutored for four years the sons of his friend, William Lambton, one of whom, John,

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would become a Canadian governor general.15 Sandra den Otter sees the Scottish Enlightenment as providing “a framework for understanding the relationship between laws and the evolution of civil societies,” that the students who imbibed it carried with them into administrative posts across the British Empire. They understood “civilization as the complicated interplay of social, economic, political, and religious elements,” and, rather than merely transplanting English law, tried to maintain “social order through local indigenous practices and institutions.”16 Hume’s ideas also circulated in popular literature through the History of England, which was reissued more than a hundred times in the nineteenth century. History was an important resource for liberalizers and conservatives alike. Historical debate remained, before mid-century, more public than academic, and the most popular historians poked fun at the dry-as-dust scholars.17 Historical knowledge was primarily acquired through reading at home, rather than in the classroom, and Hume’s History of England was the best of the bestsellers, one of a “small handful of works for which ‘a continuing large demand was expected.’”18 Many of the leading historians were statesmen, including T.B. Macaulay and François Guizot. Politicians needed usable histories for their speeches: when Macaulay spoke of “that noble science of politics” in 1829, he was referring to history as the school of experience and judgment. Much English history was whiggish: an account of the irresistible rise of liberty and progress, looking back to the Magna Carta, always in contrast to a less free and stable France. That was Henry Hallam’s view, voiced in his Constitutional History of England (1827), ubiquitous in history courses, where the Magna Carta was seen as the first national event. It was also the view of Macaulay, an essayist, then a politician, then a bestselling historian from the 1840s. John Burrow observes that “Macaulay approached European history in the manner of Hume and Millar, qualified by a nineteenth-century Burkean sense of the lessons provided by the French Revolution.”19 Burke mediated between eighteenth-century philosophical history and a new, nineteenth-century historicism that portrayed “man” as “absorbed by sociopolitical reality.”20 But Hume’s challenges to whig history persisted, notwithstanding criticisms of his work as too impious, conjectural, conservative, and insufficiently archival. The growing gap between Hume and contextual, rigorous, archival history, already visible in Gibbon, coincided with a growing English disdain for Scottish common sense philosophies amongst the more specialized English universities. But before mid-century, Hume exercised a remarkable “dominance,” according to Burrow: The chief obstacle to the Whig’s pious appropriation of the national past, the obstinate litigant who blocked the undisputed enjoyment of his inheritance, was above all, and for nearly a century, Hume. Hume

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affected the Whig historians of the early nineteenth century, to reapply a simile of Macaulay’s, like a hair in the mouth: inescapable and intolerable. His offences were manifold and rank. He claimed, notoriously, that under the Tudors the English had as little public liberty as the subjects of the Grand Turk. There was no established free constitution for the Stuarts to transgress or attempt to overthrow. The actions of the Long Parliament were clearly innovative and in many respects unreasonable. Hume had presented a sympathetic account of Charles I’s predicament, and condemned Strafford’s attainder. And, as might be expected of a well-known atheist, he had lacked piety, finding the leaders of the long Parliament uncouth and fanatical.21 Hume celebrated civil liberties but was distressingly agnostic about political liberties. According to one assessment, the History “from its beginning to its conclusion is chiefly to be regarded as a plausible defence of prerogative.”22 British historiography circulated and was applied to Europe, carried there by British occupiers at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. German historians, for example, realized that English history showed that Germanic traditions, too, could “be drawn upon to yield liberty without a Declaration of the Rights of Man, fraternity without the abolition of traditional social hierarchy, and prosperity without equality.”23 German-English affinities crucially informed the Congress of Vienna, which sought not a status quo ante (the outcome in North America) but a new concert of constitutionalized nations orchestrating a balance of power amongst themselves, resting on commerce and converse. The key liberal constitutionalists, according to Beatrice de Graaf, were Alexander I of Russia and, for Britain, Viscount Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington, who were worried that the harsh penalties demanded by Austria’s Klements von Metternich might cause France to collapse. But Metternich, too, subscribed to an essentially British model for postwar reconstruction. In London in 1794, he admired the flourishing industrial economy, constitutional debates and history, and the paramount power of the press and public opinion, recognizing that modern governments must not silence but debate their “opponents.”24 The loose, commerce and converse British model was preferable, for Metternich, to Tsar Alexander I’s more formal project of a union of provinces united in one nation, with one army.25 English liberty was also admired in Parisian salons in 1815, including Madame de Staël’s.26 Still, the European powers cracked down on oppositional writing and demonstrations, and their soldiers remained in France after the peace. But the primary element of stabilization gradually became the French national debt. Staggering British debt was seen to stabilize Britain by ensuring security of property, thanks to the concentration of wealth amongst the investing classes and their political power in a parliamentary system.

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Alexander Hamilton had followed that model in America and now France would also follow it. Revolutionary and Napoleonic expropriations were confirmed rather than reversed, leaving religious holdings under national control, and the French debt was set at what the country was thought able to pay (all debts to private creditors, 700 million francs as reparations, and the costs of occupation). When French default seemed imminent, Wellington reduced the sum on the condition that France negotiate its debt through the English merchant bank Baring Brothers. And after surviving an assassination attempt in France, Wellington brought the soldiers home and trusted to “security through financial interdependence,” so that by 1818, according to de Graaf, “security had become a matter of mutual financial dependence, of orderly compromises and consistent criteria.”27 The Restoration government and its successor governments painstakingly reconstructed national credit, increasing subscriptions to 846,330 by 1850, the investments immune to intervening revolutions. French Restoration theorists celebrated debt as the peculiar “glory” of the nineteenth century. Benjamin Constant explained how it confirmed and extended commerce’s civilizing powers: “The effects of commerce are extended even further; not only does it emancipate individuals, but, in creating credit, it renders authority itself dependent.”28 But France also owed its improved finances to punishing reparations imposed on Haiti in 1825.29 Eighteenth-century French and British arguments for peace and commerce as an alternative to war shaped the nineteenth-century accommodations that resulted in a liberal trade deal between England and France, which was signed in 1860 and served as a basis for wider European economic liberalization.30 Financial networks, and Barings in particular, did similar work in smoothing relations between British and American interests and lobbies. The earliest American trust, in 1822, took the gains of the illegal slave trade with Cuba into the Farmers’ Fire Insurance and Loan Company in New York that wrangled a £200,000 loan from Baring Brothers: the first international bank transaction in the United States.31 Local governments had to agree to bear the heavy resultant social costs, the violence and poverty, and so they did. During the 1820s and 1830s, fabulous fortunes were being made in the United States from slavery and cotton, as well as dispossession and forced relocation. Deportation, enslavement, and extermination piled up such that “it seems all the southern world is to be in a war,” as one correspondent observed to President Andrew Jackson in 1836.” American violence mingled with commercial sociability in shocking ways: a decapitated Seminole head on display in a drugstore in St Augustine, Florida.32 But even amidst the widespread, popular dislocation and violence, the upper reaches of finance were increasing their coordination and consolidation. Saskia Sasson distinguishes between local banks with an

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interest in flourishing communities and international finance operating on an extractive logic and able to ignore domestic social costs. The further the investors are from the social costs, the more they privilege economic interests alone: “no God but gain.”33 Transnational, increasingly routine jointstock companies transferred capital investment from the metropolis to the frontier and returned lucrative profits. They renewed the Enlightenment formula for cosmopolitanism, that is, for conventions that could traverse religious or ethnic and also national fissures, like so many rowers rowing. That French and American model would be applied in Canada to facilitate the removal of soldiers there as well. But if, in 1815, such men as Wellington seemed liberal to autocrats in Europe and even at home to the most irascible British conservatives (Wellington performed the “indispensable function of instructing George in political realities”34), they looked hopelessly reactionary to reformers and radicals. As the military passions subsided, the British state was governing for the few, not the many: a “tax-eater” state, generally characterized as “Old Corruption,” inequitable, “undemocratic, bloated, and inefficient.”35 The postwar years “from Waterloo to Peterloo” saw a “liberal awakening” in public opinion that put the ruling Tories on the defence. Violent repression, as when soldiers fired into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators at St Peter’s fields in Manchester in 1819, only strengthened public outrage and resolve. The British fiscal-military state that had achieved such stunning success abroad was undone by the civilian population at home. 1819 saw not just Peterloo but also fierce debates over reform by such eloquent champions as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Sir Walter Scott. Earl Grey, who began to champion reform in 1793, observed in 1820 that nine-tenths of the lower and middle classes supported it.36 A worried young conservative, Robert Peel, asked a friend: “Do you not think that the tone of England – of that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs, which is called public opinion – is more liberal – to use an odious but intelligible phrase, than the policy of the Government?”37 Conservatives feared failing to adapt as the Stuart kings had failed. But Peel also told the Commons in 1821 that it must not “stand shivering in every fitful breeze of popular feeling.” Peel resisted liberal reforms as long as possible, until wider public opinion made them irresistible.38 Ideological momentum accrued behind such demands as Catholic emancipation, the abolition of rotten boroughs, and expansion of the franchise. Reformers were far from united: the great whigs sought to accommodate the middle classes rather than to fight them; doctrinaire liberals wanted impartial and centralized administration; working-class radicals wanted something more like 1789.39 The “middlemost” increasingly lent momentum to the demands for reform.40 Local autonomy on the ancien regime

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model lost ground to Enlightenment humanitarianism that attacked older norms, from belief in witches to a taste for public executions. You couldn’t alleviate the bloody code, as reformers did in the 1820s, with local liberties; for that you needed Beccaria, just as you needed Smith to dismantle the corn laws driving up the price of bread. And you needed Hume’s theories of an essentially sovereign opinion underpinning the whole. Gradually, those conversations expanded to include transatlantic and imperial questions of custom and justice, progress and power. The bloody code had seen, according to V.A.C. Gatrell, approximately 35,000 death sentences handed down in England and Wales between 1770 and 1830, resulting in 7,000 executions.41 In 1823, the tories conferred on judges the power to commute sentences for most crimes, and in the 1830s, the whigs abolished the death penalty for property crimes. But amidst tremendous social dislocation, economic hardship, and political grievance, with spontaneous and organized popular violence widespread across the country and particularly intense in the manufacturing districts and in Ireland, Peel was reluctant to relinquish recourse to soldiers for crowd control, remembering, perhaps, that his mill-owning grandfather had once been threatened by a crowd. Canadians felt the pressure of the different British, French, and American paradigms. They imported workhouses and built a penitentiary at Kingston during the 1830s, but they also sporadically staged mass hangings to quell rebellion. Where conservatives believed that soldiers maintained order in the face of violent threats to it, reformers believed that soldiers exacerbated the problem, as they had done at Peterloo. Better to govern people by their opinion and interest than by brutal physical force. Every bullet fired or gun waved at crowds, every lash of the whip, seemed a repudiation of civil society peacefully governing itself. When a soldier was flogged, in the early 1830s, for expressing reform sympathies, he suffered in ennobling silence and then wrote up the experience so vividly as to become famous and get his floggers cashiered.42 The gap was too great between government by opinion and flogging a man for voicing that opinion. This was Hume’s or Elias’s civilizing process at work: literary expression and political debate that appealed to sympathy to discredit state violence. Public sensibility was far from an ideal mechanism of accountability – many things escaped its notice, and many tyrannies were justified. But it was, nonetheless, an important constituent of modern liberty. Jeffrey McNairn shows how such appeals to sympathy and sensibility reshaped a reaction against imprisonment for debt in Upper Canada in the 1830s.43 Violence had to become more invisible and subtle, at least around the more respectable and civilized peoples. Debtors problematized the boundaries of respectability: you needed a modicum of respectability to borrow but debts drove many people into poverty.

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Different kinds of conservatives, reformers, and radicals across British North America continually looked for local, colonial, and imperial allies, and found common cause with British counterparts who well understood how to leverage colonial grievances. Canada remained constitutionally, financially, and socially tethered to Britain, and the flow of knowledge, interest, and sympathy was always dialogical. Because the region was seen as liberally governed, it mattered to political thinkers as a crucial test case for rival political logics and for British hegemony, always understanding the United States as a leading threat to that hegemony. That’s not to say that the impoverished inhabitant of the backwoods of Canada could expect to find the British crown responsive to their grievances. But there were mechanisms for getting such grievances into local and transnational circulation, and people highly motivated to seize upon such grievances to advance their own political agendas. During the 1820s, the public sphere was diverse as well as “liberal,” visitors often observed, as public houses catered to mixed assemblages.44 For Catharine Parr Traill, “the swarthy complexions, shaggy black hair, and singular costume of the Indians formed a striking contrast with the fair-faced Europeans that were mingled with them.”45 John Howison, visiting the Talbot district in Upper Canada, described a mixed assemblage: “several Scotch Highlanders smoking tobacco, muttering Gaelic … three Indians in full hunting costume; and a couple of New England Americans [who] talked volubly about politics, recounted many incredible stories of their own prowess, and intermingled the whole with oaths and impious expressions.” He found the “Indians” the most admirable of the three: less debased and “more entitled to respect than either the Scotch or the Americans.”46 The self-styled enlightened observer recognized good personal qualities and bad government wherever he found them, and many emigrants aspired to that reputation. Elizabeth Elbourne traces the “minor gentry” Bannister family, who settled on Anishinaabe territory at Rice Lake, became drawn into disputes over land and politics, and made themselves career “experts” and advocates for Indigenous peoples. Saxe Bannister began that career in 1822 by attacking an article in the Edinburgh Review on “Indians of North America” that described them as uncivilized and uncivilizable, doomed to “disappear from the face of the earth.” Bannister defended Indigenous people as refined and civilized and blamed their decline and degradation on injustice, fraud, and violence: “It is a cruel sophism, after debasing a people by bad governing and by hard treatment, to argue from their degradation that they are essentially not fit to share the benefits of civil institutions.”47 Amidst wrenching, terrible stories and images, colonial atrocities and grievances took on a trans-imperial political significance. The backwoods Indigenous subject was made to matter in real time for high British politics by skilled propagandists. Indigenous experiences and arguments had helped

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to construct the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and they now helped to construct nineteenth-century liberal modernity. The very different worlds of liberal theory, international trade, British diaspora, academic knowledge, and Indigenous activism were translated into one another by cosmopolitan negotiators and advocates who understood that their best avenue to advancement was to translate social pressures into political ones. High politics could not easily insulate themselves from social pressures from below. That was a historiographical point, well explained by David Craig in reference to the philosophical theories of R.G. Collingwood in The Idea of History. Anyone who wants to shape the world finds it “crowded” with people doing the same. Success or failure rests on being able to design one’s plans to “fit into the interstices of the rest,” that is, to master and manipulate the context.48 During the age of reform, most such arguments usually owed some debt to Hume’s historiography and philosophy. The 1820s saw the last gasps of the ancien regime fiscal-military state trying to preserve as much and reform as little as possible; the 1830s saw an alliance of whigs and liberal reformers win power and begin a program of social and political reform, amidst rising economic tensions that put them, too, on the defensive. The liberalization was always modest, the voting public a minority of the population (still single digits in Britain after 1832; still single digits in Canada in 1867).49 Taken together, the three decades after 1815 saw a major political realignment that reversed the recent oligarchical turn. The next three chapters here focus on three strands of change visible across Britain and Canada: (1) demilitarization of the state; (2) political and economic liberal reforms to loosen state capture and oligarchy; and (3) discovery of “the social” in the emergence of new research, particularly social statistics. There was no consensus around any of these things and the reform alliance was mixed and unstable. The long-term trajectory shows liberal and radical impulses ceding to a new kind of conservative order. This chapter focuses on the 1820s and the arguments for demilitarization of the British imperial state and their Canadian consequences. There was nothing inevitable about the defeat of postwar conservatism in Britain or Canada. Conservatives adapted their arguments and their policies to accommodate the new “liberal” tone to public opinion. Confronted with arguments that poverty and violence were increasing, they summoned answers that looped in Canadian evidence, arguments, and grievances. On the one hand, they leveraged Canada’s military and political insecurity as an argument for keeping the generals in charge of things, including Wellington himself as prime minister for most of 1828, 1829, and 1830. The second British Empire saw an authoritarian turn in response to the war but also the growing importance of India. The American menace justified authoritarianism in the Canadas, but the more that Britons fled the harsh economic

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conditions for the Canadas, the more difficult it became to defend authoritarian rule there. Liberalizers in Britain and Canada joined forces and put the governance of Canada at the forefront of the liberalizing process. But conservatives did the same in their battle against liberalization, taking it beyond militarization to domestic and social relations. On the other hand, thus, conservatives formulated their own analyses of poverty and violence and how to resolve them. The liberal reformers complained that hard times in Britain drove Britons to settle in British North America, but that corrupt and reactionary governments obstructed their acquisition of the “waste” lands there. Conservatives responded by noticing another kind of poverty: that of Indigenous peoples being driven off their lands by an influx of settlers that was, from the 1820s, “unprecedented and devastating.”50 They formulated a project of civilization to perpetuate long-standing alliances with Indigenous nations, understood as conventionally bound to the same kinds of conservative and military customs and values as the Wellingtonians themselves, together opposing a more democratic, Americanizing process of dispossession and resettlement. John Tobias magisterially summed up Canadian Indian policy as “Protection, Civilization, Assimilation.”51 Civilization bridged the other two, protection and assimilation, though in retrospect has tended to be collapsed into the latter, as a kind of proto-assimilation. But civilization was initially presumed to be self-civilization, through the ordinary workings of historical agency: commerce and converse. Early Indigenous and Eurowestern theorists of civilization presumed that Indigenous people could largely civilize themselves. If they needed help from teachers, priests, and government officials, well, so did everyone else; and there need be, and indeed initially was, no dearth of Indigenous peoples in those helping positions. Assimilation replaced civilization when government officials decided that Indigenous people lacked the intrinsic mechanisms of sociability to civilize themselves and write their own histories, requiring instead to be physically manhandled into modern disciplinary forms, in institutions that resembled Bentham’s Panopticon. Civilization, unlike assimilation, understood Indigenous people as historical agents, perhaps not exactly like other British subjects but more like them than not. Civilization was, like the Royal Proclamation, initially designed to check the abuses of settler colonialism. It, too, reflected demands from Indigenous peoples that British officials heard and transmitted in reports designed to meet British purposes and politics. These reports were translations, not transcriptions, and as subject to misrepresentation and distortion as the older versions. But they still recognized the need for alliances resting on compromises. The political transformations after 1815 saw elites respond to the new currency of liberal ideas by relinquishing a certain internal solidarity to form broader-based political blocks, to carry

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them into slippery and yet congealing party blocks with their own liberalizing and democratizing pressures and tensions. British civilizers sought a fantastical reconciliation of British oversight and protection, settler colonialism, and Indigenous self-advancement. Their humanitarian dreamworld foundered on the American-style ambitions of settlers and ceded, sometimes wistfully, to something more pragmatic.52 But humanitarianism itself erased politics for something more Eurocentric and monist, concealing the continuities of anti-imperialism across the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. I focus on the more explicitly political question of governing minorities by recalibrating complex balances of power. Hume’s model of government by opinion was broadly transnational and transatlantic and it forced the enfranchised to negotiate with the unenfranchised around conventions as well as constitutions. Through the shifting alliances of majorities and minorities, in the history of politics as of sexuality, can be seen the reconstruction of the “normal” – both quantitatively and qualitatively.53 As British settlers flooded westward into the Canadas, they seized upon the opportunity to do by force of opinion what the Americans had done by force of arms: roll back British oversight and make the humanitarian-protection lobby in Britain as irrelevant as the divineright-of-kings lobby. The conservative soldier, Darling, frankly defended the old alliances and protections; the whig statesman, Durham, tried to preserve them more discreetly; the statistician, Rawson, conceded the inevitable power of the majoritarian settler “norm” and pondered its consequences. Partisan conservative logic infused the Darling report, widely recognized as the “founding document of the British civilizing project” because it was taken up as British policy.54 Henry Charles Darling’s report on the Canadian Indian Department was penned in 1828 on instructions from the Colonial and War Office, transmitted to him via Governor General George Ramsay, Lord Dalhousie. Under extreme pressure from liberal reformers to cut spending, especially military spending, Whitehall was looking for ways to reduce. The Canadian Indian Department was under military oversight: could costs be cut, and could they be cut by curtailing the annual distribution of presents written into eighteenth-century peace treaties? In December 1822, Dalhousie agreed to reduce expenses but insisted on more fortifications and a continued military presence at Sault Ste Marie to protect the frontier and maintain communications with the numerous tribes there. He also warned that any curtailment of presents would be a dangerous breach of faith.55 A series of treaties signed between 1818 and 1827 in Upper Canada alienated much of the remaining unceded land, more than 7 million acres, according to a new plan of annuities rather than up-front payments, the better to reduce costs. But Whitehall needed still more cutbacks and demanded a report on the “exact” condition of the Indian Department in Upper Canada

3.1 | Portrait of George Ramsay, 9th Earl Dalhousie, print by Thomas Lupton, after a painting of 1829 by John Watson Gordon, highlighting the splendour of the soldier-statesmen in the waning British military state. © Trustees of the British Museum, Number 2010,7081.4544.

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and Lower Canada. Asked whether the Colonial Office should reinforce or close down the Indian Department, Darling responded with a recommendation for civilization.56 Darling’s report is nothing like the expansive and complicated reports and histories discussed in other chapters: it was a mere fourteen pages long. But it merits careful consideration here because it made two very important points that became permanent and powerful constituents of the debates about Indigenous peoples in Canada. It opened with an observation that the Indian problem in Canada was poverty, and it recommended civilization as the fix. These sound like classic liberal-reform ideas, but they were not. Darling’s report has generally been read with hindsight, in terms of its impact on and relevance for subsequent policies and events. But hindsight obliterates the tory tilt that inflected this first iteration of civilization policy. In the 1820s, demilitarization was first and foremost a question of police: of the civil and state mechanisms that, overlapping like Venn diagrams, conduced to public order and social stability. The question as to whether “Indians” should be governed according to a military or a non-military paradigm emerged amidst complex challenges to the demilitarization of the state and the constitution of civil society in Britain. Darling’s strategic goal did not anticipate liberal assimilation, but was a covert prop to the flagging fiscal-military state. Here, I’ll set out that post-war context, broadly understood, as a foundation for the analysis of subsequent liberal debates, made necessary by a neglect of Canada in much recent history of British imperialism.57 Here, I provide some sense of the wider imperial context: the waning military state beset by fear of violent disorder and partisan attack. I then discuss Darling’s report in terms of how it channelled the ambitions and perplexities of the conservative project of rule on the eve of its capitulation to liberal hegemonies. By the time that Darling wrote, in 1828, the governing Tories – Liverpool, Canning, Goderich, Wellington, Peel – were under pressure from harsh economic conditions stoking widespread disaffection and resistance to the various state and state-protected mechanisms of rent, tithe, and tax exaction, including violent uprisings in Lancashire in the late 1820s. A loose whig opposition was channelling such grievances into a campaign for “cheap, economic, civil government” as against “large, expensive military government.”58 The state had militarized itself too much during the wars and now had to turn away from naked domination.59 Social spending was local, national spending largely for soldiers, sinecures, and pensions, effectively transferring money, political economists observed disapprovingly, “from the poor to give to the rich, and particularly to the economically nonproductive rich.”60 The loose tory coalition was weak in Parliament, upheld in the Lords primarily by Wellington and in the Commons by Home Secretary Robert

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Peel and Chancellor of the Exchequer Henry Goulburn. During Wellington’s administration, Peel spoke 660 times and Goulburn 785. Whig opponents harassed them ceaselessly: Joseph Hume, the leading critic on colonial matters, spoke 1,434 times. According to Peter Jupp, a hard core of activists on the opposition bench drove the agenda.61 But they lacked leadership – Grey was loath – and so allowed the conservatives to remain in power, albeit with increasing concessions to reform. The colonies complicated matters.62 Soldiers remained indispensable to imperial rule. The numbers of imperial subjects governed were unprecedented and almost unimaginable to previous generations: C.A. Bayly estimates them at 200 million people.63 The calculus of British imperial property was no less amazing to contemporaries, albeit harder to calculate with the technologies of the day.64 Governing so many very different peoples, places, and things both indirectly and directly provoked administrative and political experimentation. Bayly sees an “imperial meridian,” a long phase of political conservatism, militarization, and repression that was more than just a plateau between two liberalisms. Colonial rule in the empire and cabinet rule at home were remarkably intertwined. Many of the leading British statesmen cut their teeth on the problems of imperial rule and, indeed, of British North America in particular. They reformed the Colonial and War Office (separated in 1854) to make it an efficient node for exercising power that was at once military and administrative, as they sought to depoliticize it. But still, the military state was steaming ahead in Canada.65 Citadels and Martello towers were going up, canals were going down, and veterans filled offices, not least Dalhousie himself and much of his staff. The Canadas were not a distant and abstract problem but a known, vital concern for tory ministers. Peel and Goulburn had served as undersecretaries in the Colonial Office before transferring to the Irish office, in 1812 and 1821, respectively. Peel then went to the Home Office, while Goulburn got the Exchequer in Wellington’s cabinet. As undersecretary, Goulburn had largely overseen the North American theatre of the War of 1812, including the efforts of George Murray, lieutenant governor of Upper Canada from December 1814 to May 1815 (when Napoleon’s escape summoned him back to Europe). In May 1828, Wellington chose Murray as his colonial minister precisely because the Canada question “was becoming a major colonial issue.”66 In fact, Wellington relied on Peel for political advice and on Bathurst and Goulburn for colonial advice, and he tended to dictate colonial policy to Murray, treating him as a “senior clerk.”67 These men were well situated to reason from colonial to metropolitan concerns and to encompass Canada as a part of that process. So were their enemies. The colonies were fodder for attack everywhere that governors and settlers fell out, but they fell out

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so spectacularly in the 1820s in the Canadas as to make those colonies particularly interesting. They were the object of a special investigation by a twenty-one-member Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Civil Government of Canada, established in 1828, which investigated the militia question as well as other grievances related to land tenure, clergy reserves, and constitutional questions. Earl Grey advised his son, Viscount Howick, to build his career on the colonial question, and in 1834 made him colonial secretary.68 People cared about Lower Canada and Upper Canada not for the Canadas’ sake but because they saw in the two colonies a synecdoche of the larger political questions of post-war Britain. Was the imperial state a warmongering, fiscally predatory autocracy or was it the guardian and exemplar of British political liberty and fairness? And how did the British diaspora affect that calculation? The Colonial and War Office was a good place to make a stand for the tory state but it had to be reconstructed to make it defensible. Governing at a distance required bureaucratic innovations that then came into more general use through the civil service. Links within the department were crucial: administrative capacity became most highly developed in the military branch of the state during the Napoleonic Wars. Military men were among the best administrators of their day and the postwar era saw those capacities extended into the civil state, a process that began with the administration of the colonies.69 Generating an informed and efficient Colonial Office required something like a revolution in government.70 Under Bathurst from 1812 to 1827 it was transformed from neglectful and uninformed into a competent and informed apparatus at the vanguard of modern state formation.71 Pre-Ireland, Peel exemplified the old regime: in 1812, ceding the undersecretaryship to his friend Goulburn, Peel advised him to rely on delaying tactics as he took over “the superintendence of the correspondence with all the British colonies on the face of the globe on all subjects military and civil.” “Collisions of the governor and assemblies” were the greatest difficulty, Peel warned, not easily resolved politically or administratively.72 Over the 1820s, the two-way flow of correspondence over civil governance of even small colonies increased enormously. Precisely because Bathurst preferred to delegate administration, he made his department a model of administrative efficiency, run by legendary undersecretaries including Robert Wilmot Horton and James Stephen. In short, modern state formation was having an intense moment around the growing capacity of the Colonial Office of the 1820s, prompted by both internal reorganization and partisan attacks in Parliament. Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford see a wave of commissions of inquiry between 1819 and 1840 that aimed to produce knowledge of colonial law and to engineer

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interventions in colonial affairs.73 The three reports studied in this section drew parallels between Britain and Canada, and reminded Canadians of their continuing accountability to the British state and public. That accountability made Canada very different from the United States.74 An early fruit of the reformed colonial office was a bill introduced in the House of Commons in 1822, by undersecretary Wilmot Horton, to unite Upper and Lower Canada with one legislature shared between them, as well as to subsidize emigration to Canada. He was friendly with Thomas Malthus and sought to mortgage the poor rates to finance emigration and ease domestic pressures.75 But what seemed an obvious administrative reform from the Colonial Office perspective was just as obviously an illiberal political encroachment viewed through the eyes of Canadian legislators, furious that they were not consulted. Alex Martinborough identifies critical reaction in the Commons and the Canadas. In the former, for example, “James Mackintosh, a Scottish whig member of Parliament and former magistrate in India, argued that the bill should not be passed ‘without affording to the inhabitants the fullest time for expressing their Opinions’”; and he reiterated the argument after Wilmot had replied insisting on Parliament’s “unlimited prerogative to alter colonial constitutions granted through parliamentary statute.” The bill was suspended in order to sound Canadian opinion, which was found to be mixed: some like James Macaulay defended imperial prerogative, and others with William Warren Baldwin demanded colonial opinion be consulted – though Baldwin considered public meetings and petitions the best expression of that opinion. Anti-union petitions garnered 68,000 signatures and the bill was quietly dropped.76 The principle of political legitimation through public meetings of one sort or another that had animated the Royal Proclamation was tested and sustained a little longer. But how far down the mixed population did that principle stretch? And how to mediate between popular meetings as a source of legitimacy and the emerging bureaucracy of colonial government that rested on privileged agency and knowledge? Darling’s report on the Canadian Indian Department reflected that complicated context. It epitomized the “rage for order” in the Colonial Office of the 1820s and the larger trajectory of imperial governance, as the work of a military officer and veteran of the War of 1812 with evolving and expanding colonial and civilian responsibilities, gathering information to serve a centralizing administrative project. For Darling, military forms and mechanisms were not a “state of exception” to civilian rule but an indispensable branch of stable civilian rule and executive mandate.77 Henry Darling owed his career to his brother: both were career soldiers, sons of a sergeant in the 45th Foot regiment and quartermaster, originally from Durham but long

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stationed in Ireland. Ralph Darling enlisted as a private at age fourteen and, with the patronage of the Duke of York, rose to important offices in the military and Colonial Office; Ralph, in turn, obtained positions for Henry Charles Darling and later his son Charles Henry Darling. The brothers saw military action in various arenas, and Ralph rose to administer both recruitment and demobilization (he signed Dalhousie’s commission papers), then becoming acting governor of Mauritius and later governor of New South Wales. Henry, like his brother, began in his father’s 45th Foot regiment, serving in the West Indies and in Nova Scotia with the Fencibles. He went on half-pay at the end of the war before finding employment with Dalhousie as his military secretary from 1820, and was also, from 1826, a superintendent of the Indian Department in the Canadas. In later life, Henry and his son Charles emulated Ralph Darling’s career: both were knighted and both served as colonial governors (Sir Henry in Tobago and Sir Charles in Newfoundland, Cape Colony, and finally Victoria, Australia). The Darlings were Tories, with a genuinely imperial as well as a military outlook, better connected within military networks than colonial ones: administrators in the Colonial Office described Ralph as a martinet and a “plodder.”78 But to be too military in one’s orientation was to be a magnet for liberal attack. If Ralph and Henry Darling brought personal and partisan coherence to colonial governance it was because they faced similar challenges. In the Canadas and New South Wales, the key problem was land-hungry settler colonialism determined to exercise despotisms against Indigenous peoples and to justify them by discrediting the governor, along with his retinue, as a high-spending, petty, overly military despot; thus could settlers expect support from whigs and liberals across local and imperial stages. The Darlings could only hope to fend off such attacks if they could make the special needs or problems associated with Indigenous peoples cohere with the legitimate exercise of state authority. Were “Indians” a threat to or an adjunct of civil order and authority? There was no simple answer and the question was, in effect, that of “civilization” more generally. For tory purposes, civil order and civilization were virtually interchangeable. Civilization, as an immediate practical policy in Canada, meant the bible and the plough; but as abstract political principle, it meant a governable population. Where liberals wanted to remake preliberal subjects into modern liberal citizens, Tories, more modestly, sought something commensurate with what Michel Foucault described as the concept of police in the eighteenth century: “the ensemble of mechanisms serving to ensure order, the properly channeled growth of wealth and the conditions of preservation of health in general.”79 But if police and civilization were congruous in the eighteenth century, in the nineteenth they were bifurcating and reifying; policing became bureaucratically distinct, while civilization became

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racially distinct. The 1820s were a key moment in that transformation and Canada a key place for their reconfiguration, according to a logic that helps us to understand both the ambitions and the failings of that tory project of rule. Civilization and police connected; their opposite was violence, running the gamut from petty to revolutionary forms. Soldiers remained the gold standard for open violence everywhere, including mainland Britain: they were deployed against the Lancashire weavers’ “rising” of 1826 that saw ten people killed, scores injured, and much damage to property.80 There, the classic municipal mechanism of civil order, the magistracy, entirely broke down. Peel readily deployed soldiers in the Midlands, though he resented the expenditure, believing that such an “opulent” place should pay for policing as a local and civil expense.81 The magistracy was even more obviously inadequate in Ireland, as was the volunteer militia force known as the “Yeomanry”: it was too Protestant to maintain order, and tended rather to provoke than restrain violence, especially during the “Captain Rock” movement of the early 1820s that saw widespread agrarian violence. Peel struggled, during his years at Dublin Castle, to create and sustain a more autonomous instrument of police, a “Peace Preservation Force” introduced in 1814 that slowly became more trusted under his successors.82 At the same time, moving to the Home Office, Peel established yet another police force in London, beginning in 1829. That was also the year that the worsening crisis in Ireland prompted him to reverse his position on Catholic emancipation and force it through Parliament. The alternative, military occupation, was inconceivable.83 But Catholic enfranchisement was quickly counterbalanced with abolition of the forty-shillings franchise in Ireland and a new qualification of £10 freehold. The number of voters in the Irish countryside fell from over 200,000 to less than 40,000.84 The new “Met” police would be less military than the Irish version. They were uniformed so as not to be feared as spies, but their uniform – blue rather than red, complete with top hat and wooden truncheon – was tailored to signal civilian oversight.85 Nine “Peel’s Principles” of policing were issued to every new officer from 1829 – probably written not by Peel but by the two police commissioners, Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne. They had a liberal strain in their insistence on public opinion as the key legitimating and effective power, relying on “the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary” and understanding civil policing as the “alternative” to military force. They described police power as “dependent on public approval of their existence, actions, and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.” It must “seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice

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of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing.”86 This was a top-down project of directed, coercive sociability, but also one responsive to consent and popular opinion, at least in theory. Peel’s preference for police over soldiers, that is, for soft over hard power, usefully signals the decline of ancien regime toryism and the beginnings of a more moderate political conservatism. As civil servants, policemen were sprigs of the executive branch of government, the branch that Peel spent much of the 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s trying to insulate against liberalizing pressures. The police force was a concession but also an insulation, ambiguously liberal and conservative. But it rested on a presumption of impartiality that failed where people were polarized ethnically and politically, as in Ireland and Canada. And calls for policing tended to increase during polarizing crises.87 Canada was not yet an acute problem in the same way as Ireland, but the potential was there for all to see. Lower Canada had the religious divisions that made Ireland so ungovernable, deep and politicized enough to make neutral bureaucratic instruments of police unobtainable. The Irish diaspora intensified such concerns. The whole able-bodied male population was supposedly organized into a militia, led by officers who served as the necessary aid to government when some civilian show of force was needed, such as an arrest or the transportation of prisoners. But the militia was considered by state officials to be unreliable and likely to let prisoners escape, according to Donald Fyson. Magistrates preferred to rely on a quasi-professional constabulary and watch.88 Dalhousie voiced disappointment with such arrangements in early despatches to Bathurst, regretting the absence of something like a uniformed yeomanry, “found in almost every other part of the British Empire.”89 In 1827, distressed by what he saw as disloyal sentiments expressed at public meetings frequented by militia officers, Dalhousie “dismissioned” some prominent French-Canadian officers, including thirteen current and three former members of the legislative assembly. Where Dalhousie saw a branch of the colonial state behaving as “active agents of a party hostile to His Majesty’s Government,” the colonial perspective was that, in a world where all able-bodied men were in the militia, a ban on their participation in partisan meetings amounted to martial law.90 The London Times avidly reported the “very serious” dispute between Dalhousie and the Lower Canadian public as showing “alarming symptoms of apparent alienation” and of “anger and distrust towards this country.” The Times blamed the disaffection on overly military rule: “we doubt very gravely, whether military men ought ever to be employed as civil governors over any portion of a free people. They have one and all an instinctive jealousy of privileges which set their own power at defiance; they are habituated to command, but not to persuade or reason: they dread freedom of speech, and hate a deliberative assembly.”91

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But British North America had other wellsprings for violence than internal faction. Above all, the border with the United States, with many sections contested, fostered complex incitements to insecurity and violence.92 Smuggling and counterfeiting were regular cross-border activities, as American counterfeiters set up shops in Montreal, prompting retaliatory cross-border raids organized by bankers rather than by state officials.93 Local officials along the borderlands regularly negotiated local resolutions to crises around the extradition of criminals or escaped prisoners and refugee slaves, tending more towards a legal continentalism than constitutional centralization.94 Those counter-hegemonic negotiations were not just on the fringes of settler society but influenced its core governing institutions. The conservative bishop of Toronto, John Strachan, only came round to support popular schooling after the War of 1812 because he saw settlers in the borderlands taking their children to American schools.95 The American border was both a threat and a seductive lure that escalated the perceived dangers from internal violence in the Canadas. The American Revolution had turned social violence into revolutionary and military violence; the danger was of paradigm-formation. Lord Liverpool, prime minister from 1812 to 1827, worried that an alliance of English radicals and “factious and disaffected colonials” would see the American experience repeated in other settler societies.96 Both Canadas seemed worryingly riddled with potential republicans. Upper Canadians had grounds for concern during the War of 1812 as the colonial elite, suspicious of the largely American-born population in the Niagara Peninsula, demanded martial law there and, after the war, wanted crackdowns on the political and civil liberties of American-born settlers.97 Indigenous peoples continued to inhabit the border, to move freely back and forth across it, and to play British and American authorities against one another.98 Their cultural and political otherness challenged Eurowestern projects of sovereignty, expansion, and police,99 and new lexicons of race, space, and violence were deployed around accusations of “savagery.” Conceptions of violence were spatialized and racialized in North America in a way not seen in Britain. Franklin’s arguments that Indigenous people made the borderlands uniquely dangerous continued to resonate, as Andrew Jackson parlayed borderland threats into a bellicose nationalism during the 1820s. A lawyer from the borders of North and South Carolina, Jackson worked as a prosecutor, and also traded in Cherokee lands around present-day Memphis in anticipation of their becoming available. Federal treaties with the Cherokees in 1790–91 stipulated that only federal authorities, not territorial ones, could cross the border. Years later, as treaty provisions were enforced, Jackson found crossing the border increasingly difficult. In 1811, a federal official refused him permission, provoking Jackson to brandish

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his guns, describing them as “General Jackson’s passports.” Jason Opal sees in Jackson the epistemology of war hawks: “Bitterly rejecting a Federalist model of citizenship that assumed clear territorial limits, they invented a new ‘protection covenant,’ whereby the people themselves, imagined within a brutal state of nature, retained full sovereignty to deploy violence.”100 That is to say, while engaging in some unsavoury commercial projects, Jackson claimed a right to violence and state warrant – a thoroughly American version of “l’état c’est moi.” The borderlands underwrote this epistemology: “Instead of dwelling in a civil society, where they had to continually perform certain laws, they were an inherently lawful people living in a pitiless, indeed savage, world. To protect the American people it was necessary to stop pretending that anything like civil order existed beyond national borders and deploy violence accordingly.”101 Jackson’s rising political fortunes worked to disseminate his outlook. American invasion of Canada had been repelled in the War of 1812, but Jackson, who had resoundingly beaten the main British army in New Orleans in the final battle of that war, continued to mobilize frontier violence and escalate his political ambitions with a failed presidential bid in 1824 and a successful one in 1828. Jackson exaggerated the threat of Indigenous violence to engage in extreme forms of retaliatory violence, including warfare and “removal” – deportation – that served an expansionary American nationalism.102 Claudio Saunt notes that for removal to succeed, “civilization” projects had to fail: “For state-sponsored expulsion to seem necessary, the prospect of civilizing ‘our Indians’ – said to be never so promising in the mid-1820s – had to yield to the harrowing counterview of ‘approaching catastrophe’ and ‘impending doom,’ as the secretary of war James Barbour dramatized it.”103 Jackson’s logic of frontier violence was a paradigmatic expression of settler colonialism. Even as it threatened British North American security, it also recapitulated tensions felt along its settlement frontiers. According to Lisa Ford, the 1820s were a key decade of settler sovereignty that saw violent aggressions against Indigenous peoples and the claim that positive law was being imposed on them as a promise of security designed to attract new settlers. The key Canadian case occurred in 1823 when Shawanakiskie murdered an unnamed Indigenous woman on the streets of Amherst. The question of whether or not he was subject to British-Canadian justice went all the way up to Robert Peel, although the precedent-setting decision, that he was indeed subject to justice, did not result in punishment because Shawanakiskie had in the meantime escaped from custody.104 In fact, legal pluralism remained widespread after the 1820s, and magistrates and judges, as well as trade factors, long enjoyed much discretion in deciding whether the majesty of law was better upheld by ignoring crimes or by token justice than by prosecution and punishment.105

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That legal pluralism extended to civil as well as criminal law. The “new subjects” of the king acquired in the Conquest had kept their civil laws and their property, notwithstanding pressures to abolish it and impose British common law uniformly across the settled regions. And so, too, the Proclamation protected distinctive Indigenous forms of landholding without any necessity to define its details. Recent work by Julia Lewandoski rejects any “misunderstanding between two incommensurable cultures, one that believed in private property and one that did not.” The “rage for order” did not extend, in the eighteenth century or early nineteenth, to a British demand for standard and uniform tenure. It sufficed to specify lands on the south shore of the St Lawrence as “Abenaki land,” to distinguish it from seigneurial or freehold land, while remaining agnostic about its technicalities. Given “incomplete conquest,” Lewandoski argues, “asserting territorial and financial control was more important to the Executive Council than placing Indian subjects within a standardized tenure regime.” Indeed, anomaly better bound the Indigenous inhabitants to British protection than could law. As settlers encroached upon those lands, their inhabitants sought assistance from the British authorities.106 Thus was the nation-to-nation clientelism in the Royal Proclamation preserved. But settler encroachment and local political pressure exceeded British protection and the technicalities of tenure were eroded in Canadian courts and political relations. Canadian settlers coveted Indigenous lands as much as American settlers did, but their governing officials were much less likely to license a Jacksonian, bottom-up warrant to violence. Indigenous dispossession was carefully managed as a contributor to, rather than as a defiance of, metropolitan authority.107 British officials were determined to prove that civilization could succeed and they urged it as a counter to the aggressive anti-civilization arguments and projects playing out in the United States. In fact, already by the mid-1820s, violent confrontations on settlement frontiers from Seven Oaks in Rupert’s Land to Red Indian Lake in Newfoundland were proving that Jacksonian logic found fertile ground across British North America as elsewhere in British settler societies. Therein lay a terrible perplexity for the Colonial Office: how to interpose stabilizing British political mores and bureaucratic middle power? The Darling brothers were at the heart of that confrontation, and they were distinctively politicized as such, amidst real ambiguity about who or what interest they served. In New South Wales, debates around violence and rule of law in settler-Aboriginal relations were framed around the extension of positive law and its suspension in favour of martial law to let the crown “exercise its severities, against rebels.” Governor Thomas Brisbane declared martial law in 1824, but his successor Governor Ralph Darling refused to declare martial law in 1826, resisting the arguments from his attorney general, none other than Saxe Bannister,

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who wanted to see the state monopolize violence and impose legal equality on settlers and Aboriginal peoples alike. Darling dismissed Bannister but he also responded to settler demands for violent repression at Hunter River, by blaming “irregularities on the part of your own people which I apprehend is in many cases the causes of the disorders committed by the Natives.”108 Ralph Darling interposed himself between settlers and Aboriginal-held land, much as Britain had done in North America in 1763, and earned comparable hostility from settlers, as any serious protections for Indigenous peoples in the Canadas of the 1820s would also do. Henry Darling wrote his report within that highly politicized context, addressing both the grievances and misgovernance of Indigenous people and the political stakes of settler resistance. He saw impoverishment at a moment when British accusations of impoverishment were enjoying widespread political currency. Malthus had tried to write the state out of poverty management: to govern either poverty or wealth was to insinuate perverse incentives. But the Britain of 1828 was still the Britain of the old poor law, not yet the new. This was a world of “customary dignifying rights [that] accorded the poor nominal choices and recognized their prerogative, however slight, to bargain face to face for what they claimed to need and deserve.”109 Steven King observes that those customary claims were being outpaced by the growing numbers of under- and unemployed men, but he also identifies exchanges in 1828 to show that there, too, custom “retained its constraining power over the acts of the parish.”110 The governing conservatives were riven by tensions between an older logic of paternalism and a newer logic of austerity. The consequence was intense debate about the gap between “government” and “economy,” protections and prices, soldiers and suppressions, carried into larger questions of national and imperial government. Darling, too, must grapple with the problem and repudiate the Malthusian pressures for austerity that were tending to unite moderate liberals and conservatives in Britain. Two models of violence, the highly social version in France and the highly racial version in the United States, were both flamboyantly anti-British, and both had real supporters in Britain and Canada. Canadians were confronting the quarrel between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, the former fearful of social and political levellers, and the latter more fearful of elite-led rebellions, well knowing that elite and non-elite white men in Virginia had a modus vivendi based on their superiority to and violence against slaves.111 The Pax Britannica model trembled. Britain must either loosen its grasp on Canada or firm it up, either directly or indirectly. (Not until the 1840s would a solution be found in something that Britain, France, America, and Canada shared, something that could be summed up with one word: Barings.)

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Lord Goderich, who served successively as chancellor of the exchequer, minister for war and the colonies, and prime minister between 1823 and 1828, sought to abolish the Canadian Indian Department entirely, something Darling and Dalhousie strenuously fought. If they did not bend the Indian Department to party purposes, they knew, their enemies would. In 1824, the two men corresponded about the deprivations inflicted by metropolitan austerity, especially around the determination of the Wendat chiefs at Lorette, Lower Canada, to take their grievances to the throne: “perseverance in the pursuit of their object is the most conspicuous trait in the Indian character.” Amidst Indigenous peoples’ genuine grievances were supposedly spurious ones stirred up by machinating political rivals. Darling dismissed one from Kahnawà:ke, remarking that “little confidence is placed in any paper purporting to contain the real sentiments of the Indians for as these unfortunate People are destitute of education, and little acquainted with any language but their own, they are necessarily at the mercy of designing Persons, who they may consult in their Affairs.” He instanced rival petitions from Kanehsatà:ke for two different translators that shared signatures.112 Darling dismissed Kanyen’kehà:ka grievances in the same way Dalhousie did French-Canadian grievances, as drafted by a small factious minority playing on widespread popular ignorance. No report written by such a man could be other than politically strategic. Darling sought to make “Indians” a crucial prop to the high-stakes government of the Canadas. A mounting alliance of whigs and radicals, including evangelical interests and other “humanitarians” that initially organized around the abolition of slavery, was broadening its scope and compounding pressure on the Colonial Office to protect Indigenous peoples from quasi-genocidal attacks by land-hungry settlers. The key events in that story occurred in the mid-1830s: Sir Francis Bond Head, lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, who argued that Britain should take Indigenous land and send the people themselves off to die quietly in remote regions; the formation of the Aborigines’ Protection Society; and publication of a parliamentary Report of the Select Committee on Aborigines, 1835–37, which reprinted the Darling report, amongst other things, to show plunder and predation in Canada. As a consequence, scholars have read the Darling report retrospectively, promiscuously intermingling developments from the 1820s and 1830s.113 That’s a mistake. The pressures behind the report would precipitate whig-liberal victories over the next decade but Darling’s response to those pressures shows a conservative state still in control of the messaging. Like the Midlands uprisings, poverty and violence in the Canadas could justify soldiers on the ground, but it remained preferable to find a less military version of policing, its costs outsourced to civil society. Where colonialism and its critics in the 1830s were deeply invested in race, Darling’s tory civilization project was less vested in parsing race and

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more vested in parsing the state. For the governing coalitions of the 1820s, the key Canadian question was: how do you get a secure and economically prospering state, with minimal violence and minimal constitutional change? “Indians” were, from that perspective, as much a solution as a problem, because they seemed to reverse the American paradigm. Where the American political logic tended towards a trajectory of rebellion, militarization, and separation, the Indigenous trajectory was from bellicose autonomy to something more like loyal subjecthood. Indigenous peoples had discontents and grievances, just like anybody else, but their grievances were only a serious concern if they found common cause with Americans. Violence on the Jacksonian settlement frontier south of the border meant they were not likely to find common cause there unless, Darling noted, serious mistreatment in Canada drove them there. Darling organized his report around two axes – military violence and extra-military violence – that spoke to two major concerns. Did the British government in Canada any longer need to cultivate the Indigenous peoples as military allies? And did those Indigenous peoples pose another kind of threat than a military one? These were the classic questions that had always informed British diplomatic relations with Indigenous nations. Darling analyzed relations with individual nations one by one, paying special attention to their record of military service, their proximity to the border, and the probability that they might join an opposing side. Would they be useless, useful, or dangerous in the event of another American war? Whereas some groups of people around Oka or the eastern border of Lower Canada were dismissed as too corrupted to be useful, Darling insisted on the usefulness of the Kahnawa’kehró:non at Kahnawà:ke, the Haudenosaunee on the Grand River, and the Algonquin and Abenaki at Trois-Rivières, St Francis, and Beçancour. These people remained useful props to the British imperial state in Canada and its capacity to police the Canadian-American border as well as any internal Americanization or breakaway republicanism. Even where they became minorities, as Benjamin Hoy observes, Indigenous people remained practically important across many parts of the Canadian border, and valuable clients of the conservative imperial state.114 There was much precedent for alliances between rulers and persecuted minorities, mutually protecting one another. Majoritarian threats posed to Jewish bankers and Muslim soldiers made them useful allies to medieval kings, and unlikely to conspire against them. But that special relationship with the crown could make minorities a proxy target for popular resentments.115 To keep its Indigenous allies and subjects useful and loyal, the government had to protect their lands and encourage their civilization. Darling made that point repeatedly. Speaking of the peoples around Trois-Rivières,

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Darling observed that they were losing their land to squatters and other encroachments and that this “cruel” plundering was the Indian question. Concerning all the Indian tribes having lands assigned to them for their support; viz. That if by vigilant superintendence and effectual legal protection they are not maintained in the possession of their lands, one of three results must follow, as the consequence of the rapid progress making in the clearing and settling of the forest through which they have been accustomed to hunt. 1st. They must be entirely maintained and supported by Government: 2d. Or they will starve in the streets of the country towns and villages, if they do not crowd the gaols of the larger towns and cities: 3d. Or they will turn their backs with indignation on their father, in whose promises of protection they have with confidence for so many years relied, and will throw themselves, with vengeance in their hearts, into the arms of the Americans, who are ever ready to receive them, and who are now endeavouring to induce the tribes in Upper Canada, with whom they have the readiest intercourse, to accept of lands on the Mississippi. The Abenaquais and Algonquins now particularly under consideration were much employed last war, and in case of a renewal of hostilities, their services would again be valuable.116 A few pages later, regarding the Six Nations on the Grand River, Darling wrote that they had been faithful and useful in the past. To keep them so would “depend upon the conduct of the British Government during this period of peace, to improve that feeling and rivet their attachment.” That objective, Darling contended, “will be best promoted by taking advantage of the disposition now so rapidly spreading amongst them to advance in civilization; by creating and improving in them, by every means, a love of the country, of the soil in which they are settled, and a respect for the Government which protects them.” Again, his closing words restated the argument: the choices were to protect or to ruin “the Indian” in Canada.117 Darling defended the Indian Department with an argument for nonmilitary militarization of Indigenous-settler boundaries and the CanadianAmerican boundary. Indigenous peoples were borderlands peoples who could reinforce the international border as a non-military but unmistakably martial presence. In return, the British government must firm up and honour the boundaries between settlers and Indigenous communities. That firming up was also best done in non-military fashion, with agents, missionaries, and teachers appointed and administered from the civil rather than the military branch of the British state. That policy change did indeed follow from

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the Darling report: the Indian Department became a civil expense in 1830. Darling did not engineer the relational transition from military alliances to demilitarized civilization projects; rather, he aimed at maintaining a veiled military-style presence in an expanding civil society that was increasingly resentful of military warrants and expenses. Wellingtonians, as a military state within the imperial state, tended to see Indigenous warriors as a kind of conservative militia group – a view borne out by their role in the rebellions. Civilization for Darling was not so much a liberal project as a conservative and clientelist one. From the perspective of the conservative-clientelist, fiscal-military state, Indigenous warriors did not reflect wider social tensions but rather the solution to those wider tensions. Their very poverty made them particularly useful clients for a tory statesman seeking a combination of authority and balance of power amongst rival interests and identities. Their history of direct loyalty to the crown, rather than to the colonial state, made them a bulwark for the crown against settler agitation. And their continuing capacity for violence took its meaning from that observation: it was not, as historians have argued, that they became militarily irrelevant but that they took on a new domestic relevance, as a certain kind of police, being discovered at that moment in Britain as a prop to public order. Conservative mechanisms of political alliance and reciprocity were clientelist, not impartial, and Indigenous peoples remained valuable clients. Clientelism was not corruption but a form of reciprocity, we might even say of social citizenship. And Indigenous loyalty to the state could be the more confidently assumed because reformers complained loud and long that Indigenous lands were not coming onto the market quickly enough. Indigenous people were useful against both American and Canadian popular politics because both those publics wanted the exact same thing: Indigenous lands. Indigenous allies could serve to ward off internal Americanization in the Canadas, as well as the invading variety. Darling’s solution reflected the kind of negotiation around policing seen in other British jurisdictions. The tory viewpoint was that if you could maintain order, liberal prosperity should naturally follow, whereas reformers thought if you could get liberal prosperity, order should naturally follow. Tories preferred statist solutions; reformers preferred to dismantle the state; where the former would blur state-society distinctions, the latter would sharpen them. Henry Darling’s civilization project had two salient precedents. One, his brother recommended a civilization policy in New South Wales in 1826. Soon after arriving there in December 1825, Ralph Darling instructed a local archdeacon to report on ways that Aboriginal peoples might be converted and educated. In turn, the archdeacon commissioned a report from a naval lieutenant, Richard Sadleir, who had served on the Great Lakes from July 1815 to 1819, and was counted an expert on indigeneity. Ralph Darling

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forwarded those reports to the Colonial Office, and recommended civilization but also warned that “a very considerable expense must be incurred to do anything effectually,” to which the minister, Goderich, responded with approval that fell short of committing resources to the project.118 Henry Darling proceeded more strategically: his civilizing project would be cheap and rely primarily on the Anglican Church. Civilization would enable less military spending, by drawing on metropolitan subscriptions and a colonial church establishment: “It appears to me that this would not be attended with much expense. A small sum by way of salary to a schoolmaster wherever a school may be formed, say four or five in the whole,” plus small sums added to the salary of an existing English missionary and a second if the Lord Bishop of the diocese appointed one, as well as “some aid in building school-houses.”119 But the Anglican role in the civilizing project collided with the other precedent for its recommendation. Henry Darling built his civilization project atop a self-civilization project launched by Indigenous peoples themselves, when he urged civilization as commensurate with the “liberality of the British Government,” and “the disposition now shown generally amongst the resident Indians [of Canada] to shake off the rude habits of savage life, and to embrace Christianity and civilization.”120 Indigenous peoples were not simply pawns to be moved around an imperial chess board. They had their own ideas on violence, the state, and civilization, and their own ways of managing them. Among their own projects of self-civilization was the conversion to Methodism of Kahkewaˉquonaˉby or Peter Jones, the Ojibwe chief at the Credit Reserve at Mississauga. Jones rapidly converted much of his community – an event that struck not just Darling but many others as a remarkable and promising new tendency. Conversion was a principled act on Jones’s part, but it was also a strategic one aimed at securing for the Mississauga political rights and secure land tenure, at a time when his community was suffering from dwindling resources and protections and growing pressures for land cessions. There had been eight sale agreements between 1792 and 1820.121 Jones decided that “civilization” could be relatively easy to demonstrate, with evidence of church-going and settlement, the Bible and the plough, clean households, and repudiation of alcohol that he blamed for the growing weakness of his people. He believed such claims compatible with traditional forms of governance and constitutionalism and, Bohaker notes, his leadership and humility were approved as conforming to Anishinaabe norms.122 Jones understood civilization as an empirical category; instead, it would prove a reifying and “Orientalizing” one.123 Jones’s early success posed problems for any tory civilization project. Methodists and other evangelicals were generally not good Tories; they tended, rather, towards the other side

3.2 | This portrait of Kahkewaˉquonaˉby or Peter Jones, painted as a miniature by Matilda Jones in 1832 and engraved the following year, shows the Mississauga chief as a man of two civilizations harmoniously combined, both in his dress and in the background to the painting. Courtesy of the Victoria University Library Toronto and the Toronto Public Library x 2-25 Cab II.

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of the party divide. If the Indigenous peoples of Canada were converting to Methodism en masse, they threatened to form a partisan, anti-Tory faction, even perhaps an anti-Tory race. In Canada, Methodists were particularly dangerous because they were seen as American levellers in fact or spirit: they carried the borderlands into the heart of Loyalist society.124 The Anglican establishment, led by Bishop Strachan, was irreducibly hostile to Peter Jones and his Mississauga civilizing project and lent that influence to their dispossession. Jones’s strategy failed in a dramatic and definitive confrontation in January 1828 when he and his brother met with Lieutenant Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland’s inner governing circle: Bishop Strachan, attorney general John Beverley Robinson,125 civil secretary Sir George Hillier (who served with Maitland in the wars), and James Givins, superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Home District since 1797. Givins, a military officer, had spent two years of the Revolutionary War as a prisoner in American hands; he fought the 1813 American invasion and his house, looted by American soldiers (who stole a picture of the Battle of Trafalgar among other items), still bore bloodstains of soldiers wounded in that fight. The four men informed Peter Jones that the governor “did not feel disposed to assist the Indians so long as they remained under the instruction of their present teachers [i.e., Methodists], who were not responsible to the Government for any of their proceedings and instructions.” Forced to choose, Jones chose Methodism and dispossession over Anglicanism and patronage.126 The Canadas, like Ireland, were too factionalized to generate neutral bureaucracies. Without patronage and assistance, Indigenous peoples could not protect their land from the predations of neighbouring settlers and squatters. Darling forcefully described the situation as “plunder”: “the active interposition of the Government is urgently called for on behalf of these helpless individuals, whose landed possessions (where they have any assigned to them,) are daily plundered by their designing and more enlightened white brethren.”127 Indigenous peoples could not defend themselves against asset-stripping by squatters, tenants, and all sorts of scofflaws who congregated near their reserves. If they leased a plot of land to a farmer, they were liable to lose both rents and title. Legal hybridity, as when a non-Indigenous man married an Indigenous woman and laid claim to common rights and usages, thereby privatizing them through legal forms, provided another dangerous encroachment on Indigenous commons.128 The problem also reflected a process of dispossession that Allan Greer has described as an overlay of a non-Indigenous commons on an existing Indigenous commons, where settlers let their livestock roam freely and encroached upon Indigenous resources. Elsewhere, by contrast, livestock owners were responsible for damages done by their livestock.129 Complaints of such encroachments accumulated in the years prior to Darling’s report. In the words of Buckquaquet of the Rice Lake Mississauga

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in 1818, “From our lands we receive scarcely anything … Our hunting is destroyed.” Indian Department officials concurred: William Claus urged the Mississauga that if their land was “useless” and “laying dead,” all the more reason to dispose of it.130 There was a broader failure to protect and police Indigenous lands and rights to anything like accepted standards in areas settled by Europeans. A civilization project was never going to do that work. Rather than police the interface between Indian and non-Indian lands and uses, the local settler state left them to run themselves after the model of a frontier, a Franklinesque, racialized and spatialized borderlands. Indigenous lands, by dint of their special legal status, functioned as an internal borderland, a place where state authority did not stretch, and where, therefore, illicit profits and predations attracted scofflaws and squatters. Wherever the state created Indian reserves, it generated hard-wired geographies of disorder, lawlessness, and violence. To be an “Indian” in settler Canada was to be perpetually on an unstable, if not violent, frontier. As Darling recognized, this disorder emanated from settlers rather than Indigenous inhabitants. His references to “enlightened” neighbours reflect a central irony of the interplay of violence and Eurowestern civilization. Civilization for Tories was a disciplined respect for rule of law and consensual restrictions on violence. Indigenous communities in places like Brantford, Mississauga, and Kahnawà:ke were too “civilized” to respond violently to the encroachments on their lands. But even as land-hungry settler society defied such restraints, it also claimed a monopoly on higher civilization and denounced “Indians” as unpoliced and uncivilized, the better to rob them. The source of the disorder was not the cultural traits of Indigenous peoples living on reserves, but the legal limbo of differences of legal title to reserve property. Because Indigenous people had legally anomalous property, the colonial state could be put to work to prise their property from them. So long as settlers accompanied the process with intense, vituperative racialization, other kinds of property relations could not be threatened in that process of predation. Where Jones thought he could demonstrate visibly orderly use of property as empirical proof of civilization, the emerging settler colonial state would reify civilization as the antithesis of a disorder understood not as violence but as an underlying, primitive or pre-liberal, racialized threat to “liberal” property relations and values. Although the Canadian colonial state did not engage in Andrew Jackson’s populist appeals to sovereign political violence, it tolerated petty violence and illegal predations on Indigenous property that wrought similar damage in the long run. Whereas Dalhousie’s military retinue sought to interpose barriers between settlers and Natives, colonials dismantled them. Paul Romney identifies a wider pattern of disenfranchisement and dispossession under John Beverley Robinson, but Indigenous people were uniquely vulnerable

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for lack of independent political and legal agency.131 Sidney Harring shows, for example, how Robinson, initially as attorney general, later as chief justice, overcame his distaste for squatters enough to claim that their unstoppable encroachments and his inability to police them added up to a logic of land surrender.132 The patricians of Upper Canada made disorder and predation their allies in the project of dispossessing Indigenous peoples settled in Canada. The Colonial Office proved no more effective a protector after 1828 than before. As policing became increasingly a local and civil project, rather than an imperial and military one, it became obligingly subsidiary to the agenda of settler colonialism. Darling’s civilization project became, in subsequent years, a top-down imperial project. But that’s not how it began. Darling was amplifying Indigenous analysis of their changing circumstances, which is to say, Indigenous history, grounded on Indigenous claims to civilization. Such language of civilization was natural to all the different interlocutors. But by the 1820s, it was becoming impossible not to recognize that Indigenous wartime losses would not be regained, and peacetime losses would exacerbate them. The many different Indigenous inhabitants of British North America were being stripped of their wealth and autonomy, their constitutions and their civilization. An unreliable British-Canadian state complex was not protecting them from dispossession and poverty. Indigenous grievances recorded the widening gap between past and present. Like the British public, Indigenous peoples wanted whatever it was that insulated you from poverty and violence. If they used the languages of civilization and respectability, they did not necessarily use them in Eurocentric or middle-class-centric terms; the English middle classes had no monopoly on respectability as a hedge against violence and poverty. It’s a truism that all social groups have their own social logics. But it was not enough for Indigenous people to be civilized and respectable on their own understanding. They also needed recognition from Eurowestern settlers and officials to enjoy the ordinary rights and protections of the British subject, such as immunity from theft. If Darling understood and confirmed the main point – plunder – he didn’t understand or convey the history behind it. And Eurowestern officials and audiences, taking their bearings from Locke and Hobbes, Smith and Ferguson, believed that Indigenous poverty was old and diminishing, not new and progressing. Henry Darling did not remain in Canada to see his report enacted but, on Dalhousie’s advice, proceeded to England in September 1828 to present it personally to the colonial authorities. He coveted but did not get superintendence in the reformed Indian Department; nor was he appointed governor of the Bahamas, his next choice; nor did he get the Treasury of New South Wales that brother Ralph tried to secure for him in 1829.133 Both of Henry Darling’s patrons were too discredited: Dalhousie was replaced

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in September 1828 and Ralph Darling was embattled through 1829. Sir Ralph had aroused hostility in New South Wales for harsh treatment of a prisoner who died after being sentenced to a chain gang; for trying to repress the “republicans” in the local newspapers with taxes and restraining laws; and for other acts typical of excessively military rule, according to complaints voiced by such critics as Joseph Hume and Daniel O’Connell: “Mr. O’Connell said, that unless the Governors of our distant colonies were kept under proper control, there was no extent of despotism which they would not practice.”134 Pamphlets also accused Ralph Darling of overspending and of dispensing patronage to a troop of relations that included Henry Darling’s son, Charles Darling, who served as his uncle’s assistant private secretary and later his military secretary. With the governor attacked in absentia, with Sir George Murray weakly defending Sir Ralph in the Commons and quietly casting about for a replacement, Henry Darling took up the cause, reprinting some of his brother’s self-exculpatory despatches to the Colonial Office and adding his own arguments. The first charge against Sir Ralph, cited by Henry Darling, specified “that the progress of extravagance has been most enormous in every department; – for instance, the Police Establishment in 1828 cost £8,000, and that now it is doubled.” In fact, Henry Darling responded, the “Police Establishment” had increased from £20,556 8.s. 2½d to £21,632, 3s. 5½d between 1828 and 1829. But his broader line of defence was that governors naturally aroused local resentments when they did their jobs – though they could hardly do them well when “the Editors of the opposition papers and a few factious individuals, were eagerly looking out for every pretence to abuse and vilify the Government, and whose object has been to magnify or distort every occurrence, and to persuade these people that they have been treated with unnecessary severity … If the Governor of such a colony is to be arraigned on the information of every factious malecontent, or by individuals dismissed for improper conduct, no man who regards either his peace or his reputation, would accept the situation.”135 As ever, Darling was not just describing a particular situation, but simultaneously defending an equally embattled and discredited Dalhousie and recapitulating a defence of the tory state more generally. He could not save his brother from recall at the end of his term in March 1831: that was inevitable under the newly elected whig administration, to whom Ralph Darling “symbolized much that was wrong with the colonial system of government.”136 Back in England, Ralph was exonerated by select committee, knighted immediately afterwards, and received further minor honorific appointments. (His wife, Lady Eliza, sponsored a “School of Industry” in Sussex and in 1834 published advice for humble Girls Going Out to Service, which justified economic inequality as the source of liberty in England, where “none can oppress another, but

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where rich and poor are ‘taught to do to others as they would have others do to them,’” knowing themselves equal in the sight of God.137) Henry Darling was acceptable enough to the government of Earl Grey to be named governor of Tobago in 1833, where he oversaw the dismantling of slavery, fought accusations of misgovernance around high infant mortality rates, and died in office in 1845. By that time the scene was set for a different iteration of the civilization project in Canada. In the 1820s, state officials thought hard about how to govern within the remnants of the fiscal-military state, and Henry Darling’s report of 1828 spoke strategically from that insider perspective. The 1830s, in contrast, was a decade of whig-reform hegemony: it saw reformers thinking hard about how to do things through the medium of civil society. Tories had sought to construct intermediary gradations between the state and civil society that could variously, and usually ambiguously, reflect military and/or civilian branches as required by the situation, given enough political discretion. Their critics and successors wanted more theoretically driven reforms that would more starkly distinguish state from society. Those reformers believed that the heavily armed, heavily taxing state was the major obstacle to improvement and demanded a smaller, cheaper, civilian state as the best avenue to economic and social improvement. When Darling made the observation of Indigenous poverty, he opened up new ways of debating conservative versus liberal rule around the meaning of civilization. Reformers seized upon Darling’s observations and amplified them. Darling’s report was republished by the Aborigines’ Protection Society, created in 1837 with Saxe Bannister one of its founders, that formulated a serious critique of settler colonial predations across the British Empire, increasingly understood as genocidal.138 But before those developments could redound back in Canada, more urgent questions occupied the agenda, namely, the threat to British rule posed by political polarization leading up to the rebellions of 1837–38. Darling’s analysis of colonial relationships was too crudely physical, too obsessed with the physical movements of men and armies and their dangerous passions. But that was a tory take on the public sphere. A liberal take, by contrast, looked beyond mere physical presence to see political economy at work in the material interests and the voluntary associations, including rival but legitimate political parties. Rather than defending an unaccountable governing class, it channelled competing interests and identities into a majoritarian political project. That was Durham’s mandate.

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Liberal Civilization in the 1830s: The Durham Report

i: b r it is h b e g inni ngs The rebellions in 1830s Canada were another attempt at an Atlantic Revolution.1 British and Canadian understandings of the rebellions reflected readings of British politics and history. Patriot leader Louis-Joseph Papineau and his son Amédée likened their grievances to Irish “constitutional resistance.”2 The British insisted that the political rights of the British subject must be curtailed in Canada, but the violence of the suppression – martial law, thousands of soldiers deployed, and mass arrests – could not be allowed to last. In 1838, Lord Durham was sent to restore a measure of peaceful order. A committed constitutionalist, he held unconstitutional powers, but still earned a reprimand for breaching them. The irascible Durham immediately resigned and returned to England. Immediately on his departure, rebellion broke out anew, with yet more violent suppression and arrests. Early in 1839, Durham submitted his Report on the Affairs of British North America that recommended, amongst a slew of lesser reforms, two major constitutional changes: the union of Upper and Lower Canada, and colonial self-government that should, he argued, painlessly effect the assimilation of French Canada. The union of the Canadas was enacted as law, responsible government was not, but, unlike the predicted assimilation, occurred nonetheless. I skirt the violent events themselves to focus on the British project of understanding, manipulating, and sublimating the violence. Few documents have attracted more attention in Canadian history than Durham’s report, described by a constitutional scholar as “the greatest state paper in colonial history.”3 This was not just another report by just another official. His government was supposed to restrain the extreme violence in Canada; instead, his report inherited that task. It was a historical analysis of the causes and

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consequences of the Canadian rebellions but one designed to become an enduring part of the unwritten British-Canadian constitution, much like Hume’s History. Durham’s history analyzed the political jealousies that impeded the better angels of the British constitution in Canada, seen to be factionalized internally and failing to rise to British or North American norms of progress. Durham’s straw-into-gold problem was worse than Hume’s, exacerbated by the widespread violence and disaffection, especially in Lower Canada. There was no stable constitutional-political field to work from; extremists at both ends demanded policies – authoritarianism and republicanism – incompatible with and dangerous to a fragile political equilibrium back home. Durham’s was a liberal-political analysis of social and economic causes and consequences. It shows us the strengths of political liberalism in its heyday, operated by a master strategist reasoning between England and Canada, and the limits of that liberalism. The limits were acutely obvious in Britain at the time of Durham’s report. Radicals and whigs, liberals and moderates, united to bring down Wellington’s government in 1830, but struggled to maintain enough unity once they were in power, their legislation invariably too radical for some, too conservative for others. The philosophical radicals usually wanted something more; the great whigs in cabinet usually wanted something less. All the more remarkable, therefore, to note that two of the most effective critics of the tories in the 1820s and most radical voices inside the government in the early 1830s were also consecutive governors general to the Canadas in the 1830s: John Lambton, Lord Durham, and Charles Poulett Thomson, Lord Sydenham. Ian Newbould argues that “few politicians in the 1830s were reformers by nature.”4 But Durham and Sydenham were both reformers, anomalously so, and distrusted as such in cabinet. The two men were political allies and friendly with one another. They went on a trade mission to France together in the early 1830s and leaned on one another for support and data, as in 1834 when Durham turned to Poulett Thomson for economic statistics for a speech given in Glasgow advocating freer trade with France, and in 1839 when Thomson closeted with Durham to get instructions on how to govern Canada.5 Sydenham’s and Durham’s liberalisms were aligned but distinct, the one more steeped in economics, the other in politics. The young Sydenham excelled as an economist, marching facts and figures into parliamentary debate and forcing them into the political mainstream. He was seen to embody Manchester liberalism and from 1830 he ran the Board of Trade, initially as vice-president, later as president. The diarist Charles Greville described him in 1830 as “an ultra political communist … There never was a more sudden rise than this; a young merchant, after two or three years of Parliament and two or three speeches, is made Vice-President of the Board

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of Trade, Treasurer of the Navy, and a Privy Councillor.”6 That’s what the new political economy could do for an ambitious young man. If the “upper ten thousand” was mostly landed and wealthy elites, perhaps 20 per cent had managed to lever themselves into it.7 But snobs found such social climbing distasteful. Durham’s liberalism was less economic (he “would go little further than to advocate, with some vagueness, economy and retrenchment in public expenditure”8) and more specifically political: he was an accomplished critic of oligarchy. In the 1820s he perfected the criticism; in the 1830s he wrote legislation that strategically targeted its weakest points. Durham was not himself a consummate deal broker – his temper was far too incendiary for that – but his position as a charismatic figure at the radical edge of mainstream liberalism forced moderates to come to terms, lest a more radical coalition take shape around him. Harriet Martineau argued: “From the moment when the young John George Lambton fixed the attention of the best opposition men by his maiden speech, to that in which he provided for the establishment of responsible government in Canada, he was the trust and hope of the most highly principled Liberals in the country.”9 Durham and Sydenham were, in short, virtuoso political insiders, liberal conservatives in their way, but more liberal than most of their peers. But there were real differences between them. Durham was a whig, a defender of ancien regime liberties; Sydenham was a philosophical radical, personally close to James Mill and Bentham, more statist than Durham, and less respectful of local autonomy.10 From the Canadian perspective, Ian Radforth notes, Durham and Sydenham look more like counter-revolutionaries, defending rather than criticizing authoritarian rule.11 They saw themselves as accountable primarily to British public opinion: that was a democratizing view in Britain and a conservative one in Canada. The gaps between Durham and Sydenham and between Britain and Canada reveal the tensions between politics and economics, theory and practice. Durham’s was a political liberalism but it took as one argument for political liberalism a growing economic inequality and illiberalism. Hume had said populations that weren’t economically flourishing were badly governed, and Durham saw oligarchic state capture causing poverty in Britain, Canada, and especially French Canada, that demanded a broader balance of power amongst parties and jurisdictions able to check one another. Sydenham, by contrast, wanted greater state capture for utilitarians in an aggrandized bureaucratic-administrative state that would be more rational and efficient than partisan. Durham’s public disciplined the state, Sydenham’s state disciplined the public. Those gaps became more acute during the 1840s after their deaths. Both men were also consummate practical politicians who helped to engineer some of liberalism’s greatest political victories. Their absence from histories of liberalism distorts that history.12

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It makes liberalism more doctrinaire and less contextual. Liberal reformers had to prise power from people unlikely to be persuaded by a good argument and fearful of concessions to radical “communists.” Doctrinaire ideologists were ill-equipped for that balancing act. There’s an element of The Sting to the history of political reform: the most successful arguments disappear into their context. Textbook histories of liberalism privilege representation over intervention.13 Durham’s report was, like Hume’s History of England, an ironic maker’s history, but one needing ironic enactment by Sydenham. Here, I provide a contextual reading, based on Durham’s and Sydenham’s tag-team negotiation of liberal principles and partisan politics first in Britain, then in Canada. The eighteenth of April 1821 was a banner day for British liberalism. In one part of London, the Political Economy Club was formed as a meeting place for economic liberals, including statesmen and journalists.14 The same day, at Westminster, a wealthy financier turned mp , David Ricardo, spoke in favour of John Lambton’s (doomed) bill to extend the franchise to all householders and leaseholders with three-year leases. Lambton was friendly with many members of the club, including Ricardo. Lambton attended the club as a visitor in April of 1822, when the questions for discussion – “whether the restrictions of the Colonial system can under any circumstance be beneficial to the Mother-country,” and “the best mode of Taxation” – failed to end conclusively. They did not discuss the question proposed by Thomas Malthus: “On what does the demand for Labour depend?” but postponed it on his request. Where Charles Poulett Thomson joined the club in March 1828, Lambton never did.15 By 1867, 109 men had been members of the Political Economy Club, and fifty-two of them had been in Parliament.16 Its members also wrote widely: the Edinburgh Review published many economists, including Nassau Senior and J.R. McCulloch. They attacked conservative economics – mercantilism – as driving trade wars and corruption. The Napoleonic Wars had cut Britain off from European produce, forcing policies to increase their own supply and find other partners. Corn laws hiked the price of grain to reclaim the “great Wastes” at home17 and encourage colonial production. But the tories were too much in thrall to the landed interests to dismantle them at the end of the wars. Liberals blamed the corn laws for driving up the price of the workingman’s food. In Parliament, Ricardo led the economists’ demands for tariff reduction, believing that no amount of science or knowledge could better “the natural operation of commerce, [which] cannot be adjusted by any human wisdom or skill.”18 But the conservatives preferred to use the taxes to pay off the sinking fund on war debts, in case another war occurred. Moderate tories, above all George Canning, leader in the Commons from 1822, and William Huskisson, at the Board of Trade from 1823, pressed for expansive trade policies.19 A select

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committee of 1828 recommended the tariff be reduced and the sinking fund abolished. But the death of Canning in 1827 and Huskisson in 1828 emboldened the reformers. Tory claims of good economic governance were fraying on the evidence. The 1820s saw prolonged hardship, worsened by a failure of the harvest and riots in southern countries in the fall of 1830. Lucy Brown observes that “Parliament was not master of the situation. To the members of that period the economic problem was basically one of the maintenance of civil order.” That was the view of Charles Poulett Thomson, elected to Parliament in 1826. He was from a commercial family and tutored by McCulloch, with whom he afterwards remained very close. He developed what his brother, George Poulett Scrope, also an mp , described as “strong opinions of a liberal character on the more ordinary political questions of the age. These principles were entirely self-formed.” (Poulett Scrope was more scathing about cuts to poor relief in 1834: “so preposterous a recommendation, he could scarcely have expected to proceed from some juvenile theorist – some raw tyro in political economy, unacquainted with the state of the working classes of England, and the spirit or operations of the Poor-laws.”20) Poulett Thomson initially ran in Dover on the invitation of utilitarians, including Bentham who canvassed for him, and on his election he congratulated voters on “having rescued their town from the disgrace of being a Government Borough.”21 He was invited to Manchester because his views so perfectly reflected what was becoming known as “Manchester liberalism.” Thomson saw himself as more systematic, philosophical, and informed than his fellow mp s and often boasted of his command of facts. Of his first speech in Parliament, in May 1827, supporting relaxation of the Navigation Acts, he remarked: “A man who tells the House facts with which the majority are unacquainted, is sure to be listened to, and the reputation for doing so will procure him attention upon other points on which he, perhaps, does not deserve it.”22 In early 1830, Thomson moved for a select committee to inquiry into tax revision, with a hard-hitting speech on “injudicious taxation” that fell just short of advocating income tax. Canadian timber was protected, Thomson complained, at a cost of 1.5 million sterling per year, a sum “as much a dead loss to the country as if it were thrown into the sea.”23 The speech made him Canadian enemies. Economics bolstered all the other attacks. The country seemed to be hemorrhaging money simultaneously to the landed interests, the army, the colonies, and the poor. Britain was enormously wealthy but also carried staggering debts and heavy interest payments, far higher than any other nation, as a consequence of its wars and military establishment, and into the mid-nineteenth century, nearly three quarters of government revenues went to servicing the country’s debts. (Government debt in England, in the

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mid-1850s, calculated in American dollars, stood at $3 billion, almost three times that of France, and fifty times that of the United States.24) The cost of poor relief was trivial compared to the cost of war and debt, but it was increasing and anomalous enough to worry the economists. The national cost of poor relief rose from 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent of national product in the early nineteenth century, significantly more than continental European countries paid.25 Those fiscal transfers were all the more indefensible if you understood them, as Thomson did, as causing the other problems and leading England “at last to ruin and poverty.”26 England was the wealthiest country in Europe but growing numbers of Englishmen intensely feared the loss of that competitive advantage to the United States. Cambridge philosopher Charles Babbage’s 1830 treatise Reflections on the Decline of Science in England marked a growing public concern. There was a comparative element to that sense of decline, as other countries pulled themselves out of poverty, that would haunt later British declensionists.27 But there was also an empirical recognition that, even as Britain industrialized and accumulated new concentrations of wealth, it acquired concentrations of poverty and disorder.28 Tax reform seemed the least painful fix. And if the landed interests blocked the reform, all the more reason to expand the voting public to force change upon a privileged and jealous class. In fact, Peel, like Huskisson, was sympathetic to an income tax that would get at concentrated and inactive capital, thereby encouraging productive investment. Income tax was also a way to protect the landed.29 But he preferred to keep fiscal policy in the cabinet, argues Brown.30 The Exchequer was fast becoming the bottom line of attack and defence for policies more generally. Poulett Thomson’s motion for a select committee on tax policy would, Peel warned, transfer the power of the Exchequer to a parliamentary committee and, by obviating executive discretion, provoke speculative booms and busts. Thomson knew his motion was unrealistic, but he used it to test loyalties and “educate” Parliament to freetrade doctrine. The motion lost 167 to 78, but all seventy-eight were on the opposition benches and voted against Wellington, helping to bring him down. Economic arguments based on appeal to economic laws were a stake in the heart of ancien regime toryism. The new political economy looked for and found “scientific” laws true in all times and places, including Malthus’s supposed law that food would increase mathematically, and demand for it exponentially; J.-B. Say’s law that supply creates demand; and Ricardo’s law of diminishing returns, discovered simultaneously by Malthus in 1815. That theory suggested landlords would soak up the benefits of tariffs, by charging more rents for the more productive lands. Malthus posited that rents rose with economic growth: better growth with rent than stagnation. Where Malthus privileged the interests of landholders on grounds that there was “no class in society whose interests are more nearly and intimately

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connected with the prosperity of the state,” Ricardo saw an irreducible conflict of interest between landlords versus capital and labour, with rents systematically draining the latter to benefit the former. He claimed scientific predictive power, the gold standard for knowledge since the Scientific Revolution.31 But conservatives pointed to the French Revolution to defend, first, experience and probability against Ricardo’s abstract science, and, second, government intervention against laissez-faire doctrines that wrongly presumed a mass public capacity to, in Malthus’s words, “reason from the past to the future” and forsake “present gratification for fear of privation in the future.”32 Economic theories were messier than laboratory experiments and they needed improved data and logic – statistics and mathematics – to make them more rigorous. Economists thrilled to the “amazing power of mathematics to impose its principles of identity and sameness on many things that would seem to resist them.”33 At their forefront, doing the work of reading “science” across the different intellectual disciplines of the day, was William Whewell, a Cambridge natural philosopher who coined the phrase “scientist” in the early 1830s to describe shared traits across a new kind of community, spanning the different intellectual disciplines. Whewell wrote philosophical treatises on knowledge as well as very practical ones – his first chair was in mineralogy, his last in philosophy – that propped up the heavily mathematical Cambridge curriculum. For Whewell, as for Hume, science was a matter of psychology: not reality but mind turned facts into inductive truth.34 Whewell published a series of highly mathematized economic articles, beginning in 1829, to uphold Malthus’s arguments against its critics, though Malthus admitted he couldn’t understand them himself; nor could other whigs and liberals. Lord Lansdowne was one who did and who frequented economists. At Bowood, he hosted Nassau Senior who “annoyed other guests by expecting silence when he studied, and who disliked dancing, music, and cards.” But Lansdowne tempered his economics with a defence of the landed interests and a dislike for political radicals.35 Lansdowne’s cousin was the key whig economist in Lord Grey’s administration: John Charles Spencer, Lord Althorp, popularly known as “Honest Jack” to distinguish him from “Radical Jack,” Lord Durham, and “Finality Jack,” Lord John Russell. Althorp refused the prime ministership in 1830, but served as chancellor of the exchequer and party leader in the Commons (his title was a courtesy until 1834 when his father’s death took him to the Lords and, by choice, largely out of politics). Althorp also took over the Board of Trade in 1830 and installed Poulett Thomson as vice-president, leaving him largely to run it and later ceding the presidency to him. Lucy Brown observes: “In 1830, therefore, the Board of Trade fell under the guidance of one who was intelligent and energetic, who was a more consistent, or at

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least a more explicit, free-trader than Huskisson had been, but who lacked Huskisson’s political experience and his standing, both in Parliament and in the country. His appointment gave impetus to the development of the Board of Trade along Benthamite and Ricardian lines.”36 Thomson remained close to McCulloch and collaborated with him on currency questions.37 Althorp’s first budget in 1831 was “an amalgam of views held by the leading exponents of David Ricardo’s liberal economics”: Poulett Thomson, McCulloch, and Sir Henry Parnell, recent author of the treatise On Financial Reform. The budget proposed to reduce and abolish hundreds of specific duties, including colonial timber, and to impose a tax on land transfers; income and property taxes were considered desirable but unobtainable. But so, it turned out, were the modest reforms proposed. The tories beat back the land transfer tax and the tariff reforms and reformers learned the lesson of “parliamentary hostility to doctrinaire policies.”38 Through the 1830s, the liberals achieved only modest policy gains and few appointments.39 Whigs proved reluctant even on issues of slavery and child labour, needing to be pushed by liberals like Thomson.40 The “condition of England” question was beginning to take shape in such debates. Was the country wealthy, wealthy in pockets, or generally suffering? How bad was the suffering? Would it fix itself? The more obvious the suffering, the more did cautious economic pragmatism fail to persuade. But the data was hard to obtain, mostly embedded in voluminous parliamentary papers and needing translation into economic “law.”41 Expertise was taking shape in the universities, with professorships founded at Oxford, Cambridge, and ucl during the 1820s, their occupiers seeking to lead wider debates and educate the public. American universities did the same thing.42 Jeremy Bentham argued that the public must be taught “the science of political economy” in order to “recognize the community of interests that exists among nations.”43 Political economists agreed with that assessment.44 They sought to replace corrupt with expert government best suited for middle-class rule and an engineered social and economic harmony.45 Radical ambitions for working-class self-education dismayed the utilitarians, prompting James Mill to warn Lord Brougham in 1832: “These opinions, if they were to spread, would be the subversion of civilised society; worse than the overwhelming deluge of Huns and Tartars.”46 Popularizing political economy was not like popularizing history. History was grounded in ordinary knowledge and experience, including domestic life and its sympathies and consolations.47 History’s lessons were always indirect, never perfectly translated from one context to another, because no two historical episodes fully resembled one another. Economics sought to find as much identity between its observations as possible to produce objective and universal statistics. Economic facts took on their own logic and rigour, distinct

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from history or politics. And for the Malthusian political economists, that logic was more in collision than collusion with the logic of the household. If the family were ruled by economic logic, it would not look much like a family anymore, a point that Charles Dickens made at length in Hard Times. The new political economy repudiated sympathy for the poor and recommended harsh new workhouse regimes, achieved in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, to discourage popular recourse to assistance. Where Hume had argued that you could have both sympathy and growth, Edwin Chadwick, an influential and Malthusian poor law commissioner, demanded a choice between the two. Bentham sought a middle ground in self-sustaining workhouses that would be more efficient than penal. But those in the workhouses knew them to be unmistakably penal, coercive, and degrading. Poor law reform put liberal economics to benefit the propertied public. If economics was Thomson’s bailiwick, parliamentary reform was Durham’s. Here the whigs were on stronger ground, uniting around the need to extend the franchise and abolish rotten boroughs, effectively empowering the upper middle classes. Whig grandees like Durham saw the leadership of public opinion as noblesse oblige, calling for the skillful maneuvering of a canoeist in rapids.48 Lord John Russell, younger son of the Duke of Bedford, argued in Parliament that “great changes accomplished by the people” were dangerous even when salutary, but those “accomplished by the aristocracy, at the desire of the people, are at once salutary and safe.”49 Durham’s mother was an earl’s daughter, his father a whig mp and the owner of a mine worth £50,000 a year. Durham, Russell, and their peers saw an enlarging middle class, educated and commercially minded, as an enlightened, educated, sober constituency, the best foundation for a broad political coalition or consensus.50 Without it, Britain might go the way of France. Durham’s brother Hedworth declared in Sunderland in 1830: “When the Duke of Wellington declared against reform, civil war stared us in the face.”51 In 1832, when the king delayed his approval of the Reform Act, Durham went to the palace to speed things along. When the king’s aide, Lord Albemarle, asked: “Is there revolution?” Durham replied, “There will be if you stay to finish your breakfast.”52 Unenfranchised, the middling classes were too likely to rally with the unenfranchised, “outdoor” public; enfranchised as an “indoor” public, they should become reliable defenders of the establishment. Voters or not, they exercised political choice and the goal of the statesmen was to swing their choice, that is, to “trim” their vote. Whether or not people did trim was subject to controversy that opposed history to philosophy, T.B. Macaulay to James Mill. Macaulay agreed with Hume on trimming and political choice. From the 1820s, the young man began to write historical-political essays comparing the England of his day with the 1680s, both periods of intense political

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polarization. Deep social and economic changes, to wealth, population, and relationships, coupled with an ultra-tory refusal to adapt, caused “the slow erosion of consent” and a likelihood of civil war, not between rich and poor but the elite and the middling public.53 Elected to Parliament in 1830, Macaulay so eloquently championed the Reform Act of 1832 that he became a household name. He went to India as an administrator from 1834 to 1838, then returned to represent Edinburgh in Parliament between 1838 and 1847, but increasingly spent his time writing a massive, popular history of England since 1688. Macaulay saw the trimmers or swing voters as the wise men of history and the authors of political stability. Henry VIII had “trimmed tween Francis and the Emperor Charles.” The trimmers of 1688 were William of Orange and the Marquess of Halifax, who made the case for “trimming” between a “devouring Prerogative and a Licentious ungovernable freedom.”54 The trimmers in 1832 were middling people like himself, “the wealth and intelligence of the country, the glory of the British name,” taught by property and history to value a balance of authority and liberty.55 That was also Hume’s and Durham’s view of the English middle classes. Whole classes, like whole nations, could be a balancing political power by dint of their special commitment to commerce and converse. James Mill took a more analytic view of relations of power in an essay on “Government” in 1820 that became a “text book” for the utilitarians and renewed the Hobbesian logic of ceaseless competition.56 We create government, Mill argued, to get things from other people and to protect the community from coercive commands for those goods, so that boundless desires do not become domination: “A man is never satisfied with a smaller degree, if he can obtain a greater … The demand, therefore, of power over the acts of other men is really boundless.” The classic mix of crown, aristocracy, and people supposedly allowed for trimming, but, Mill argued, the governing invariably allied against the people, reducing three parties to two. It was always in democracy’s interest that “neither the king nor the aristocracy should have one particle of power, or one particle of the wealth of the community, for their own advantage.” Therefore, the crown and aristocracy always had “all possible motives for combining” against the community as a whole, and a balance of power was impossible.57 Mill naturalized jealousy by erasing history. Macaulay responded with an argument for history. People were not so jealous as Mill portrayed them, but more “reasoning and imaginative,” especially when well governed. Motives were rich and complex and only history could supply real knowledge for statesmen, distinct from “the barren theories of the Utilitarian sophists, and from the petty craft, so often mistaken for statesmanship by minds grown narrow in habits of intrigue, jobbing, and official etiquette.”58 Macaulay’s history inherited a rich vein of sociology from the Scottish Enlightenment. His categories were crude: the Irish were “almost

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as rude as the savages of Labrador.”59 But the categories still replaced Mill’s binary with a palette of choices. Mill needed no sociology; Macaulay did. If you didn’t see history as merely a confrontation between oppressors and oppressed defined a priori by their relationship to power, then you had to investigate local and contextual factors that might be economic or religious or racial or partisan or personal. Policemen bullied ordinary people, but ordinary people sometimes bullied policemen.60 John Stuart Mill criticized both men’s positions but found a middle ground in universal, philosophical history: yes to sociological criteria, but generic, abstracted, and frozen ones that enabled the armchair philosopher to define what counted as progressive.61 Durham also took the trimming view. His speech in favour of reform in 1821, an ode to “public opinion ” as the great power of British history, roused reform admiration. (“Lambton spoke well,” observed Greville in his diary.62) The basic argument was: first, that the middling people had a new political intelligence. They demanded more political power, they deserved it, and they would never be satisfied without it. They “may yield to conciliation but never will to severity.” Second, that the current economic policy – high taxes and a sinking fund – was ill-advised, especially given current economic hardship. Third, that unnecessary, impolitic and barbarous cruelties in the criminal code disgusted “the better sympathies.” And fourth, if you looked abroad, you saw England propping up “feudal abuses and despotisms” in Europe. Still, Durham admitted that this was a new form of oppression: the people, formerly ill-governed through violence, now were ill-governed through corruption. Tax accountability was eroded and the people were not substantively represented in the Commons. Durham quoted Blackstone on the need for balanced monarchy: the people check the nobility, the nobility checks the crown, and the crown checks both.63 But no such checks were possible, argued Durham, when public opinion was so repressed. Durham demanded “extension of the Elective Franchise to the unrepresented classes contributing directly to taxation – Copyholders, Leaseholders, and Householders,” reform of rotten boroughs, triennial parliaments, and restrictions on spending. He situated those demands in a larger constitutional-historical context, seen as perpetual tension between opinion and tyranny. Ancient liberties dating back to the Saxon era gave “all English freemen” a vote in electing representatives until Henry VI “most treacherously and tyrannically disqualified” them. The country suffered because benefits flowed to the corrupt governing classes, not to the governed. Finally and above all: “This is not a time at which public opinion can be trifled with; it is making rapid and mighty progress throughout the world.” The next year, 1822, the Commons debated whether or not to hear a strongly worded petition protesting the imprisonment of Henry Hunt, a speaker at Peterloo jailed for seditious conspiracy, that complained of “notorious and avowed corruption.” Durham defended the use of “strong language”

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as reflecting strong sentiments: “He thought it was much the best way to allow the people of England to give vent to their feelings.” Peel, newly elevated to the cabinet and speaking immediately after him, saw only “a studied attempt to throw obloquy and insult upon all the institutions of the country.”64 Durham wanted to rewrite the boundary between governing and governed to reflect, he declared in 1831, the difference between those with enough property to be “independent” and those without it: “the 10l. householders are possessed of sufficient independence and property to ensure a permanent interest in the prosperity of the country, that they are free from undue influence on the one hand and factious excitement on the other; and that, therefore, we could not have selected a better class of people in whom to vest this important privilege.”65 Durham’s surgical attempts to define economic independence aimed to focus the broad pressures for parliamentary reform on the upper middle classes. Building on the eighteenth-century arguments for the “middling” as the place of most truth, energy, and virtue, early nineteenth-century liberals celebrated the British middle classes as the great stabilizing force that had saved the nation from a French Revolution of its own. Political stability and bourgeois order seemed intertwined, whether by a certain bourgeois class consciousness or by the dense network of middle-class associational life.66 But they also seemed threatened by the under-enfranchisement of the middle classes on the technical question of freehold vs leasehold tenure. That left politics too much in the hands of a corrupt oligarchy who bribed and intimidated the working-class public, some of it enfranchised in unreformed boroughs. Durham was patrician and conservative as well as “radical”: he sought accountability to the propertied public, with strict restraints against the unpropertied public. The gentry, he thought, were growing too remote from both, living apart in the country and failing to mix with their neighbours in town, whom they were falling behind in education and intellect. Yet they kept a “large body of men, possessed of talents, skill, and wealth” from joining in political privileges.67 Appreciation for middle-class energies and virtues characterized economic and political thought alike. Middle-class discretionary income was sought as eagerly as middle-class political agency. The 1830s saw an explosion of joint-stock banks that let smaller investors buy in, on promises to “democratize” credit much as the Reform Bill had democratized politics. One pamphlet in 1836 argued that “middling classes of traders” were the “most ‘respectable’ proprietary.”68 The interests of private creditors were attributed an important “public” role in sustaining British credit, deserving of public accountability to that interest, according to the whigs and liberals who championed them. And those interests took on imperial dimensions: in the 1830s and 1840s as the “annual trickle of migrants [began] to swell into

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the flood that helped to build a ‘British world’” and then from the 1850s and 1860s as the “funds [came] to hand to build the City’s great property empire abroad.”69 Property was considered the antithesis of privilege because anyone, in theory, could acquire sufficient property to vote. A property franchise was, the young conservative William Gladstone mused in 1835, only a rough measure of capacity for self-government, one that inevitably must enfranchise some who didn’t deserve to vote and disenfranchise some who did. But it was the easiest way to draw the line without amassing a big state apparatus to scrutinize voting qualifications more empirically. In his words: “The poorest man may be fit: the wealthiest man may be the most unfit, either to sit or to elect. But the question is not merely fitness, but evidence of fitness: the public or the state must have those who are the most likely to be fit; it cannot have absolute proof, but must be content with general results.”70 Property, as both identity and interest, mediated between a political economy predicated on facts and a political liberalism that presumed that the propertied best judged their own interests. It solved epistemological as well as political problems. If Catholics or Jews or anyone else had property and education, on what grounds could the constitution disempower them? Social and cultural theory might discriminate but the Reform Act of 1832 did not. Durham’s failed attempts to expand the vote informed the more successful outcome in 1832. A four-man committee, chaired by Durham, drew up the measure, along with two protégés of Althorp (his cousin Viscount Duncannon and friend Sir James Graham), and Lord John Russell, “Finality Jack,” so-called because he always insisted that reform must go no further. Donald Southgate observes that all the cabinet whigs except Durham “prayed for ‘finality’” as the prime objective.71 Durham was the most left voice on the committee drafting the reform, though he played only a minor part in its subsequent negotiation into law. Russell and Althorp did that work, with Durham unwell and absent, grieving his children’s deaths. He did make one speech during the second reading that (after inviting his personal critics to put up their dukes) insisted that the reformers had not stirred up public agitation. Instead, they had responded to fifty years’ demand for change required to root out corruption, and to stave off such “political convulsion” as had followed “the unnatural compression of great power by insufficient means,” as seen in the three great Atlantic revolutions, all of them, he insisted, avoidable.72 Stuart J. Reid describes “this half-forgotten man” as “the link between the aristocratic Whigs, when they made the great departure, and the insurgent forces of Radicalism, which made the movement resistless.”73 The “Great Reform Act” of 1832 was a clear repudiation of the oligarchical turn in British politics seen in recent decades.74 The basis of the

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representation remained (after fierce fights stretching from 1831 to 1832) property rather than population: the old forty-shilling freehold franchise was expanded by inclusion of leasehold. The bill also abolished the smallest, rottenest boroughs and provided for voter registration. Most ridings acquired more voters, but in some ridings their numbers fell. The reform of 1832 has been described as vertical rather than horizontal. It enfranchised property, not people, and it did not lower the property qualifications but extended recognition of existing qualifications across a wider range of tenures, including copyhold, amidst real debates around the statistics of wealth and population.75 David Bateman and Martin Daunton see an extremely precise calculation to enfranchise the more propertied middling people and divide them politically from the less propertied: “A less democratic franchise was created, with a closer connection between property and the vote.”76 Thousands of artisans and working people in boroughs where they enjoyed “ancient rights” were disenfranchised, and Henry Hunt lost his seat.77 The creation of new boroughs such as Manchester and Birmingham increased the electorate, but rates of enfranchisement declined under the new law, falling from 7 per cent in 1832 to 6 per cent by 1851, and workingmen also lost influence relative to the expanding middle-class enfranchisement.78 Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast see an evolution from a “natural” to “mature” polity, from personal to impersonal rights, less violent but still obstinately elite. “The major intention of the act was to restructure political representation within the elite, to move closer to a situation in which all elites enjoyed the same political rights.” It was not a democratic compromise between elite and non-elite.79 Older understandings of British liberties ceded to something more managerial and disciplined.80 The change was not just to the electorate but also to the organization of power in Parliament. The Reform Bill did not inaugurate two-party politics but consolidated and legitimated it, facilitating partisan appeals to constituencies that were newly consolidated by voter registration.81 Registration, according to North, Wallis, and Weingast, turned political parties into mass organizations. Earlier party networks were highly personal and informal.82 Registration made parties more impersonal and stable, something Peel recognized early on and rode to political victory in 1841. Durham saw it too and urged voter registration on Lord Melbourne, the conservative whig who had replaced Grey as prime minister: with “political associations in every town and village of the Empire,” he argued, “we can never be betrayed again by mad Tories or timid Whigs.”83 But Melbourne too much distrusted “Durham and the masses” to act on the advice. According to Newbould, “Whigs viewed central electoral activity as an insidious democratic inroad on the aristocratic preserve.” They similarly rebuffed Poulett Thomson when he advocated mass propaganda, seeing “the new style of politician

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who would attempt to galvanize public opinion and rise to power on its strengths. This system the Whig mind could comprehend, but at the close of the 1830s, could in no way accept.”84 Durham did not live to see the whigs fall from office, though he did see them hang by a knife’s edge after 1834. That year he resigned his cabinet post, after an appalling fight with Earl Grey that convinced anyone who saw it that Durham was political poison. Distrust and distaste were not lessened by a very public and bitter fight between Durham and Lord Brougham as rival claimants to leadership of the left-liberals and radicals. Durham was pushed by a number of radicals, including John Stuart Mill, to make a play for a new moderate-radical alliance. In September 1837, Russell warned Melbourne against offending Durham and Poulett Thompson, for fear of amplifying their appeal.85 Melbourne was delighted to usher Durham off the scene on one diplomatic mission after another, including Belgium, twice to Russia, and then Canada.86

ii: f ro m b r ita in to canada Reform in England was a tough nut to crack but Canada may have been tougher, given the more extreme polarization, violence, and military insecurity. A set of corrupt Tory placeholders refused any accountability to the voting and opining public, one supposedly constituted in the image and transcript of the British public. Accountability, to the British public via Parliament, was too tenuous to check the many petty tyrannies of the governing factions. There were many grounds for pessimism, not least Durham’s temper and fragile health. It was far from obvious that inter-elite privileges could be shared out impersonally in colonies where “race” loomed larger than religion. Macaulay argued that there was no such thing as “essentially Christian” government any more than “essentially Christian” horsemanship. But he still thought backwards colonials, including Scottish and Irish peasants, too primitive to civilize themselves without coercive imperial rule.87 In Canada, the population was more mixed, making the stakes seem higher, the dangers to liberal civilization greater.88 William Lyon Mackenzie favoured abolition of slavery, but he also worried over the loyalist streak in Upper Canada’s Black population and his projected republic would have required oaths from them and not from whites.89 Indigenous peoples were also seen as too loyal.90 Britain’s binary – propertied vs unpropertied; governed vs governing – was complicated in Canada by the conservative skewing of racialized peoples, whom conservatives such as Dalhousie and Darling cultivated as clientelist allies against reform. Different kinds of ascriptions vied with different versions

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of impartiality. It was also more heavily freighted by American proximity and American attacks on aristocratic rule.91 Canadian economics worried Durham as much as Canadian politics, given Canada’s relative backwardness compared to the United States. The more eastern regions of the Canadas had less productive lands and a majority French-Canadian population: conservative Anglo-Protestants blamed the latter as much as the former for the economic lag.92 In a series of virulent letters in the Montreal Herald between 1835 and 1838, a Scottishborn, Montreal-based journalist-teacher, Adam Thom, denounced French Canadians as barbaric, too “torpid” to farm lucratively, like the “lazy savage” who too little valued his property to preserve it. Alas, no transportation infrastructure could be built without their taxes and votes.93 Reactionary Anglo-Protestants lumped all the different kinds of conquered populations together as economically retrograde and naturally conservative. Donald Creighton, writing a century later, saw a “difference of social heritage as fundamental as the differences of race, language, or creed.” It pitted “a governing class whose deepest instincts were towards improvement, expansion, and prosperity” against “the sullen, inert opposition of men who accepted unquestioningly the purposes, pursuits, and habits of their forefathers.”94 That governing class counted many men deeply invested in the slave trade and Indigenous dispossession, some from Britain and some coming via the United States. Durham saw much in Canada that resembled the England of the 1820s: aloof communities without any centre for union. There was not, he regretted, “that habitual intercourse between the inhabitants of different parts of the country, which, by diffusing through all a knowledge of the opinion and interests of each, makes a people one and united, in spite of the extent of territory and dispersion of population.”95 Insulation always begat oligarchy and violence. Durham renewed his old arguments of a choice between violence and reform, arguing that empowerment would channel grievances into legitimate political expressions. He had earlier pooh-poohed Lord Carnarvon’s argument that a broader franchise would exacerbate urban tumult in England. “Facts, – experience,” taught otherwise, Durham had insisted: “the violence consequent upon popular excitement is in the inverse ratio of representation; that is, it diminishes in proportion as the inhabitants are admitted to the free exercise of their franchise.”96 Modern rule was “through” rather than “over” the people, modern power soft preferably to hard.97 But the central powerbrokers in both Upper and Lower Canada relied on imperial connections and neglected local ones.98 In 1837, Canadian rebels had challenged imperial soft power as a bluff, only to discover there was no bluff. But Melbourne’s weak liberal

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government still needed a constitutional solution to the crisis, one that had to run the gauntlet of ultra-conservative and ultra-radical attack, the former demanding an authoritarian crackdown, the latter demanding democratic reform. How to create a liberalizing outcome from the crisis? Durham could not presume stability but had to actively engineer it, amidst intense pressures for political polarization and war capitalism. The violence in Canada could spiral in the way American violence had spiralled, and it could also reverse liberalism’s fragile, post-war gains in Britain. Emigration offered the struggling British workingman an outlet but only a stable and liberal Canada could ease British pressures. Anything else offered too little appeal to emigrants and too much fodder for partisan attack, as well as threatened to amplify American demography and hegemony. In Durham’s report, an exemplary political liberalism met an exemplary political challenge. Lord Brougham, Durham’s great enemy in the House of Lords (still smarting at being left off the 1832 Reform Bill committee), argued that it wasn’t really Durham’s report at all: “Wakefield thought it, Buller wrote it Durham signed it”; others insisted that Durham’s “high-spirited” voice prevailed throughout the bulk of it.99 Two Bullers were involved, Charles and his brother Arthur, both philosophical radicals, both authors of appendices. Charles Buller described himself as more sympathetic to the French than Durham, and he also wrote a highly influential pamphlet in favour of the Durham report and responsible government.100 Durham’s arguments for a measure of responsible government and federation also showed debts to Edward Ellice, a prominent British businessman and mp for Coventry between 1818 and 1863, as well as minister for war in Grey’s cabinet, who had extensive interests in Canada inherited from his Scottish father. Ellice had persuaded Durham to accept the Canadian posting and sent his son as a secretary to the mission.101 But the text, scrutinized as a pattern of meaning and effect, shows clear debts to Durham. Outside government, Durham could not rewrite the constitution directly as he had done in 1832. But a strategically written and pitched argument might leverage British public opinion to get the same anti-oligarchical results in Canada. Still, there was a genuine clash between the metropolitan and colonial publics. Durham had to decide whether Canada could civilize itself through the ordinary workings of history or whether it needed the kind of civilization from above that the utilitarians advocated for India. Durham came to Canada as a rooter-out of oligarchy, and everyone expected him to make a “too much oligarchy” argument. But he confounded expectations when he realized, as he famously said, that Canada’s problem was not a replay of the age-old whig-tory factionalism from English political history, but something more insidious. “I expected to find a contest between a government and a people: I found two nations warring in the bosom of a

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single state: I found a struggle, not of principles, but of races; and I perceived that it would be idle to attempt any amelioration of laws or institutions until we could first succeed in terminating the deadly animosity that now separates the inhabitants of Lower Canada into the hostile divisions of French and English.”102 Durham’s analysis has been parsed as an attack on French Canada, because he argued that assimilation was the only remedy. But that’s a static image plucked from a more complicated and dynamic story: a historical analysis of cause and effect that looks very much like David Hume’s. Hume wrote his History of England to defend party politics – the life and “vigour” of the nation – and nudge them to be pro-constitutional parties of “interest” rather than anti-constitutional “parties of affection.”103 Durham’s Reform Bill had done that work in England; the question was how to do the same in Canada, channelling political activism towards indoor rather than outdoor expression, and a politics of interest rather than a politics of affection. Durham argued that both races were polarizing around identity. A despatch of August 1838 observed that they didn’t care what they disputed, only that they disputed: “What may be the immediate subject of dispute seems to be of no consequence so surely as there is a dispute on any subject, the great bulk of the Canadian and the great bulk of the British appear ranged against each other.” Not issues but ideologies, not interest but affection, drove the polarization: “the subject of dissension has been, not the connexion with England, nor the form of the constitution, nor any of the practical abuses which have affected all classes of the people, but simply such institutions, laws, and customs as are of French origin, which the British have sought to overthrow and the Canadians have struggled to preserve, each class assuming false designations and fighting under false colours –  the British professing exclusive loyalty to the Crown of England, and the Canadians pretending to the character of reformers.” Appearances were deceiving: the British Canadians were the ones demanding more democracy and responsibility, less British oversight. They were “deeply offended” at any sort of restraint upon them, local or imperial. Behind the superficially shared, antiFrench passions uniting them could be seen emerging political tensions between the “general” public and the “official body” or executive in Britain or Canada. The danger to British interests, in short, came from British not French settlers. The Canadiens were merely, even accidentally, absorbing the first wave of an American-style attack, temporarily shielding the state.104 French jealousy was an immediate problem but it was more effect than cause, provoked by English jealousy. The French settlers, Durham explained, lacked enterprise because they came to Canada at a time when French political institutions repressed civil society and enterprise. They remained repressed because the English coupled enterprise with political ascendency. They pursued all possible advantage, even into government and law, where

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they jealously guarded their privileges from the French Canadians. The problem was not their spirit of enterprise, which was good and natural, but the constitution that let them take that spirit into unfair state capture. If the foremost task of government was, as James Mill had argued, to protect people from the boundless desires of oppressors, the Canadian constitution failed the test by giving the English race an “unjust favouratism” in government and law.105 English Canadians sought not the general good but a supremacy that provoked first alarm, then jealousy, and finally hatred amongst French Canadians, who began to use their own political instruments as jealously as possible to protect themselves.106 On Durham’s analysis, very like Sebastiani’s account of Hume’s analysis, Britons exercising unchecked, unbalanced powers in the colony chose to transform themselves into “little tyrants.” All the while, American national jealousies threatened Canada, especially “those undisguised projects of conquest and rapine which, since the invasion of Texas, find but too much favour among the daring population of the frontiers.”107 Durham echoed Hume but also Franklin, seeing a dangerous borderlands that exacerbated internal vulnerability. The United States government had no designs on Canada but could not stop the American public – still smarting at the capture of Washington and prone to popular, non-state invasion and conquest as in Texas – from war-hunger. The Britain vs America question still dominated public affairs, the choice always worryingly intertwined in complex social and political matrices. Durham’s solution was to unite the Canadas under a responsible government. Federation was preferable to union but Francophobes in Britain and Canada would not accept federation that gave French Canada a legislature of its own. And British North American federation was premature in the current state of transportation. So Durham argued for a united Canadian polity able to rise to its economic destiny and beat off those covetous Americans, while swamping the French minority in an English majority. No coercive state assimilation project was needed because, properly orchestrated, French-Canadian public opinion would assimilate itself. Durham identified a kind of invisible hand of assimilation operating in America, pointing to Louisiana where racial distinctions caused “great jealousy” but where a “perfectly free competition” converted “enemies” into rivals, animated by emulation rather than jealousy.108 The whole point of a constitution, Durham argued, was precisely to ensure that “personal ambition [which] is inherent in human nature” could find “legitimate development,”109 that is, according to shared rules. Durham’s analysis owed much to Mill but also to Tocqueville. The French political philosopher, touring around American prisons in the 1820s, had been struck by the extraordinary assimilating powers of the American “tyranny of the majority” in places like Louisiana, and his eloquent ode to the sorry decline of Frenchness in America resonated

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powerfully. American processes of assimilation were very much part of the story because, Janet Ajzenstat convincingly argues, Durham wrote with the first volume of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, newly published, open before him.110 She modifies the classic reading of Durham’s report as recommending assimilation by arguing that for Durham assimilation need only be political and civic, not cultural, so long as commercial sociability could then operate normally. But Ajzenstat saw French-Canadian nationalism as Canada’s past and present problem. That’s too partial a view of Durham who sought to engineer self-discipline in both English and French. Tocqueville witnessed mass deportation of Indigenous peoples in 1830s America and he lamented that Anglo-Saxon enterprise and ambition together imposed death or servility on everyone else.111 Anglo-Saxons monopolized “enlightenment, power, and happiness” and denied everyone else “virtually all the privileges of humanity.”112 The English race just does conquer, swamp, and assimilate anything that obstructs it, wherever it goes. John Bull remained as chauvinist and insolent as ever. For many liberal thinkers, modernization seemed to dovetail with anglicization, as the price of commercial sociability and liberal modernity.113 But I see a difference between saying that English enterprise justifies domination and saying that English “vindictive jealousy” justifies domination. It’s hard to imagine a more thorough repudiation of Scottish Enlightenment not seen anywhere else in Durham. Jealousy lurks inside an enterprising spirit but it must be checked by a good constitution to prevent faction and polarization. Civilization is not civilization if it doesn’t have a plan for checking chauvinism and oligarchy, visibly reinforcing one another in Canada. Durham saw English Canadians behaving as James Mill had predicted: pursuing boundless power and conspiring against the public by infusing political jealousies in trade, culture, and everything else, even the local agricultural societies. A liberal theory of history must take into account the way that people made political choices – trimmed – according to interests, identities, and power. Power could distort identities and interests. But that observation could be worked in liberal as well as conservative directions. Europe had united against a France in pursuit of universal sovereignty; so too would historically and liberally minded people unite against Britons where they were too powerful and jealous. Power could discipline as well as amplify jealousy, as Durham, who served as a special diplomatic envoy to European hotspots, knew better than most. Durham’s diplomacy in regard to “the Eastern Question” – Russia – bears comparison to his diplomacy in regard to the western – Canadian – question. Tsar Nicholas I, in power since 1825, pursued a more conservative, violent, and expansive project of rule than Alexander I, encroaching on Persian and Turkish territories, extending into the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, and the

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Danube. Britain and Russia took different sides in political disputes across Europe, especially Poland where Russia brutally crushed rebellion, while Metternich looked to Nicholas to lend warrant for his own crackdowns and encroachments. Determined British propagandists attacked Russia as the single greatest threat to European peace and British power, and persuaded the public and even the foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, that the Russians pursued a “spirit of systematic and universal encroachment.”114 Sent to Russia in 1832 and again in 1835–36, Durham took a long, winding itinerary via Constantinople to St Petersburg to glean local information. He saw that “on all sides and in all directions, civilization has increased. Arsenals, dockyards, hospitals, universities have sprung up as if by magic, all rude and to a limited extent, compared with our own establishments, but large with reference to their previous state.” But “the difficulties of communication, the vast extent of territory, and the inclemency of the climate” all obstructed centralization, such that “there is not one element of strength which is not directly counterbalanced by a corresponding check of weakness.” The population was not just isolated by the land but also by the “universal want of education amongst the middle and lower classes, and the prevalence of climates and customs.” Russia could not send soldiers across frontiers: they lacked incentive and the state lacked capacity.115 Russia was no threat to Britain, Durham insisted, and Poulett Thomson vigorously seconded his argument, as did Richard Cobden, another economic liberal, who blamed “one active mind” for having “incessantly roused public opinion, through every accessible channel of the periodical press against Russia.”116 Durham published a defence of Russia and demanded that the Whig newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, desist its “vituperation” against Russia.117 Both the “eastern question” and the “Canada question” were, first and foremost, problems of British public opinion. Imprudent vehemence by party politicians stoking a bellicose nationalism, imperial adventuring, threatened to restore the fiscal-military state in Britain. Durham must urgently discipline British chauvinism. Not military violence but peaceful trade and emergent local middle classes, able to rise to their balancing roles both socially and geopolitically, would secure the Pax Britannica. Durham’s point of departure was that depersonalization of political power should enfranchise the propertied and educated classes. Jealousy was a refusal of impartiality, a defence of identity-based privilege. In Lower Canada, Durham saw ethnic jealousies used to deny propertied and educated people their rightful political influence. Ethnic jealousies amongst the elites threatened elite rule. It was no part of Durham’s mandate to weaken the authority of property as the root of political identity. Canada needed more impersonality. And Durham conspicuously did not recommend the imperial rule that the Mills, father and son, recommended for India.118 He recommended

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self-civilization by the propertied public. But French Canadians could not civilize themselves if the first and continuing cause of the problem was EnglishCanadian jealousy. The English must first civilize themselves. The argument was laid out initially in his despatch of August 1838, written when Durham was still fully empowered as governor, and then restated in his report, as a historical analysis of cause and effect. It couldn’t be clearer as an indictment not of the French but of the English Canadians. Durham argued that, even though the constitution of 1791 created two provinces, supposedly for French and English, still, it made the existing strife inevitable because “the British already predominate in French Canada, not numerically of course, but by means of their superior energy and wealth, and their natural relationship to the powers of Government. It was long before the Canadians perceived that their nationality was in the course of being over-ridden by a British nationality.”119 The Canadiens so little understood the situation that they even elected “almost a majority of Englishmen. But with the progress of British intrusion, they at length discovered, not only the uses of a representative system, but also that their nationality was in danger,” and so had recently come to use “the representative system for the single purpose of maintaining their nationality against the progressive intrusion of the British race.” By this account French-Canadian jealousy was a product of English-Canadian jealousy. It came “long” and “at length” after English-Canadian jealousy capitalized upon its “natural relationship to the powers of Government.” Thus Durham came to the state of crisis prevailing in August 1838, again very precisely specified as French disaffection and English jealousy: “that the bulk of the Canadian people are as disaffected as ever, and that the British part of the population regard the Canadians with vindictive jealousy.”120 The British wanted to dominate, the French to escape domination. Where the despatch was written for the cabinet, the report, submitted and ordered printed early in 1839, was written for the public. It shifted the burden of emphasis to make British jealousies more obviously a reaction to, as well as a cause of, the violent uprising, but still insisted that obstacles to better politics were primarily political, not racial, and only incidentally cultural. English Canadians behaved like Machiavellian princes rather than looking to mutual benefit from commerce and converse. They provoked a reactive French-Canadian jealousy, even amongst those most disposed to liberal emulation. Some of the most refined people in the colony were French Canadian. There was no natural antipathy to civilization, moderation, and enlightened self-interest. But even the most enlightened were forced into factionalism by circumstances. With business and public office too much dominated by the English, such men flooded into the liberal professions, which become overcrowded and unremunerative. Some went into politics, others returned to their villages to live, educated and impoverished, articulate and

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disgruntled, amongst their uneducated peers. Direct lines of sociability and influence ran from the village to the politicians, with the result that FrenchCanadian politicians commanded more influence than any politicians in the world. Because they owed so much to popular opinion, they catered to it rather than disciplining it, and the result was jealous nationalism. It’s worth seeing the description of how good leadership turned bad, according to the August despatch: The employment by the Canadians of constitutional and popular means for their national purpose, has taught some of them, consisting chiefly of the most active and able, higher political views than such as belong to the question of nationality. These men are not at heart friendly to the barbarous institutions of their ancestors, but would readily adopt a more enlightened system, if they could do so without losing their own importance. Their necessary dependence on the prejudiced mass has alone restrained them from joining in many of the views for the improvement of the country which are entertained by the British. They have also learned to estimate the practical abuses of Government which affect all classes, and to wish for many reforms without reference to Canadian nationality.121 Such men had public influence and could, under a new political system, be counted on to help end the racial strife but currently were too few to “affect my opinion of the temper of the Canadian people.” Durham’s analysis unpicked economic and political factors. French-Canadian leadership was held back by a British constitution that didn’t only obstruct their efforts at advancement but actually handed care of their interests to their enemies. French Canadians were governed like women in a poorhouse, by their enemies and against their interest. John Stuart Mill came to similar conclusions and he responded to political attacks on Durham through the fall of 1838 with a “manifesto … claiming for him not mere acquittal, but praise and honour.” Mill’s argument for Durham and liberal reform appeared in the Westminster Review in January 1839 but was already circulating in advance form months earlier.122 Mill, too, saw racial jealousies at work: “But who is the cause of these jealousies? Who fostered them? … the Executive Government took part with one race, against the other – it took part with the English race, instead of being the umpire and arbitrator between both.”123 But Mill insisted that the conflict was “not one of races, but of principles,” not of nations but of politics.124 He thought he could rationally debunk Canadian identity politics. Durham knew better. Mill was thinking in terms of whole society evolution, from the primitive to the philosophical. Not just his history but also his

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historiography was stagial: beginning with the narrowly local and empirical, rising to a certain cosmopolitan relativism, and then fully achieving its promise in the observation of permanent philosophical truths about the society in question, the extent to which it was progressive or not as well as “the chief source of its progressiveness.” And French Canadians, Mill argued in a review of Tocqueville published in 1840, were not progressive. They lacked the “restless, impatient eagerness for improvement” characteristic of the Americans.125 Mill was theorizing about what it would take to turn Canada into a more fully civilized nation. He sought to see through events and arguments to philosophical principles. He thought there were structural truths bigger than partisan ones. Mill had failed to learn Hume’s lesson, namely, that the big questions come before the public not as philosophical but as partisan ones. As Hamilton had remarked of impeachment: “In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influences, and interests on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of the parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”126 Durham had to persuade the Canadian conservatives to relinquish their political superiority, knowing that reason was passion’s slave. People do not yield power to a good argument, as Durham observed in regard to municipal government. The local legislatures had power to create municipal institutions and should have done so. Municipal institutions were “the foundations of Anglo-Saxon freedom and civilization,” and, if they had operated properly, the strife could have been prevented. Instead, in Canada, legislatures managed most local business, thereby wielding “a power which no single body, however popular in its constitution, ought to have.” They even politicized schools and closed them. But power always governs to the limits of its strength. “It is in vain to expect that this sacrifice of power will be voluntarily made by any representative body.”127 How, under such conditions, to redistribute some part of English power to its self-avowed enemies and antithesis? Chauvinists in the colony had too many influential friends in London, all insisting that French Canadians would use any power granted them to undermine the imperial tie. Political factions were too closely lined up, on both sides of the Atlantic, waiting to attack Durham and Melbourne alike. Before writing the report, Durham had resigned his governorship because his enemies – above all Lord Brougham – had persuaded Melbourne to veto Durham’s proclamation exiling suspected Patriot rebels to Bermuda without trial. Even martial law, the Duke of Wellington was pleased to concur in the Lords, did not extend so far as that. That was just the latest of a series of attacks on Durham that could be expected to continue unrelentingly.128

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4.1 | A Deserter, a political cartoon by John Doyle, printed in January 1839, shows Lord Durham being disciplined: led away by two grenadiers, Viscount Melbourne and the Duke of Wellington, with Lord Brougham bringing up the rear. © The National Portrait Gallery D41502.

An argument for moderation must be especially weak in a North America dominated, according to Tocqueville, by a pushing Anglo-Saxon greed and competitiveness that rendered nugatory all political and historical restraints upon it and beat the British at economic growth. Canada must rise to the rivalry or capitulate. Durham wanted not just Canada but Britain itself to rise to the rivalry. His was not a little-England perspective but, rather, a world liberal-imperial project to settle self-governing British subjects on the “waste” lands across the empire. But he also wanted liberal constitutionalism to win out over a pushing and predatory chauvinism. The classic liberal political-economic problem in the nineteenth century was not downward but upward redistribution. Hume defended economic inequality as natural, but criticized popular poverty, the active impoverishment of the population, as political – that is, caused by bad government. So did Durham.

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Englishmen at home tempered their economic and political ambitions only because concerted political pressures forced it upon them. That was the story of English constitutional history, newly culminating in the Great Reform Act of 1832. But when Englishmen went abroad, those dominating ambitions were apt to become a tyranny exercised against anyone that could be described as not English. Rules for the sharing out of power that operated impersonally amongst Britons became racialized arguments for British supremacy in a mixed population. Englishmen made themselves oligarchs and tyrants wherever they could, in the household and the colony. They distorted the language of identity and civilization to that end. British liberalism in a colonial context quickly became illiberal, as American history showed. But Canadian history showed not just colonial illiberalism but support from illiberal factions back in Britain. Reactionary Canadians demanded unaccountable government and disenfranchisement of their enemies, with language sometimes so extreme as to prompt legal historian Blaine Baker to wonder whether they had a concept of rule of law.129 John Beverley Robinson had earlier stirred up widespread anxiety in Upper Canada around the rights of American-born citizens when he invoked the formal requirements for naturalization – seven years’ residence in Canada and an oath of loyalty – to disbar two political radicals, Barnabas Bidwell and his son Marshall Bidwell, from taking up seats in the local legislature. This was a very rash incitement to political disaffection that, Robinson’s biographer argues, “left most Upper Canadians with the impression” that the local government were “villains who had attempted to oppress honest settlers.”130 Adam Thom denounced the argument by Lord Gosford, Canadian governor general in 1835, that the government must “be acceptable to the great body of the people,” as leading to barbaric democracy.131 Max Hamon argues that Thom persuaded Durham that the “greatest kindness to [Canadiens] would be to initiate them into the blessings of English civilisation.”132 But only Thom tried to disenfranchise them. Durham wanted something more impartial, grounded on interest and property, not affection and race. To allow identity to swamp property as a marker was to follow the American model and to wage a kind of domestic war on your political enemies, as Americans had done in the 1770s and in many respects continued to do in the 1820s. Even northern American states were disenfranchising free Black men while abolishing all property requirements for white men. In 1824, Andrew Jackson fell short of winning the presidency, whereas in 1828, the first year that unpropertied white men were widely enfranchised, he won a clear majority with 56 per cent of the vote and used it for nakedly reactionary projects, including the disenfranchisement of Black voters and forced relocations of Indigenous peoples. Tocqueville, surveying these

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events, was struck by the combination of democracy and tyranny. He reiterated Hume’s lesson that opinion, not the state, had the reins: “the collective force of citizens will always be more powerful to produce social well-being than the authority of government.”133 In Sheldon Wolin’s formulation: “If the concept of political power was as old as Thucydides or as young as Machiavelli, and that of economic power as old as Harrington or as young as Marx, the concept of social power may be said to be as old as the Scottish thinkers of the eighteenth century and as young as Tocqueville.”134 Tocqueville had an aristocrat’s nostalgia for ancien regime checks on public opinion, and his arguments appealed more to the great whigs than to the utilitarians in Britain.135 History was no more check than aristocracy.136 But what Hume relaxed by psychologizing, the Americans bolstered with new forms of psychological coercion. “Monarchs had, so to speak, materialized oppression; the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind as the will which it is intended to coerce. Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.”137 Impossible not to see a threat stretching well beyond America to Canada and even to fortress England, where conservative and radical extremists would happily polarize the country. The question was not simply whether Canada was going to Americanize itself, but whether Britain was going to Americanize itself. Durham, too, seemed to fall into Hume’s and Mill’s trap of justifying racial supremacy. He flattered English Canadians for their enterprise and viciously slurred French Canadians as devoid of enterprise, culture, even of history. They needed assimilation with liberal politics and better schools. Arthur Buller, commissioned to write up a project of education, described them as bereft of anything but ignorance. “Go where you will, you will scarcely find a trace of education among the peasantry.” Women were, he observed, better educated than men. The “complete destruction of past systems, and the utter absence of any at the present time, are matters of great good fortune and congratulation, for now a clear field lies open for the future.” Buller declared the Canadiens apt for education, being “shrewd and intelligent,” moral, and amiable, but lacking in enterprise: “Their wants are few and easily satisfied. They have not advanced one step in civilization beyond the old Bretons who first set foot on the banks of the St. Lawrence, and they are quite content to be stationary.”138 Charles Grey, a brother-inlaw of Durham serving in Canada during the mission, who kept his father, the former prime minister, informed of events and Durham’s activities, was surprised to see such ignorance coincide with collective agency: “Ignorant as

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these People are to a degree which I could scarcely have believed, I cannot quite understand how the conspiracy could have been organized so perfectly and with so much secrecy.”139 But ignorance in Quebec was politically and historically constructed, for Durham. And the attack on French-Canadian identity and civilization would not stop there. Durham could see the ultimate target, namely, himself. A public that would disenfranchise and despoil some of the most cultivated, educated, and propertied French Canadians would attack anyone seeking to clip its wings, French or British. But you could not simply say that property should rule; you had to say that identity did not disqualify. Look what happened in the last century: so soon as the British neutralized the French, the British settlers turned against Britain and Britons, entirely predictably according to Franklin’s critics at the time. Unassimilated, the Canadiens were a useful barrier against Americanization, much like Darling’s warriors. Arguably, Durham was following Darling’s lead and making a fiscalmilitary pitch to the fiscal-military statesmen who still had a determinative voice in British policy, Wellington and Peel. Non-assimilation was as good as a citadel for British presence, if you could moderate it. But paternalist British protection was null; the French Canadians had to protect themselves. So Durham confirmed and even stoked the cultural chauvinism prevalent in Canada and Britain, while giving the Canadiens full political agency, such as it was. He also gave them a lesson on the efficient secret of the unwritten constitution: executive prerogative was best enjoyed discreetly, as unwritten convention rather than as explicit law. Durham had to do two things in his report: to recognize diversity politically while checking its upward reach. In England, the property qualification had done that work: he could say he was only enfranchising people who already met existing property qualifications, not licensing democratic expansion. The property qualification could not do that work in Canada for two reasons: on the one hand, the classic, medieval qualification of fortyshillings freehold enfranchised a more socially heterogeneous community than in England, including most artisans; on the other hand, the political fights were about identity, not property. Durham had to create a dramatic tension between identities and entitlements. If you met the property requirement, then not being a certain kind of Englishman should not disqualify you from political liberties. The argument had to be made because factionalism, when it gets the bit between its teeth, always makes an identity argument. That was clear from Hume’s History of England. The differences between political factions during the English civil wars, according to Hume, had been construed “as opposite of those of the most distant nations.” And yet those distinctions were political, not natural, created wholly by politicization of identity. They

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dissipated when the constitution worked properly. If you were serious about liberalism, you had to be serious about tolerating diversity, because identity claims were so useful to factions.140 Even quiet English villages despised their nearest neighbours as uncivilized.141 Durham’s crucial liberal premise, voiced in the despatch: that identities were relative, state capture was not, and that the capturers superimposed suspect identities on the captured, the better to oppress them. Where British liberalism weaponized Britishness for purposes of oligarchical rule, the correct response was not to insist that the “alien” resembled the Englishman but, rather, to insist that even those manifestly not “our” kind of Englishman still had the rights of the British subject. Durham was, like Hume, more Francophile than Francophobe. He admired some French Canadians as heirs to French civilization, including the most cultured people in the colony. If the French Canadians were vulnerable to accusations of incapacity, then who was not? But don’t fool yourself by racializing that incapacity, as oligarchs and slavers always did. Race was irrelevant. Occam’s razor might see the argument applied to other colonial landscapes. Ireland always loomed in the background of these conversations: John Stuart Mill wanted Durham as prime minister to get the three great reform projects of a secret ballot and justice for Ireland and Canada. But Durham went far beyond defending diversity. He viciously discredited French-Canadian nationalism as the weakest part of their argument, in what might be seen as a reverse application of Charles Taylor’s politics of recognition. It was one thing to give the Patriots a path to power; another thing to let them claim a victory for their identity. Durham offered the Canadien leadership a choice: they could have the discreet exercise of power or a triumphalist nationalism but not both at once. Recognition was a consolation prize you offered to the political losers. English-Canadian loyalists were praised to the heavens for their virtues, but like the praise accorded to women, it was done to weaken rather than strengthen their political influence. A demand for recognition of identity was amour propre, not amour de soi.142 Hardly a person in the world but thinks they deserve more recognition than they have. Conventionalism must be impartially applied to all parties and identities. Minorities can only enjoy such powers and privileges discreetly. A swaggering minority is likely to attract majority pushback, even mob violence. The unwritten British constitution best rewarded the most discreet exercise of power. Parliamentary responsibility in Britain was itself a convention, not a law.143 Durham was advising reformers to pursue it on a British rather than an American template, as a victory for discretion, impartiality, and property. He aimed to cap the violence by driving a wedge between the popular classes and their political leaders. A liberally aspirational leadership should look more like a republic of letters than a mob. It should

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take its bearings from literary culture, from history and literature, from the kind of literary constitutionalizing that Durham was performing in his report. Durham, according to a recent argument by Maxime RaymondDufour, sought to provoke exactly the kind of literary-political outrage and response that he got when François-Xavier Garneau chose to debunk the report by writing a history of French Canada. The result, Garneau’s celebrated, liberal-leaning History, published from 1845, fulfilled Durham’s ambitions for modernization: assimilation to elite, mannered, and domesticated public opinion, rather than demagoguery and violence. Even as it attacked British imperialism, it helped to channel expressions of FrenchCanadian nationalism into polite and constitutional forms – forms that Garneau had admired in the English middle classes during a two-year visit in the early 1830s.144 This was assimilation as commerce and converse, under the leadership of the educated and enterprising middle classes. Garneau showed that French Canadians had the same history as Durham: the same appeals to constitutional history and the historic rights of the British subject, as well as their own. His history of the French Canadians began with their Norman forebears who had, he argued, given England the Magna Carta and liberty.145 (Hume had seen the Magna Carta in that light, as a continental innovation but also a baronial grab for power usefully checked by ancient Anglo-Saxon liberties.) Garneau also urged Canadien politicos to preserve the British connection and, he wrote (as he told Papineau in 1847) to convey the bigger historical picture: “leur faire sentir qu’ils sont exposés sur un théâtre plus important qu’ils ne paraissent le croire.”146 Intertwined histories had grown more entangled by the Conquest, as French in Canada and British in Britain debated the rights of the conquered. Beginning almost immediately with the publication of the Quebec Gazette in 1765, letters from “Civis Canadiensis” invoked the Magna Carta, Edward Coke, and other constitutional authorities to demand the ordinary rights of the British subject.147 By 1830, not just editorials and speeches and pamphlets but longform French-Canadian history had taken shape to rebut the Anglocentric and assimilation-predicting editorials and histories emanating from English Canada: that year, Pierre-Jean de Sales Laterrière published A Political and Historical Account of Lower Canada, written in French but published in London in English, the better to reach the governing classes. He blamed the vicious attack on French Canadians as reflecting their obvious permanency and growing strength.148 And the ninety-two resolutions of 1834, composed by Papineau and A.N. Morin, passed by the legislature and submitted to the Colonial Office, began, naturally enough, with history: “1. Resolved, That His Majesty’s loyal subjects, the people of this Province of Lower Canada, have shown the strongest attachment to the British Empire, of which they are a portion; that they have repeatedly defended it with courage in time of

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war.” They had resisted American appeals, maintained loyalty, welcomed British immigrants, protected British rights and forms, and pursued prosperity for all “without any distinction of origin or creed, and upon the solid and durable basis of unity of interest, and equal confidence in the protection of the mother country.” They were constitutional and political champions of liberty and defended as such in Britain. But the resolutions also invoked North American historical experience to recommend more accountable and democratic government: the most authoritarian of the Thirteen Colonies had been the first to rebel, the democratic ones the last.149 Canadiens had and used history in the same way as Durham. In misrepresenting French Canadians as ahistorical, Durham was suggesting they were unmoored, like Americans, and assimilable by classically American processes of social and political power. But he was also trying to arrest those identity politics from taking hold in Canada. Americans were deeply riven by party politics but they were also uniting around a largely shared definition of “national character” notable for its extreme populism, racism, and violence. The Jacksonian model of politics, for all that it flamboyantly touted its anti-oligarchic credentials, too much resembled the anti-middle-class alliances that the Reform Act had sought to check. It pursued an immoderate conservative hegemony that would destroy the old American “whig” party.150 Durham sought to preserve something more like old-fashioned, Humean party politics, the balance-of-power politics that the Americans were expelling from the hemisphere.151 The threat of continental American sovereignty could only be checked in North America so long as some peoples remained unassimilated. British Canadians were no barrier, as Tocqueville had observed, because “this population is identical to that of the United States. I am therefore right to say that the English race does not halt at the limits of the Union, but advances well beyond toward the northeast.” The English race, he predicted, would “expand constantly. It would overrun treaties like so many “imaginary dikes” and could be stopped only by dense and “aggregated populations in its path.”152 The British policy of the balance of power “required a modicum of disunity” in Europe153 and North America. French-Canadian assimilation would be a positive injury to the British presence in North America. British and French-Canadian interests were best served by French-Canadian constitutional-liberal histories on British templates that were still Humean templates. Durham’s understanding of civilization was more relentlessly political than John Stuart Mill’s, and that made it more cosmopolitan. The American formula was to carry political into cultural warfare, understanding politics as “downstream from culture,” so as to negate mere politics.154 Cultural threats are, by definition, imaginary and boundless, more like Veblen’s jealous rivalries for status than Hume’s mutual flourishing.

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Durham performed jealousy to win over the jealous but he also demanded that those aspiring to something more liberal and democratic discipline the illiberals amongst them. His report might be likened to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, well understood historically as an anti-violence parable. Shylock, too, belonged to a culturally despised and politically disempowered minority (while Shakespeare’s Venice tolerated Jews, Shakespeare’s England did not). Suddenly, Shylock gained legal power over someone who had mistreated him. Given the clearly defined choices of human sympathy or commercial interest or bloody revenge, which would he choose? Shylock rejected sympathy and interest for revenge. No modern commercial metropolis – necessarily a place of cultural diversity – could tolerate such revenge. Canada, too, seemed in danger of preferring vengeful hatred to sympathy and interest. Durham wanted to see French Canadians handed a measure of political power but did not want them to put their political agency to ethno-nationalist hatreds, whether by seceding or merely by braking British immigration. Hume found Shakespeare too brutal and barbaric, and Philip Roth thought that Jews had been on trial ever since Shylock.155 Durham’s report was no less brutal. The hurtful clichés gave the report just enough traction with a chauvinist majority opinion in Britain and Canada to engineer a better outcome than something more civil might have done. Durham coupled the unsympathetic account of French Canadians with an argument for political enlargement and agency. Political agency was itself education and schools must be accountable to it. Durham recommended self-civilization, not a coercive, forced modernization project. His version of modernization would operate within, not outside, history. Durham had to make, and did make, a win-win liberal argument for enlargement: yes, the English would be relinquishing some measure of power, but they would thereby gain much more power. They would be better able to anglicize and modernize their institutions and better able to expand economically if they enacted the union of the Canadas and responsible government. But Durham understood that not just the combination of union and responsible government would check English-Canadian domination: so would either of them operating alone. Upper Canadians made exactly that argument, knowing that union would turn their governing faction into a mere party amongst other parties. This was not win-win but lose-lose for friends and champions of English-Canadian superiority, and well known as such. To make it a win-win story, Durham portrayed French Canadians as so supine as to be easily absorbable under conditions of power-sharing. He drew on a century’s worth of Francophobe whiggery and more recent French Restoration debates about whether the French were fitted for modern freedom (“Shame on you, feeble-heads, to Slavery prone,” apostrophized William Wordsworth).156 Denied political power, they had become a faction; given political power, they would

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be disarmed of their jealousy and submit to the natural processes of anglicization, just like those happy Louisianans, where, he argued, “The influence of perfectly equal and popular institutions in effacing distinctions of race without disorder or oppression, and with little more than the ordinary animosities of party in a free country,” was “memorably exemplified,” and suggestive of similar results in Lower Canada.157 In fact, Tocqueville had said it only worked where French Canadians were demographically swamped; in Canada the outcome was predictably different. Cue Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” Patriot leader Louis-Joseph Papineau, in a reply to what he described as “this strange report,” denounced the unenlightened, false, ignorant, and despotic calumnies against the French-Canadian people, even as he reproduced at great length Durham’s criticisms of English Canadians.158 Durham and Papineau agreed, more or less, on the recent political history of Canada: Britons had behaved badly, enabled by a flawed application of the British constitution. As Eric Sager notes, complaints of the “aristocracy of wealth” and “monopoly of power and profit in favour of the minority” were central to the Patriot platform.159 That was also Etienne Parent’s view. More cautious than Papineau, Parent pointed to Poland in 1831 and warned that “honourable submission” was preferable to “dishonourable domination.” Parent was imprisoned during the rebellions, and in the spring of 1839 translated Durham’s report into French. He also, Eric Sager points out, attacked inequality: “It is really only a question of an Oligarchy, composed of public employees, monopolists, and speculators who are protected in their speculations by the Legislative and Executive Councils.”160 French-Canadian and Durhamite cultural analyses differed, of course, but culture had no political weight for Durham who wanted impartial enfranchisement of the propertied. What mattered most, constitutionally, was whether a liberal-conservative self-critique or a more violent republicanism would be the fix for Canada’s problems. The more that a Papineau or a William Lyon Mackenzie denounced Durham’s constitutionalism, the more they marginalized themselves as violent enemies of it. Durham would make immoderate nationalism nugatory, while allowing a more moderate, constitutional version to continue its empty squabbles, the better to protect British interests in the region. Durham was saying: go ahead, give French Canada power; it’s not really power. That was devious circumvention, done, liberal reformer Francis Hincks believed, to distract attention from the consequences of the reforms proposed. Urging Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine to form a political alliance with Robert Baldwin, Hincks wrote: “On the Union question, you should not mind Lord D’s motives, but the effect of the scheme. Lord Durham I think wrote more against you than he would have done, in order to carry the British party with him.”161 But, more than just circumvention, it was also Pascal’s wager, whereby outward conformity recreates the inner self.

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Whatever a subject’s inner longings, where they could best be achieved by outward conformity to liberal forms, liberalization should result. This was political liberty rather than Bentham’s Panopticon because achieved through power rather than abjection. Body followed mind rather than mind following body. It was the great liberal wager: that when you engineer a situation of disciplined self-government, you get disciplined self-government. According to Hincks, if the Patriots wanted not nationalist exclusion but “liberal institutions and government,” the union of the Canadas would deliver the necessary “immense Reform majority.”162 And again: “if we all combine as Canadians to promote the good of all classes in Canada there cannot be a doubt that under the new Constitution worked as Lord Durham proposes, the only party that would suffer would be the bureaucrats.” If they acted like liberals, they would get liberal results, namely, “perfectly equal and popular institutions.” Nationalism was too close to Hume’s parties of affection, rather than parties of interest; too intrinsically chauvinist. The same argument was made by Durham’s close associate, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a leading English voice for imperialism, who served as an advisor to Durham in Canada and also collaborated with him on a New Zealand settlement project. Wakefield has been credited with engineering a major shift in British imperial policy between 1833–38 that was “founded on (heavily qualified) free labour, freer trade and the promotion of free settler colonialism,” to make British overseas governance less violent and more commercial.163 Wakefield made the argument in early communications with the French-Canadian party leadership and, in 1842, published an article explaining that Durham’s recommendations had handed power to French Canada by making them, pace James Mill, a “balancing power.” They could not “be the majority, but they can give the majority to any other considerable party.” Durham had given them the casting vote and “for this they should thank God [i.e., Durham]; for it is by this alone that, after the rebellion, they could have been spared from extermination by the rude hands of the British party. It shows that the Union, if worked in the spirit of justice, is calculated to protect the French from the evils of a perpetual warfare with the British in Lower Canada.”164 Wakefield had tried to persuade Lafontaine of this reading from the beginning (reportedly with Durham’s approval), and it was probably Wakefield who leaked Durham’s report to the press. Propertied classes in Canada, like propertied classes in England, should trim according to the threat to property and stability. Trimmers turned Mill’s binary into Macaulay’s shifting alliances and, under a good constitution, would produce good liberal-conservative outcomes. To make the balance of power work in Canada as in England, Durham demanded moderation from moderates amongst the English and the French. To ally with English-Canadian liberals, French Canadians had to relinquish

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a nationalism that Durham found excessive – and vice versa. Both national groupings must relinquish factionalism for partyism, amour propre for amour de soi. Moderation was the price of power and the moderates on both sides must silence or convert or repudiate their extremists, as Peel and Melbourne were doing in Westminster. They must flag their openness; the language of exclusivity would always arouse opposition. The goal was not to banish parties per se but to construct expansive, open-ended but disciplined parties able to command legislative majorities.165 And Durham modelled that lesson in his negotiations with Melbourne in 1839. Resignation let him escape the rigours of a Canadian winter that might have killed him (as a recent Russian winter had nearly done), but it also gave his report maximum impact. Even as a governor, still less as an ex-governor, Durham could not force Melbourne’s hand. But the resignation heightened the dramatic distance between him and Melbourne so as to amplify his informal, public influence. There was widespread public interest in the spat, understood to pit the explosive Durham against his enemy, Lord Brougham. Two of Britain’s most prominent and radical politicians were squaring off. When Durham’s report was leaked to the London Times, public interest reached a fever pitch. Everyone suddenly had in their hands a sensational report that interrogated first questions of executive privilege, written in unusually casual prose, more like a history than a report. For emphasis, the key arguments were restated as handy marginal notations, in themselves an education and an incitement. Sir Charles Metcalfe, who inherited the fight over responsible government in Canada in the mid-1840s, blamed those marginal notes for his troubles. Before the report, the “Democratic party in Upper Canada” had “no precise name for the object of their desires, and could not exactly define their views. Lord Durham’s report gave them the definition, and the words Irresponsible Government, Responsibility of the Government, Responsibility of the Officers of the Government, occurring repeatedly in the marginal notes, it is said furnished the name. From that time, ‘Responsible Government’ became the war-cry of the party.”166 Durham reached out directly to public opinion in Britain with a powerful piece of liberal propaganda. In the process he put tremendous pressure on Melbourne and Peel to support his recommendations. But the report was unmistakably a parliamentary instrument, designed to consolidate rather than to challenge gentlemanly agreement. Lord John Russell warned Melbourne that Durham was making a play for leadership, and some think that only ill health and premature death prevented such a bid.167 Arguably, Durham’s report was a kind of Tamworth Manifesto. Robert Peel might have reversed the gains of the 1832 Reform Act when he was invited to form a government in 1834. But he responded by issuing an unprecedented manifesto, a new kind of national political propaganda, designed to

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persuade not just local electors but the nation that he would respect the reform as “a final and irreconcilable settlement of a great constitutional question – a settlement which no friend to the peace and welfare of this country would attempt to disturb, either by direct or by insidious means.” Peel was persuading his potential political allies that he would not be differently persuaded in the future. But ultra-conservatives had excoriated the pledge and Peel himself committed to “more advanced views than those which he afterwards cared to maintain.”168 At other moments, Peel declared himself “perfectly careless … of the opinions which prevail out of doors.”169 If Durham was himself in the running, four years later, he needed to perform a different version of finality. Ged Martin sees the report as a “coded manifesto” to answer the question “What will I do if I become prime minister of Great Britain? … Durham was making it clear that he did not intend to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire. The limits that he placed on colonial self-government were designed to reassure the emerging middle class that their surplus children could make homes on Canadian farms, and that no tariff wall would impede the sale of their manufactured goods to Canadian consumers,” because Britain would keep control of land and tariff policies.170 But others see the moment for radical alliance as already lost. Norman McCord argues that losses in the election of 1837 made it obvious that there would be no further parliamentary, which is to say democratic, reform in England, prompting reformers in 1838 to turn instead to the corn laws, effectively distancing themselves from the Chartists.171 So, too, Macaulay thought that the flourishing “centre gauche” of 1832 had yielded to a centre-right in 1838, numbering himself among the trimmers.172 The shift that made Melbourne unstable probably blocked Durham. Durham’s biographer, Chester New, saw an entente: “Durham was to support the Melbourne government and the government was to do everything possible for Durham’s Canadian recommendations. Both sides fulfilled their parts loyally.”173 Rightward drift was a problem for Peel as well, struggling to keep the ultra-tories from driving party policy. Melbourne needed Peel’s approval, understood by everyone as the one casting vote able to uphold or topple a government that had lost parliamentary confidence. As a utilitarian critic, John Leader, observed in 1839, under the “Lichfield House compact” whereby Melbourne and Daniel O’Connell promised to support one another, Peel governed England, O’Connell ruled Ireland, while “the Whigs govern nothing but Downing-street. The right hon. Member for Tamworth, is contented with power without place or patronage, and the Whigs are contented with place and patronage without power.” Melbourne’s mistreatment of Durham was, for Leader, a failing.174 It was an awkward moment to belabour the definition of confidence. So slight was the balance of power and so inflammatory the Canada question that both Durham and Peel were being urged to bring down

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Melbourne on it, make themselves prime minister, and redirect British politics towards something more liberal or conservative. Both rejected that chalice, preferring to protect the British presence in Canada. Melbourne’s distortion of Durham’s project – yes to union, no to responsible government – manifestly ceded control of the legislature to any parties willing to work together, as conservatives and liberals, from John Beverley Robinson to Wakefield, prognosticated to anyone who would listen. Robinson spent much of 1839 in England denouncing Durham’s proposal. James Stephen at the Colonial Office met him coolly but Peel and Wellington embraced him and heard him out. But even Wellington rejected his argument as “written for ‘Old England’” that existed now only in memory: “this is not Old England – not anything like it.”175 Both Peel and Wellington were in a position to know from Robinson that Melbourne was ironically ceding the responsible government that he claimed to be scotching. But both chose to exercise a “restraining influence” and to assent to it, once “shorn” of its most objectionable clauses. The tory alternative was indefensible. John Beverley Robinson published a long pamphlet, Canada and the Canada Bill, recommending draconian solutions: Montreal should be annexed to Upper Canada, and eastern Lower Canada to New Brunswick; the rest of the colony should remain under an unelected special council, at least until English immigration had made it “an English colony.” The French Canadians “whose violence and treasonable plots have occasioned so much mischief, and whose reported hostility to the Crown is the main cause of disturbing the present constitution,” must be coercively assimilated, stripped of their vote, their property laws, and their French-language schooling. No, this wasn’t despotism, Robinson insisted, because no written constitution passed by Parliament, operating as rule of law, could be despotic.176 Robinson’s arguments were unwelcome in England and he was ordered back to Canada before the final debate on the Canada Bill took place in 1840. Wellington tended to agree with Robinson and attacked the Canada Bill in the Lords with “great vehemence.” But Peel and his colonial advisor, Lord Stanley (who had visited British North America and whose son would later serve as Canadian governor general) refused to bring down Melbourne on it. Indeed, Peel urged for union to be pushed through without delay, as the Canadians seemed to be about as tranquil and accepting of it as they were likely to be. From Canada, Charles Grey was saying the same thing to Lord Grey. Wellington, too, while personally opposed to the bill, and resentful of Peel’s heavy-handed negotiations, advised the Conservative peers to accept it.177 Both considered their party too weak to replace Melbourne’s government without ceding too much ground to ultra-Tories while Ireland and Canada were so unsettled. British governments of the 1840s slowed the devolution of power but did not obstruct it outright.

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4.2 | Another cartoon by John Doyle, A Decided Fling, dated October 1839, shows Charles Poulett Thomson, the soon-to-be Lord Sydenham, being ungraciously flung across the ocean to Canada by Edward Ellice. © The National Portrait Gallery d41548.

Finality Jack and Radical Jack had worked together in 1832 but in 1839 they were on opposite sides in regard to Canada. Russell, who agreed to become colonial secretary as part of the deal to send Poulett Thompson to Canada to replace Durham, believed there could be only one imperial centre of power.178 Russell distrusted local governments. He remained close to the architects of the poor laws, including Nassau Senior and Edwin Chadwick, who sought to impose central, bureaucratic control over local authorities, described by Russell as not just jobbers but jobbers “most surely in a Tory sense.”179 That was different from the classic whig position on poor laws, namely, that more landed influence and social consensus would keep the rates down.180 Whigs remained nostalgic for the ancien regime state, understood not as institutionally weak but as socially powerful, ruled skillfully and effectively, according to Joanna Innes, by a shared “newspaper-reading, book-club-subscribing, party-politically conscious” public opinion that did

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not fall into local versus national distinctions and tensions until the nineteenth century.181 Durham’s understanding of power was more like Hume’s than Russell’s, with the emphasis on public opinion. But opinion must be made more upwardly than downwardly emulative, more like a polite republic of letters than republican demagoguery. Across the North Atlantic world, according to Annalien de Dijn, conservative political theorists were redefining “liberty” to replace a democratizing model of participation in government with civil liberty, that is, secure enjoyment of life and property. According to de Dijn: “people were free – that is, they possessed ‘civil’ liberty – if they and their property were secure; if they were able to enjoy their lives and possessions in peace and quiet.”182 But North American states were constructed to engineer a calculated, racialized insecurity of property. The fight was always for resources, including slaves and land, as well as for power. Canada was a kind of go-between for Britain and America, a place where the values of each hegemon had a certain presence and popular command, the one strongly entrenched in the Canadian state, the other strongly entrenched in Canadian society. So which paradigm would win out? Durham was under pressure to do with Canada and Britain what Hume had done with Scotland and England: to make Canada a fruitful and persisting exemplar for Pax Britannica, by shoring up a more impartial security of property and public participation for the propertied. Stepping in to fulfil the project embodied in Durham’s report was Poulett Thomson, soon-to-be Lord Sydenham. When he first visited Toronto, Thomson received an address from the mayor and council warning him not to cede “the same rights and privileges with the loyal British population” to French Canadians, “diplomatically” (says Adam Shortt) referred to as “that portion of the population who, from education, habits and prejudices, are aliens to our nation and our institutions.” Poulett Thomson replied that any permanent solution must be founded upon “principles of equal justice to all Her Majesty’s subjects.”183 A despatch to Russell noted: “In a country so lately convulsed, and where passions are still so much excited, extreme opinions cannot but exist; and accordingly, while some persons advocate an immediate return to the former Constitution of the Province, others propose either the entire exclusion from political privileges of all of French origin, or the partial dismemberment of the Province, with the view of conferring on one portion a representative system, while maintaining in the other a despotism.”184 Durham and Sydenham sought an “impartiality” that their critics conceived as far too partial to French Canadians.185 Attacks on FrenchCanadian Catholics as dangerous “aliens” and “foreigners” that only a degenerate Britishness would protect or tolerate persisted throughout the following decade. The Montreal Gazette helped to provoke rioting in 1849 under the banner “our blood and our race.”186 “Muscular” conservatism

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looked to popular violence to reinforce its claims, and many democratizers responded in kind.187 Violent intimidation was a natural weapon for those who understood civilization as a form of realpolitik, the “might makes right” perspective, who resented being checked by British constitutionalism and British minority rule. Durham’s project, as Colin Coates notes, “aimed to reduce French Canadians to a political minority.”188 But it did so at a time when minorities held the balance of power in Westminster and the very notion of a political majority was in abeyance. John A. Macdonald showed himself a student of Durham when he recapitulated John Leader’s observation and applied it to Canada: “remember that O Connell, with his tail, absolutely governed England after the Lichfield House bargain. So long as the French have 20 votes they will be a power, & must be conciliated.”189 Inter-elite bargains handed minorities the balance of power in Britain and should do the same in Canada. The Rebellion Losses Act showed that the calculated gamble succeeded. In 1849, when Durham’s son-in-law, Lord Elgin, signed the bill, he ceded responsible government. It was a slap in the face to conservatives who saw revolutionary violence legitimated and monetized, in a measure “unprecedented in the history of civilized nations.”190 But it was done on terms perfectly commensurate with commercial sociability, as an act of history and of protection for property, not of racialization. It carefully alienated not just such unreconstructed ethnic nationalists as the aging Papineau, but also locofoco radical demands for “wide and equal distribution of land” and abolition of the banks.191 And as an act of history and commercial sociability, it was perfectly defensible and was indeed defended as such by all levels of the state – imperial and military, local and civil – amidst violent incitements. People died in the riots that the new law provoked, but there was no state warrant behind the deaths: no Peterloo. Lafontaine and Baldwin created a police force and then dissolved it again. “The Riot Act was read and the troops charged on the mob. No lives were lost,” recorded the conservative press.192 The reformed Canadian state ostentatiously foreswore identity-based violence and visibly committed to a non-violent and property-respecting version of rule. Canadians might be turbulent, but theirs was declaredly not “the turbulence of the people, the insecurity of life and property” that The Economist in 1847 blamed for the Irish potato famine: “Every breach of the laws of morality and social order brings its own punishment and inconvenience. Where there is not perfect security, there can never be prosperity. This is the first law of civilization.”193 Canadian reformers had to rise to those Economist standards, understood as the historical foundation and paramount virtue of the British empire. They had to perform a standard of civilization “to protect the life, liberty, and property of Europeans in non-European settings.”194 And they sustained those

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credentials into negotiations for and against abolition of seigneurial tenure, although the issue outlasted their premierships. The Tories, meanwhile, were looting and burning. It was no small irony that among the casualties of the violence was the legislative library: 25,000 volumes, a carefully curated collection, including political and literary works and many unique documents from Canada.195 In one stroke, the Tories made themselves a people of no history and no literature. There were long-lasting and terrible consequences. Durham argued that French Canadians were wholly suited to liberal politics but he veiled that argument beneath a superficial claim that they were not. The deeper claim won over Canadian politics but the superficial one won over Canadian literary culture. Writers and scholars long made “deep causes” arguments out of superficialities.196 And politicians and scholars spoke with one voice to apply that racial model to Indigenous peoples. Durham’s liberal political project required more social and economic impartiality than colonial Canada could muster. The liberal economic project of his successor, Charles Poulett Thomson, Lord Sydenham (the title came during his Canada stint but I use it generally for the Canadian period), worked, in many respects, to prevent Durham’s political logic from applying to Indigenous peoples. Sydenham was more ideological than Durham and more invested in specifically economic knowledge, expertise, and bureaucracy. Where Durham enlarged, Sydenham narrowed the workings of state and society. In Britain and in Canada, he lent leadership to the rightward turn, from political enlargement to corn law repeal. He also bought off the conservatives in Upper Canada, renamed Canada West in 1840, at the expense of liberals and Lower Canada, or Canada East, who now had to share customs revenue with the western province. The debt would be secured by an imperial guarantee: Canada did not look lucrative or stable enough for investors without that guarantee. The focus of Sydenham’s opening speech to the first meeting of the united Canadian legislature in June 1841 was the imperial guarantee for £1,500,000 to relieve “the pressure of interest on the public debt” and to build up “great public undertakings,” especially the inland navigation: “The rapid settlement of the country – the value of every man’s property with it – the advancement of his future fortunes are deeply affected by this question.” It required a bigger colonial state, more calibrated to the international money market, to sustain the payments and expend the money on western infrastructure. In the process, state and society were narrowed and specialized, the former more bureaucratized and the latter more financialized, both of them less promiscuously social. We know that Sydenham went a long way towards conceding responsible government but not exactly how far. Sydenham was, like Durham, a former cabinet minister, well acquainted with the workings of British power.

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Sydenham privately remarked that Lower Canada would be all the better for a decade or so of illiberal rule, but he did not make any such observation publicly and had to content himself with quietly slipping in as much enforced modernization as possible before the constitution was restored in 1841. Many of those reforms looked about as liberal as a Benthamite workhouse. But Sydenham also recognized that he must court public opinion, even without the tools that made it governable in England. The same letter that sighed for dictatorial rule in Lower Canada sighed that Upper Canada was yet more ungovernable, divided between rival factions on whom Sydenham had no purchase. “Think of a House in which half the members hold places, yet in which the government does not command a single vote; in which the placemen generally vote against the executive; and where there is no one to defend the government when attacked or to state the opinion or views of the governor! How, with a popular assembly, government is to be conducted under such circumstances, is a riddle to me.”197 Sydenham had conferred with Durham at length before going to Canada, and as governor he machinated to get a funded and functioning administration in place, effectively bringing in most of the machinery of responsible government, but without bringing in the French leadership. He trusted that the incompatibilities of his enemies – the ultra-tories and ultra-reformers – would force a moderate compromise and keep him in power, as was happening in Britain. It was only irresponsible if you believed that a given party or race had a natural right to representation in the government. Sydenham refused to recognize party or race and insisted that he was governing, as instructed, “in accordance with the well-understood wishes and interests of the people.” Tories and “Baldwinites” alike denied the claim: “The former refused to admit the system they abhorred had been established, and the latter denied that Bagot’s ministry possessed the confidence of the House.”198 Sydenham operated in the gap between those interpretations and deftly evaded traps. When Austin Cuvillier, an outspoken adversary of Sydenham, was proposed as speaker in one such test, Sydenham accepted the nomination. That was good enough evidence of responsibility for Francis Hincks, who promptly joined the block of ministerial supporters, and found his new tory colleagues “as thoroughly Liberal as I could wish.”199 In June 1842, thus, Hincks accepted Sydenham’s invitation to serve as inspector general, that is, finance minister. Sydenham insisted that he was responsive to public opinion and he inaugurated classic cabinet/party government in Canada, even as he told the Colonial Office that he had warded it off. Sir Charles Metcalfe, coming along later, was bemused: “If Lord Sydenham did not intend this, he was more mistaken than from his known ability one would suppose to be possible; and if he did intend it, he, with his eyes open, carried into practice that very theory of Responsible Colonial Government which he had pronounced his opinion decidedly against.”200 Shortt suggests

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that Sydenham is nowhere on the record as opposing responsible government, though he did report to Lord John Russell that he had successfully repelled it “in its inadmissible sense,” namely, that a governor must not just consult his advisors but be bound by them.201 Gordon Stewart sees general agreement on that point, from Durham and Sydenham through Metcalfe and Stanley.202 All the while, Ian Radforth observes, Sydenham built up administrative apparatus to engineer what Jean-Marie Fecteau described as “social regulation,” that is, the reciprocal engagement of institutions and agents.203 The colonial state looked like the British state being constructed as a point of agreement amongst the centrist liberal-conservative politicians of the 1830s and 1840s, under Melbourne, Peel, and Russell. Durham had been scathing about the inadequacies of the colonial state: corrupt, partisan, ineffective. Competent administration offered a negotiable middle ground, Radforth observes: “Thomson insisted that it was well worth pursuing measures that had a practical utility and went down well with the public. In his estimation, Utilitarianism had a genuinely popular appeal.”204 But it was easier to construct an expert civil service in England than in Canada, where impartiality was aspirational. Partisan politicians used patronage appointments as the best way to attract support for their party and also to control the emerging administrative state. Bureaucrats are springs of the executive branch that resist legislative or judicial correction. Joseph Heath argues they have a vocational logic, like science or medicine.205 Sydenham thought political economy a science for the state, its logic and facts able to transcend politics and engineer wealth. Sydenham would get that wealth by creating a “great empire of the St. Lawrence” to “link the garden that was western Upper Canada to British markets.”206 That diaspora-and-debt project was always supposed to make Canada more British and, indeed, had been opposed by the Patriot party in Lower Canada on those grounds, as diluting their influence and draining their wealth. Their influence was the more diluted because “rep by pop,” rejected in Britain in 1832, was again rejected in Canada in 1840 as the basis for the united legislature, notwithstanding Durham’s recommendation in favour. Instead, each section of the province would have the same number of seats, though Upper Canada had fewer inhabitants. Debt was as problematic as diaspora. Hume had warned that excessive debt worked to dispossess the landed, and in Lower Canada those living on and owning the land were disproportionately French: hence the long debates about whether to tax land or commerce. But debt engineered parties of interest over parties of affection. Sydenham was now conniving to circumvent British austerity, believing that Canada paid more than its fair share of costs of imperial pauperism, and he urged a British immigration tax to help carry those costs. Appalled by the obvious bribery of Upper Canadian conservatives, John Neilson, a Lower Canadian anti-unionist, denounced those who held their noses and exclaimed

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“with all the feelings and recklessness of a Shylock, nousl’acceptons.”207 When Sydenham died very suddenly after a fall from a horse, Sir Charles Bagot inherited his economic, political, and bureaucratic perplexities. Bagot was named not by Melbourne but by a restored Peel. But if Peel’s “practical intellect” recognized the need for responsibility,208 the process would be as protracted and discreet as he could make it. Bagot, too, understood the need for discretion. He inherited a situation that could point to collision or consensus, depending on how you read the shifting coalition of parties and how vehemently your critics denounced you. Bagot, maneuvering tirelessly in the lead-up to his first parliament, saw three political parties where Wakefield saw four. Bagot thought he could put together a friendly alliance that could maintain a majority; Wakefield thought he would fall short unless he could bring in French-Canadian leadership with their king-making powers. Ursilla N. Macdonnell argues that Wakefield’s letters pushed Bagot to invite four French leaders into the government.209 When the legislature opened in early September, Bagot immediately saw he could not command the necessary majority, and that the French party was “bound together by a sentiment of law & language & community of objects, & a spirit of honor & natural dependence, which is scarcely to be found in any other of the existing parties.”210 The French orchestrated collective action too effectively to be shut out from power. Sydenham had orchestrated cabinet government but kept popular public opinion out of it, Bagot told Stanley: “half” the electorate “has no representation or voice in the Executive Council, or the administration of public affairs, & having been defied and vanquished, and, I must add, treated with no small share of contumely by Lord Sydenham, is in a state of united, persisting, and violent opposition to the Government.” But bringing them into the government would also bring in Robert Baldwin, whom Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine refused to abandon. By the end of September, Bagot had caved and invited them both into his cabinet, though it would be early October before he settled on the full list. It included a smattering of independents and exactly one Tory, Robert Baldwin Sullivan, doing duty for supposed impartiality. But in calming one branch of “violent opposition” to government, he inflamed the “violent antipathy to the French” amongst the party of “merchants & capitalists” of Montreal and Quebec: “you may imagine the extravagance to which this was carried, when it gained for its supporters the soubriquet of the ‘Blood-and-Guts Party.’” Bagot criticized Bond Head and Sydenham for having stoked that extravagance with their talk of “crisis.”211 Bagot tried to persuade the reformers that they had responsible government and the conservatives that they did not. In fact, he admitted to the colonial secretary, Lord Stanley, that “whether the doctrine of responsible government is openly acknowledged, or is only tacitly acquiesced in, virtually it exists.” But he dared not say it aloud and expected the same

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discretion of his legislators: “Hitherto the French have conducted themselves as well as I could wish. And I continue to flatter myself that they are now well aware how much of their future prosperity depends upon their present discretion.”212 Power demanded discretion: responsibility worked best when it pretended to be responsiveness. To define executive prerogative was to make it a political football. Robert Peel observed as much in a letter to Stanley on the continuing Canadian crisis the following year: “The principle of the relation of the Sovereign to the Ministers here, is practically acted upon, it is recognized as the general constitutional rule – but what would be thought of the demand made by ministers that the Sovereign should formally and by stipulation admit it to be the rule? If this would be preposterous in the case of the Sovereign, it is much more so in the case of a servant of the Sovereign exercising a delegated authority.”213 Blackstone had made discretion the best protection for parliamentary privilege and Dicey would later prefer his “flowing and discursive” disquisitions to law reduced “to a series of accurately stated propositions.”214 Canadian challenges to British conventions threatened to undermine them. Peel fought the democratization of discretion and prerogative at every turn.215 Canadians wanted a Canadian Tamworth Manifesto to guarantee final settlement of a great constitutional question. But Peel would not repeat that now-regretted error. He wanted flagrant security for imperial impositions, complete discretion for imperial concessions, in Canada and England, and he policed the boundary between the spoken and the unspoken to protect executive prerogative. During the discussion of Durham’s instructions, Peel had complained that the wording broached prerogative, so that he dared not even take enough notice of them to censure them.216 Executive prerogative must not speak its name in the imperial Parliament, let alone a colonial knock-off. All the while, Peel was orchestrating a quiet political coup, the “efficient secret” of British politics, that saw cabinet seize virtually all policy-making powers from the generality of mp s.217 Small wonder that he policed discretion. Bagot had to tell stories that insulated local and imperial responsibility from one another. He was pinioned between two constitutionalisms: the American one that ostentatiously flagged its purposefulness and the more discrete British one that did not. He was equally pinioned between two Roberts: Robert Baldwin, who wanted explicit and enduring declarations of responsible government, and Robert Peel, who wanted any accommodation to be as slight and invisible as possible, not made into a convention. The colonials were being frustratingly literal-minded. Robert Baldwin consistently refused anything but formal and crystal-clear statements of responsible government, carefully distinguished from irresponsibility at every possible opportunity. In October 1842, Bagot reprimanded Baldwin over a

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legal opinion to which Baldwin had “gratuitously attached a long dissertation on responsible government. He would not have this sort of thing, Bagot lectured; he would not have ministers attempting to intrude their political theories on the apolitical business of the Crown.” Michael Cross remarks that “Robert was anxious to establish the triumph of responsibility on the public record. Sir Charles wanted to maintain as much ambiguity as possible.”218 Bagot grasped that in a world ruled by public opinion, certainty is specious and self-destructive. But the civil list – the list of expenses and state officials – operated against ambiguity. It was the place where the party translated into the state with maximum transparency and accountability.219 Patronage wooed people to parties and integrated party and state. The reformers drew up a list of non-partisan offices that they wanted to make explicitly partisan appointments, including deputy heads of departments and commissioner of lands. But the Canadian civil list had been written into the Union Act, beyond the reach of the colonial legislature. Bagot could only hope to bury the problem of supply behind the invitation extended to Baldwin and Lafontaine, immediately passing a supply bill at a moment when “all minor questions of contention” were thrown over, and then quickly proroguing the legislature until the following February – by which time he was too ill to meet with it. His successor, Metcalfe, would inherit the problem. Peel and Stanley grew increasingly worried at the gap between Bagot’s account and their own understanding of the situation. Stanley sent Wakefield’s analysis to Bagot, while Peel concluded that “Bagot has made a mess of things.” But it was impossible to ignore an organized and insistent public opinion in Canada; impossible to govern, as Gosford had said, without some measure of public respect. Bagot’s flattery better reflected the liberal-conservative project of reading consent into coercion. Political education was required on both sides: conservatives to accept a responsibility-leaning version of responsiveness and liberals a responsiveness-leaning version of responsibility. Discretion, in fact, worked both ways, not just to protect but also to sap executive prerogative, something that William Warren Baldwin and Francis Hincks recognized, even if Robert Baldwin did not. Canadian discretion and British distance and ignorance could carry things a long way, as they had done in the 1760s. But informal compromises could also be reversed, and that’s what happened under Sir Charles Metcalfe, Bagot’s successor. He was willing to accept Baldwin and Lafontaine as his advisors but not to cede all offices, under guise of partisan patronage. It required a spectacular act of political theatre, the Rebellion Losses Bill, to serve as a Canadian Tamworth Manifesto. Durham engineered a measure of ethnic and political impartiality into the constitution, and made it a resource for liberalizers across the empire. Propertied French Canadians would be ruled like men, by their opinions,

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so long as they rallied around a property-protecting state. But the principle applied, as Sir Charles Lucas observed approvingly in the early twentieth century, only to the white races.220 Durham did not want a racialized constitution but he did want an imperial resettlement project to get impoverished Britons onto colonial lands. He insisted that Britain’s investment of blood and treasure in its colonies gave it sovereignty and the right of resettlement. He served not just the propertied but also the impoverished people of both England and Canada, offering them a clear path to political agency and to the property qualifications that brought political agency, by emigration and settlement. That too served the propertied public, by de-escalating Chartist pressures. But it didn’t notice identities that didn’t rise to the political liberties of the enfranchised. If you were Indigenous, Durham’s constitution looked like racialized oligarchy. Anne Curthoys speaks of “the dog that didn’t bark,” by which she means that Durham – who had been briefed by the Aborigines’ Protection Society on the need to protect Indigenous “rights” in Canada – should have seen the breach of liberalism inherent in the disenfranchisement and dispossession already underway, to which his report lent further momentum.221 And Sydenham exacerbated the process. Ignoring Anishinaabeg council petitions from southern Ontario, he moved the provincial capital or “Great Council Fire” from Toronto to Kingston, as a concession to Lower Canadians. His utilitarian reforms to the civil service made it more centralized and bureaucratized and less peopled by and accountable to local communities and interests. Both men wanted to see land and emigration run from Westminster, the better to ensure efficient transfer of British subjects to the colonies. Canada could not be a safety valve for British social tensions when its economic development was so scandalously behind that of America, the value of land much lower. That difference could not be blamed on natural causes, argued Durham: the available land of Upper Canada, at least, was as good as anything elsewhere. The colonial oligarchs were to blame and his report provided many examples. The clergy reserves were clearly supposed to be one-seventh of public lands; the local gentry’s decision to make them one-seventh of all lands was an invitation to corruption and underdevelopment. The surveying was atrociously bad, but petitions for correction invariably sided with old holders, not newcomers. One correspondent said there’d been no point in complaining before Durham’s arrival; only now did redress seem faintly possible. The lands granted to soldiers and militia were so inaccessible, surrounded by underdeveloped deserts held by speculators, that the militiamen had to sell for a pittance to the speculators. And where American speculators promoted enterprise, Canadians stagnated. From Durham’s perspective – always that of the British public – Canadian corruptionists were denying self-improvement to the imperial public as a whole.

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Durham’s report rested in part on the new economic theories advanced by Gibbon Wakefield, who wanted free land grants to become land sales, the better to build up a colonial labour force and improve the value of land. But Durham’s analysis was still more political than economic. The new forms of wealth seemed to be threatening political equilibriums by overly empowering a rent-seeking, predatory, and corrupt governing faction. Everything the local oligarchs did was done either badly or jealously to make them more wealthy and unaccountable. Political accountability and British immigration would fix the problem locally because it would empower the enterprising middling, propertied people. But because there was already too much too-cheap land, Durham paid scant attention to the social and economic workings of property, to the way in which it was being transferred from Indigenous to Eurowestern hands. Durham purchased the portrait of Wendat chief Zacharie Vincent, painted and shown by Antoine Plamondon in 1838 under the title The Last of the Hurons. Perhaps he waxed romantic about the portrait when showing it to visitors back in England, much as Tocqueville had waxed romantic about the decline of Frenchness in America. All three men, Tocqueville, Durham, and Vincent, personified romantic sensibility confronting a vulgar and threatening Americanization. But the sense of history in that “Last” as something social, economic, and political, rather than merely romantic, failed Durham. Durham did not bark against the oligarchical rule of Indigenous people, but his appendix did give a noisy yap. There, Charles Buller, in a report on the management of lands written in November 1838, described the way in which the Six Nations on the Brant River had lost more than half the land originally guaranteed to them at the end of the American War as recompense for their loyalty. Of the manner in which the large proportion they have alienated was acquired by the individuals into whose hands, as is stated by Mr. Radenhurst, it passed with the sanction of the Government of the colony, and nearly the whole of whom were connected with that Government, I could not obtain any testimony upon which I could feel myself justified in relying. It is, however, certain that the consideration paid for it was for the most part of merely temporary benefit to them. The government, under whose guardianship the Indians were settled, and whose duty it should have been to provide efficient securities against any improvident grants, by which a provision, intended to be permanent, might be disposed of for inadequate or temporary returns, would seem, in these instances, to have neglected or violated its implied trust. To the extent of this alienation, the objects of the original grant, so far as the advantage of the Indians was concerned, would appear to have been frustrated, by the same authority, and almost by the same individuals, that made the grant.222

4.3 | Not two but three civilizations meet in Antoine Plamondon’s The Last of the Hurons, a portrait of Zacharie Vincent, Telariolin, a Wendat chief. Painted and shown in 1838, it won a medal from the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, and was purchased by Lord Durham who took it home with him. Plamondon and Vincent each reversed the “Last” narrative hanging over them both with their paintings and in their own lives. Antoine Plamondon, The Last of the Hurons (Zacharie Vincent), 1838, oil on canvas, 114.7 x 97cm. Gift of the Schaeffer family, Thornhill, Ontario, 2018. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada, Accession 48622.

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Buller’s was an indictment of corruption and tyranny reinforcing one another that fell in perfectly with the larger arguments of the report. English Canadians used their government offices not only to monopolize economic opportunities but also to seize property in a series of corrupt transactions. Canadian wealth came at the expense of Indigenous poverty, as any informed and clear-sighted observer, mandated to see such things, must see. The liberal alliance that had precipitated Durham and Thomson into government in the early 1830s had campaigned on accusations of impoverishment. It’s all the more troubling, therefore, that no such barking occurs in the report proper. Durham knew what was going on. He did repudiate austerity in the Indian Department and continued imperial responsibility. He called for internal reforms to the administration and a report on the “actual state” of Indigenous people (i.e., “position, number, habits, circumstances, and degrees of moral and social advancement”), along with the “utmost strictness” in either managing or disposing of their lands. Yet he was not just ignorant but also callous of Indigenous property and politics. He wanted a constitutional critique of oligarchy that rested on and protected classic English property rights, understanding that justice and property must stand or fall together. The Pax Britannica was also a Pax Bourgeois. British security of property might be contrasted with a greater French uncertainty of property that might spread to Canada. In France, two decades of intense public debates about restitution of, or compensation for, property seized during the French Revolution, political upheavals, and legal reforms provoked real uncertainty. Donald Kelley and Bonnie Smith count forty titles debating possession published between 1837 and 1842.223 It was their property that gave the British gentry and the middlemost their political purchase, their claims to resist democracy and oligarchy alike. The more uncertain the property, the more uncertain the Pax. To loosen the definition of property so as to encompass Indigenous forms would weaken it legally and politically. It required a certain agnosticism about property and a relative openness to democratization that Durham conspicuously lacked. But if that work was not done, then Indigenous people lacked political purchase against oligarchy. They would be governed like women in a poorhouse, by their rivals and enemies. The consequences were corrupt and predatory rent-farming of the land and of the people themselves, in the manner of an ancien regime tax farmer. Seen from one perspective, Indigenous people looked like paupers, a liability or lien driving up colonial costs.224 Seen from another, they looked like assets, much as paupers were assets for poor law administrators in England. Charles Dickens put that view prominently before the British public in his phenomenally successful novel, serialized in Bentley’s Miscellany beginning in February 1837, Oliver Twist. After the infant was orphaned and his lack of resources ascertained:

4.4 | John George Lambton, Earl Durham, replica of a painting by Thomas Phillips in 1819, done in 1820. Like Zacharie Vincent, Durham is shown in contemplative mode, as a romantic, sensitive, and high-status young man, who ponders the threats posed by war and democratization to his civilization. © The National Portrait Gallery npg 2547.

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the parish authorities magnanimously and humanely resolved, that Oliver should be “farmed,” or, in other words, that he should be despatched to a branch-workhouse some three miles off, where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-laws, rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, under the parental superintendence of an elderly female, who received the culprits at and for the consideration of sevenpence-halfpenny per small head per week. Sevenpence-halfpenny’s worth per week is a good round diet for a child; a great deal may be got for sevenpence-halfpenny, quite enough to overload its stomach, and make it uncomfortable. The elderly female was a woman of wisdom and experience; she knew what was good for children; and she had a very accurate perception of what was good for herself. So, she appropriated the greater part of the weekly stipend to her own use, and consigned the rising parochial generation to even a shorter allowance than was originally provided for them. Thereby finding in the lowest depth a deeper still; and proving herself a very great experimental philosopher.225 Dickens was putting his powers of literary sympathy and liberal debunking to a direct attack on the poor law logic of Bond Head or Chadwick or Poulett Thomson. Paupers were horribly farmed in England. And so were Indigenous peoples in Canada, according to the appendices of Durham’s report. The colonial officials were corrupt and predatory enough to “farm” any assets placed under their control: land, people, anything. But these sub-political relationships escaped Durham’s interest and flouted Sydenham’s. Economic theorists such as Ricardo and Malthus disputed the role of labour and capital in determining the value of land and the wealth of the nation, but generally failed to see either labour or capital in Indigenous societies. Race trumped liberal economics and liberal politics in Sydenham and Durham. Centralization of immigration policy and land grants would provide an immediate stopgap solution to the administrative problems. These were Royal Proclamation principles reaffirmed, to check settlers behaving like rapacious Americans of the 1760s while still providing an avenue to resettlement. They fell in very happily with Durham’s interests as a reformer, a wealthy landed Englishman, and a speculator in New Zealand. Durham looked back to the ancien regime state where centralized legislation relied for its local efficacy on shared interests and concerns, overlapping in a shared public sphere led by the whig grandees. When Durham advocated for the “ancient liberties” of England, he was looking for an England less socially and problematically modern, in a shrinking Atlantic.226 If you could make the colonies more like old England, then England too could be more

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like old England, eased of its perplexing new social pressures by the safety valve of emigration, and shored up by elite opinion that, no longer tethered to and destabilized by frontier democratization in the Canadas, could become more poised, even equipoised. But Durham’s project was too metropolitan, whiggish, and too studiedly political. Darling had already shown that imperial protection was null in Canada. Durham wanted to shore up the rule of property without investigation of the messy way that property became property – always through theft and violence on Hume’s reading. His project was to shore up property by making the middle classes a buffer for it, no longer adequately protected by Burke’s insistence that it was ballast for the nation. He sought the kind of insulation for property that Peel sought for prerogative. Durham recommended more efficient, uniform, and predictable mechanisms of acquisition of and title to land, on the model of the United States: “it gives an instant and secure title; and it admits of no favouritism, but distributes the public land amongst all classes and persons upon precisely equal terms.”227 “All classes and persons” was untrue. Indigenous dispossession was advancing both as overt contractual transfer and discreet social transfer. John Beverley Robinson, early as attorney general, later as chief justice, did not just repudiate collective Indigenous tenure; he leveraged illegal squatting against it. Incessant encroachment undermined the value of treaties across British North America.228 Settlers and speculators wanted what Peel wanted: maximum certainty for their own will and property, maximum discretion for encroaching on everyone else’s. Canada had to be seen to meet those demands from intending investors and emigrants in Britain, by guaranteeing debts and lands and upholding the “paramount” British virtue of security for property.229 The result was a revolution in property, as described by John Weaver: “Land-allocation exercises during the peak years of the great land rush, from roughly 1815 to 1870, taught legislators, bureaucrats, financial institutions, and wealth-seeking citizens to think of property rights as individualized, precisely defined, enforceable, transferable, and promoting the public good.”230 The revolution in property and security went well beyond Canadian land. In 1830s Egypt, for example, Pasha Mehmed ‘Ali worked to persuade the British that “a Christian’s head is as safe on his shoulders at Cairo as it is in London, and his purse safer in his pocket.”231 But what was generalizable in principle – the mutual protections of politics and economics, stabilized by impartial institutions of credit – was in practice highly in thrall to the City of London, the epicentre of English banking. Heavily indebted Canadians must continually negotiate and perform security for British investors. They did so by insisting on security for stated and politically represented property, and insecurity for Indigenous traditions of property. Darling and Tocqueville had pointed out that the

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one clearly came at the expense of the other. Both saw the imperial state as the best protector of colonized peoples. Without that protection, land held by an Indigenous person became less secure than the average London leasehold or purse. There were legal and constitutional elements at work in that process but public opinion and social power were what legitimated and empowered it. Durham shrank from the problem but did recommend investigation. Investigations were performed in 1839 and 1840; still, neither was adequate to generate the kind of authoritative declarations required to legitimate either Indigenous possession or Eurowestern dispossession. Better data was needed but also better authority for the data. That required a new “Bagot Commission,” created in October 1842, to inquire into the workings of the Indian Department. October 1842 was a decisive moment for responsible government and settler colonialism. When he admitted Baldwin and Lafontaine into the cabinet, Bagot was hard-pressed politically and fiscally. He was telling stories that there was and there wasn’t responsible government and that the colony was and wasn’t in dire economic and financial straits. Its economic future was bright and boundless but the British state must urgently send money. Bagot was trying to confirm fiscal pledges made to Sydenham that Peel and Stanley now wanted to revise downwards. Michael Piva argues that the revision was minor – but nonetheless the fiscal negotiations were no less tense than the political ones.232 Bagot had begun to bill the Treasury directly for outstanding expenses that he had no right to claim, accurately predicting that Stanley wouldn’t dare repudiate them, but there were stern reprimands. Sydenham had bought votes with patronage; Bagot needed funds to do the same. Bagot wanted to spend more money on works and less money on other things; he needed cutbacks that didn’t harm the interests of a single legislator, and that gestured towards economic growth. There was exactly one way to accomplish that and one possible victim. It was time to turn back to serious consideration of the Indian Department. There were untapped savings to be cut from presents and annuities and untapped wealth in the waste lands and monies accumulated from earlier cessions. There was no electoral price to pay, because Indigenous people mostly didn’t vote. And so Bagot created a commission to investigate the Indian Department at the same moment as he conceded responsible government. But to understand the connections between responsible government, state finance, political economy, and the Indian Department, we need to take a step backwards. The question – did “Indians,” like French Canadians, have the rights of the British subject? – was not on the table. That silence conveys something important about the limits of liberal political analysis. Durham brilliantly made politics a central focus for reform to achieve real political victories, but the political focus veiled social and economic realities.

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Indigenous people in Canada could vote but ordinarily did not for reasons that a merely political liberalism could not encompass. Their traditions of collective action persisted and they preferred to express their grievances collectively, rather than as individual voters. The Bagot report quickly confirmed that the “Indian problem” of the 1840s remained what it had been for Darling: poverty driven by racism rather than by race. Equipped with the latest sociological data and methods, the commissioners saw an invidious convergence of political, economic, and social factors. But that argument was lost on scholars who followed Durham in seeing race as “deep” analysis. To understand the arguments and the stakes, we must return to British debates about poverty before tracing their transfer to Canada. We must follow the new relations and understandings of wealth and poverty that developed from the emergence of social statistics, beginning in France in the 1820s and taken up in England in the 1830s.

5

The Sociology of Civilization in the 1840s: The Bagot Report

i: b r it is h b e gi nni ngs Where conservatives reasoned from authority in the 1820s, reformers in the 1830s reasoned with political liberty that came increasingly to resemble the argument from authority. But the model of middle-class virtue and wealth, touted as the stabilizing power in British history, still flailed in the aftermath of reform amidst growing extremes of wealth and poverty. Wealthy Britons were prospering more than ever as the fruits of commercial empire streamed back to metropolitan traders, investors, and consumers. The middlemost were also prospering and building up middle-class culture and institutions. But impossible not to notice, as well, stark and growing evidence of dire poverty, often shockingly juxtaposed with wealth, especially in the new factory towns in the midlands – and in London, which always housed between a quarter and a third of England’s paupers. Millions of people pushed off the land flooded to the cities and the colonies or ex-colonies, seeking better opportunities. Victorian-era globalization saw the interests of the classes and the bodies of the masses roam globally. But diaspora, like Peel’s police and Durham’s reforms, only modestly eased pressures on a political system designed to protect the status quo. The diaspora turned masses into classes: a propertied overclass vested in the hegemony of the British constitution and common law around the world. Their ascendency was said to be the measure of civilization. But that ascendency remained perpetually threatened by oligarchy and corruption from above, and a brawny proletariat from below. The rediscovery of “the social” as something underlying and explaining political relationships, grounds for optimism for Hume, provoked dismay amongst his Victorian intellectual heirs.

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The emerging “social question” in early Victorian England was the discovery of profound and entrenched poverty, squalor, and disease amidst glittering wealth and rising inequality. While standards of living did rise overall, Boyd Hilton argues, still “inequality and absolute poverty” peaked during the 1830s and 1840s.1 Wealth and poverty both had their own landscapes, their palaces and their pauper palaces, but they also flanked and juxtaposed one another. If you strolled along West London’s airy, middle-class avenues, you saw handsome public and private buildings; if you peered into the back alleys and mews in between those avenues, you saw densely crowded shanties, filthy and rank. Portman Square was one of the finest neighbourhoods in Marylebone and the adjacent Calmel buildings one of the poorest.2 “Social” investigators began to scrutinize the slums, fascinated by the materiality of working-class sociability. They saw another kind of corruption threatening them: matter in motion that tended to decay and putrefaction. A new language of “dangerous classes” emerged in the 1830s, conjoining fears of working-class collective political action with fears of their collective physical action as agents of decay. The investigators drew up new measures for social density correlated to morbidity and mortality, death and disease. They also worried about the dangers that poverty and putrefaction posed to them, as a cause of disease. These things were conjoined as individual, local, and national problems, threatening progressive teleologies.3 Urban squalor, trailed by rural squalor, became a major public concern, as social investigators worked to disaggregate it first conceptually and then materially.4 This was not just a British concern: by the 1840s, James Huston observes, “the poverty and misery of England’s working class had become common knowledge and something of an international scandal.”5 Americans were particularly vociferous critics, and rebellious Canadians joined in that chorus.6 Thomas Malthus had reasoned between the political and the physical when he argued, from 1798, that the poor and the primitive threatened to drag Britain down to their level. His arguments for austerity drew on demographic calculations, including Hume and Franklin, to warn against spiralling poor relief and the prospect of food scarcity. Malthus demanded a choice be made between interest and sympathy, wealth and poverty. As one early reviewer observed, he reinvigorated Hobbes’s philosophy, “which states the natural state of man to be a state of warfare.”7 But by the 1830s, not food but space seemed the battlefield, reflecting the concern over slums.8 People were not rising to middle-class standards of economic and political agency, but sinking into something more fearfully uncivilized that threatened the whole nation with a decivilizing process. Political reform must cede, under those circumstances, to something more managerial and coercive. New measures aimed to govern more directly the poor and the city. On the one hand, a harsh new workhouse regime aimed to restrict the collective

5.1 | The engraving of F.W. Topham’s The Mendicants is ascribed to Daniel Wilson in 1838. The image lends dignity to an impoverished family begging for alms. © The Trustees of the British Museum 1865,0114.995.

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agency of the poor, individualizing their choices: “destitution is dealt with individually, instead of in crowds, and this one circumstance makes the whole difference.”9 The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was designed to cut anomalously high (by European standards) taxes for the support of the poor on a philosophy of “less eligibility” advocated by Poor Law Commissioner Edwin Chadwick. The poor would receive relief but it would be provided on terms as minimal and degrading as possible, to discourage use and to make poverty shameful. Women, as seen, were at the hard edge of that austerity-and-shame project. Harsh treatment could push the poor from the slums to productive lands in the colonies. On the other hand, metropolitan and colonial space must be materially reconstructed with heavy infrastructure investment: transportation in the colonies, and sewers and aqueducts in the slums to control the stench and filth. Middle-class standards of propriety and individuality would be brought to the landscape as well as to morals and politics. Property was the vital focus of those efforts; improved property values a strategic outcome. The value of the property lay in a certain capacity for dematerialization. Ungoverned sociability tended too much towards decline in land and people, seen with varying degrees of intensity in the metropolis and the colonies. People who did not rise to mastery of their physical environment but allowed themselves to be dragged into something more like decay must be governed by people who did rise to that mastery. Civilization as material refinement, as railways and aqueducts, demanded a certain immaterial capacity, a capacity for abstraction, that was said to elude the poor and the primitive. Money itself was one such abstraction, according to the early anthropological thinkers, and especially some of the new financial forms taking shape in the 1830s and 1840s. If the material quality of working-class sociability and property was one of the great fascinations of the 1830s, so too were new mechanisms of financial association, liquidity, and risk. Wealth remade itself legally, the better to circulate without friction from one place to another and the better to protect itself against democratizing pressures for regulation and taxation. Material wealth was, in a globalizing and revolutionary age, neither lucrative nor secure enough. Even as older taxes on corn and windows were abolished and income taxes were taking shape, the propertied were finding new legal protections against state and market vagaries, including joint-stock corporations and limited liability. These facilitated access to credit and also incentivized risk by setting limits to the costs any single investor bore for failure.10 Henry Carey, an American advocate of limited liability and a neomercantilist, saw them as serving the greatest possible freedom and confidence in security of property, while checking a British tendency towards economic universal sovereignty.11 But the result of such innovations was to concentrate profits while socializing risk and cost, effectively making

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them a public charge. The public charge could be checked by the poor law logic of Francis Bond Head, whose arguments for making women’s “treasure” private rather than joint-stock Carey faithfully reproduced at length. Carey praised “the excellence of the argument and its applicability to all other cases of regulation,” as an argument for non-interference with the workings of nature.12 The “joint-stock” reading of property was an investor’s theory of value that made everything else epiphenomenal. It was used, paradoxically, to delegitimate customs that protected the vulnerable from the market and to protect investors from market mechanisms of accountability for their rash speculations. These were radical and immoderate views, justified as moderate by Malthus’s domino logic, designed to sever moral from material thought so as to obstruct any glimmering of humanitarianism as a fiscal logic of the emerging administrative state. These were big changes that occurred during much debate about the meaning of the “public” and its moral and economic interests. As lawyers argued whether the extension of joint-stock privileges and limited liability better protected “the public” or creditors understood to represent the most important public interests, one bankruptcy judge noted in 1845 that “the word ‘public’ [was] used for ‘creditors.’”13 The propertied middlemost eagerly joined in the financial manias and popular joint-stock banks. But by the 1840s those banks were shifting their funding model from investors to depositors. Investors were usually propertied men. Depositors were small savers, often women and working class: seen as more trusting than investors, less likely to demand or get accountability, and receiving smaller returns on their deposits than investors did on investments. Meanwhile, the investing classes redefined risk as something more systemic and structural than moral and individual. Boyd Hilton argues that in the early nineteenth century, businessmen who failed were seen to be morally culpable and, rightly, to bear the costs of their errors in judgment. But that “age of atonement” ended from 1844, as the new corporate forms were made more routine and widely available, and even more so in 1856. The flight from risk and blame was denounced as oligarchical financial conspiracy, by novelists (for whom bankruptcy was a common theme) and public moralists. In 1840 the London Times excoriated such innovations as disregarding “friendship, ability, knowledge, education, character, credit, even monied worth,” so that “the mere amount and value of the shares standing in the name of each, is the sole bond of connection between the proprietors.”14 Some political economists denounced old-fashioned state capture. McCulloch saw “a fortress whence speculators of all sorts may sally forth to prey upon the public, and to which they may safely retreat if their forays fail of success.”15 At the Board of Trade, Poulett Thomson was torn, believing that unlimited liability attracted the worst, most speculative men, but limited liability protected the

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most well-informed investors, who sold their shares before doubts circulated more widely. Thomson resisted early pressures for liberalization but, by 1837, allowed some concessions. His critics saw him making corporate privilege a matter of political discretion, that is, “a source of patronage, sought for and obtained by endless begging and intrigue,” now centred in the Board of Trade rather than Parliament proper.16 William Gladstone, who inherited the Board of Trade in the early 1840s, complained that “nothing gave the Board so much uneasiness and annoyance as the exercise of the discretionary powers already vested in them as to the management of commercial matters.”17 Demands for more liberal laws of incorporation were demands for greater autonomy for business, more thoroughly stamped by law as “private” rather than public, a pattern seen in the United States as well as in Britain.18 Gladstone and Peel liberalized incorporation in 1844, and Palmerston extended that liberalization in 1856. The changes did nothing to check speculative bubbles and crashes.19 Individual mp s joined enthusiastically in the expansion of company shareholding and directorships, their numbers rising by one third in 1845 alone.20 The new forms of wealth did not just shrug off financial risks and costs, but also social and environmental ones. Not just the slums and shantytowns, but also the toxic sloughs and pollution consequent on urbanization and industrialization became the object of both poor law and public health efforts. The new sewers and waterworks, and the new poorhouses, were both of them massive public investments. The costs were born by local ratepayers in Britain, and they drove up public debts, especially amongst local governments, very considerably. Thus, propertied sociability became de-materialized, while the sociability of the unpropertied became more ostentatiously read as material and physical. These things were in dialogue with one another and the former became an answer to the latter. Industry and finance together were siphoning wealth from the working classes and from the built landscape, leaving behind spreading slums and swamps and open sewers, clogged with toxic run-off as well as human waste and garbage. Chadwick’s solutions were managed peoples and landscapes, funded by public debt. He argued that the private individual must be responsible for their own poverty, but the community must be responsible for the landscape and must accumulate the necessary debts to clean it up. That, too, was a privatization of risk and cost, transferred away from industries that had, on previous understandings, had to clean up their own messes. In mid-century Chicago, for example, Robin Einhorn describes a toxic slough that businessmen created but refused to clear up, insisting that the costs be borne by the tax-paying public as a matter of public health.21 This was not a retreat of the state but a reconfiguration to make it better serve and protect capital.

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Public debt, as seen, enjoyed a reputation for stabilizing economics and politics. Only creditable communities, with good reputations, could run up substantial debts: the London Stock Exchange refused to quote securities of repudiating governments from 1826 (though bad terms of credit were a likelier outcome).22 And the more that some governments ran up debts to offer public services, such as roads and sewers, the more others came under pressures to do the same, as the measure of collective agency, which is to say civilization. Colonial governments, too, felt the pressures to increase their debt loads. Colonial debt was riskier than metropolitan debt, but it also had a higher rate of return, and the risks could be neutralized by state guarantees. Even the most irrational investments could be made rational if the government in question was willing and able to lend sufficient protection to the investments, by guaranteeing losses and by protecting them from locals who might prefer, in hard times, to repudiate their debts. Canadians badly wanted public infrastructure during the 1840s, especially canals and railways, and needed British investment to get it. By investing overseas and getting colonial government backing, the financial sector was able to shrug off accountability to both the market and British public opinion.23 John Kelly draws on Veblen to argue that “the colonial purpose of the first jointstock companies explains their moral license to exploit people in one location, both customers and employees, in duty to owners not merely absentee but, in the origins of the institutional form, located entirely elsewhere with secure priority.”24 Economic, political, and social relationships were rebounding upon one another in complicated ways, experienced simultaneously as progress and decline. How to distinguish the one from the other and how to make such distinctions rigorous? New forms of knowledge took shape in answer to such questions, above all a new European “passion” for “social statistics” that looked for macroscopic regularities as the model of explanation.25 French and Belgian statisticians led with theoretical innovations that British observers began to integrate into their vaunted political economy. On the one hand were statistical comparisons from one country or empire or colony to the next according to such “statist” (hence “statistics”) measures as birth and death, production and education. On the other hand was close scrutiny of the new industrial slums as a place of particular interest and susceptibility to measurement, with density correlating to, and also taken as a proxy for, dearth, disease, and death.26 The two genres overlapped wherever observers could spy a slum. An emerging imperial bureaucracy compared the numbers, noting parallels between “the negative impact of progress and a lack of progress.”27 The abolition of slavery in 1834 inflamed those questions: everywhere pro- and anti-slaving interests scrutinized measures of prosperity or poverty and the latter’s causes, debating whether race

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or racism was the more to blame. From such places and debates, a flood of documents – what Lord Brougham described in 1838 as a “new mass of papers laid on our table from the West Indies” – descended upon the Colonial Office. Padraic Scanlan sees something general, “bureaucratic civilization,” in that massive paper trail, reflecting “the work of bureaucrats sent across the empire and to the slums and remote countryside of Britain proper to observe and report … In this heterogenous world, form-filling, check-signing, and ledger-writing connected clerks in Kingston-upon Thames with their counterparts in Kingston, Jamaica, and Kingston, Upper Canada.”28 The bureaucratic civilizers who trailed alongside governors and soldiers across the complex British imperial world saw worrying challenges to the narrative arc of civilization and revisited the old debates about climate, character, and culture with sociological data, some of it inculpating race, some of it inculpating racism, as the cause of death and disease, crime, and poverty, across the extended Pax Britannica. Poverty was tantalizingly easy to see and difficult to measure, directly or indirectly by such proxies as education and mortality. But if they could get the data right, Scanlan observes, the bureaucratic civilizers believed “it was possible to measure civilization – through criminal statistics, accounts of land ownership, and indices of productivity.”29 The Colonial Office remained a vital centre for observations and reflections of that nature. At its centre, Sir James Stephen, British undersecretary of state for the colonies from 1836, brought a liberalizing bent to colonial affairs. A regular correspondent for the Edinburgh Review, he wrote an early argument for “Pax Britannica” in a treatise on the Roman foundations of British law, and also wrote most of the bill that abolished slavery.30 When he retired in 1849, it was to become Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. Stephen was sympathetic to the colonial subject’s position, especially the white subject. And he exercised inordinate authority, Charles Buller argued in 1838, because he was uniquely knowledgeable on so many complex local questions that he could dictate policy not only to rotating colonial ministers but to Parliament itself, which merely “registers the edicts of the Colonial Office.” According to Buller, “No pile of despatches, with their multifarious enclosures, no red-taped heap of Colonial grievances or squabbles, can scare his practised eye. He handles with unfaltering hand the papers at which his superiors quail: and ere they have waded through one half of them, he suggests the course, which the previous measures – dictated by himself – compel the Government to adopt.”31 The administrative state quickly discovered, in effect, what Joseph Heath has argued for modern bureaucracy more generally: “many civil servants are effectively unsupervisable – from either above or below – in the way that they carry out their responsibilities and in how they exercise

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their (sometimes enormous) power.”32 Even Stephen was sorely tested by Canadian perplexities. In 1837 he famously exclaimed: “Oh Canada! What wrongs have I done thee that thou thus pursuest me in my home and my office, my walks and my dreams?”33 Amidst so many changes, conceptions of civilization changed as well. The term still referred to a certain promise of material and moral progress, achieved by collective action in some equilibrium between state and society. But the original observation of non-state agency amongst Indigenous peoples was obliterated in the new definitions. In an essay on “Civilisation” in 1836, John Stuart Mill distinguished between absolute and comparative versions. The first referred to “the best characteristics of Man and Society; farther advanced in the road to perfection; happier, nobler, wiser.” The second referred to “that kind of improvement only, which distinguishes a wealthy and powerful nation from savages or barbarians,” and subject to “the vices or the miseries of civilization.” Mill wanted to see universal patterns but still distinguish good from evil, progressive from unprogressive, among them. But he made the principle of collective agency the defining factor and then failed to see its workings in traditional societies. “Wherever, therefore, we find human beings acting together for common purposes in large bodies, and enjoying the pleasures of social intercourse, we term them civilized. In savage life there is little or no law, or administration of justice; no systematic employment of the collective strength of society, to protect individuals against injury from one another; every one trusts to his own strength or cunning, and where that fails, he is generally without resource.”34 Mill recapitulated the worst caricatures of the stadialists, failing to see what Franklin and Hume had seen amongst Indigenous peoples of North America. Civilized peoples sublimated material civilization in the service of immaterial associations, while slumdwellers and savages remained in thrall to the merely physical. Lacking higher qualities of reason and trust, they capitulated to instinct and environment. Civilization must protect itself against such impulses for degeneration. Virtuoso social theorists drew extensive comparison between the social question in the metropolitan city and the imperial frontier. One such was Alexis de Tocqueville, who followed his North American travels with a tour around Britain in 1835, including a visit to Manchester in July where he explicitly and sensationally compared the “savages” of the frontier and the metropolis. England, long admired as the exemplar of commercial-constitutional freedom, was now coming to seem, internationally, as a “harbinger of the evil consequences of unrestricted development.”35 Tocqueville framed his remarks as both culmination and refutation of Hume’s rich country/ poor country analysis. Equalization by comparative advantage was dead. At Manchester, he saw “the combination of the advantages of a rich and of a poor country; of an ignorant and an enlightened people; of civilisation and

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barbarism.” Tocqueville counted thirty or forty factories and, scattered haphazard amongst those six-story towers, “the wretched dwellings of the poor … Heaps of dung, rubble from buildings, putrid, stagnant pools are found here and there among the houses and over the bumpy, pitted surfaces of the public places. No trace of surveyor’s rod or spirit-level.” If the poverty was startling, so too was the occasional sighting of “fine stone buildings with Corinthian columns.” But on the lower ground, below the river (the Styx of this new Hades), amidst marshes and channels, in the dark shadow of the factories, could be seen narrow and twisted roads “lined with one-story houses whose ill-fitting planks and broken windows show them up, even from a distance, as the last refuge a man might find between poverty and death.” Others lived still worse, in “a row of cellars, to which a sunken corridor leads. Twelve to fifteen human beings are crowded pell-mell into each of these damp, repulsive holes.” No sun penetrated the dark alleyways and all-covering black smoke of the factories where “300,000 human beings are ceaselessly at work … From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.”36 Tocqueville drew upon an emerging genre that saw both slums and savages as a kind of public injury. His guide around Manchester was James Phillips Kay (later Kay-Shuttleworth), author of The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Class in Manchester in 1832, which described the “dense mass” of people, crowded in “narrow, unpaved, and almost pestilential streets, in an atmosphere loaded with the smoke and exhalations of a large manufacturing city” and associated it with petty crime and violence, turbulent riots and machine breaking, the “fearful strength of that multitude.”37 In 1845, Friedrich Engels, long-time collaborator of Karl Marx, further probed The Condition of the Working Class in England, describing their sufferings in western London as being as mysterious to many observers as the living conditions of “the savages in Australia or on the South-sea islands.”38 Marx took the argument further, describing British civilization as like Asian despotism, and doux commerce as a new feudalism. The urban proletariat, the degraded factory worker, Marx argued, had no real choice or autonomy. The workers outnumbered the exploiters nowhere more spectacularly than at the factory, a fact that increasingly dominated his interest. The conservative workings of law and public opinion in regard to property, what Marx called “the valorization of value,” was another concern for many socialists.39 With Proudhon, Marx denounced the whole legal edifice constructed to defend property, on grounds that occupation did not legitimate possession, might did not produce right. Property was, on social and economic evidence that debunked legal impartiality and equality,

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becoming “entangled in and in many respects identified with privilege.”40 Where Ricardo argued that rents flowed to landlords, Marx showed that they flowed to capitalists. Capitalism even turned women, the natural prop of men, into their economic rivals, making women’s agency just one more obstruction to the natural workings of male freedom. Marx had no truck with consumption, especially women’s consumption, as agency: where Hume saw the market as its best expression, Marx saw the worst expression of domination, though he agreed with Hume that civil society held together the state, not the other way around, an argument he wrote in 1844 and published in 1845.41 Social relationships, interdependence, must liberate people in some non-market way, with violence rather than liberal reform the best avenue to that liberation. Political theories that did not confront the brutal physical reality of poverty, dirt, and disease were becoming irrelevant. Hume’s model rested on his description of English artisans as enjoying “full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniences of life.” But now the increase of wealth correlated to the impoverishment and misery of the poor. The whig-liberal coalition was badly wrong-footed by the new sociology. Conservatives, by contrast, saw their truths verified. Peel observed in June 1845, during debate over the corn laws, that “extremes of wealth and poverty … exist, I believe, in every country on the face of the earth. I doubt, indeed, whether the more civilization and refinement increases, there be not a greater tendency towards those extremes.” But if inequality was a law of civilization, still, Peel argued, “some effort must be made.”42 That was also the conclusion of a parliamentary commission on the condition of large towns that reported in 1844.43 Peel’s late government, “totally focused on trying to quell social agitation,”44 accomplished reform of the corn laws and navigation acts, public health legislation, as well as the liberalization of corporate law. Canadians had earlier taken up earlier British models of statistical analysis: Sir John Sinclair’s statistical account of Scotland had inspired Robert Gourlay to undertake a statistical account of Canada in 1817–18 as “an experiment in democracy and enlightenment.” But in calling public meetings and criticizing local oligarchs as an obstacle to development, Gourlay made himself an enemy of those oligarchs and was swiftly imprisoned and deported.45 A decade later, in Montreal, Jacques Viger, while undertaking a formal census, took the opportunity to investigate the density and ownership of property in Montreal, what Robert Sweeny describes as perhaps “the first sociological study of any town in the Americas.”46 Viger discovered “endemic” overcrowding in Montreal: half of the population lived in buildings with more than one family, and in the districts that attracted higher numbers of immigrants, such as Point-à-Callière near the port of Montreal, one in four people lived in a building containing six or more households.47

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Montreal looked much like other modern industrial cities, with economic polarization written into the landscape. Further investigations, including another by Viger in the early 1830s, showed decline of property ownership amongst the popular classes, but also a large-sell off by landlords to a broader swath of population: all sorts of people, immigrants as well as native born, were buying property and were, Sweeny theorizes, more likely to rally around the crown during the rebellions of the 1830s.48 Canada had working-class slums for the same reasons that London or Manchester had them: the growing proletarianization of the British agricultural and industrial working classes, which was another kind of mass dispossession occurring at the same time as Indigenous dispossession and according to the same Wakefieldian processes. Diaspora was a win-win situation for English wealth, ramping down the threats from a proximate “brawny and many-breeding poverty” domestically and ramping up the profits to be made from a brawny and many-breeding colonial tax-paying public. Ambitious, up-and-coming men of the 1830s and 1840s understood that these things connected and that statistics measured their connections. They understood that poverty, like Mill’s civilization, was both absolute and relative, and that the markers of poverty and savagery were essentially interchangeable. Techniques for governing colonies were applied in British slums, and vice versa.49 Similar markers could be seen in the bodies of working-class immigrants; they too looked atomized and ungrounded by property or associational life. Here, I focus on the Indian Department and the ways in which Indigenous people were drawn into a British-Canadian rendering of “the social question.” The Bagot Commission report of 1844 emerged from the same intellectual milieu as Kay and Tocqueville, reasoned from the English slums to the Canadian frontier, and made plain the shortcomings of liberalism characterized by a dispossessing invisible hand. Durham was wrong about the “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.” The Bagot report saw virtual unanimity beneath those superficial political divisions. Durham’s deep causes of polarization evaporated when “Indians” were brought into the story. Rather, the whole Canadian electorate was “virtually a party,” unified in its pursuit of Indigenous dispossession. The observation was made in 1837, using Darling’s report amongst other evidence, by a parliamentary select committee “on Aboriginal Tribes” (connected to the Aborigines’ Protection Society) and was circulated by it as a pamphlet.50 Darling had identified Indigenous dispossession and impoverishment as the great problem of the imperial frontier; metropolitan reformers seized upon the observation to write it into a civilizing project; in 1844, the Bagot Commission report confirmed the finding, this time with social statistics. There could be too little as well as too much political polarization. But even as they debunked Durham’s analysis, the Bagot commissioners

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reasoned from and built atop it. Durham had seen a spurious racial privilege being turned into constitutional privilege. The Bagot Commission saw the same thing in regard to the Indigenous peoples. A different but no less spurious racial privilege was reworking the sub-political world of property on which the constitution rested. Liberal arguments for self-help already strained credulity in Britain. All the harder to see how a colonized people being illiberally plundered by local oligarchs were supposed to get good government. And harder still, given Durham’s debunking of race as justification for oligarchical rule. Diehard tories repudiated that lesson; the Bagot Commission did not. The Bagot Commission probably didn’t look particularly sophisticated or promising at the outset as a place to interrogate economic, political, and social pressures. There had already been two recent and inconclusive investigations into the Indian Department, in 1839 and 1840. They had confirmed two trends observed by the Special Council that governed during the suspension of the constitution after the rebellions. On the one hand, a policy of payments to “Indians” was actively engineering poverty, according to Malthus’s theory of perverse incentives. They were being given cash and thereby being “trained in an aversion to labor” and “incapacitated from becoming useful members of the community.” On the other hand, the money wasn’t even going to “Indians.” At Wendake (Lorette), near Quebec, by “the intermixture of white blood they have now so lost the original purity of race that they cannot properly be considered as Indians.”51 Canada was transferring wealth from the propertied to the poor, in defiance of the Malthusian proscriptions acting in Britain. Moreover, the grounds for the transfer, whether history or race, seemed to be spurious. Better knowledge was needed as to what was owed according to law – historical treaties – and what should be owed according to utilitarian reasoning that understood laws as no more than useful conventions. One of the three Bagot commissioners, William Hepburn, a registrar in the Court of Chancery, had been on the two most recent commissions. In the 1840 commission, he served alongside Robert Sympson Jameson (Anna Jameson’s estranged husband) and James Buchanan Macaulay, who had also written the previous solo and informal report of April 1839 that while not defending “the degenerate races” still pushed against resettlement policies.52 The report of 1840 was also critical of existing conditions for Indigenous peoples but recommended modest administrative reforms. The second Bagot commissioner was John Davidson, a former commissioner of crown lands. The third was Rawson W. Rawson, a social investigator catapulted into Canada from the heart of the “condition of England” question. Rawson was the energetic centre of the London Statistical Society, and the editor of its journal, when he dropped that work to come to Canada as civil secretary to

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the governor. Read in hindsight, the Bagot report inaugurated a predatory state racialization project. But read in its context, it looks somewhat different: a not-unsophisticated attempt to block a predatory state that was engineering Indigenous poverty. Equipped with social statistical tools and the reports of his predecessors, Rawson recognized that the “Indian problem” was a problem of poverty and settler plundering. The work was awkwardly done and, like most criticisms of settler colonialism at the time, “relatively ineffectual.”53 But it reminds us that anti-racism has a history. Rawson’s analysis rested on three interlocking trends: the lapses of political economy, intensifying popular agitation, and the impact of terrible epidemics of cholera and typhus. Rawson stood at the conjunction of these different trends. The son of a prominent medical philanthropist, he worked at the Board of Trade as a statistician under one of the leading free-trade economists and education reformers of the day, George Richardson Porter. He also undertook some of the earliest doorto-door social statistics investigations in London slums. The Bagot report reflected complex intellectual and social convergences. In Parliament, the lapses of liberalism were becoming acute. Reformers who had harried the tories now became the harried amidst worsening economic and social conditions. Such urgent questions as tariff policy, currency reform, child labour, the ten hours movement, a minimum wage, and slavery prompted fifty-three royal commissions between 1830 and 1842.54 Sydney Smith exclaimed “the whole earth was in commission” and that “the only doubt which a man felt on seeing a Whig whom he had never met before was, not whether he was a Commissioner or no, but what the department of human life might be into which he had been appointed to inquire.”55 Poulett Thomson now had his own radical bugbears, among them John Fielden, a cotton manufacturer, who often had better data to hand. Fielden won election for Oldham in 1832 and, just before going to sit in Parliament in late January of 1833, he commissioned a survey of the poor in thirty-five northern townships. In less than a month, sixty Fielden agents interviewed 24,000 workers in over 8,000 families. The findings, announced in the Commons in February, showed an average net income of his interviewees of just over 2½ d. per day.56 When the Guardian expressed incredulity, Fielden doubled down: working people subsisted on a pittance, and “severe and unparalleled distress amongst the productive classes pervades almost every country in England, Scotland and Ireland, and those who deny it are the worst enemies not only of the poor, but also of the rich.” The Guardian denied the “broad, preposterous, pernicious falsehood, without the slightest foundation in truth.”57 In the Commons, Fielden asked what the expansion of the franchise had been for, if not to mitigate the widespread distress. Personally attacked, deeply resentful (as he confided to James Kay), Poulett Thomson created and chaired a select committee on the state of commerce, manufactures,

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and shipping.58 The commission numbered a few radicals, including Fielden, but most members and witnesses were liberals, each of whom “swore to the prosperous state of his branch of trade and recommended no particular change in government policy beyond a repeal of the Corn Laws.” There were thirty-three sittings and 700 pages of testimony but no recommendations for reform. As regards labour reforms, a ten-hour day, and restrictions on women’s and children’s labour, Fielden and William Cobbett denounced Thomson’s argument as “mammon against mercy” and his vaunted British prosperity that rested on the labour of 300,000 little girls.59 Again sittings were held, again witnesses were carefully selected. The reform that followed set a conservative cap of forty-eight hours’ work for children under thirteen, with provision for inspection and schooling. The government needed better data for these fights. In 1832, it created a statistical post at the Board of Trade as a temporary position, made permanent in January 1834. There was a scramble for the job, which went not to Poulett Thomson’s preferred candidate, J.R. McCulloch, but instead to George Richardson Porter, the son of a London sugar merchant. He had recently written a chapter on life insurance for an almanac published by Charles Knight who, refusing the statistics job himself, recommended Porter.60 Porter was a reformer and a free trader, though that may not have been well known, because he had recently dedicated a publication to the leading protectionist in the upper house, Lord Chandos. Porter was married to David Ricardo’s sister Sarah, an economist in her own right. She wrote an 1830 novel that recommended a life of labour in Australia over a life of idle wealth in England, and, in 1835, the popular Conversations in Arithmetic, subsequently republished as a textbook to turn children “not into mathematicians but rather into reasoning beings.”61 Installed in the Statistics Branch, G.R. Porter quickly began to publish an annual series of statistical “blue books”: yet another of the different kinds of reports and tabulations that, William Lubenow argues, “educated the political nation” to the utility of expert, bureaucratic government administration.62 Porter’s tables were monuments of economic data, the first appearing in 1833, that expanded in scope in subsequent years. In the mid-1830s, he brought in crime, though unable to go beyond committal rates, and in 1835 “Porter’s Tables” figured in a pamphlet by John Pitt Kennedy, Instruct, Employ: Don’t Hang Them; or Ireland Tranquilized without Soldiers and Enriched without English Capital. But, Porter’s biographer observes: “Although much information was collected, it was too little to contribute decisively to major issues. This was not entirely Porter’s fault. With only a handful of clerks he had to get much of his information from sources such as chambers of commerce. If they failed to supply it, he could not compel them to do so.”63 Porter only had access to official documents, and much of the most useful information escaped his ambit.

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A surviving letter book recording Porter’s official correspondence between 1832 to 1836 shows his attempts to fulfil and expand his mandate.64 The job of the branch was, Porter remarked in July 1832 in a letter to the Post Office, to abstract and record, for the information of the government and occasionally of Parliament, “all such accounts as may mark the state of Wealth, Commerce, & Intercourse through the Empire.” Around the same time Porter and his secretaries also sought information from the National Debt Office, the Excise Office, the Stationer’s Company, the Lord Mayor (on Smithfield cattle numbers quarterly), the West India Dock, East India Dock, Commercial Dock, Grand Surrey Canal Dock, Commercial Dock, St Catherine’s Dock, and the Stamp Office (asked to supply probate duty in the following terms: “It appears desirable to know not only the Amount of the Revenue thus acquired but also the Amount of Property in respect of which it is paid, & the classes of the community from whom it is drawn. This might be done by stating the amount of property sworn to in each class of the amount of duty to which each has yielded”). He asked the Treasury about the purchases made to reduce the national debt and the figures on annuities and savings banks accounts quarterly; he sought complete economic information for the colonies from Lord Howick. All the chambers of commerce of all the principal towns were given long questionnaires on the state and progress of manufactures and commerce, including any local taxes or voluntary contributions that might show “the progress of individual wealth or comfort in the population.” The progress of wealth was the key phrase, but Porter also inquired into persons in jail, charged or convicted; schools and scholars; students in such associations as the National and the British and Foreign School societies; and insolvent debtors. These matters were all public or organized in associations that gave regular public reports of their work. A request to the Bank of England in December for information on bullion, circulation of notes, and dividends paid and payable was more delicate as a possible breach of privacy. Another private letter accompanied the official one, noting that the information was destined for parliamentary publication. Under those circumstances, he assured the Governor of the Bank, the Lords of Trade realized that compliance might cause trouble, so “there will be no obligation on the part of the Bank to favour this committee with the information in question.”65 The next letter, to the Chamber of Commerce in Glasgow, was again a private one, saying that while regular information was needed as for regular public report, the chamber needn’t enter into particulars. Other letters pressed for more details on the state of employment and the condition of trade, as Porter sought to counter Fielden’s bleak numbers early in 1833. By springtime, his new interest was in prices: how much, the bakers were asked, was bread selling for? How much, Porter asked

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Bethlem Hospital, was it paying for meat, cheese, butter, milk, bread, coals, and clothing? What was coming in from Ireland by way of hides and skins in Liverpool or Bristol? As his secretaries, including Rawson, renewed banal requests for regular statements, Porter took on fishing expeditions, asking the chambers of commerce for connections to local gentlemen who knew things worth knowing. Birmingham was so approached in July 1833: “The field in this country for such a labour is so fast, and has hitherto been so untrodden, that I shall need the assistance of many intelligent, and well-informed gentlemen”; so too was the Cork chamber asked for help from “intelligent & practical men.” Individual connections were forged and pursed avidly. In January 1834, William Armstrong of Newcastle was apprised of Porter’s “very great anxiety for the collection of local statistical information,” even such facts as “may appear trifling and unimportant in the eyes of some superficial persons.” These gentlemanly networks were pursued across the Channel to France, where state statistics were further developed, and a French statesman was assured, in good Humean terms, that “so far from French prosperity being adverse to the interests of my own country, these cannot but be benefitted by circumstances that shall tend to the encouragement of peaceful arts of life, amongst such near, and powerful and intelligent neighbours.”66 In April of 1834, Porter wrote to the great London hospitals, St Thomas’s and Bart’s, asking for prices paid, and explaining why he was writing: “All such collections must be manifestly incomplete if confined to the statement of matters, within the immediate reach and control of Government, and it has accordingly been my desire to seek out such other channels of information, as can give sanction of authenticity to the facts which they may be able to contribute.” Porter had exhausted official knowledge and wanted knowledge he had no power to command. He diplomatically negotiated between the public and the private, the state, business, and the associational life, all the while protecting commercial privacy. Already, statistical societies were forming to fill the yawning gap between the public and the private: in Manchester in 1833 and London in 1834, both of them with the support of Poulett Thomson. The London Statistical Society, “the prototype of social science institutions,” emerged from a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Sciences in Cambridge in 1833.67 William Whewell, vice-president of the association and chair of the meeting, invited the Belgian astronomer, Adolphe Quetelet, who came with some pioneering statistical information on crime and suicide that fit into no existing branch of the association. Quetelet believed that the mathematics of astronomy could be applied to create a statistical science of society. Theodore Porter observes of his dual intellectual background: “On the one side was error analysis, astronomy, and the mathematical study of insurance; on the other, the concrete business of taking and presenting

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the census, and ‘the noble task of diminishing the number of social infirmities.’”68 Quetelet’s innovation was to apply the recent discovery by Gauss of “normal distribution” to social life, showing that most people cluster, statistically, on a bell-shaped curve. Quetelet measured not just such everyday norms of height and weight (he invented the body-mass index), but also “frightening regularity” in such supposed anomalies as suicide and crime under diverse political regimes. The suggestion of uniformity amidst political differences, and of “normal” measures of crime, updated Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. Quetelet’s model of “social physics” was, according to Eileen Magnello, at once an account of mean values and a project of using those mean values to “find the ideal type of society, politics, and morals. Since he thought that deviations from central values caused society’s ills, he believed that a mean philosophical and political position should be able to resolve society’s conflicts.”69 Quetelet’s great book of 1835, Sur l’Homme et le developpement de ses facultés, was for George Sarton “one of the greatest books of the nineteenth century.”70 Historian David Nirenberg and mathematician Ricardo Nirenberg observe in their recent history of counting that “for every object of knowledge we have a choice of focus and attention, a choice between willing sameness and willing difference (or perhaps not willing at all). That choice is, however, often prejudiced in the literal sense of the word: prejudged, the product of prior habits and commitments, theory laden.”71 Intellectual ambitions and prejudices vied to classify race as sameness or difference. Intrigued baas members gathered at the Cambridge rooms of Richard Jones, newly elected to the chair of political economy at King’s College London, to urge a statistical section on the baas . Amongst the leading lights of British academe present at the meeting were William Whewell, Thomas Malthus (then professor of history and political economy at the East India Company College in Hertfordshire), and Charles Babbage (Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge). Whewell was conservative but most of the others were liberal, and Babbage was actively seeking election to Parliament.72 He had recently written a book, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, that suggested the factory as the model for efficient social and economic relationships.73 Babbage and Whewell had been grudging supporters of the baas in its first year, especially Whewell who opposed any democratization of science outside Oxbridge and London. But the founders forced his hand by sending the meeting to Cambridge in 1833. It was at that meeting that the term “scientist” was first used – and repudiated – as a term to describe the gathered membership. The British Association’s president, Adam Sedgewick, was distinctly uncomfortable at the prospect of including social studies alongside the other sciences. The new section was told to restrict itself to “matters of fact, with mere abstractions,

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and with numerical results,” and to avoid “higher generalizations of political economy or philosophy.” The baas sought to represent apolitical science and cross-party conversations.74 Nassau Senior had warned against conflating economics and social statistics in his earlier 1831 pleas for statistical societies, insisting that “political economy is not greedy of facts, it is independent of them,” and that any such society must not address controversial economic writings.75 But some scientific champions of the 1830s believed that “thinking scientifically meant leaning into its political nature.” They thought that science could represent and integrate the whole of society.76 Worried that statistics might subside before the next meeting at Edinburgh, Jones asked Babbage to keep up interest in the section. That concern dovetailed with Porter’s frustrations at the Board of Trade. In late January Porter wrote to Babbage promising support from himself, Poulett Thompson, Joseph Hume, Charles Knight, and Edwin Chadwick. That was enough for an informal gathering in February, with many of the Cambridge statisticians present, including Malthus, Jones, and Babbage, to arrange a more formal “public meeting of Noblemen and Gentlemen” in March to establish the Statistical Society of London. A plethora of mp s and nobles attended, including Lord Lansdowne as founding president from 1834–36 and again 1842–43, and Viscount Sandon, later the Earl of Harrowby, president from 1842–44. Sandon had been vice-president of the Board of Trade in 1791, president of council from 1812–27. A motion to support the creation of such a society was made by “a politically balanced team” of Henry Goulburn and Francis Jeffrey. A provisional committee consisted of Babbage, Jones, the constitutional historian Henry Hallam, and Joseph Drinkwater, who was a Cambridge wrangler and reforming lawyer friendly with Babbage and Whewell, and the author of a recent report on factories in Yorkshire.77 All four had been at the Cambridge meeting. G.R. Porter, who had not been at Cambridge, served on the founding council in 1834. Members of the Political Economy Club figured prominently, including Porter, Senior, McCulloch, and Tooke. The society already had 200 members before its meeting and by March it boasted 398. Rawson W. Rawson was proposed in January by Porter and the radical mp Joseph Hume, while Sandon also added his signature (two signatures were required but more could be added). Despite appearances, the society was already struggling. Few people had findings to present and few came to hear them: attendance at the first eighteen months averaged 6.4. A handful of members kept it going in those early years, including Hallam and especially Porter who missed only one of those eighteen meetings. One meeting was informed that no papers had been submitted for the next meeting. Porter and another councillor, Woronzow Greig (the son of Mary Somerville; a barrister-naturalist, recently named frs ), offered papers, but they alone turned out to hear them. In 1836, the society

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successfully reorganized and renewed itself with new committees and a new secretary, Rawson, who was “the perfect foil, adding exceptional energy and industriousness to Porter’s experience and influence.”78 Young Rawson was the son of Sir William Rawson, who was born William Adams, but took his wife’s maiden name, Rawson, to receive a bequest, thereby doubling up on his son’s name. Sir William was originally from Cornwall, trained in London, and began his career in Exeter, then moved to Bath and finally to London in 1810, where he obtained the office of oculist extraordinary to George IV during his regency, and to the dukes of Kent and Sussex. He also secured a parliamentary subsidy to support free treatments for eye disease at Regent’s Park. Chronic ophthalmia was causing blindness amongst veterans of the Egyptian campaign, and on Adams’s offer to treat them, “several out-pensioners of Chelsea Hospital, afflicted with blindness, were at different times placed under his care, as subjects for experiment as to the importance and efficacy of the practice,” ultimately leading up to the creation of an ophthalmic hospital under his direction. Hopes to reduce the number and expenses of pensioners devolved into a quarrel between Adams and the Army Medical Board, as to whether Adams’s cure was original or effective, whether pensions could be cut off, and whether Adams deserved recompense. With Lord Palmerston, secretary of war, taking Adams’s side, a parliamentary committee fudged the findings (“the Committee could agree in nothing but in not printing the evidence which they had elicited,” which both parties thought “creditable to neither”) and recommended funds to the pensioners and Adams alike.79 At the Greenwich Hospital, Adams’s artificial lens treatment for cataracts was so much appreciated that they gave him a silver service, mined at their mines in Cumberland. Knighted in 1814 and made wealthy by the bequest in 1825, Adams invested in Mexican silver mines after treating a rich Mexican miner.80 He formed a “Mexican Mining Association,” hiring as director Charles Bullock, a “Pickwickian entrepreneur, showman, naturalist,” who had recently staged a display of Mexican antiquities, produce, and people, both human models and living. Sir William printed and circulated glowing recommendations for Mexican silver investments. An ardent supporter of Latin American emancipation, he argued for the commercial benefits to be gained from “the civilization and prosperity of the inhabitants of the New World, consequent on the restoration of their mining industry”; the fiscal benefits; and the political benefits “from the emancipation of the New World, and the advantages to be derived by her from being thus rendered independent of the politics of the Continental Powers of Europe.” He also praised the joint-stock company as “the main spring to effect the early regeneration and prosperity” of Mexico and England. It would, moreover, give England a “salutary balancing power, between them

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and the United States, making British influence paramount” and making Britain more generally “the Arbitres of nations, – holding the Balance of Power in both Hemispheres in her own hands.”81 It was a heady vision of mutual benefit in old and new worlds. Adams volubly aired it before friends and strangers. John Rickman, another early statistician and frs , shared a carriage ride with Adams (and also with Robert Southey, author of a poem on Europe’s civilizing mission in Mexico) and drily mocked him. At Deptford, “we received a fourth passenger into the coach who, alluding to placards by the roadside, immediately took occasion to reprobate public lotteries, announced as nearly at an end. But this enemy to gambling soon announced himself as a speculator in South American mines, and almost as the original founder of one of these projects, either Anglo-Mexican, or United-Mexican, the last of which especially is sure to produce cent. per cent. interest.”82 The initial capitalization of the Mexican Mining Association in 1824 was half a million pounds, and rested on some prominent “City bigwigs” whom Adams personally recruited. One who came in as a partner: Alexander Baring, later Lord Ashburton, a banker and reforming mp who supported free trade in 1815 and opposed it in 1846. He invested £5,000 of company money in the mining scheme (about half the sum he received in 1834 as compensation for his 3,300 slaves in British Guiana and St Kitts). Members of the managing committee included Sir John Lubbock, of the Lubbock banking company; merchant banker James Campbell; and Sir James Cockburn, the paymaster and inspector general of the Royal Marines, who had family connections to the royals and Peel.83 This was not just a Latin boom. Southern European countries also boomed: the number of foreign sovereign debts traded in the London Stock Exchange rose tenfold.84 But the bubble began to burst in December of 1825. Soon the mining companies and the Latin American states that had guaranteed investments were in default. Amongst the casualties were sixty private merchant banks.85 Canning resisted pressure to apply either diplomatic or military pressure, insisting that “if British investors chose to risk their money overseas, then it was their own funeral if they lost it.”86 The bust began in England, not Latin America, before many mines had been tested. Some did yield, but most did not. That of the Mexican Mining Association at Temascaltepec turned out to have no silver at all; investigation in 1826 showed it “a worthless speculation on which £30,000 had been spent and not an ounce of silver produced.” Rawson “was beggared.”87 Canadians also suffered their first industrial layoff.88 The crash made a huge impression on financial and literary imaginations. In William Makepeace Thackeray’s Great Hoggarty Diamond (1848), “Muff and Tippett Company shut up, after swallowing a capital of £300,000, as some said, and nothing to show for it except a treaty with some Indians,

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who had afterwards tomahawked the agent of the Company. Some people said there were no Indians, and no agent to be tomahawked at all.” Robert Bell’s The Ladder of Gold (1850) recalled the “whispering fear” of 1825 between partners and relations, the “wild commotion on the Exchange; the chaos in the market-place where men looked into each other’s faces with distrust and separated without buying or selling; the solitary watch of women, as they waited, with shattered nerves, for the tidings that might in a single hour hurl down their children from affluence to beggary.”89 Bell might have been recounting the personal experience of young Rawson, who had to leave school to find work, beginning in the Corn Department of the Board of Trade at age seventeen, then moving to the Statistics Department. In the Statistical Society, Rawson immediately became the most ostentatiously engaged member. He presented many papers, served on important committees, enrolled new members, and edited the society’s journal from its founding in 1838, all the while nudging the society towards pioneering investigation of poverty and education. Rawson’s opening foray was a paper, presented in June 1835, on the collection of statistics.90 He urged the general membership to submit statistical information. Many gentlemen hesitated because they worried that they were underqualified or their information was too minute or incomplete. Not to worry, Rawson reassured them. He “compared statistics to a vast edifice, composed of many smaller parts, each requiring care in its preparation, and the arrangement of the whole demanding much sagacity and combination. In both, persons of different capacity were required for different purposes. The carpenter could not draw the model, nor the architect mould the brick: so the person

5.2 and 5.3 | Two images of the 1825 stock market bubble, before and after the crash. In the first, by George Cruikshank, A Scene in the Farce of “Lofty Projects,” hot-air balloons promising the moon are lined up in front of a dizzying array of banking and lending shops, with a sign saying “Gull Lane, leading to The Workhouse.” In the second, by Isaac Robert Cruikshank, The Bubble Burst, several Latin American mining companies are referenced in the bursting of the gigantic bubble labelled “Speculation 1825,” while wailing and leaping investors lament their losses and sink into quicksand. Many people were beggared by the crash, including Rawson’s father, Sir William Rawson, which cast a suspicious pall over investments in the Americas for many years. © The Trustees of the British Museum 1935,0522.6.179 and 1868,0808.8643.

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who could not complete a scheme of statistics might be the best qualified to furnish the details. A daily familiarity with them might lead him to suppose that they were valueless, but collected and refined, they were gold: “the means and the emblem of wealth.” Britain was awash in statistical data that needed only extraction and submission by willing workers. “The small number, and still smaller leisure of the Council, with the absence of means to employ clerks and copyists, rendered the Society dependent upon the co-operation of its members.” He urged everyone to collect what information they could from familiar sources, and those “connected with public institutions, hospitals, charities, corporate bodies, bodies administering the poor-laws, regulating markets, or employing a number of labourers, might also afford useful information.” All could join committees to help the society council verify, “digest, and embody the information collected.” Rawson was propelling British statistics in a new direction, away from the intentions of the society’s founders and towards something more social and professional. Medicine was an important foundation for the work. In March 1836, Rawson began attending meetings of the medical committee and the following month served on a committee to consider a list of queries that the committee would send around to medical institutions, such as hospitals.91 He urged it to get coroners’ inquests and investigate statistics on suicides. Rawson and John Clendinning were the two regular attendees of that committee during the 1830s. Clendinning was a physician at the Marylebone Dispensary and the Western Dispensary, who served as censor and Croonian lecturer to the Royal College of Physicians, was named frs in 1841, and was known for his “unswerving devotion to his liberal and reformist principles.”92 The committee faltered from the late 1830s until 1841, when it was invigorated by William Guy, a professor at King’s College and an important new champion of medical statistics. Rawson and Guy were mutual admirers: Rawson signed Guy’s membership papers and Guy quoted Rawson’s investigations into poverty in Marylebone in his lectures. But Clendinning and Rawson shifted their focus from the medical committee to the statistics of life committee, which began to meet in January of 1838, and again were among the most active members.93 This was just months after the creation of the General Record Office, the product of intense ssl lobbying, with the medical statistician and ssl member William Farr appointed as registrar. Each year the society renewed calls for better support of the census. In February 1838, Rawson moved for a subcommittee to draw up forms of statistical returns from hospitals, lunatic asylums, prisons, hospital ships, and other public asylums and charities. The subcommittee spent much of the year working on those model returns, along with a circular letter requesting the information. They drew up long lists of those institutions and delegated

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the actual work of soliciting information to members with connections at those institutions. Rawson’s long list reveals his medical connections: the Cholera Hospital, Greenwich Hospital, the London Lock, St Thomas’s, the General Lying-In Hospital, St George’s Hospital, the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, St Patricks Benevolent Society, the Royal Infirmary for Diseases of the Eye, the Westminster Lying-In Hospital, the East London Lying-In Charity, the Jewish Hospital, the London Female Penitentiary, and the general penitentiary. The subcommittee hummed with a great variety of activities: in January 1839, “Mr. Rawson suggested as a subject of enquiry a comparison of the duration of life among the higher and the lower classes, as shown in the experience of Insurance Societies, contrasted with Benefit Societies and Workhouses.”94 The subcommittee resolved to write to the Poor Law Commission to ask for information on the total number of persons in the workhouses of England and Wales, distinguishing the number above sixty years of age. It lamented the “comparatively useless” information from Parliament.95 In February, Rawson reported on dealings with the commissioner of police, whom he had asked for information on sickness amongst the constabulary; in March he provided those returns and described efforts to get information from the librarian of the House of Commons; in May, he followed up on returns from friendly societies. Meetings were somewhat irregular after that, but Rawson attended and presented varied material until the minutes stopped in the spring of 1841. Rawson wrote the new orientation into the structure of the ssl . He signed many nomination forms for men who would further such investigations: doctors, actuaries, and other kinds of proto-statisticians.96 He began slowly, signing one in June and two in December 1835. In 1836 he signed only eight more. But then he hit his stride and signed 134 of the next 200 nomination papers. By contrast, Chadwick and Whewell signed only one nomination each. Rawson filled the society with hands-on practical investigators who could provide specialized information, from insurance societies, friendly societies, and medical practices. He tilted the society towards clerks and away from the temper and character of men like Whewell. Rawson also circulated the findings in expanding networks. He regularly described interesting papers that he’d read, drawing out the highlights. He reported on the baas statistical section activities at great length. After the members discussed Quetelet’s work, for example, he came to the next meeting with Quetelet’s response, communicated personally. To sustain the conversations and the foundering provincial societies, the ssl decided to publish a journal, with Rawson as its founding editor. The decision to publish distinguished the Statistical Society from similar societies, including the Political Economy Club.97 Almut Sprigade says: “The Journal of the Statistical Society of London came into existence four years after the foundation of the Society. For the first two years of its existence,

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from 1838 to 1840, almost two-thirds of the articles published in the journal reported on the statistics of education, the living conditions, crime and the local statistics of the lower classes.”98 That was Rawson’s doing. Some of the most genteel members grew worried. Rawson never shrank from controversy. His use of Quetelet’s data in 1838 was to confirm reports from Belgium that two charities there had successfully eradicated local indigence. As Rawson told Quetelet, “one of our associates famous for his knowledge of Political Economy” (probably Tooke) attacked the findings: a system of charity “must have unfavourable effects on the independent industry of the town. I replied to him that the commission had announced that mendicity had been eradicated, to which he replied that this Establishment could even have caused a large part of this mendicity.”99 On the other hand, patrons fell away. C.W. Dilke, the editor of the Athenaeum, a leading literary weekly, was not impressed with the new orientation. Dilke was a science enthusiast and under his editorship (1830–46) the Athenaeum published significantly more scientific content than its rivals, with a weekly column on “Popular science,” long and detailed accounts of the baas , and approximately 20 per cent of its thousands of reviews devoted to scientific works. But Dilke lambasted Rawson for excess specialization. For all that the journal was conducted with “great zeal and labor I object to its publication because in my opinion legitimate material does not exist, & because it swallows up the entire resources of the Society – which Society really was not established for the mere purposes of publishing the proceedings of other Societies … But assuming that I am wrong – that such publication is the sole or more important object of the Society,” Dilke remarked, better to reduce the honorary vice-presidents, and use its funds to improve the Journal. The members were told that they should exert themselves & bring in new members, now what would you think such an argument as the following is likely to have with country gentlemen, or persons much engaged, like myself, who after all contribute the real majority in all Societies? “Let me propose you as a member of the Statistical Society. Well, what are the personal advantages & what good does the Society do? The advantages are that you will pay two guineas a year for the Journal, which you may get for ten shillings, and the good done – Nothing.” This is the view I take of the matter & that I am not far wrong is I think shown by decreasing instead of increasing members.100 The society must choose between gentlemanly sociability and petit bourgeois knowledge. This was a larger quarrel playing out in scientific societies more generally: would they be dominated by titled amateurs or by specialized professionals? Should they blur or reinforce class boundaries? Rawson was making

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statistics an avenue for professional and social advancement from below, unlike Whewell’s elite, Cambridge-centric science. Rawson’s was a broadly liberalizing project, stretching down to the petite bourgeoisie and their observed facts. Elite gatekeepers wanted more rigid distinctions between the elite and the hoi polloi, resting on gentrified versions of knowledge.101 Genteel knowledge rested as much on gentility as on objectivity, and the more genteel the knower, the more reliable their knowledge. Whewell argued, in the baas meeting in 1833, that facts observed by limited, local observers could carry no weight: “The circumstances of the observation can hardly be properly understood or interpreted by others; the suggestions which the observations themselves supply, for change of plan or details, cannot in any other way be properly appreciated and acted on.”102 He said much the same in March 1834 in a positive but “excruciatingly patronizing” review of Mary Somerville’s recent book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences.103 Her analysis was lucid, Whewell argued, in the way of women: “not perturbed by the powers of philosophic thought, even when the latter are strongest. The heart goes on with its own concerns, asking no counsel of the head.” In men, by contrast, “practical instincts and theoretical views are perpetually disturbing and perplexing each other. Action must be conformable to rule; theory must be capable of application to action.”104 Trust and gentlemanly status must not be prised apart by social or sexual heterogeneity.105 As historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison observe: “The mastery of scientific practices is inevitably linked to self-mastery, the assiduous cultivation of a certain kind of self.”106 Good and objective science demanded an equipoise and a civilizing process all its own, and a certain kind of historical agent – white, male, educated – its best practitioner. Radicals argued, in reply, that their facts were political and rightly so. According to an argument in 1840 in the Westminster Review, by John Robertson, a fact advanced without opinion “prevents the discovery of new truths, – it deprives the labours of the Society of definite purposes, – the facts of which it causes the collection and arrangement are those which are useless and irrelevant as evidence, – and lastly, the observance of this rule is irreconcilable not merely with the progress of society and knowledge, but with the actions and operations of the society itself.” The ssl Journal concurred, repudiating any inferior, handmaid status. Its epistemological restraint, it declared, “was not to make us hewers and drawers to those engaged on any edifice of physical science; – but it was that we should ourselves be the architects of a science or of sciences, the perfectors of some definite branch or branches of knowledge, which should do honour to ourselves and our country, and at the same time to the distinguished men who summoned us to the labour; – the elaborators, in fine, of truths which we feel to be necessary to our happiness, but which are yet wholly hide from us, or but partially

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revealed.”107 The Journal insisted on the intellectual autonomy, not to say sovereignty, of statistics. “Statistics, by their very name, are defined to be the observations necessary to the social or moral sciences, to the sciences of the statist, to whom the statesman and legislator must resort for the principles on which to legislate and govern. These sciences are equally distinct from the purely physical, the purely mathematical, and the purely metaphysical, though the mathematical must lend aid to their pursuit.” The “Statist,” the society argued, did not “undertake to pursue geology, or meteorology, or geography, or botany, or zoology, as separate and complete sciences,” but instead “selects from the facts which these elucidate, such as may bear on the welfare of the human race in our present state of knowledge; in fine, he contemplates only those facts known to science which are also cognizable by art. For his is the science of the arts of civil life.”108 A detailed explanation followed, with a table that listed the chief sections of knowledge: I. The Statistics of Physical Geography, Division, and Appropriation; or geographical and proprietary statistics. II. The Statistics of Production; or agricultural, mining, fishing, manufacturing, and commercial statistics. III. The Statistics of Instruction; or ecclesiastical, scientific, literary, and academical statistics. IV. The Statistics of Protection; or constitutional, legal, judicial, and criminal statistics. V. The Statistics of Consumption and Enjoyment; or of population, distribution, consumption, diversions, life, health, and public and private charity. Further detailed explanations itemized exactly what each heading referenced. The “Statistics of Appropriation,” for example, included: “1st. Of private tenures and private property; 2d. Of voluntary association to hold property in common use, or to the common benefit; and, 3d. Of public property, or property held by the state, or the political organization of any whole community, to the common use and advantage, against all claimants, internal or external.” That was a remarkably agnostic definition of property, suitable for international comparisons across different property regimes, but capable, thereby, of deconstructing the elaborate double standards of civilized versus uncivilized tenure being constructed by settler colonial states. Much worse, for British intellectual-political purposes, was the inclusion, under “Production,” of “the whole of the field contemplated by political economy, excepting consumption of wealth” and then the criteria of “Consumption and Enjoyment” including: “1st. Of domestic economy and manners, and private charity; 2d. Of social intercourse, combined amusements, mutual

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assurance, and voluntary association for charitable purposes; and, 3d. Of public amusements, or public supplies of commodities provided by political authorities; of public hospitals; and of public charity as organized by poor laws, &c.” In August of 1840, as the baas gathered at Glasgow, there was no more controversial topic than whether the poor laws should be extended to Scotland. Statisticians claimed a right to address such questions. If statistics was the science of what mattered to human happiness, then statistics was not just a human science but the human science. Such a claim must clash with Whewell’s conservative philosophy of science that made Providence, interpreted by elite gatekeepers, the ultimate guarantor of truth. Yet there Whewell was, reduced to a subsection of a subsection of “academic knowledge.” The baas had voted some modest funds to the statistical research in the 1830s, to address such questions as the state of education in English schools, mining statistics, the “Condition of the Working Population,” vital statistics, and statistics of sickness and mortality in York.109 But Whewell grew uneasy about the directions statistics was taking and used his influence to shrink and then end those funds in the early 1840s. The tensions were still building in the 1830s. So long as the Statistical Society was attracting prominent figures and producing knowledge, so long would the Athenaeum report on its activities. In 1837, it published a report by Rawson on the state of the poor in a particularly notorious and impoverished stretch of Marylebone.110 Marylebone is now a wealthy district of London but in the early nineteenth century, as the city’s western edge, it drew many poor immigrants, many from Ireland. These things were not unrelated: the wealthy elite tended to gravitate westward in London, away from the worst concentrations of poverty in the East End. The western suburbs, Marylebone and Paddington, were the greenest and healthiest. But they also housed railway stations, commercial traffic, and swarms of migrants who congregated on the edges of built-up settlement, erecting the sort of cheap shanties described by Tocqueville at Manchester. Densely populated warrens surrounded by dung and dust heaps worried the wealthy living nearby. In Marylebone, a dense concentration of Irish immigrants in the Calmel building, on derelict land owned by the bishop of London between Marylebone and Paddington off Orchard Street and Portman Square, caused particular concern and scrutiny. An 1815 inquiry into “the state of mendicity and vagrancy” in and around London showed that the Irish poor (their numbers estimated around 16,000, more than half of them children) flocked to the Calmel buildings in part because a Calmel Society existed to relieve their poverty. Its honorary secretary, Montagu Burgoyne, described 700 Irish poor living in twenty-four small houses, often three or four families to a room. They were, he argued, “totally neglected by the parish, inasmuch as the court

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where they lived was not cleansed, and was a perfect nuisance; persons were afraid of entering it for fear of contagion,” even doctors. Never, he added, “neither in town nor in the country, have I met with so many poor among whom there was so much distress, so much profligacy, and so much ignorance. The discovery that the Society made in Calmel Buildings led them to investigate the state of the Irish poor, not only in the parish of Mary-le-bone, but throughout the metropolis.”111 Burgoyne also described the applicants for relief as fabulists and liars, a verdict seconded by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who saw crime, delinquency, sexual depravity, and Jacobinism merging into “one great phantasmagoria of the mad, bad, and dangerous people.”112 Efforts at improvement included a ragged school, paid for by parents in the Calmel buildings, under a teacher “who held a class of fifty in the single lodging-house room which he occupied with his wife and six children.”113 By the 1830s, increasing waves of Irish migrants to the western districts of London intensified middle-class scrutiny and concern. A civil engineer, Joseph Jopling, who lived adjacent to the Calmel buildings, put forward a plan in 1833 to demolish them and erect public meeting rooms, on grounds that such population density “should not be permitted anywhere.”114 The Marylebone Literary and Scientific Institution that began to meet in 1835 had the Calmel buildings as near neighbours. Charles Babbage lived on nearby Dorset Street and the Statistical Society began its meetings there. Charles Dickens lived with his father on Marylebone Lane during the 1830s while working as a court reporter, and Oliver Twist described not the sort of poverty seen in the East End but poverty intertwined with wealth in complex ways. The juxtaposition made the poverty highly visible and prompted interest in its spatial distribution and in medical and social statistics. When Florence Nightingale began her campaign to reform London hospitals and asked the registrar general how she might obtain hospital statistics, he advised her to start with the teaching hospital recently founded in Paddington by medical reformers: “St Mary’s is a more likely institution to supply this information than any other.”115 St Mary’s and the Paddington Workhouse Infirmary, built in 1845–46, were pioneers of social medicine. The social and statistical turn during the age of reform owed a lot to medicine, also being reconstructed from below. The new generation of doctors tended to be political liberalizers: critics of conservative statesmanship and medical leadership. The radical weekly medical journal, The Lancet, began to appear in 1823, edited by Thomas Wakley along with other radicals, with 4,000 subscribers by the end of the decade. It attacked exclusionary elitism in medical education, licensing, and institutions everywhere, facing off against the gentleman physicians of Harley Street, in Marylebone, the champions of the old ways.116 But these were also fights fought against conservative laymen lording over doctors. In 1844, The Lancet denounced the

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Marylebone guardians for refusing to appoint a consulting surgeon to the workhouse infirmary, and in 1854, when lay governors and medical staff were at “daggers drawn” over a case of death in childbirth, The Lancet sided with the doctors.117 Medical liberals seconded workingmen’s complaints of long hours, exposure to toxic substances, and child labour. Christopher Hamlin argues that “medical men came closest to offering an alternative standard and means of analysis” to political economy on labour questions.118 Quarantines were another political hotcake, seen by medical liberals as a hangover of the military state, their reading confirmed by a military “sanitary cordon” that France stretched across its border with Spain, ostensibly to preserve against yellow fever, but that was made into an occupying force to restore the Spanish monarchy in 1823. In the early 1830s, as cholera spread westward from Asia, the manifest inadequacy of quarantines, the millions dead in Asia, hundreds of thousands in Europe, and the association of the disease with poverty and filth all effected a social turn in medicine. To have a theory of cholera during the 1830s was to have a sociology of civilization. But a pandemic is also a “massive voluntary experiment in comparative government.”119 Pandemics tend to reinvigorate the Enlightenment argument that governments, for all their well-grounded differences, must ultimately be judged according to how well they manage the most urgent threats to generalized well-being. The new medical statistics began with population studies and also began, as did much medical reform, with France, where the Revolution had dismantled many older institutions and privileges. Statistics of Paris had begun to be collected by the Seine authorities from the late 1810s, and in 1828, Louis-René Villermé, already known for an important study of prisons published in 1820, produced a detailed statistical analysis of population density, household mortality, and household income (using tax records) that mapped poverty and mortality across the city. It proved, in the words of historian William Coleman, that “death is a social disease.”120 Others were doing comparable studies: Benoiston de Châteauneuf calculated the longevity of rich and poor in 1830.121 Tocqueville was deeply influenced by this work when he went to the United States in the early 1830s to study prisons and to Britain in the mid-1830s to study slums. He attended the baas meeting in Dublin in August, including the statistics sessions, and visited the Dublin poorhouse. In London, Tocqueville attended one of Charles Babbage’s famous soirées and formed a lasting friendship.122 Density studies took a tremendous leap forward in the early 1830s when cholera struck the supposedly primitive and modern civilizations alike. Cholera is the quintessential “filth” disease: it requires a “very gross level of contamination” of water supplies by sewage, and the intense dehydration – vomiting and diarrhea – makes a cholera epidemic viscerally corporeal for everyone in

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the vicinity.123 Cholera was a devastating catastrophe that upended existing knowledge and politics. Governments unable to explain or mitigate mass die-off must remake themselves. Britain was not the hardest hit, but perhaps its vaunted civilization was. “Political freedom was predicated on biological freedom,” observes Hamlin: a sense of national self-determination, upended by disease that “eroded both the use and the exchange value of bodies, and blocked mechanisms of betterment.”124 Cholera erased liberal freedoms and imperial distance as space and time. The question that British pundits confronted was whether the causes were contagion (manageable with proper quarantines) or environmental (manageable with proper sanitation), or whether they were more like civilizational causes, that is, whether they debunked stadial histories by showing a historical trajectory not just away from, but also back towards, the density and filth, irrational passions and superstitions, and the state incapacity of the “dark” ages. Cholera intensified the empirical turn of British politics: the state could not just “muddle through” but required obviously informed and effective policy.125 Laissez-faire liberals saw their dogmas confirmed in these catastrophes – cholera and typhus in the 1830s, Irish famine and typhus in the 1840s. The Economist, founded in 1843, pronounced: “There is a worse evil than typhus or cholera or impure water, and that is mental imbecility” caused by state intervention into things people should do for themselves.126 Officials and would-be knowledge workers debated whether epidemics required the state to obstruct or facilitate the free flow of goods and people. These were debates about how rich and poor countries and neighbours mingled and debates about history as a mode of explanation for epidemics. Classic epidemiological case studies should paint a narrative of serial progression, with a beginning, a middle, and an ending.127 But it was impossible to follow cholera as it leaped across the city, until 1854 when John Snow showed statistical clumping around the Broad Street pump (in Soho, slightly southeast of Marylebone). Something more synchronic and ultimately social emerged to serve as causal analysis, and to modernize debates dating back to the plague. When it had last appeared in Europe, at Marseilles in 1720, five physicians sent by the French court declared it noncontagious, and shifted the emphasis to medical topography and environmental causes, as part of the Montesquieuian turn towards environmental explanations. But both environmentalists and contagionists, Kevin Siena observes, saw the urban poor as tending to biological putrefaction that could become the predisposition to either infection or contagion. “Chemically speaking, the poor’s blood was like plague-infested blood, even when plague was absent. London paupers walked around daily with a mild form of the same corruption that typified an epidemic.”128 Between the decline of the plague and the appearance of cholera, such fears were kept alive by “putrid fever” or “gaol fever” (generally though

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not exclusively typhus) which became endemic in British cities. At Liverpool between 1780 and 1796, “nearly a fifth of Liverpool’s estimated slum population – nearly 3,000 of 16,000 – had full blown typhus every single year.”129 The Napoleonic Wars also saw severe typhus outbreaks amidst terrible deprivation and concentration in besieged cities, ships, prisons, and hospitals. The sprawling slums of the 1830s were, again, very hard hit. People noticed that, while cholera could spread beyond crowded to dispersed and healthy populations, typhus could not. Where people were not densely crowded, typhus could be no more than sporadic. Such observations provoked an “anticontagionism” movement that radical doctors applied to epidemic diseases more generally. Older models of one-to-one contagion persisted for vaccination, syphilis, and rabies, but seemed beside the point for mass outbreaks. Contagionists saw the trees but missed the sociological forest. The terms “epidemic” disease and “contagious” disease began to be applied, by some, in binary fashion to distinguish the social from non-social causes. Thomas Southwood Smith, who carried eighteenth-century theories of putrefaction into 1830s epidemiology, argued that epidemic diseases had no specific identity, unlike germ diseases, and all were caused by filth.130 The most radical described cholera as Indian typhus, plague as African typhus, and yellow fever as American typhus.131 Typhus as much as cholera prompted doctors to wonder whether civilization itself was pathogenic.132 The notion of “epidemic” diseases, having essentially social models of causation and transmission, became as recognizable and rigorous as the other prevailing models: contagious diseases, such as rabies or syphilis, known to spread with bodily fluids; and intrinsic or inherited or “constitutional” diseases, above all tuberculosis. People weren’t seen to catch tuberculosis from one another but, rather, to possess a particular individual aptitude for it. When the new social theorists spoke of an “epidemic constitution” they were shifting the onus of the disease and of its investigation to the broader geographical-cum-social context, much as the Scottish Enlightenment did with history. A diagnosis of epidemic typhus (still only hazily distinguished from typhoid, another filth disease, before the 1840s) was an immediate diagnostic for overcrowding, dirt, and poverty, and it shaped the larger field. Contagionist doctors, even those believing in animalcules, increasingly accepted that a germ of disease, like a seed, could only grow in the right soil, namely, overcrowding, filth, poverty, and seething passion. Consensus formed around the argument that “the principal preservative of cholera consists in the amelioration of the social condition of populations”133 and “c’est le sort des populations qu’il faut améliorer.”134 Sanitarian prescriptions were dispersal and social distancing, fresh air, cleanliness, and good living. Those prescriptions were also a liberal political project for modern living in general. If your town was sufficiently clean and dispersed, argued some anticontagionists, even the plague could be no more contagious than a broken leg.135

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Theories of cholera and typhus informed one another because sanitary investigators studying cholera in working-class neighbourhoods often discovered typhus there. Together they reinforced the liberal critique of the authoritarian fiscal-military state and then, in its wake, the social and statistical turn. When cholera began its spread westward across Europe, the “autocracies” of eastern Europe threw up quarantines manned by soldiers that failed to arrest its spread. That failure prompted liberal responses in western Europe.136 France was enjoying a liberal moment under the July Monarchy, a triumph for reformers who had denounced the quarantines and sanitary cordons of the Bourbon Restoration. England had recently liberalized its quarantines in response to similar criticisms. Peter Baldwin finds that “quarantinism was favored by the wealthy, able to ride out a resulting period of economic inactivity while the poor earned their bread day to day … Given the choice between cholera and free trade, on the one hand, and no disease, but a trade embargo on the other, one observer bet that the poor would choose the epidemiological over the economic disaster.”137 Conservative and liberal doctors also disputed remedies as well as causes and preventives. One of the earliest uses of clinical statistics in France was the proof produced by P.C.A. Louis that the preferred treatment of the radicals, bloodletting, killed more patients than other treatments (by dehydrating patients already dying of it).138 Cholera came to Montreal first in North America and immediately drew, as well as local scrutiny, visiting medical commissions from New York and Philadelphia, keen to avert the disease’s spread. The Philadelphia commissioners found all the kinds of overcrowding and filth that epidemics invariably prognosticated: immigrants were “crowded in narrow lanes, in ill-ventilated apartments, and many with scarcely a shelter from the weather.” Six, even ten families now crowded into tenements that had previously housed but one. “In a house containing only two rooms, during the last year, fifty persons were found, twenty-seven of whom were sick with typhus fever.” The Philadelphia commissioners learned from a local Dr Robinson that the typhus had overwintered in Montreal and spread beyond the emigrants into “other classes.”139 The New York commissioners drew comparisons between cholera and “congestive typhus,” and described cholera as an atmospheric disease that ravaged Montreal in particular due to high levels of “superstition, personal uncleanliness and intemperance,” while in the better classes, exaggerated fears of the disease were to blame.140 Montreal’s own commissioners, by contrast, in a report of 1834, ignored local conditions and threw the blame on the “paupers, immigrants, and even orphans” that “landed destitute upon our shores.”141 Patriot politician E.E. Rodier saw his country reduced to a vast cemetery: “It was not enough to send among us avaricious egotists without any spirit of liberty than that

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which can be bestowed by a simple education of the counter, to enrich themselves at the expense of the Canadians, then endeavour to enslave them, they must rid themselves of their beggars and cast them by thousands on our shores; they must send miserable beings, who after having partaken of the bread of our children, will subject them to the horrors following upon hunger and misery, they must do still more, they must send us in their train pestilence and death.”142 Centralized gubernatorial response to the cholera epidemic was another political irritant to Patriot politicians, though in the long run resulted in a more successful combined program of civil restrictions and civic cleansing, which would also be a long-term argument for a centralized public health policy, very different from what was seen in the United States.143 Typhus, also associated with impoverished Irish immigrants, sustained the fears and tensions in the intervals between cholera outbreaks. In Britain, typhus “besieged the country in 1826–7, 1832–3, 1837, and in 1846,”144 ravaging poor working-class neighbourhoods. At the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow, “possibly the filthiest and unhealthiest of all the British cities of this period,” typhus afflicted less than 10 per cent of all patients between 1800 and 1815, rising to 36 per cent from 1815–30 and rising above 50 per cent of all hospital admissions in the 1830s.145 In England and Wales, an outbreak between July 1837 and December 1838 killed between 20,000 and 30,000. Wherever the rich and the poor lived closely intertwined, more in West than in East London, the rich felt threatened by the poor. In 1838, the surgeon to Marylebone’s Western General Dispensary diagnosed typhus in a Paddington woman living with four others in one room – yet, he complained, authorities failed to remove her for several days.146 Investigation into typhus was organized by Edwin Chadwick, the poor law commissioner. Investigation into the western areas, where respectable propertied people and Irish navvies both congregated, seemed particularly urgent. Other diseases posed other perplexities but it was typhus and cholera, with their tens of thousands of victims during the 1830s, statistically correlated to overcrowding, poverty, and filth in buildings and institutions permanently fixed on the urban landscape, even in affluent neighbourhoods, that most directly challenged liberal government and Malthusian logic.147 The poor and diseased seemed to be overrunning the most respectable and civilized parts of the British empire. And if the most wealthy inhabitants of West London could flee to their country homes, the middlemost could not. If the middling classes wanted to carry security for their property and persons into medical matters, they had to carry it to environmental engineering. They had to reverse the physical decay of the poor into toxic matter, imposing the managerial hand that the poor could not impose on themselves. They had to build up, using modern tools of bureaucracy and

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debt, managed landscapes of aqueducts and sewers, as well as workhouses and infirmaries where the poor could die innocuously if not decently. Sewers and sponsored emigration became the great nostrums of the 1840s, succeeding to, but also reinforcing, the political and poor law reforms of the 1830s. Francis Bond Head was named lieutenant governor of Upper Canada in the mid-1830s because Canada was becoming a place where poverty and pauperism might be engineered out of existence. Better Canada than West London, where the poorest Irish migrants seemed particularly to be drawn. More commissions investigated more Irish migrants as poverty deepened in Ireland. One studying “Irish and Scotch Vagrants” in 1828 warned that England was maintaining the paupers of all Britain; another in 1833 warned that the evil was increasing. Poulett Scrope urgently recommended a poor law for Ireland. Althorp responded with yet another parliamentary commission that reported in 1836. Heavily influenced by political economists, particularly Nassau Senior, it concluded poor laws would be too expensive; better public works and assisted immigration. A poor law was nonetheless introduced in 1838, characterized by gloomy prison-like buildings and a ban on outdoor relief.148 Witnesses at these various commissions of the 1830s warned that, unlike other migrations, that of the Irish was uniquely decivilizing: “an example of a less civilized population spreading themselves, as a kind of substratum, beneath a more civilized community; and, without excelling in any branch of industry, obtaining possession of all the lowest departments of manual labour.”149 From the 1820s to the 1840s, in short, the movements and the social and material life of the poor preoccupied liberal imaginations. But liberal and sanitarian solutions often diverged as much as they converged: wasn’t a workhouse just a big, enforced concentration of the putrefying poor? The “new poor law” of 1834 was passed to restrict soaring costs, which had doubled in recent years, as well as local maladministration and excessive outdoor relief. It centralized administration under expert bureaucrats like Chadwick – his watchwords “uniformity, efficiency, and impersonality” – and centralized relief in large “union” workhouses serving multiple parishes together.150 Centralization was intended to obstruct local generosity that drew paupers from harsher regimes in other parishes. Marylebone kept its own workhouse, dating to the 1770s and accommodating 1,000 paupers, but it was expanded to accommodate half as many again by the early 1840s, with hundreds more in an infirmary. To the west, a poor law union was formed in 1837 for the parishes of Chelsea, Fulham, Hammersmith, Kensington, and Paddington. But rapid population growth, plus fears of overconcentration, prompted new workhouses in every one of those parishes during the early 1840s. West London was expanding as quickly as British North America, both of them receiving large numbers of migrant

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workers and families who, once arrived, often struggled to find work and were ineligible for poor or medical relief where they landed. But eligibility was scant relief: in Marylebone, mortality rates in the infirmary were appallingly high, above 300 deaths yearly from 1838 to 1841. The death rate of children under seven there was 94 per cent.151 The public buildings erected on the West London landscape were supposed to be monuments to stability, order, and property values. But if you peered inside to see their inner workings, made newly visible by social investigators, you saw they tended more to concentrate than obviate the dangers and degradations of slums and prisons. To many it seemed obvious that if overly dense sociability was pathological, then you needed a hygienically managed sociability to restore proper workings of history. That was the early conclusion of the British sanitarianism, initially expressed in reports on typhus in London in 1837, one by Southwood Smith, and another by Neil Arnott and John Phillips Kay. But Rawson’s study of Marylebone suggested that there could be no simple physical correlation; culture complicated things. Rawson’s and the Statistical Society’s interests in poverty, crime, and disease, as well as their history there, naturally drew them to Marylebone’s Calmel building. At a public meeting in February 1837, it was resolved to investigate the state of the poor, and especially of education, in the “most wretched and notorious localities in the parish,” beginning with the Calmel buildings. The findings were presented by Rawson in May. He reported that the buildings contained twenty-six houses and 231 rooms, of which 199 were occupied by 882 inhabitants, who made up 280 families, most of them Irish and Catholic. That worked out to an average of thirty-four people per house and 4.5 people per room. One room had thirteen individuals living in it. Fifty of those rooms had more than one family living in them, Rawson observed: 116 (of 204) families with children occupied one room and seventy-six occupied only part of one room. Further observations on the social and educational conditions of these families were provided: of 280 families (with and without children this time), 238 lived in close and confined quarters, 134 in clean quarters, and 146 in dirty quarters. Rawson reported that English families were more likely to live alone than the Irish, but that the Irish suffered less from poverty than the English, “from the greater readiness of the former to assist one another, and the small quantity and cheap quality of the food which they consume.”152 Even the poorest had sympathy and choice, effectively self-civilization. Rawson’s paper on poverty and population density became a classic reference in the public health literature that Rawson avidly followed. The bigger question fought out between conservatives, liberals, and radicals in the 1830s and the 1840s, that Rawson did not quail from broaching, was whether poverty caused dirt and disease or whether dirt and disease caused poverty. Chadwick and Southwood Smith took the latter, deeply

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conservative view. Chadwick’s 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain declared that death was not a social disease so much as a sanitary one. Cullen argues that “Chadwick’s microscope had miasma painted on the end of it.”153 The poor should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and the role of the well-to-do was to impose a kind of forcible assimilation from above, by manipulating the physical environment to make it salubrious. Paupers and the working poor were to be governed not by their opinions, like men, but by physical engineering, like matter, in order to arrest the poor’s tendency to putrefaction – that is, to become one with the dirt around them. Hamlin traced the deep background to that view: “Locke’s psychological models modified by Scottish philosophers saw the human as an adaptable machine. Hence, change in the environment: Renew the air, change the water, replace the litter in the cage, broadcast round the clock lectures on political economy, and a reliable animal machine would walk out.”154 Intangible elite associations had to deconstruct the more physical ones percolating up from below and threatening to drag them down. The propertied elite had to be insulated from the exercise of both political and material agency by the poor. It required a double process: on the one hand, institutional capacity – in staff and buildings – for sorting and managing the poor and the built environment, separating the progressive from the decaying (waterworks from sewers, hospitals from infirmaries, workhouses from Calmel buildings). On the other hand, the reconstruction of the state around these new institutions, and the emergence of a new version of the “public” in infrastructure and debt together. Municipal governments were substantially reconstructed across Europe and North America, modernized through massive shared debt.155 Building and infrastructure everywhere became engines of growth and stability. Poverty had become too visible, in practice and in theory, as a spectacle and a social corrosive. Building Chadwick’s sewers and waterworks was a cheap alternative to poor relief and social reform, one that materially improved the landscape in mortgageable form. Paddington, for example, acquired a railway station in 1838, followed promptly by a vestry hall, a workhouse, a succession of new churches (the old parish church unfortunately falling on the wrong side of the tracks), and St Mary’s Hospital, the better to bring order, stability, and value to the growing wealth invested in housing stock.156 Municipalities borrowed and built speculatively, predicting rising populations and land values consequent upon the material improvements, in Paddington as in the Canadas. National governments facilitated the process by removing caps on borrowing, Hamlin noticed, “linked no doubt to the growing faith that capital investment was the motor of progress.”157 But they also understood

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that an expanded local state, whether municipal or colonial, permitted a smaller, cheaper national-imperial state. Sir Charles Wood (the second Earl Grey’s son-in-law), advised Lord John Russell in 1850: “It is evidently wise to put as little on the Government whose overthrow causes a revolution as you can and to have as much as you can on the local bodies, which may be overthrown a dozen times and nobody be the worse.”158 Peel, Russell, and Gladstone could all agree on such things. They could also understand that the debts were part of the appeal. No one, after all, would democratize their mortgage. William Gladstone came to epitomize that shared, liberal-conservative outlook. In the 1840s, as chair of the Board of Trade in Robert Peel’s conservative administration, then as chancellor of the exchequer in Lord Aberdeen’s liberal-conservative administration from 1852–55 and again from 1859–66 in Lord Palmerston’s Liberal administration: he was always “the incarnation of British sound finance,” which made borrowing and lending the mainstay of British political and imperial strength.159 After 1840, a new era of financial security emerged, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, as, for the “first time in European history … money became reliable.’”160 Medicine, too, would largely fall in with these sanitarian responses to social problems, after mid-century, which offered many jobs for medical officers of health.161 But opposition persisted. At the baas meeting in Glasgow in 1840, no amount of elite equipoise could silence the fierce debates as to whether the poor laws should be extended to Scotland, where the able-bodied poor still had no right to relief. An Edinburgh professor and practitioner, William Pulteney Alison, gave a paper from his monograph of that year, Observations on the Management of the Poor in Scotland and Its Effects on the Health of Great Towns; a digest also went to Rawson’s journal. Alison was the foremost advocate for social medicine, based on observations of widespread fever and destitution in Scotland, amounting to 55,000 in the last five years in Glasgow and nearly 15,000 in Edinburgh: one in six and one in twelve people respectively.162 There was more fever in Scotland than in England, he argued, because more poverty and no proper relief. People were destitute and on the brink of starvation. The “grand evil of Poverty itself” was the public health problem in Scotland, and a generous system of poor relief the great solution. Relief was not as demoralizing as poverty, he argued, instancing three young women seen during a cold spring in 1838, suffering from hunger and exposure, refused admission to the workhouse and, scantily relieved by charity, all nursing infants who died. “If anyone supposes, that the effect of this sacrifice of innocent life was to improve the morals of these women or their associates, I can only say, that he knows nothing of the effect of real destitution on human character and conduct.”163

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Alison saw women, children, and the elderly suffering the most from destitution. By contrast, Hamlin remarks, Chadwick considered women and children “rarely in regard to their health problems per se, but rather how these affected the health and morality of men.”164 You could always see dirt, Alison argued, but epidemic typhus was only seen during periods of hardship, as measured by applications for relief. Alison returned to a Malthusian focus on food as the best medicine. The argument was anathema to Chadwick, who was trying to suppress evidence for starvation that Farr saw in England. For liberal-leaning statisticians, poverty was an empirical and moral question; for the conservatives, such political arguments threatened to discredit science and the baas . Chadwick fiercely attacked Alison and effectively conquered the English sanitary scene with his report of 1842. Rawson was in the middle between them, his sympathies clearly with Alison. He nominated Alison for the ssl, published Alison’s work on poor relief in Scotland in the Journal, and sent copies around to Chadwick and other members, including William Henry Sykes, an East India Company man and ardent statistical society activist from its earliest days; and Lord Ebrington, then serving as viceroy to Ireland, who wrote back, in mid-August 1841, to declare himself completely convinced. Where Ebrington had previously thought Scotland should not get a poor law, he now averred that “I am quite a convert to Alison’s views” and would vote to support an “Inquiry.”165 Citing the spat about Quetelet’s data and the enthusiasm for Alison, Cullen remarks: “With men like Rawson taking control the hold of orthodox political economy was weakened.”166 Rawson was also rebuffing conservative arguments about the relationship between crime and education. Porter and Rawson were both educational reformers, both connected with the Central Society of Education, active between 1836 and 1840 as a lobby for secular education (but that failed to overcome even whig, let alone conservative, deference to the established Church).167 Guido de Ruggiero identifies education reform and colonial reform as emanating from the same source.168 The Central Society’s managing board included fifteen mps, among them Poulett Scrope. It advocated practical, Pestalozzian education, on the model of Emmanuel de Fellenberg, who promoted “natural” education based on the innate abilities of all children to observe and reason. Education was cultivated through manual activities for working-class children and non-manual activities for the better off.169 An early prospectus by Thomas Wyse, mp, demanded an end to the “dry husk” of bookish learning in the middle-class grammar schools and “sound and substantial food from the great treasury of modern discovery.”170 If power could be formal and

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informal, so could knowledge, and the society aligned the two, recommending the “supplementary Education obtained, principally in mature age, by means of museums, libraries, and literary and scientific institutions; this Education is of great value, and is increasing.”171 In 1837, the Central Society activists at ssl organized an education committee, with Porter as its perpetual chair. Rawson began more and more to study education and to advocate it as the best remedy for social problems. Liberal statisticians in 1830s England were responding directly to an 1833 argument made by a French statistician, A.M. Guerry, that education did nothing to reduce crime. Cullen argues that they were “obsessed” with the book and debunking it. When an argument along those lines was made at the baas meeting in Glasgow, using data from Worcestershire, Lord Sandon and Rawson (who, Cullen remarks, “had sat through much more dubious papers in the past”) both interrupted him in mid-paper, with Sandon telling the author to “stop wasting their time” and Rawson arguing that it was easy to overlook small schools.172 Rawson had discovered that for himself while trying to measure crime rates by class and arguing that increased property crimes were the price of urbanization and industrialization. In 1841, his statistics on non-violent larcenies showed “that the collection of large masses of the population in crowded cities conduces more than anything else to the creation of those causes, whatever they may be, which stimulate the commission of crime.”173 But the interplay of moral and material causes required knowledge of both crime and education. With the obvious success of the Calmel buildings investigation to justify them, the investigators decided to expand the study into “the general social condition of the families” in other parts of the metropolis. In practice, that meant that they sent round observers to knock on doors and ask about the state of schooling. But schools were nebulous. The investigators had to itemize a long list of small and often very short-lived schools and win the cooperation of their management. Some of those classes did not look very educational. Including Sunday schools complicated things still further. The statisticians also had problems managing their worker, later their workers. They got parish boundaries wrong and verifications revealed troubling discoveries of errors and omissions. The investigation petered out by the 1840s, after Rawson left. But education had clearly risen to the centre of Rawson’s interests, a shift that occurred around the time that Kay “dumped the ‘sanitary idea’ in Chadwick’s lap” by becoming secretary to the Privy Council’s Education Committee in 1838.174 Rawson was now reporting to both the Statistical Society and the Education Society on education in relation to statistical observations of poverty, crime, and, increasingly, race, teased out from other people’s research for

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presentation to the ssl and its journal. It’s important to note that these were social investigations designed by someone perfectly familiar with that new technique. Rawson explicitly described the methods in use. For example, he looked for statistical differences in the types of crime committed in British cities as compared to the countryside and discovered rising property crimes in urbanized areas. Correlating education and crime, he found that “education has less power to restrain the sudden outbreaks of passion, such as anger and lust, than it has to prevent the commission of crimes arising from premeditation, and from vices which are the result of the gradual growth of evil desires unrepressed, such as cupidity, &c. On the other hand, forgery, and offences requiring for their execution some degree of intelligence and powers of mental combination, are necessarily peculiar to the instructed classes.”175 Different social classes all had their own normal vices and crimes. That was a very Queteletian view to take and a rebuke to conservative arguments that morality followed gentility. Rawson suggested, in his analysis on crime, that “the same mental and moral phenomena apparently rise from similar causes … This is most strongly marked in the infant mind, which, in all climates, and apart from external influences, exhibits no difference, except in regard to temper” (attributable to varieties in physical conditions). Differences reflected individual circumstances of upbringing.176 Education, for Rawson, was paramount for constructing agency. A recent book by A.W. Ager, Crime and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century England, argues that Rawson’s 1841 evidence connecting illiteracy with poverty stands up to modern findings. Rawson observed that only 2 to 3 per cent of “disorderly prostitutes” in Dublin and London were literate: “and it is from such as these, bred up in the darkest ignorance, debased by the vilest associations, and exposed to the most bitter trials and temptations that the law expects and claims orderly habits and decent conduct.”177 Like Alison, Rawson targeted reactionary conservatism with a demand for state intervention.178 The poor, too, had self-civilization and should be ruled like men not beasts. But it was, still, an assimilation project that came with a “sweeping dismissal of the entire structure of learning in the communities of the labouring poor.”179 These problems followed Rawson to Canada. Where education did not improve social conditions, as in India, Rawson blamed poverty, not innate capacity. Race was not a necessary variable: on so much might John Stuart Mill and Rawson have agreed. But when Mill and Rawson had to confront poverty amongst specific populations, their prescriptions tended to diverge, the one defending and the other criticizing unaccountable government from above. Stefan Collini shows that Mill reasoned from Hume’s “all government rests on opinion” towards a highly rational model of national character that negated the political agency of “Indians.”180 Rawson sought to preserve their agency.

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ii : fro m b r itain to canada As well as his statistical work, Rawson had his demanding day job at the Board of Trade, where he served as private secretary to the vice-president, initially Poulett Thomson, then Alexander Baring, and then, from 1841, the young high tory William Gladstone. Gladstone’s defence of his family’s record as slave-owners, against Lord Howick’s accusations of cruelty, prompted Peel to appoint him undersecretary for colonies briefly in 1835 and to turn back to him again in 1841. Thus, for example, in October, Rawson was providing Gladstone with statistics on wheat production for use during debates over the corn laws. In November, Rawson sent Lord Sandon’s account of the trade in borax and reminded Gladstone not to forget an appointment with his cousin. Soon, Rawson was spread too thin across private and public responsibilities. In early January 1842, describing Rawson as simultaneously holding an “important place in this office” and acting as his “private secretary,” Gladstone asked W.E. Blair to serve as Rawson’s assistant. When Rawson was busy with the Board of Trade, Blair would do Gladstone’s private work; when Rawson was busy with the private work, Blair would assist with Rawson “in the discharge of his more strictly official duties, but the former would probably constitute yr principal occupation.” The salary would be £100 and the appointment would be a confidential and private one: “and yr tenure dependent on mine. At the same time I would afford you opportunities of making yourself known and I should be glad so far as my means extend to avail myself of any occasion for providing you with more permanent appointment.”181 A similar offer was probably extended to Rawson; just a few months later Rawson was thanking Gladstone for his appointment as civil secretary in Canada. On 18 June, Rawson wrote to Charles Babbage that he couldn’t come to dinner because he was leaving for Canada. He promised to say farewell at a meeting of the ssl on the Monday (which Prince Albert was to attend) and continued with a request for advice: “What can I do for Science in Canada? Time I cannot give it. But countenance I will to my utmost. & I intend to ask others, as I now ask you, how I can best promote its objects there?”182 In July, Rawson borrowed £300 from Gladstone, which he repaid in installments: it’s not clear whether the money went towards expenses in Canada or the expenses of maintaining his mother and sisters in Italy where they were living cheaply. Rawson also repaid his benefactor with long, informative letters lending insider knowledge of Canadian circumstances. There was much to recount because Rawson arrived in Canada in the middle of the fight over responsible government – a fight, Rawson was horrified to discover, that embroiled his office. Rawson’s position in Canada was like

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his position under Gladstone, ambiguously public and private. That might do for Britain but it would not do in Canada when fights about the civil list were fierce and polarizing. Rawson came as a godsend to both Lord Stanley at the Colonial Office and Sir Charles Bagot, the Canadian governor general. He was not the first to be offered the job; everyone else refused it. When Bagot arrived, delayed by bad weather and tides, Sydenham’s secretary, T.W.C. Murdoch, met him and provided a wealth of background information on political relationships among the Canadians; he also wrote up financial recommendations for submission to the Colonial Office. But Murdoch’s position was temporary and though Bagot tried to persuade him to stay, Murdoch preferred to return to his modest but permanent position in London. Someone else had to be found, and on 18 June, Stanley reported to Bagot that he had appointed a young men “I felt I could safely trust.” He laid out Rawson’s qualifications: ten years in the Board of Trade as second in the Statistics Department under Porter; the statistical work; and work for Gladstone who “speaks of him in the very highest terms, & is very sorry to part with him.” Gladstone described Rawson as clear-headed, well-informed, indefatigable, and cheerful, and as giving satisfaction to visitors to the department. His statistical work gave him “a good knowledge of affairs of Canada, increased of late by interest when he took in watching the progress of the Government of Lord Sydenham, under whom he served at the Board of Trade, up to the moment of his replacement.” Stanley added, “If he has any politics, I believe they incline to Conservative, but certainly they are not violent.”183 Political leanings were somewhat in flux during the early to mid-1840s. Peel was coming to seem a better bet for liberal reform, according to G.R. Porter.184 His new job offered much scope for intellectual and political advancement for a man such as Rawson, looking to a career as a knowledge-worker and civil servant. Peel complained into the 1840s that he had no way to reward science or scholarship save “clerical preferment.”185 But it wasn’t clear whether Rawson was answerable to and paid by the Colonial Office, or the governor personally, or the provincial establishment. Rawson’s position was a matter of patronage, and that made it highly contentious and political. Governors, who swooped in and out of a colonial scene, had very few political levers outside of patronage (as Peel knew from his own experience in Ireland where, if you wanted support, he told Lord Liverpool in 1813, you must “purchase it”186). Canadian reformers soon began to attack Rawson both personally and professionally, and Rawson’s letters to Gladstone took on a plaintive note. In December 1842, Rawson reported to Gladstone, describing Bagot’s health – clearly in terminal decline – and his own ambiguous position, plagued by jealousy and ignorance:

5.4 | Rawson W. Rawson was a pioneering statistician, poverty expert, and civil servant who tried and failed to find a middle ground between liberal, conservative, and settler colonial politics in colonial Canada. Portrait courtesy of the Cory Library for Humanities Research at Rhodes University.

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I am Chief Secretary but inferior in rank & order of precedence to the Provincial Secretaries & every member of the Executive Council. This would not signify, but it is not generally known and people are continually making mistakes which place me in an awkward position as regards the Executive Council. It is natural too for the Governor to wish his confidential Secretary to stand next to himself, & accordingly I sit opposite to him at dinner, but have to sneak into my place how best I can. In business I have nothing to do with provincial affairs. I do not know what occurs or is determined upon in Council except what the Governor mentions to me, or I learn incidentally from some member of it. There is a great, I admit a natural & justifiable jealousy of my interference in any provincial matter, or of my exerting any influence with the Govr. The Council are his advisors or agents, responsible to him, tacitly to one another – and really to the Assembly. And yet I am his confidential Servant, whom he constantly advises – though by no means invariably. In all the recent negotiations with Lafontaine, altho’ Sir C. discussed the general measures with me, and always told me what had been done, many things were determined upon & were in course of execution before they came to my knowledge. I am therefore half confidant & half responsible, while in a majority of cases I am neither one nor the other. I am not very regardful of public opinion, as long as I can look into my conscience, & satisfy myself that I have not willfully or blindly done wrong, but I cannot but be sensible that my future reputation is in some degree wrapped up with the good or ill administration of this government, although as I have shown I have very little to do with it or rather am only entitled to a whisper in its conduct. He worried that inaccurate calumnies might be reaching them.187 Political discretion required exquisite politesse: Rawson’s letters showed the vulnerability of a classic Jane Austen heroine, negotiating across a social minefield. The ambiguities of the position notwithstanding, Rawson reported positively on Canadian politics and loyalty. “Affairs are going on very smoothly here. The feeling of the French Canadians towards Sir Charles personally & politically is very good,” as were the feelings of Upper Canadians. “I do not believe that Baldwin and his associates have what in England would be deemed extreme views. He desires to have a government in which the wishes of the people can be fairly heard & possess its legitimate influence. But he has expressed most strongly to me his opinion that the interests of Canada are bound up with those of Great Britain, & that with a just Provincial Government the greatest misfortune to Canada would be a separation from the mother country. Upon the French Canadians, justly treated, I look as the Conservative staple of the colony.”

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Things deteriorated along with Bagot’s laboured breathing. Baldwin and Lafontaine took over the everyday business of government and did not welcome Rawson. He lacked local knowledge from local networks, but also could “know” nothing officially by dint of his ambiguous position. His extensive and sophisticated knowledge of society and the state counted for nothing. The polarization around imperial versus colonial warrants to knowledge and action made Rawson’s identity, authority, and knowledge seem like imperial overreach, to be jealously rebuffed by the reformers. But there was something that he could usefully know and do, thereby also serving his twin masters, the Colonial Office and “science.” He could undertake the kind of statistical investigation that was serving as “political education” in England, namely, the inquiry into the Indian Department that Bagot had mandated in October 1842. He could make himself expert once again. The work must have seemed a godsend: it played to his strengths as a bureaucratic knowledge expert at a moment when such men as Porter and Chadwick were making a career and reconstructing government on such projects. Anodyne legislation was getting passed in Canada, unlike Britain where specialized knowledge was providing political solutions to social problems, including corn law repeal and public health. Ruggiero observes, “Liberalism had taken its place in the traditional life of England; and once in contact with facts, had learned to do justice to the forces in its environment making for resistance and stability.”188 Social statistics, economic data, and public health seemed to point towards a more informed and less polarized mode of governance. Rawson could not have been better prepared by experience for what Canada seemed most urgently to need. And the Indian Department was ripe for the kind of massive informational and bureaucratic overhaul that the Poor Law Commission had been imposing in England, replacing local oligarchies with centralized oversight. Senior, one of the key architects of the poor law reform, wrote in 1835 that never “was any country more thoroughly dug up, trenched, and manured than ours will have been during the last and the ensuing year.”189 But colonial problems and tensions remained obscure, with a “hamstrung” Aborigines’ Protection Society desperate for reliable information from the colonies to challenge the colonizing lobby.190 The Canadian Indian Department looked like another such field for reform to overcome a misplaced local paternalism and corrupt local elites. At its head was Samuel Peters Jarvis, disgraced scion of the Family Compact, whose accounting in the Indian Department did not bear up under scrutiny. John Leslie noted that pressures for administrative reform had been ramped up by Durham’s “scathing indictment of the civil services of the two Canadas before Union,”191 but the Indian Department had remained relatively neglected. Rawson’s commission held fifteen months of hearings and accumulated such voluminous evidence and conclusions that it had to be published

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as two sessional papers. In effect, Rawson seized the opportunity to write an expert report that might, following Durham and Chadwick, transform state and society. Yet you couldn’t help but note the tensions between those very different “liberal” projects: the one for colonial self-education through political engagement, the other for a managerial infrastructure project. Rawson had to make a choice. All the while, his situation grew more painful and precarious. Bagot resigned his commission in January 1843, and in late March Sir Charles Metcalfe arrived to succeed him. Rawson initially welcomed Metcalfe’s appointment. A letter to Gladstone in April 1843 bustled with enthusiastic prospects for immigration and wheat production around the Huron Tract, and exclaimed, “I like Sir C. Metcalfe very much.”192 Metcalfe was more reserved and silent than Bagot but “he appears very kind, willing to listen, most diligent, and ready to appreciate any attempts to please him.” He thanked Gladstone for recommending him to Metcalfe. These rosy accounts did not last long. Metcalfe concluded that Bagot’s illness had allowed the executive council to act like a governing cabinet, effectively running the country. Metcalfe determined to undo that overreach by transferring the work from the executive council to staff under his control, namely his secretariat: “One of my first duties, was to resume the authority of the Governor with respect to the ordinary transaction of business, conducting the administration of the Government through the secretaries, without reference to the council except in cases in which the law required that I should have their consent, or in which I was desirous to avail myself of their advice.”193 But where Bagot had propped up Rawson’s authority by keeping his secretary at his side, Metcalfe saw Rawson as completely unconnected from himself. Rawson was unpleasantly repudiated on all sides, he told Gladstone in a letter dated August 1843. Francis Hincks was recommending the civil and private secretaryships be merged, with a reduced salary, and, “having bit at my heel, dares not look me in the face – a most cur-like consequence.” More damaging, however, was Metcalfe’s repudiation. Under Sir C. Bagot I was the first officer on his staff, the first at his table, & recognized as such. Sir C. Metcalfe however does not consider me to belong to his personal staff – and I am only a guest at his table, his Private Secretary taking my place. I have had two or three conversations on this subject with Higgins (his Priv. Sect.), & one with Sir C. Metcalfe himself, and from both I learn that it is merely because I am rejected by the Colonial officers, as not belonging to them, that Sir Charles treats me otherwise than as one of them.

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Rawson felt himself in an “undefined & false position.” But he could not deny the correctness of Sir Charles’s view. He says: – You are an officer of the colonial Department, attached to the colony, and not to me – I have no voice in your selection – Your habits or manners might be offensive to me – Your political views, or your mode of business might be opposed to mine – How then can I consider you as belonging to me and my staff? And still more to my household? The difficulty might be got over, (as I hope & believe that I should neither be offensive nor opposed to him,) by his adopting me as Sir. C. Bagot did – but Sir C. Metcalfe is not a likely person to do this, and there is his old friend & Private Secretary in the way, whom he naturally wishes to maintain as far as possible in the first place, to which he would have appointed him, (I mean my office) if it had been open.194 Even Stanley had preferred Metcalfe’s secretary, James Macaulay Higginson, to Rawson, having offered him the civil secretaryship before Rawson.195 Metcalfe considered Rawson “a very estimable and amiable character,”196 but still wanted to abolish his position. He wanted a provincial secretary responsible to the legislature, and his own personal secretary as a civil secretary. The reformers wanted only the provincial secretary but finally (in 1846) permitted a private secretary with a reduced salary. Metcalfe had scant room to negotiate, with Stanley warning him not to revise the civil list in the Canada Union Act.197 Metcalfe prepared for an open break with the colonial reformers that finally came in November 1843, when the executive council, excepting only the provincial secretary Dominick Daly, resigned en masse. Even Hincks fell back into line with Baldwin and Lafontaine, who claimed that Metcalfe had spent too much time in India to be suited to governing liberal British subjects. Metcalfe justified his position as necessary to preserve state impartiality and the British connection, considering the reformers’ pledges of loyalty “utterly worthless.” But the result, he observed, was to unite “the whole colony” as “a party opposed to Her Majesty’s Government.”198 For the next nine months, known as “the Metcalfe crisis,” Metcalfe ran Canada with a skeleton ministry, consisting only of William Henry Draper and Denis-Benjamin Viger, representatives from Upper and Lower Canada respectively, plus Dominick Daly.199 Viger, another Anglophile (who had collaborated with Garneau in London in the 1830s), desperately feared more widespread violence.200 In 1823, Daly had been named private secretary to the lieutenant governor of Lower Canada, Sir Francis Nathaniel Burton. When Burton fell out with the governor general, Lord Dalhousie, Daly was caught between the two until in 1827 he was formally attached to

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Dalhousie’s retinue as provincial secretary. Dalhousie protested the appointment but the Colonial Office insisted upon it. Daly remained in post over the next decade, apparently persuading both the governor and the colonial legislators, with whom he had very cordial relations, that he served both camps.201 Durham confirmed him in place and so did Sydenham in 1841, but only after Daly had, on Sydenham’s advice, run for and won election to the legislative assembly. Both Rawson and Gibbon Wakefield formed friendly relations with him and followed his advice. But in 1843 when relations deteriorated, Daly, like Rawson and Wakefield, chose Metcalfe’s part. The reformers, apparently warned of Daly’s choice in advance, a month before resigning tried to “destroy” his reputation by accusing him of attempting to appropriate for the governor the proceeds of marriage licences. Daly was exonerated and, indeed, went on to win re-election, but responsible government effectively ended his career in Canada and only minor offices elsewhere followed.202 Higginson was also subjected to scurrilous rumours about his relationship to Metcalfe.203 Rawson must have watched those attacks with something more than dismay. The Metcalfe crisis evaporated Rawson’s sympathy for the reformers. They had, he exclaimed to Gladstone in November, taken a stand over “formal demand for an entire control over the disposal of Patronage! … The question is a crucial one, for they go out on a vital principle of ‘responsible government,’ and will avail themselves of that cuckoo cry to enlist popular opinion in their favour.” They timed it to hold up supplies, but had, he trusted, “overshot the mark.” A long analysis of issues and voting strengths followed. Rawson believed that Metcalfe could command enough supporters to win votes in the assembly by breaking up French-Canadian political solidarity: “if no other good arise than division of the French Canadian Phalanx, a great point will have been gained.”204 By December, Rawson was undeceived. Lafontaine held his phalanx (the vote was forty-six to twenty-three), and Metcalfe could not find men willing to form a governing council: “Few men are willing to risk their position with their party. The conservatives are willing enough but they are too few. The moderates are chary. The Reformers are loath.”205 In London, Rawson’s letters were circulated amongst the cabinet and sent to Buckingham Palace, as proof that Metcalfe was behaving reasonably. Peel and Stanley valued the letters because they stood in the same relation to Metcalfe as Metcalfe to Rawson. Sir Robert Peel told Parliament in May 1844 that “not one single Member of Her Majesty’s present Government was personally acquainted with Sir Charles Metcalfe … He was not connected with them either by political or by personal ties”: he had been chosen for his experience and his “moderation and firmness” in previous postings.206 Small wonder he opposed purely partisan appointments. Details were also useful amidst real unclarity about the dispute that divided Metcalfe and his advisors. Methodist minister and

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educator Egerton Ryerson defended Metcalfe, arguing that the trigger was not a veto on Baldwin and Lafontaine’s attempts to prohibit “secret societies,” that is, violent right-wing groups that conservatives had regularly called upon for thuggish purposes. The law was aimed against the Orange Order, notoriously put to work, by Bond Head and Sydenham amongst others, to beat and intimidate rival supporters. The Orange Order blurred distinctions between social violence and discreet state sanction for the violence, across British North America.207 Metcalfe had reserved the bill and Stanley had vetoed it on grounds that Queen Victoria “cannot be advised to concur in an enactment placing any class of Her Majesty’s Subjects beyond the protection of the Law, and depriving them, without a previous conviction for crime, of the privileges to which all British Subjects have a common title.” Yes, such societies were a threat to peace – but executive prerogative and informal appeal to loyalty was a better check on “their possible excesses” than legislation, according to Stanley’s despatch of 27 March 1844.208 Ryerson saw criminalization without crime that would strip its victims of such civil rights as the right to serve on a jury, reducing them “very nearly to the state of aliens and slaves – though still subjects of taxation,” something not seen in any other part of the empire.209 Conservatives would be encouraged, rather than required, to distance themselves from violent intimidation, and to prefer white intimidators. Rawson confronted a very different situation than Darling. Rawson’s political usefulness was clearly at an end by late in 1843 and in December he gratefully accepted a new commission as treasurer and paymaster-general in Mauritius. Stanley made the offer but, Rawson told Gladstone, he knew whom to thank. He would have preferred a posting back home in Britain, but to Mauritius he finally went, with a long detour to visit his family in Italy en route. Once in Mauritius, the chatty letters soon resumed, as Rawson reflected upon the messy closing down of slavery and the labour shortage consequent upon it. He left Mauritius in 1854 to become colonial secretary in the Cape of Good Hope, where he advocated self-government, studied ferns, and supported the establishment of a museum. He left both those governments in drastic financial distress that critics blamed upon him, but still became governor of the Bahamas in 1864 and then of the Windward Islands. In 1875 he retired from colonial service and returned to Britain and to the Statistical Society, continually on its council from 1876 and president from 1884–86; in 1885, he also became the founding president of the International Statistical Institute. His inaugural lecture celebrated the British Empire for its size, wealth, and high proportion of civilized to uncivilized peoples.210 His statistical interests were by now focused on trade – the sort of work that Porter had done – and he had left the poverty research far behind. A wistful late letter to Chadwick reflected on that early blighted interest.211

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But Rawson didn’t leave Canada without seeing deposited, in January 1844, the voluminous report of the Bagot Commission, long understood as a keystone of emerging Canadian policies of assimilation. Once again, the genre of “report” deserves to be analyzed as social and political history. Rawson commanded the most advanced intellectual tools of the day to write proto-sociology. He was personally and politically close to Quetelet, for whom sociological knowledge was knowledge of general laws: “so long as the same causes exist, we must expect a repetition of the same effects.” Social statistics must span cultural divides to produce universal laws. Canada’s “Indians” must also be studied, like everyone else, as social beings. And as a poverty expert, Rawson was well equipped to recognize an Indigenous poverty problem in Canada. It followed from his researches and from the previous Canadian reporters, Darling and Durham, both of whom saw that comparative poverty was driving Canadian political tensions. Like Darling, Rawson realized that Indigenous people were losing their land and becoming impoverished. Like Durham, he saw the need for historical analysis of cause and effect. Unlike them, Rawson sought social explanations for these events. How could people with land be impoverished? How to understand poverty in a dispersed population: the antithesis of the crowded London slum? Were the causes of Indigenous poverty biological, or economic, or social? The Bagot Commission’s report fell into some obviously racializing language and conceptual traps. But it also shows a remarkable attempt to identify social mechanisms of dispossession, operating in Canada very differently from the United States, albeit in tandem. Rawson’s experiences and associations in England were explicitly anti-racist by the standards of the day. Cole Harris identifies “a broad tradition of liberal humanitarianism that was rooted in the Enlightenment and in early nineteenth-century Protestant evangelical Christianity. By the 1830s it considerably influenced the Colonial Office and acquired a good deal of parliamentary power.”212 Rawson’s own writings on statistics tended more towards nurture than nature arguments for even such hardwired human traits as laughter and tears. He thought that any child raised among people who cried when they were happy and laughed when they were sad would do the same. Human nature was plastic for Rawson, as for his boss and patron G.R. Porter, a vocal critic of race-based theories of poverty. In 1841, Porter published an influential free-trade tract, The Many Sacrificed to the Few; Proved by the Effects of the Sugar Monopoly, that combined liberal economics and politics to attack an economic oligarchy disproportionately benefitting itself and injuring the greater good. The numbers were very precise: the sugar tariff benefitted the 283,997 men employed in agriculture as against the 5,836,889 not in agriculture, effectively taxing nineteen people to benefit the twentieth. Porter dismantled the diatribes against purportedly

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idle ex-slaves (such as voiced by Lord Dalhousie to justify steering resources away from Black loyalists and refugees in Nova Scotia213). Porter argued that wherever they were well treated and well reimbursed, they worked hard, and counterexamples must be blamed on “causes which class under slavery, and not under freedom.” Again, “paid by the day, their productivity was below the average Norfolk labourer; paid by the hour, it was equal and sometimes better.”214 Porter showed Rawson how to “see” race in economic and social statistics. Progress was best accomplished by exploding oligarchy, racial or otherwise. Rawson also had connections with the Aborigines’ Protection Society, formed in 1836 by abolitionists and Quaker circles turning their attention from slavery to this new moral quagmire. aps founders such as Saxe Bannister and Thomas Hodgkin thought the global diaspora and resettlement was “a natural consequence of the laws governing the human race,” but sought to make them more humane through Christianizing and civilizing.215 In 1835, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton moved and obtained the creation of the parliamentary committee on Aborigines in British settlements. It soon began to publish local observations, including the Darling report, to indict the terrible suffering and impoverishment resulting from British imperial expansion.216 Conditions in British North America were singled out: especially in the Hudson’s Bay territories, where the company’s callous treatment of Indigenous peoples was denounced by Richard King; and also in Upper Canada, where Francis Bond Head put the “dying race” argument towards unilateral dispossession. Bond Head argued that the attempt “to make farmers of the red men” and congregate them “for the purpose of civilization” had failed, implanting more vices than it eradicated. The dispersed remaining populations should be congregated at Manitoulin Island where they could quietly die off, while the rest of southern Ontario could go under the plough.217 In breach of the Royal Proclamation, he forced new land cessions.218 Indigenous communities across the region erupted into protest, expressed through public meetings, petitions, and transatlantic Methodist and Quaker networks, denouncing the transfers as fraudulent and winning support from “humanitarians” in Britain. Citing Darling, they insisted on “the capacity for intellectual, moral, and social improvement in the coloured races” and on the need for education as an avenue to agency and civilization.219 A memorial to Lord John Russell when he became colonial minister in 1839 urged him to enact a “Magna Charta of the coloured races generally.”220 The Colonial Office conceded that Bond Head’s policies were “misguided,” but did not return the land.221 Herman Merivale was another Rawson associate.222 He was an Oxfordtrained scholar and lawyer, an active member of the London Statistical Society, and from 1837 to 1841, the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at

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Oxford (the position won because his main rival “chose to promulgate some unsound opinions in the matter of infant baptism”223). He delivered and then in 1841 published Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, reissued in 1861, by which time he had replaced James Stephen as undersecretary in the Colonial Office. Merivale was an early fan of Quetelet and statistics: he recommended the February 1839 issue of the London Statistical Society’s journal to Macvey Napier at the Edinburgh Review, remarking that: “If it is not a science, it must be at least what Aristotle would have called an art: the art of arranging figures & statements in such a manner as to lead the mind as precisely as possible to the subject of inquiry.”224 Merivale thought in racial stereotypes: “The boatman of the American lakes is still a Frenchman to the core.”225 But, rejecting Franklin’s and Bond Head’s argument for incapacity, he described North American Indigenous peoples as of “higher moral elevation than any other uncivilized race of mankind.”226 Merivale debunked the declension narrative as self-serving and false, using Rawson’s statistics to make the case. He denounced the Hudson’s Bay Company and also the Royal Proclamation for claiming to protect Indigenous people on their lands, while in practice “every art has been introduced to obtain their consent to the usurpations made upon them; bit by bit they have been deprived of their magnificent hunting-grounds.”227 Rawson came to Canada as a scientist, statist, and liberal humanitarian. Those early leanings were confirmed during the early months of his investigation, in February and March 1843, when he transmitted to the attorney general, L.H. Lafontaine, petitions from Abenaki communities at Bécancour and Saint-François, complaining of depredations and encroachments on their land and asking for protection.228 This was a moment of rising numbers of petitions coming from the Abenaki, Haudenosaunee, and Algonquin-Nipissing peoples at different settlements across the Canadas confirming the poverty and predation identified by Darling. They warned that without protection for settlements and hunting and fishing, they would soon be “dead of hunger,” according to one such petition made in 1847 by more than 130 Innu men at Taddoussac.229 The Bagot report made the same argument, while rejecting Bond Head’s declensionist arguments as baseless and self-interested. That quarrel ran deep. Bond Head had been an engineer involved in the financial bust that destroyed Rawson’s family wealth. Bond Head’s memoirs of his experience, published in October 1826, had demolished any residual hope of a mining boom in Argentina. He had attacked the paucity and inaccessibility of the minerals, the climate, corrupt politicians, and a population “perfectly destitute of the idea of a contract, of punctuality, or of the value of time.” Investors and bondholders greeted the book with “dismay.”230 Rawson was personally, professionally, and politically disposed to disagree with everything that Bond Head said about the incapacity

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and illiberal governance of poor and racialized people, as a libel. The Bagot report stated flatly at the outset: “As Sir F. Head’s views differ from the most competent authorities, and do not appear to be supported by experience,” they could be summarily dismissed.231 Bond Head was wrong to claim that Indigenous people had a “peculiar inaptitude” for farming and civilization; or that “congregating them for the purpose of civilization has implanted many more vices than it has eradicated”; or that they should be isolated from whites on remote northern reserves. Rawson insisted on an aptitude for progress, to be achieved the same way that everyone progressed: by associating together in communities, by using property, and by education. His model of history owed more to Hume and Quetelet than to stadialism. Social statistics presumed rough uniformity of humanity and history. Bond Head had reasoned from “the pig-sty history of our poor laws”232 to Canada. He pressed for a centralized poor law workhouse to make relief central and uniform under principles of less eligibility.233 Annuities and presents to Indigenous people looked like a kind of natural experiment, a test case in pauperization by the state.234 Bond Head saw in the “swinish government from the belly” a deeper political pattern: “A desire to pull down the aristocracy of a country proceeds only from jealousy ignorant of human nature.”235 The Bagot Commission, forced to decide which was the more jealous, the colonial oligarchs or the racialized poor, came round to Durham’s conclusion: Indigenous poverty was a consequence of illiberal rule. Durham had identified an English-Canadian oligarchy putting the state to purposes of racial predation. Rawson saw the same thing, with broader social and ethnic inputs. But Durham’s solution – political liberalization – could only intensify, not resolve, Rawson’s problem. The Canadian public was united in its pursuit of Indigenous dispossession. Britain alone imposed any kind of check on spoliation; no such check existed in Canada. The Canadian public, deeply polarized politically, was not so polarized in regards to Indigenous dispossession. The Bagot Commission prefaced its recommendations with the observation: “the settlers in almost every Colony, having either, disputes to adjust with the native Tribes, or claims to urge against them, the Representative body is virtually a party, and, therefore, ought not to be the judge in such controversies.”236 This was Metcalfe’s objection to a partisan state, carried into “Indian” policy. The Indian Department, still largely in thrall to the old Wellingtonian policies and personnel, would look very different if a reform government could completely re-staff it on partisan lines.237 Responsible government would strip away any modest protections for Indigenous peoples against dispossession. Thus could a Rawson find common cause with the local tories on the Bagot Commission, in favour of the executive and the British connection. A tory tilt continued to imbue British understandings of Canada’s “Indian” question. The Canadian electorate

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had become an organized political force and come to enjoy control of the legislature, because the settler interest was powerfully unifying. But irresponsible government was no solution to the problem. Because unpopular and irresponsible government officials enjoyed an “invidious elevation, in which they are supported by no other title than that of the preference of the Crown, they will endeavour to abate the ill-will which follows on such superiority, by ministering to all popular prejudices which do not directly invade the power and the rights of the Government they serve.”238 Such governments would give the land away as a non-political sop to a united settler opposition. Even if Indigenous declension was political and predatory, rather than natural and foreordained, how to stop it? “Civilizing” public opinion would not protect land that Indigenous people “can neither occupy nor protect against the encroachments of white squatters, with whom, in the vain attempt to guard their lands, they are brought into a state of constant hostility and collision.”239 “Collision” was the language of Durham, the evidence of a faulty constitution. But Indigenous people were too few to polarize politics as the Patriots had done, too vulnerable to the tyranny of the majority. Natural justice could not protect them because natural justice was adequate resources for all, and impoverished emigrants needed subsistence: the commission quoted Vattel to argue that “the people of Europe, too closely pent-up at home, finding land of which the Savages stood in no particular need, and of which they made no actual and constant use, were lawfully entitled to take possession of it, and to settle it with Colonies.”240 There was no alternative to dispossession, on the Bagot Commission reading, and the only choice was as to its greater or lesser hostility and violence. Had the government not made arrangements for land cessions, “the white settlers would gradually have taken possession of them, without offering any compensation whatever; it would, at that time, have been as impossible to resist the natural laws of society, and to guard the Indian Territory against the encroachments of the whites, as it would have been impolitic to have attempted to check the tide of immigration.” The British government had wisely chosen to minimize violence. Political economy’s logic was harsh, seen from above. What of the dense social world seen from below? In London, Rawson had made himself the vibrant centre of a social-statistical information network, using local observers. In Canada he had to do so again, making himself an ersatz one-man statistical society, to coalesce local knowledge, universal science, and state power. The commissioners put together a long list of questions, everything an ambitious statistician wanted to know about the material and social condition of Indigenous people and any processes of “refinement.” The commissioners posed fifty-three questions for Indian agents and twenty-four for

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missionaries and other people acquainted with them. Agents were asked, briefly summarized: how long have you been an agent; have the Indians improved; can you evaluate their settlement (villages or farms? buildings or wigwams?); how land was chosen for cultivation, how it was cultivated, and how the landless subsisted; whether improved land was secure from other Indians and whether it could be securely conveyed; what instruments and implements were used, what kinds and quantities of produce; whether young men worked, whether the day was systematically divided, how they dined, whether they fished and hunted, where they went; what impact of settlement, whether heathen or Christian, and what impact their faith had on their worship, their morality, and their attitude to improvement; what schools they attended and how well, and how apt the children were for learning or mechanical arts; whether some were tradesmen; how their health compared to the nearby white population; what were the prevailing diseases, whether increasing or decreasing since their civilization; how they managed reproduction and marriage; what proportion were half-breeds and how distinct; whether Indian women lived unmarried with white men and the impact on their children; and, finally, three questions in regard to political rights: “Do any of the Indians enjoy all or any of the civil and political rights possessed by other subjects of Her Majesty?” Did children of intermarriage enjoy such rights? And “in your opinion, have the Indians the knowledge and ability to exercise those rights?” Questions for missionaries further probed the business of education and whether there was any means of checking their excess mortality. The answers weren’t drawn up in tabular form but reproduced at great length in an appendix, like Chadwick’s 1842 report. Finally, conclusions were drawn by the commissioners. As in Britain, Rawson relied on petit bourgeois informants as crucial mediators between the subjects of statistical inquiry and the expert knowers at the centre of that project. The formula was more expansive and rigorous than Gourlay’s and avoided making his error of asking the subjects themselves what held them back. The Bagot Commission had no intention of becoming a vehicle for popular grumbling. The questionnaires were supposed to yield hard data about dirt and disease, as well as evidence of moral and intellectual capacity. Rawson, like Kahkewaˉquonaˉby or Peter Jones, believed he could find and authenticate evidence for civilization, using evidence from witnesses: Indian agents, priests, and doctors. But because the commission relied primarily on Eurowestern officials mandated to administer the affairs and interests of Indigenous people, it got results that represented those petit bourgeois officials more than the subjects of his inquiry. The exception was Peter Jones of the Credit River Mississauga, whose nowtwo-decades-old civilization project was, once again, amplified by a report looking for useful Indigenous voice and agency. Jones had, since 1828, twice

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travelled to Britain to lobby on behalf of his nation, in 1829 and 1837; he would go a third time in 1845. He frequented prominent evangelical circles and married into a wealthy English manufacturing family. Transatlantic discourses and data were being integrated into a cosmopolitan discourse, reflecting complex issues and demands at either end. Rawson and Jones, Bagot and Metcalfe were well situated to renew the old alliances between crown and calumet, but they failed. Settler colonialism was too powerful, and so were its British champions: not just the democratizers, but also the anti-democratizers reconstructing British politics around a hard-headed, financial version of public opinion. The tangled governance of mind and body, by education and public health, infused the Bagot report. If the poor, as Chadwick was arguing on the other side of the ocean, were poor because they were filthy and diseased, might not the same be true of Indigenous peoples of British North America? Might civilization be sanitary? Eighteenth-century stadial theorists including Kames and Ferguson drew connections between savagery, poverty, and a predisposition to putridity, as did their polygenist heirs.241 Dirt was matter out of place, that is, cultural difference rendered as pathology.242 Many witnesses linked cleanliness and civilization, and saw in their absence the lack of any ability to exercise agency: individual, domestic, or collective. One witness from Manitowaning, Thomas G. Anderson, denied that there was any “such thing as domestic life among the uncivilized Indians … all their time being occupied in providing food and clothing.”243 At Walpole Island, Supt J.W. Keating spelled out the comparison in detail: No person who has not seen the Indians in their natural state, and civilized, can form any notion of the vast difference between the two. The former, squalid, dirty, and in rags, the latter warmly and comfortably clad, the one, barely drawing a scanty subsistence from the chase, wallowing in his intoxication, in his angry passions, aroused, illtreating [sic] his wife and family, or attempting the life of his friend; the other supplied with regular and abundant meals, a comfortable house, surrounded with domestic animals, and leading the quiet, orderly life of the well-to-do respectable farmer … Let the Village of the Ottawas at Manitowaning be my example. It contains at least sixty neat log houses, whitewashed within and without, erected by the Indians themselves; a good Church also built by them, and stands in the midst of several hundred acres of land under flourishing condition … Any person who has visited Manitowaning at the time of the issue of presents, can with me testify to the excessive neatness of the Ottawa lodges, and to the constant employ of their inmates, they never seem to know want; but for their numerous charities, their less fortunate brethren would at that time be badly off.244

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It was also widely agreed that the Credit River Mississauga had been improved by civilization, according to reported testimony. Reverend B. Slight of Amherstburg remarked: “I have heard many of the old inhabitants, contiguous to the Credit, remark this with admiration: once they were filthy, drunken, debased creatures, now are they elevated, cleanly, sober. This improvement has had a decisive effect on their social habits; females have assumed their rank in society, children are tenderly cared for: in general they assume the form of well-organized families; they have good and comfortable houses, a few approaching even to the superior comforts of white people in their internal arrangements.”245 Likewise, Reverend James Coleman, who came to Walpole Island after seven years with the Credit band, contrasted accounts of their earlier “disorder, destitution, both in food and clothing, and dirt” with their current circumstances: “fixed residence in a good and comfortable house, gardens, order, plenty of food and clothing, cleanliness in house, person and food; and every necessary household utensil. Many of the Indian houses at the Credit were furnished with good beds, bedsteads, tables, chairs, all necessary cooking vessels and instruments, with the utmost cleanliness of all, not excepting the persons of the females who presided over and used them.”246 Peter Jones argued that Christianity and village settlement provided self-civilization enough, and the churchmen backed his claims. But a specifically medical before-and-after contrast was harder to get. If the goal was to persuade mobile peoples to settle down in villages, then a social medicine aimed against density was counterproductive. The liberal case for fresh air and free movement had to be made to attack a hunting lifestyle, the epitome of fresh air and free movement and even gentility itself, sold as such in Britain by travel entrepreneurs.247 The case had to be made that settled “Indians” were healthier. That’s what many informants saw and argued. Reverend W. Scott, stationed at the Upper St Clair Reserve, insisted that Indigenous health was “quite as good” as that of Europeans and that excessive mortality, should it occur, which it did not, would be remedied by the Gospel.248 Catholic sources tended to insist on the rude good health of Catholics that Protestants, ever the skeptics, disbelieved. But many observers made a connection between consumption and exposure. That was less true of the more settled reserves around Montreal – there, observers insisted on general good health, and blamed the prevalence of pulmonary diseases, consumption, and scrofula on reserve conditions: poverty, overwork, late weaning. Elsewhere, the Abenaki and Algonquin at Trois Rivières were said to be “good housekeepers” who became overheated by running after wild animals. At Bay of Quinté, Mohawk inhabitants were said to be healthy but suffered badly during epidemics – “but this may be attributed to their mode of life, exposure to wet, and the absence of prompt Medical advice when first

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attacked.”249 Children there suffered from irregularity and exposure when their parents hunted or imbibed. At the Six Nations reserve, Superintendent James Winnett found that the inhabitants’ health was comparable to that of whites, save that such diseases of civilization as measles hit them harder. Infant mortality he blamed on exposure to inclement winters. At the Thames River, Superintendent Joseph B. Clench described the health amongst the Delaware, Chippewas, Munsees, and Oneidas as generally good, but injured by lack of food and medical attention; they were more subject to consumption than were whites, brought on by intemperance and exposure to wet and cold during hunting and fishing. George Ironside described the Chippewas, Hurons, Shawnees, and Munsees at Amherstburgh and Point Pelée as having much improved health, equal to that of nearby whites, thanks to their increasingly sedentary lifestyle; any increase in ill health was due to exposure, intemperance, and poorness of living. Similarly, William Jones remarked of the Chippewas of the Upper St Clair reserve that as their exposure and intemperance receded, their health improved, because their strong constitutions enabled them to avoid the summer fevers that whites experienced. Reverend J. Neelands, of Owen Sound, blamed declining numbers on intemperance, exposure to cold and hunger, and the absence of medical aid. But a few were perplexed to discover that civilization did not reduce mortality. John Strachan, bishop of Toronto since 1839, noted as much: “When collected in villages, disease seems rather to increase for a time, owing, perhaps, to a change of habits, particularly consumption.” He developed a complicated theory to explain why wigwams actually caused less exposure than did warm houses: people who lived in them lived as if on the hunt: they kept their feet dry and moved around a great deal. “But when they get warm houses, they are less careful when they go out, and do not protect their feet from melted snow and cold rains – hence consumptions are more frequent in villages, than when living in their natural way.”250 John Strachan, no doubt, knew a thing or two about drafty buildings and cold feet, but the commissioners understood that better footwear could only do so much. Medical men saw ill health both before and after settlement, sometimes in specifically racial-constitutional terms. Paul Darling, a surgeon working at Manitoulin, debunked claims of a vigorous constitution: people there suffered from “original weakness of constitution,” as well as from the severe climate, irregular mode of life, and constant exposure.251 He detailed other ailments, as did another medical man, Alfred Digby, writing from Brantford, who identified a peculiar susceptibility to eruptive diseases: “The skin is much thicker and harder on the Indians (from exposure to all kinds of weather) than that of the whites, and the eruption cannot come to the surface as readily in the former as the latter.”252 Their homes were too cold to permit proper treatment of patients and he urged a hospital be

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fitted up, to warm, feed, and isolate the ill. Disease and dirt were the bread and butter of doctors, and they saw it everywhere. Here were early signs of a Chadwickian sanitarian project that would put doctors on reserves and in residential schools.253 The problem seemed particularly worrying by the early 1840s in regard to the Credit River Mississauga. They were settled and civilized. They had found that happy medium between forest, country, and city: a tidy, industrious village. And yet they died, not of epidemic but of constitutional diseases – tuberculosis above all. Indigenous consumption seemed to be an inevitable by-product of European consumerism. The discovery greatly troubled Peter Jones or Kahkewaˉquonaˉby, who recounted reports from “old Indians” of robustly healthy, long-lived, and numerous Indian families before the whites came. The introduction of contagious diseases could not explain the prevalence of pulmonary illness. That prevalence Jones blamed upon the hardships incidental to their “former mode of living” – the excessive fatigues and fasting, the heavy work, and drunkenness and injuries inflicted on one another; “these things have laid the foundation for many pulmonary complaints, from which this present generation are suffering.”254 The sins of the fathers explained constitutional disease that could, in Lamarckian style, continue to ravage even healthily settled families. The problem went beyond the lived environment to a hereditary identity. But an emphasis on consumption was an emphasis on individual morbidity and a challenge to social medicine. It individualized and racialized the “constitution” that progressive medical theorists were making general and social. It put race rather than racism, biology rather than sociology, at the heart of the problem of Indigenous poverty and population. Though dirt and ill health figured prominently in the answers to Rawson’s questions, the report’s conclusions ignored them. As the commissioners described one village after another in material form, tallying their houses and barns and so forth, and noting whether they were growing or not, they made no reference to these villages as environmental or hygienic spaces. The only mention of dirt was in reference to roaming Pottawatamies at Walpole Island, who were “wild, turbulent, mendicant, and dishonest.” Unpropertied by choice, “they prefer remaining poor, ragged, and filthy, to the restraint of civilized life: they are burthen on their [settled] brethren.”255 Originally from the southwest region of the Great Lakes, the Pottawatami were forcibly removed westward during the 1830s and some came as visitors to Canada. It wasn’t just that they roamed but that they were American that made them specially worrying to the Bagot Commission, as they’d been to Darling. By contrast, the commissioners remarked of the converted and settled population at Manitoulin Island: “As regards civilization, they are more regular in their habits; dress more like white people, wash their hands and faces

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daily, and appear to be influenced in their conduct by the instructions they receive.”256 But personal hygiene received very small mention here and public hygiene even less. Rawson apparently came around to Whewell’s point of view, namely, distrust of local frontline observers of statistical data. Witnesses spoke often of dirt but the formal report did not. Rawson knew that public health required either Alison’s test of fevers or Chadwick’s test of dirt. But there was no typhus problem on Canadian reserves and no serious prospect of mounting a campaign to better govern Canada through the management of dirt and sewers. Chadwick had tallied dung heaps and foul-smelling privies from one end of England to the other. But Canada was supposed to be a fix for the Calmel buildings, not a recapitulation. To do a census of dirt or poverty in Canada was to damage either credibility or the prospects for immigration. But to exculpate the environment was to inculpate the people: if Canadian Indigenous peoples had a constitutional disease problem, then Francis Bond Head was correct and decline was natural, not driven by settler predation. Rawson knew how those deeply conservative political economy arguments played out in the Caribbean, in Ireland, Scotland, and England, and now in Canada: reactionary politics were constructing primitive identities as an avenue to illiberal rule. He pushed hard against it, but not hard enough. In Britain, the debate about public health was a debate about the causes of poverty and the state’s role in mitigating those causes. But the British analyses rested on the effects of dispossession, and what was needed in Canada was an analysis of the causes of dispossession. As a long-standing opponent of political-economic dogma, Rawson understood poverty as a social rather than a moral category, and as an empirical question to challenge political economy’s dogmas. Dogmatic, conservative readings saw Indigenous people as naturally declining and their land value naturally transferring to white hands. Rawson realized these were political rather than natural outcomes, lies designed to engineer a fiscal transfer. Canada needed the kind of analysis that Alison was performing in Scotland to counter Chadwick: a medical-social indictment of economics and inequality as predatory state capture. Impossible to imagine anything more political and likely to inflame Rawson’s vulnerable political position: not just a Gourlay but a Chartist Gourlay. Politics undermined the epistemological project of a fact-based Indian policy. It was hard and impolitic to know things. A decade earlier, in pursuing his statistical knowledge, G.R. Porter – and Rawson writing on his behalf – had diplomatically negotiated private interests across Britain and beyond. The Bagot Commission questionnaire was more standardized and less diplomatic. But Canada, as Bruce Curtis has shown, was not well fitted for a standardized knowledge project.257 Political disputes were insinuating partisanry into every nook and cranny of public negotiations. Objectivity

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could not be got in Canada, least of all amongst Indigenous settlements. Indigenous people were not transparent objects for knowledge and there were huge cultural barriers to the transformation of their lived experiences into statistical data. Rawson lacked the time and the experience to negotiate that cultural barrier, and Indigenous people themselves had no great incentive to yield up their knowledge to intrusive and standardized questioning that jarred with their own understandings. If you ask an Indigenous hunter about his catch, for example, he may resist telling you for fear of sounding boastful and making animals more reluctant to be caught in the future. Knowledge always exists in a context. Statistics does not just translate knowledge out of its context but transforms the context. Both political economy and social statistics sought to make knowledge more objective, that is, accessible to interchangeable knowers, like so many joint-stock investors, stripped from local moral and social contexts. Rawson’s project to create “Science in Canada” on the fly could only result in a settler-skewed epistemology and policy. Back home, Rawson had skillfully parsed the complicated social tensions in a place like Marylebone, checking a crude utilitarianism. In Canada, he fell short. Social science was supposed to solve the problem of the “dangerous classes.” In 1838 the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences had offered a prize for the best essay “based on positive observations, into the elements that make up the Parisian dangerous classes, and to indicate means that could be undertaken by the government, intelligent men, and employers to improve its dangerous and depraved members.”258 But Chadwick’s sanitary turn, from people to places, replaced “dangerous classes” with archaic institutions as the focus for reform, according to Christopher Hamlin. The Bagot Commission also saw no dangerous Indigenous classes, apart from those border-crossing Pottawatamis. Indeed, if the dangerous classes were those that threatened property – the gist of the prize-winning Paris essay, which demanded an authoritarian imposition of “public order, security, and property” – then in Canada the dangerous classes were settlers illegally encroaching on Indigenous lands. If you considered the story of progressive civilization as Hume had described it, as property growing more disseminated and secure, and you looked “East from Indian Country,”259 you saw decivilization rather than civilization. The Bagot Commission reiterated Darling’s analysis of plunder. Where Indians held “large blocks” of valuable land, there they became “objects of jealousy and dislike to their neighbours; of these the more unprincipled are always on the alert to take advantage of the weakness and ignorance of the Indians, and of their partiality for spirits, in order to plunder them of their improvements and other property.”260 Given local jealousies and local state capture, what could the British state, with its middle-power, “pax on both

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your houses” methods, do to rein them in? Durham and Chadwick had produced hugely important reports, the first founded on liberal principles of impartiality, the second on expertise and data, with commissioners Charles and Arthur Buller mediating between the two. Both were anti-democratic and both ascribed unflattering identities to “backwards” and impoverished populations that obstructed their versions of reform. Liberal reformers were quashing illiberal, oligarchical privilege, Durham nationally and Chadwick locally. The question was whether the new social statistics would enhance that levelling work or counteract it. Indigenous people were ambiguously propertied so they could be constructed as in or out of the liberal project of rule by property, interest, and opinion. The Bagot Commission, forced to make a choice, recommended that Indigenous people, too, be ruled like men, rather than like decaying matter. It advocated a racially neutral liberalism and self-civilization through ordinary mechanisms: secure use of property and self-schooling. But in practice, it lent momentum to their reversal. In 1840s Canada, reformers were slowly grasping an expansive control of the colonial state, politicizing for partisan purposes its offices and policies. Being in Canada politicized you, as Rawson knew all too well. In 1840s Britain, the pendulum was swinging the other way, towards centrist consensus around something broadly “public.” In January 1847, the Economist praised statesmen who acted “without regard to personal and party views” and “only on the broad principles established by political science.”261 One such compromise was around a public health apparatus and poor law reforms supported by both Peel and Russell, the costs mitigated by the fact of rising property values.262 In 1848, in the wake of the Andover scandal, Russell removed Chadwick and created a new Poor Law Board under Charles Buller, who had broken with the doctrinaire economists to vote with Russell for ten-hour legislation in 1844. The national state would moderate excess statism and excess laissez-faire. Austerity was unconscionable for Alison in Scotland, who sought a national program, he explained in the Statistical Society journal, because the same local people “who are to pay the tax for this purpose [of relief], are vested with an uncontrolled power, both of levying the tax, and of apportioning the relief given by it, there being practically no appeal from the decisions.” Scotland was worse off than other European countries where “the relief of destitution is invested with the authority, and administered with the uniformity of law.”263 Austerity in the Canadian Indian Department was no less unconscionable for Rawson, determined not to give the British state any excuse for withdrawing its protection. Chadwick’s project was too obviously political, dogmatic, and unaccountable.264 Francis Bond Head was the bane of the Bagot report for much the same reason. Like Durham, Rawson argued that the most ostentatiously loyal Britons in Canada posed the greatest danger to British interests there.

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Conditions on the Grand River continued to exemplify the problem of illiberal rule. Six Nations land and funds were being prised away by the officials supposed to protect them. Samuel Peters Jarvis had invested thousands of band funds into a failed navigation project and, when the venture failed, more was put to buying out white investors close to the lieutenant governor, Sir John Colborne. The Bagot Commission demanded that the funds be restored. No such restitution occurred and litigation continues to this day.265 The Bagot Commission also denounced a surrender of land that Jarvis had orchestrated in 1841, with signatures from seven chiefs but no public or council sanction, in breach of the Royal Proclamation. By 1843, some signatories had recanted or claimed never to have signed in the first place. The band council made a series of recommendations, demanding confirmation of 55,000 acres – about 5 per cent of the original Haldimand Tract – and the Bagot Commission backed that recommendation. The lands were indeed confirmed in 1847, though the Six Nations had to compensate the squatters evicted.266 At the same time, the Credit River Ojibwe were also relocated from Mississauga to the Haldimand Tract. As in 1763, existing claims were reinforced but earlier predations were not restored. Rawson plumped for the Durhamite fix: property, political agency, and a breaking-down of the ascriptions of identity that political partisanship was exacerbating. He understood that the new sanitarianism – a racialized discourse of dirt, disease, and danger267 – would only increase the insecurity of Indigenous property. Indigenous people must assimilate sufficiently to protect themselves and their property from settler jealousy because no one else could be trusted to protect them. There was no way to rescue anyone from politics in a Hobbesian world.268 Governments would not and could not protect Indigenous property where popular opinion opposed it. The purported protections in the Royal Proclamation were increasing the insecurity by exaggerating differences. For Rawson, Indigenous people were enough like other people to merit the same rights and to hold property in recognizably orthodox ways. Their tenure could be comfortably subsumed under the classifications of the London Statistical Society for holding property in general: individually, collectively, and through the state. It posed neither ontological nor epistemological problems for Rawson, but only political ones: the tyranny of the majority. Much of the report tallied the ways in which Indigenous people were like everyone else. They were “entitled to all the political privileges of the whites.”269 Norms, rather than laws, kept them from the polls. They had the same intellectual and moral qualities as anyone, and the same capacity for enlightened and disciplined politics. “They possess all the higher attributes of the mind; their perceptions of religion and their sense of moral obligations are just; their imagination is fertile; their

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aptitude for instruction, and their powers for imitation are great, neither are they wanting in a desire to improve their condition.” They sought “knowledge” and, once converted, were generally very anxious for the education of their children. Many are acting as Missionaries and Interpreters among their brethren in Canada and the Territories of the Hudson’s Bay Company, with credit to themselves, and infinite advantages to those under their charge. Most, if not all those who have received a good education, are equal in every respect to their white associates; some lads of the Upper Canada College have distinguished themselves highly. Among the Chiefs are many intelligent, well conducted, religious men, quite competent to manage their own affairs, and very shrewd in the protection of their own interests.270 Indigenous people were normal and, like everyone else, tilted by their leaders towards progress and self-civilization. The report, written in the wake of Durham’s project for the liberal, self-assimilation of French Canada, to be exercised through ordinary political agency, followed that model for Indigenous self-civilization. The Bagot Commission’s opening general recommendations, summarized, were: 1 Centralized control of Indian policy, under the crown, not the provincial authorities 2 Christianity 3 Education of the young and weaning them from feelings and habits of dependence 4 Schools with teachers and missionaries whose “efficiency should be carefully watched over” 5 Not just common schools, but manual labour or industrial schools 6 Recognition for the non-Anglican educators 7 Establishing schools in Lower Canada, notwithstanding missionary opposition 8 Familiarizing Indians with management of property and outlay of money, and with the exercise of such offices among themselves as they are qualified to fill, such as rangers, postmasters, and other offices, for ordinary township purposes 9 Spending patronage on Indians to build their own buildings and do other services for their own benefit 10 Supporting institutions to promote economy such as savings banks

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The next section dealt with presents, recommending commutation for settled bands and further presents for the unsettled; the next one dealt with land. Education and freehold tenure were the major recommendations. The report sought collective, self-assimilation, to be accomplished through ordinary acts of politics and commerce, including patronage and credit. The recommendation for savings banks saw credit as a right, not a privilege – a long-standing more general reform demand.271 At the Six Nations, the commission recommended 100-acre allotments for every family, ownership restricted to members in perpetuity. The proposal was initially rebuffed but enacted in 1847 along with the consolidation of reserve boundaries. The band council would negotiate claims on and disputes over the land to uphold traditional Haudenosaunee values.272 An Ajzenstatian perspective might see only enough assimilation to stabilize property so as to enable the market and the constitution to work impartially rather than racially. Peter Jones’s testimony to the Bagot Commission tended in that direction. Indigenous people were civilized and needed only recognition as such. An impartial state should see that “many of the Indians are sufficiently instructed in the knowledge of civil affairs to be able to use the rights of British subjects as judiciously as many of their white neighbours.” What held them back from “advancement in the arts of civilized life” was not their culture but their lack of “political rights or advantages … I know of no legal impediment to their possessing such rights; the difficulty lies in the tenure by which they hold their lands.” Jones remarked sardonically: “It was kind in the Government to act as guardians of the poor defenseless Indians, and to protect them from the frauds of unprincipled white men,” but the record of forced surrenders of land “cannot be considered as doing full justice to the natives.”273 Jones, whose father and wife were white, wanted racial, political, and bureaucratic intermixing: among the rights of the British subject that Indigenous peoples should enjoy were patronage and official position in churches and the state, as missionaries, school teachers, and leaders. They needed to vote nationally and locally; to sit as jurors; to have security of tenure; their own agricultural societies; and their own elders and chiefs appointed to such positions as “Councillors, and Superintendents of the Indian Department as Wardens; Byelaws [sic] could be passed for the regulation and improvement of the several communities of Indians in this Province; such as the enactment of a moral code of laws, performance of statute labour, and regulation of fences, &c. &c.” Like other reformers, Jones blamed the local oligarchs for obstructing advancement and urged political accountability to the governed. So long as education was self-education, then civilization could be selfcivilization. Both “education” and “civilization” are teleological; both posit a progressive interface of mind and world. Hume applied it to material

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civilization, Durham to local politics, Fellenberg to everyday life. Science became modern when it wrote practical knowledge of everyday life into scholarly knowledge: the findings of pilots into bookish geographies; the discoveries of engineers into physics; the discoveries of anatomists and empirics into medicine; and so on through the different branches of industry and knowledge. The Scientific Revolution emerged from that mixing of academic and practical knowledge, as did Diderot’s Encyclopedie. Hume’s recommendation of “the civilizing powers of commerce” as a corrective to state capture also reflected the new validation of material life: the state provided no better leadership than ordinary people doing ordinary things.274 For Durham, political education was local self-government. People educated themselves by their political activities. So, too, children educated themselves by doing rather than by rote learning, according to the educational theorists and reformers, from Locke and James Mill to Fellenberg and Egerton Ryerson. Complex ideas, as Hume had argued, were based on simple ideas united by the principle of association. If you engineered those associations to produce particular sequences, vividly conveyed, you could engineer thought itself. A whole genre of teaching by exhibiting was emerging, with such advocates as George Wilson at the University of Edinburgh, Regius Professor of Technology and first director of the Industrial Museum of Scotland.275 His historian brother, Daniel Wilson, made those principles an argument for reforming classificatory categories at the British Museum. Exhibitions could create associations of ideas by their juxtapositions and contrasts: they were a privileged form of educating adults – farmers and mechanics – that received elite support in Britain, including Durham and Brougham, and state funding in Upper and Lower Canada.276 The same principles would animate the Great Exhibition of 1851. Exhibitions were, like statistics on Merivale’s rendering, supposed to “lead the mind” towards proper and progressive conclusions. Where statistics carefully arranged precise and rigorous data and then united them, exhibitions carefully arranged objects in space to construct physical associations of ideas, like an engineered thinking device that you could walk inside. It was like the Panopticon in that it managed space to lead the mind through the body, but at an exhibition it was done with consent, as commercial sociability, rather than as coercion. Thought itself was being mechanized. It’s no coincidence that Charles Babbage, one of the great apostles of British statistics, science, and mathematics, also constructed a “differential calculating machine”: a prototype computer. Henry Cowles observes that “Babbage’s lifelong goal was to replace the natural patterns of scientific reasoning with a machine capable of performing arithmetic, algebraic, and even analytical functions.”277 Mechanization of thought wasn’t just for educating the hoi polloi. A conservative reaction against the radicalizing possibility of education occurred

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across the educational spectrum. At Cambridge, Whewell understood mathematics, according to Andrew Warwick, as “a closed and uncontentious discipline which instilled correct and logical habits of thought but otherwise left men’s minds ‘passive and inert.’”278 Whewell taught mathematics like religion, as “indoctrination through public lectures.” He battled liberal and radical educational reformers, and in 1841 Robert Peel named him master of Trinity College, the better to carry on that work. Rival versions of education, conservative and liberal, described the other as essentially decivilizing. The Central Society of Education lobbyist Thomas Wyse argued that all education was either “the education of the past age” or “the education of the coming age: one with the object of holding back, or keeping still, the eternally moving man; the other of moving onward with him, of accompanying, and in some instances of moving beyond him in the course.”279 Education and civilization both rested on the premise voiced by James Mill in an article for the Encyclopedia Britannica: “That he is a progressive being is the grand distinction of man.”280 But once you saw some people as unprogressive, then you read growing ignorance, unknowing by doing, into everything they did. Nassau Senior read such things into workers’ self-education associations in England: “There is not one which is not based on folly, tyranny, and injustice which would disgrace the rudest savages.”281 British conservatives opposed public schooling and voted down education bills. Kay-Shuttleworth worked to increase public schooling and wrote a memo in favour of “industrial education” for the “coloured races” in 1847, referencing Fellenberg’s Swiss industrial school.282 But class arguments in Britain against popular education became class-and-race arguments in Canada. Egerton Ryerson, who was friendly with Peter Jones, also referenced Fellenberg in urging “Industrial Schools for the benefit of the aboriginal Indian Tribes.” Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous “laboring classes” in “ordinary civilized life” needed religious and industrial education. All must be “controlled by their feelings as almost the only rule of action, in proportion to the absence or partial character of their intellectual development.”283 But public schools had their “chief prominence” in learning, with labour subsidiary to learning; industrial schools would reverse that prominence. Education for commerce and trade would be too expensive. Second, in both cases the state must interfere as little as possible with “local management,” but local in regard to the public schools meant parents and “the people themselves.”284 Local in regard to industrial schools meant the churches, not parents or “the people themselves.” Ryerson insulated the industrial schools, much as he insulated the Orange Order from accountability. That made them fundamentally unlike the public school system in Canada West, and more like Canada East, where the Catholic Church was being written into school governance as a counterweight to popular resistance to public schooling.285

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Wherever government was unaccountable, a progressive, science-based project of education became racially loaded, coercive, effectively forced labour. That was the political fight in Lower Canada. Where for reformers, Bruce Curtis shows, “the people could best manage its own education affairs if empowered to do so,” tories believed “the exercise of the franchise, the holding of political office, and participation in public opinion must be restricted to educated men. The widespread ignorance and illiteracy of the habitants were grounds for their exclusion from politics and government, and that ignorance was propagated by the Assembly’s school system.”286 Indigenous people were seen in need of racial tutelage as well, and that tutelage perpetuated illiberal rule. The Bagot commissioners tried to repudiate that spirit of racial tutelage. They recommended, first, that education should be self-education, and second, that it should be not reified but connected to everyday life. Yet, as with the Durham recommendations, the government granted only half of what was asked: education would be highly practical, but it would not be self-education. Durham’s union of the Canadas enabled French Canadians to take control of their own schools. But while Indigenous men and women did teach in the schools being set up from the early nineteenth century,287 they gained no control. Without self-education, the growing gap between educators and educated, governors and governing, would become coercive and panoptical: the physical manipulation of the body, under conditions of coercion so as to force the mind, rather than an appeal to reason and opinion. Carried out of books and into real-world activities, it became a coercive project of forced labour, demoralizing and degrading as such. Malthus and Chadwick had sought to make any relief institutions as degrading as possible, and so did Canadian Indian agents.288 The education on offer was designed to whittle away, layer by layer, any independence of thought or sense of choice. Rebecca Swartz observes: “while education in the colonies might have started as a way to enlighten, protect, and reform, it later took on a far more rigid conception of racial difference, which assigned different kinds of children to different schools, based on perceived inherent intellectual differences between groups.”289 Rawson knew the problems of education in England: he worked with the same data as Kay and abstracted Kay’s findings for the Journal.290 The Bagot report admitted that elementary education in reading and writing had been found “ineffectual to form the minds and establish the character of the youth of the nation” in England and must be ineffectual in “the Indian youth.” Education, carried into practical life, must either confirm or reconstruct practical life. It made everyday life more visible, the better to target it for reconstruction. Indian agents would peer as obtrusively as Peter Jones at Grape Island into individual households, judging every floor as “lately scrubbed” or not, every “red table-cover” or wall covering as more or less civilizing,

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like some ghastly commercial Inquisition, the descriptions published as state papers.291 Hume would have been appalled at this massive state overreach. The Bagot Commission, like Durham, sacrificed cultural recognition for political recognition but when it carried that program into practical education, massively extended the state’s mandate and capacity to undo culture. Rawson, like Durham and Darling, chose to see Indigenous people as more same than different, as “normal” social and countable beings able to historicize themselves progressively. But his theory of historical progress was too Eurocentric for him to see anything but decline in their recent history. The commissioners argued that Indigenous people’s education “must consist not merely of the training of the mind, but of a weaning from the habits and feelings of their ancestors, and the acquirements of the language, arts, and customs of civilized life.” They recommended not just primary schools but practical education: instruction in husbandry, gardening, stock management, and simple mechanical trades for boys, and domestic economy, charge of household and dairy, and use of the needle for girls, “and both sexes should be familiarized with the mode of transacting business among the whites.” In short, industrial and manual labour schools, and preferably (witnesses including Jones were quoted as advocating) on a residential model.292 The commissioners sought knowing by doing, but they repudiated Indigenous knowing and imposed an unfamiliar form of knowledge from above. The Bagot Commission wanted the education project to be Indigenous-led but also to owe as little as possible to older forms of knowledge. These arguments were incompatible. They may reflect Rawson’s observations, in London and Canada, of social dislocation: diasporic people whose local worlds changed in ways that sacrificed the usual “cushions” against dearth and lessened the value of intergenerational knowledge.293 In Marylebone as in Canada, the racialized poor found themselves in changed environments, stripped of resources. Where Indigenous people did not move, they still saw their local resources of fish, game, and traditional harvested crops such as berries and wild rice decline around them. The social dislocation also caused the trauma of alcoholism and violence that further severed intergenerational knowledge, something that Peter Jones lamented. The problem persists: Six Nations Tuscarora writer Alicia Elliott eloquently laments the trauma and the loss of the traditional foodways that left her, at eleven or twelve years, responsible for feeding her family but ignorant of how to prepare either the old or the new foods.294 Jones, horrified by the obvious trauma amongst his people, wanted the game and fish to decline still faster, to prompt a faster transition to civilization. Elliott wants “land back.” Jones and Rawson staked everything on getting Indigenous people into government and, thereby, into the business of schooling as well as being schooled. In 1847, Jones would found a school, the Mount Elgin Institute,

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near London, following the example set by the New England Company’s Mohawk Institute on the Grand River in 1831 (itself following American models), and also the example set by Josiah Henson, who created a British American Institute for former slaves at Dresden, Ontario, in 1842.295 Everywhere that communities formed, whether in the Calmel building or on reserves, impromptu schools formed, some of them declining but others rising to more established status. Liberal reformers and statesmen should recognize those self-civilizing efforts and should, further, admit any student into a common school system designed, Ryerson insisted, for the poorest most of all. But deference to local opinion meant that Black and Indigenous children were widely made unwelcome in the public schools. And the schools that Indigenous people created for themselves were co-opted by the state and the churches and put towards aggressive separation of children from parents to compel “socialization in European behaviour.”296 Jones and Rawson presumed that a mixed and civilized population building up institutions would get a mixed and civilized state: men like themselves making the state as liberal as the opinion that forced Peel’s hand. But in failing to integrate Indigenous people within the colonial state, they effectively handed them over to what would become a monolithically settler colonial state that would spend the next century pursuing the erasure of Canada’s purported Indian problem. Rawson’s own presumptions and prejudices conduced to that outcome. He tried to make education a title to civilization and rights. He had an expansive, Queteletian understanding of education. In quarrels with conservative statisticians in Britain, Rawson was prepared to categorize even the humblest and most ragged schools as educational: equivalent, for statistical purposes, with the most elite schools as likely to cause or prevent crime. He was not prepared to categorize Indigenous teaching in that way, but only teaching that “weaned” children from their culture. There was a slippery slope between saying useful knowledge could help Indigenous people to adapt to a changing world and attacking Indigenous knowledge as the antithesis of useful knowledge. Once you separated the old from the new, you were handing the job to outsider experts. Everyone knew that. The intense fights amongst Protestants and Catholics, English and French Canadians had as their legacy a right to self-education as the only collective right written into the British North America Act in 1867. A.T. Galt, an Eastern Townships financier and railway agent and early advocate for Confederation, argued that “there could be no greater injustice to a population than to compel them to have their children educated in a manner contrary to their own religious belief.” People must educate themselves – unless they were Indigenous. Indigenous people came to be seen as “structurally incompetent.” Tressie McMillan Cottom uses that phrase to explain why

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Black American women die in childbirth in atrociously high numbers: not simply because they are poor, but because, as her experience of a miscarriage showed, their accounts of themselves are distrusted.297 The new knowledge workers were not narrow pedants: they wielded expansive, practical understandings of knowledge that they strategically put towards breaking down state capture and knowledge capture, like so many Thomas Wakleys. They sought to put informal or social power to liberalizing politics and economics, and they negotiated with local knowledge much as ancien regime reformers negotiated with local power. Many different compromises were found in many areas of knowledge. The London Statistical Society had, under Rawson’s direction, become an effective mechanism for recognizing and validating local and practical knowledge. Agricultural exhibitions had been taken up as a way to combine agricultural science with practical knowledge of farmers on the ground. Much effort went towards colligating local and central knowledge through state-funded journals and exhibitions to enable farmers to learn from one another as well as from experts, easing social tensions that were felt everywhere, but especially in French Canada. By contrast, Indigenous agricultural societies were made venues to impose top-down expert knowledge – the better to stifle agency that was always read as resistance.298 The new sociological knowledge-workers made themselves gatekeepers of good versus bad data. To discover “the social” was to discover a certain political “opacity,” according to Pierre Manent, that stood between the individual and freedom and that social experts continually sought to dismantle.299 Manent sees a new rather than an old ambition in that dismantling, but Rawson, too, sought to deconstruct the “social” obstacles to the freedom that education could provide. The line between the emancipatory and the non-emancipatory, between the social and the educational, was like the line drawn by a Durham or a Gladstone between voter and the non-voter, to yield not just institutional but also epistemological closure. And in Canada, that closure was achieved by racialization of the distinction between knowledge and ignorance. Just as a respectable woman must fear contagion of an unrespectable woman, so an improver must fear contagion from unrespectable knowledge. If you were one of the growing army of Indian improvement agents, you were highly motivated to insist on the gap between their knowledge and yours. Intellectual jealousy was hardwired in the new “machinery” of civilization. Much like, Ian Radforth observed, Durham’s and Sydenham’s reform projects became conservative in Canada, so too a Rawson must come to resemble a Whewell, his “science” as elitist in Canada as Whewell’s in England. Petit bourgeois bureaucrats would not trim but would hoard state power, much as James Mill had predicted. The Bagot report laid the foundation not for a liberal self-improvement project but for an illiberal, coercive assimilation project. Rawson could not rise to Durham’s influence in cabinet and could not buy off the self-styled

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civilizers with ironic recognition. He grasped that what Indigenous people needed was recognition for their agency as political, commercial, and moral beings and a repudiation of the double standard in the Royal Proclamation. Indigenous people were statistically and sociologically normal but everything was conspiring to construct them as anomalous and pathological. Rawson tried to reduce the gap and make the case for the ordinary workings of history and self-civilization. He leaned on Queteletian logic that stretched across national and state-society divides, enabling cross-partisan consolidation in Britain, where the Statistical Branch and the Statistical Society could work hand in glove. But statistical construction of a cosmopolitan “normal” did in principle what Chadwick was doing in practice: stripping away the social and cultural elements of humanity to reduce man to something like King Lear’s Poor Tom, an unaccommodated man, a poor bare forked animal, “the thing itself.” It paved the way for Chadwickian practices to follow. And Canadians did not want impartial and knowledgeable civil servants, like Rawson W. Rawson, but someone more like his father, Sir William Rawson, wooing London bankers to grandiose western development projects. So long as you had command of the state, even specious projections served growth and development, as Rawson understood all too well. Conservatives were putting social power to reactionary purposes, first under Peel until 1846, and then, from 1846 to 1852, under Lord John Russell, Finality Jack, achieving with discretion what could not be done with law. Rawson grappled with that discretion. He tried but failed to demonstrate that Indigenous bodies were healthy. He tried but failed to get Indigenous forms of knowledge into a state education project. And, most spectacularly, he tried but failed to stabilize Indigenous property by making it more like everybody else’s through access to networks of credit. Instead, he saw credit become, itself, the major mechanism of dispossession in Canada. He saw an invisible hand at work, orchestrating and conventionalizing a highly monetized racism across the state, law, and opinion, like so many rowers rowing. The Bagot Commission tried to write Indigenous people into rule of law, the emerging administrative state, and public opinion, understood as not so very distinct. Geloso and Rouanet’s binary of ethnogenesis versus the state exaggerates the differences as ways of negotiating across diversity: bureaucratic civilizers were themselves new kinds of middlemen between interests and identities, state and society. But the intense fight over patronage made it unrelentingly partisan, reserved for political pawns able to build Collingwoodian alliances. Indigenous peoples had always been at the centre of such alliances, lending support to various politicians.300 But the diaspora swamped their numbers and reformers disenfranchised them wherever possible. Indigenous political agency was encroached upon, like their property. In 1832, John Brant, son of Joseph Brant, won election to the

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Upper Canadian legislative assembly, but the government refused to let him sit, on grounds that “too many Indian electors were leaseholders and not freeholders, and thus ineligible to vote.”301 Peter Jones was, as seen, shut out of Anglican networks but disappointed by Methodist ones. But Anglicans disappointed as well. Shingwaukonse, his contemporary as an Ojibwe leader at Garden River, Sault Ste Marie, converted to Anglicanism and worked Anglican networks efficiently, such that Thomas Anderson recognized him as head chief in the region and declared him to be a model convert. But, Janet Chute argues, the Indian Department’s goal was “to sever the chief’s allegiances to the broader Upper Great Lakes Native community by encouraging his dependency on government patronage. In this last aim they were totally unsuccessful. Shingwaukonse had sought government favour in the first place on behalf of his Ojibwa and Ottawa allies and his own followers. For the chief to have renounced his alliances would have deprived his actions with respect to the government authorities of their essential meaning.”302 Anderson diagnosed the same problem in the Northern Great Lakes as Durham did in Lower Canada: local leadership that was more downwardly than upwardly emulative, because that leadership had no avenues forward within government and owed its legitimacy to a highly democratic local opinion. Indigenous leaders tried to flag markers of leadership.303 But settlers hardly noticed. Restrictions on Indigenous voting in the 1850s further limited the payoff for alliances. When John Strachan visited the settlement at Garden River he was dismayed by its small size. Political relationships required trust, of the sort immortalized by Lafontaine and Baldwin’s each standing for election in the other’s province. Such trust could not be leveraged across Indigenous/settler relationships in Canada because they were too unequal. Trust, as Baier pointed out, rests on a certain equality and reciprocity incompatible with impunity.304 On the Canadian frontier, state capture and the tyranny of the majority conferred so much impunity and inequality as to undermine any reciprocity. The rewards for treachery were too great, the rewards for trimming too small. Governors understood the risks of alienating the whole body of settlers.305 Conservative ability and incentive to ally with Indigenous peoples declined during the 1840s, while reformers’ distrust of both intensified. Rawson and Metcalfe were like a tag team in clinging to the older alliances. But of course they were no such thing: Metcalfe repudiated Rawson and Rawson left Metcalfe to his crisis. Reformers denounced Metcalfe, much as they had Dalhousie, as unfitted to govern free and white British subjects: “it seems almost a pity that Sir Charles Metcalfe should have abandoned the coloured populations of Jamaica and Hyderabad to assume the care of the uncoloured people of Canada.”306 Lord Elgin made the same argument, also reasoning from their mutual experiences

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in Jamaica. Elgin boasted that good relations of trust gave him more power in Canada – through “suasion, sympathy, and moderation” – than he had had in an irresponsible state like Jamaica, whereas Metcalfe had thought he could check “revolutionary tendencies by manifesting his distrust of them.”307 Later assessments concurred. According to Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, an IrishAustralian politician, in 1890: “The question really at issue was whether the colony should be governed by an honest and gallant pro-consul from India, who could not help regarding the colonists as a sort of less dusky but more troublesome Hindoos [sic], and their scheme of Colonial government as chimerical and fatal.”308 Metcalfe’s interwar biographer, Edward Thompson, observed: “It was hard that a man who had left England in the last year of the previous century, a full generation before the Reform Bill, should be sent to deal with the fiercely alive antagonisms and hopes and resolution of Canada – after his manhood had passed entirely in India and his mind been formed in that preposterous land. His notion of self-government was one which has never been held outside British India.”309 But the criticism doesn’t quite hit home. As the Darlings had known, all settlers said such things of all governors who obstructed dispossession.310 Moreover, Metcalfe came to Canada because he felt himself too liberal for British politics, then enjoying a tory moment under Peel and Stanley, who pressed him to resist the demands of reformers. For Metcalfe, the reformers’ outspoken hostility to British rule and British finance threatened discretion, deference, and debts. How could the British connection be secure without them? Promises to the contrary, he thought, were “utterly worthless.” For the London Times, reflecting on the election recently held, the colony as a whole was scarcely less worthless: “a pauper colony, without capital, without intelligence, without dignity,” and destined to become a “vulgar republic.”311 Security of possession and security of contract were necessary constituents of the Pax Britannica. If the next governor along might repudiate a charter or a tax or a legal contract, property was uncertain and poverty entrenched. Metcalfe thought his personal impartiality was needed to uphold the necessary protections; in fact, only his capitulation could confirm the underlying stability of commercial relations as the working convention for Canada. No governor could offer an adequate pledge of security for either colonial or British interests: if he held such power, then convention did not. But rival standards of purposeful political choice pinioned Metcalfe as they had Bagot. Americans set new standards for security of purpose and property through a violent and populist western expansion project that made Canada’s more discreet accommodations seem fatally timid and weak. Roebuck, the India-born, Canada-educated, radical British mp , published an argument in 1849 that the British emigrant preferred America to Canada (the comparison drawn at great length) because of the economic

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“uncertainty that attends every step of his progress” and the political “inferiority of the position which, as a colonist, he is to occupy” in Canada. Only the exercise of political will provided sufficient guarantee for civilization, law, society, and property. Neither the imperial nor the colonial government could project and sustain development, in the way that the Americans had done with their Northwest ordinance in 1784. Drawing heavily on George Bancroft, Roebuck argued that budding American states were effectively colonies that sprang up with all the certainty and superiority of immediate civilization and self-government. A would-be state need only petition for recognition and immediately it received surveys, roads, townships, justice, laws: everything “guaranteed by the authority of the United States, immediately follows, both for the person and property; and all the machinery known to the common law, and needed for the maintenance of this security, and the enforcement of the law’s decrees, is at once adopted.”312 In Canada West, by contrast, a “strange, torpid, wretched condition of things exists actually in sight” of American prospering. Certainty of possession, political will, and settled policy were all one and the same for Roebuck: The only way of creating this general understanding, and thereby really performing the part which a wise and provident government can and should perform, is to make and publish a predetermined rule for the state of things which the planters of a new colony must encounter. The law should be like the atmosphere, and attend them wheresoever they may go; and they should feel that it does follow and surround them … With a map in one hand, and an Act of Parliament in the other, they ought to feel themselves at once, though in a new country, still surrounded by all that of old produced for them order and security, – still, as formerly, possessed of powers and rights, and subject to duties and obligations, defined, clear, and known, or easily to be ascertained. Every step taken by them should have been taken in security, in peace, and with ease: and now the new community is born, its pulse begins to beat; life, and civilized life, is there.313 Roebuck admitted you couldn’t do it in a densely settled colony like Ceylon. But you could and must do it in the empty wastes of North America. Indigenous people were simply invisible to him. He wanted security for his will the same way as Benjamin Franklin had wanted security for his will: copied from old-world standards of geopolitical and legal certainty and then superimposed on frontier and “Indian” lands with all the security of a London freehold, and “sold” to English investing interests as such. If you couldn’t own and mortgage a plot of land picked out on a map, then the state had failed you. Credit was like education and civilization, a predictive teleology.

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But control of the state lent greater weight to the teleology. So did the control of history. Scholars observe that the certainties around American political purpose, especially its investment in the American constitution, were a post-hoc historical fiction. The meaning of the constitution at the time was “a profound unknown,” “deeply uncertain,” and in flux. Many were alarmed by its centralizing and nationalizing qualities. But a specious purposefulness became as much a matter of conservative epistemologies as did American ownership of the land, confirmed by successive retellings across the range of philosophical, historical, and entrepreneurial writing.314 Property, political policy, and economic investment, for imperialists like Roebuck, existed in the propertied men who, banded together as a state, alone could generate firmness of purpose that resisted undoing from one year or one government to the next; resisted, in effect, being historicized. A stable settler state was an irresistible answer to the question of constancy, one that tied together property in a long chain from the western Canadian frontier to the English money market. But the underlying premise was that the interest in settlement and development trumped social and partisan divisions. During the 1840s, it wasn’t clear that the heterogeneous and quarrelsome Canadas could ever pledge such support. Reform leaders in Canada West, but especially in Canada East, had for years denounced heavy infrastructure spending that siphoned local tax dollars to Anglo-imperial business networks. Merchants looking to boost exports denounced FrenchCanadian farmers as insufficiently market-oriented, too unproductive and poor; in fact, they often enjoyed local sales too much to gamble with the riskier international market, where local interests were apt to be carelessly dismissed in metropolitan courts.315 Conservatives and reformers during the 1840s vied to command greater commercial confidence, and reformers came to seem the better bet. Jack Little’s analysis of state and society in the Eastern Townships during the 1840s is instructive. On the one hand, there was a pronounced hostility, in the words of Dr Moses Colby, to “transferring all legislation in Lower Canada to the French Canadians, to a race of people behind all others in enterprise, in agriculture, commerce, and the arts, as well as in education.” On the other hand, there was an overwhelming concern for infrastructure funding, especially for a railway, compared to which “all other considerations were secondary as far as the political history of this decade is concerned.” Metcalfe won support in the Townships by promising a railway, but he could not deliver without legislative support. Reform promises of a railway were more credible and swung the region towards the liberals in 1847–48 (with a brief swerve back in 1849).316 Fights over property were evolving away from political disputes and towards accepted rules without much concern about differences between English or French civil law.317 Montreal, too,

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was negotiating its way to more trusting and monetized relationships. Brian Gettler notes that during the 1840s, chartered Canadian banks, always led by the Bank of Montreal, were displacing credit relationships centred on merchant importers by issuing their own banknotes, insinuating much more use of paper money into everyday economic life, all of it regulated and homogenized by the colonial state that was, further, issuing interest-bearing debentures from the 1840s.318 The Canadiens had a reputation for refusing paper money and the political allegiances that came along with them.319 Their pledged support for local and, ultimately, British-centred credit relationships was a major win for the British political and fiscal project, but also for the French Canadians at a time when racial knowledge was being used to fix value in relation to currencies.320 Montreal businessmen and bankers were making their city a financial gateway to western Canada and they joined in the new corporate forms with alacrity. Incorporations that lagged in the Canadas before 1850 accelerated after 1850, amidst much enabling legislation for incorporation, subsidies, and guarantees.321 The colonial government in Canada remade itself the better to back those local debts and hold the informal mortgages upon them: the supposedly “waste” lands in Indigenous hands across British North America.322 So did the British Stock Exchange, which began to list colonial debt in 1837, beginning, as Angela Tozer observes, with Upper Canadian debt. Tozer’s careful historical analysis of public debt and settler colonialism in British North America shows that not some “nebulous idea of ‘progress,’” but the concrete demands of financiers, drove, as they still drive, Canadian development policies.323 Across the full range of jurisdictions in the Canadas, politics were being separated from security of property that rested on debt. The reformers effectively convinced British investors of the probity and security of their politics and laws, at a time when British investors were seeking offshore investment. This was not a tribute to the invisible hand but to what Katharina Pistor describes as the “quality of the rules of the game where business is conducted. The invisible hand does its job under weak institutions; it becomes superfluous once institutions are in place that allow economic agents to enforce their rights and interests anywhere.”324 Extreme conservatives in Canada denounced the reformers as prone to violence, superstition, ignorance and jealousy, a threat to British interests and property. But if that’s how they looked in Toronto, that’s not how they looked in London. The whole point of the new political and financial forms was interchangeability of parties and shareholders. Older forms of incorporation rested on the specific identity of the founders. Under the new forms, “people could transfer into and out of the company at will with the purchase and sale of shares.” The new corporations were formally impartial in relation to identity, just like the Hobbesian state was supposed

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to be, and these two forms of impartiality were combining in ways that should ensure stable financial relationships, obligations, and profits, regardless of who ran either the company or the state. Debt had stabilized France and could stabilize French Canada. But in Montreal, tories rallied around “our blood and our race.” In Toronto they demanded: “This alien race and language must perish. It must pass away, naturally by amalgamation, or by the remorseless purification of the mind.”325 Theirs was a party of affection, more like American disaffection than classic British parties of interest: they rioted and pillaged, they burned the legislature, and they signed annexation manifestos. Meanwhile, French reform leader E.P. Taché pledged that the “last cannon shot” fired in Canada to defend the monarch would be fired by a French-Canadian hand. Reformers were looking upward for allies and were upholding property. At a moment when, Elgin pointed out to the colonial minister (his uncle, Earl Grey, formerly Lord Howick), “France and Ireland are in flames, and nearly half the people of this colony are French – nearly half of the remainder Irish,” there was grounds for fearing that those “turbulent” peoples demonstrating in the streets and at the canal works might join forces.326 But the reform leadership distanced themselves from the mob and proved themselves more defenders than despoilers of British wealth and power, even if Elgin must occasionally remind them against confiscatory measures, to “reassure English investors that it was safe to invest in Canada: that having been granted responsible government the colonists would not throw away what they had won, by any ‘measure of spoliation.’”327 The conservative penchant for propping up political relations with violence failed and discredited them. Conservatives, too, must learn to abide by the lesson of the day: debt and financialization as the modern way to stabilize public opinion. If British investment in Canada was demonstrably secure, the unwritten English constitution had become an unwritten imperial constitution. Reformers came around first, conservatives more slowly. French Canadians became, like Noel Ignatiev’s Irish in America, “white.”328 They threw their support behind a diasporic settler colonial project that made for a community of interest more white than British. No voices more loudly upheld American trade with Britain, at the time, than Southern slave interests.329 Those early standard-bearers of jealousy of trade back in the 1760s and 1770s now repudiated it because British sales were their best bulwark against the abolitionist Northern states. But even the Northern states joined in support of dispossession. Whiteness provided a conservative backstop to the Canadian reform project. To uphold the security for property that British investors and emigrants sought, Canadian politicians had to repudiate previous pledges and contracts negotiated with Indigenous peoples. They began, in that respect, to use Francis Bond Head’s playbook.

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On visiting Manitoulin Island in the mid-1830s, Bond Head had heard the Anishinaabe chief Sigonah, Blackbird, or Jean-Baptiste Assiginack, recite the wampum belts received at Niagara. He advised Lord Glenelg, the colonial secretary, of the continuing strength of those pledges: “An Indian’s word, when it is formally pledged, is one of the strongest moral securities on earth – like the rainbow it beams unbroken, when all beneath is threatened with annihilation. The most solemn form in which an Indian pledges his word, is by the delivery of a wampum belt of shells – and when the purport of this symbol is once declared, it is remembered and handed down from father to son, with an accuracy and retention of meaning which is quite extraordinary.”330 Elgin seconded the observation that Indigenous people kept their treaties constantly before them. But, Alan Corbiere notes, Bond Head saw the British promises as merely verbal and not binding: “the promises which were made, whatever they might have been, were almost invariably verbal; those who expressed them are now mouldering in their graves.”331 British pledges and promises were not just conventions but superstitions that bound only the superstitious and literal. He forced through new, unconstitutional treaties, understanding that only Indigenous people would be bound by them anyways. Europeans boasted that they were uniquely law-abiding and contract-respecting, even as they dismissed Indigenous respect for contracts and laws as excessively literal: to be civilized was to enjoy a sophisticated understanding of the historical irony of contracts. The argument would see its fullest expression in the St Catharine’s Milling decision, when Oliver Mowat and David Mills, arguing for Ontario, persuaded one court after another that all previous treaty acknowledgements of Indian land title were “mere political expediency, designed to maintain good relations with Indians.”332 Rawson did not make that leap, but Elgin did when he asked a group of Ojibwa chiefs “by what right” they claimed unceded lands north of Lake Huron.333 It’s been argued that the “Indian is a subject without a past. The settler who has the capacity to pre-empt land fits into the Enlightenment historicism that equated cultivation with a narrative of civilizational progress.”334 Many school textbooks in nineteenth-century Canada saw “nothing fit to be called history,” so unchanging and so immutable was their character and experience.335 But that’s not how statesmen in Canada understood things. Indigenous peoples, like French Canadians, had a political history shared with Europeans, one clearly stamped with negotiated Enlightenment constitutionalism, the highest calling of public and political life. But as that constitutionalism yielded to nineteenth-century historicism, the constitutional as well as the environmental landscape decayed and lost its value around them, victim of a Lockean legal instrumentalism that privileged the most powerful and transformative interests.

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But Metcalfe lacked the requisite investment in whiteness and its hypocritical double standard. The complaint that Metcalfe failed to distinguish between progressive and unprogressive races confirmed Pontiac’s complaint a century earlier that the British Empire saw only racial and not political and social distinctions amongst colonized subjects. Canadians also racialized the difference between progressive and unprogressive subjects. A long resonance can be seen in Jacques Parizeau’s reaction when he studied at the London School of Economics in the 1950s and heard the views of an old man who had served in India: “I realised that for people like him, those who were considered the masters in Quebec, the Sahib – the English Canadians – were, for people like him, only ‘damned colonials’! I tell you, this changed my views on life.”336 Canadians insisted on being seen as progressive not primitive, colonizers not colonized, in the eyes of an apparently undiscriminating British imperial state.337 But Metcalfe’s distrust was political, not racial. Metcalfe had also been waited on by the Aborigines’ Protection Society before coming to Canada, and he began, before his forced retirement from illness in 1845, to meet some of Rawson’s and Jones’s demands.338 Metcalfe wanted “equal rights for all Men in civil matters.” He really did think Canada was like India. He wrote to an India colleague, Colonel Stokes, translating the Canadian crisis into India: “Fancy such a state of things in India, with a Mahomedan Council and a Mahomedan Assembly, and you will have some notion of my position.” Such analogies were a humiliation for English Canadians who wanted to be seen as politically equal and elite.339 Metcalfe was replaying in Canada older conservative fights from India, where he had followed Governor General Richard Wellesley, brother of the Duke of Wellington, in “a scrupulous tendency to avoid interference with traditional institutions and personnel.”340 This was Hamilton versus Jefferson on whether elites or levellers were the more dangerous enemies. Metcalfe worried about violent levellers in England and he had fiercely opposed mass dispossession in Bengal in the “Permanent Settlement” that was said to have “created” private property but which, in Metcalfe’s eyes, transferred it “from the class of people entitled to it, to a set of Baboos, who have made their wealth by bribery and corruption” and by “destroying hundreds or thousands of proprietors for every one” that the policy created.341 In 1829, he had recommended impartial reforms to a legal double standard that “smacked of racial privilege” by giving immunities to Europeans.342 He also opposed the Jamaica planters’ attempts, after 1834, at “securing their labour by force and oppression.”343 Thompson, Metcalfe’s biographer, admired his effort “to hold at bay the growing arrogance of Britain’s conquerors” outside Canada, but did not apply the same analysis to Canada. Thompson himself was a “conservative liberal with a tilt towards socialism,” the son of a Methodist missionary

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to India, who had a distinguished career translating Indian and British culture, poetry, and politics into one another. He wrote an early revisionist account of the 1857 Mutiny from the Indian perspective.344 But where Edward Thompson likened the mass dispossession in India to the alienation of the commons in England, his son, E.P. Thompson, lambasted Metcalfe for not noticing the connection: “What Metcalfe did not see, or say, was that dispossession of the commoners of England, and the English common law’s insistence that ‘the nature of property … imports exclusive enjoyment’ were the templates for the Settlement of Bengal.” Thompson fils described Metcalfe as “perhaps the most humane” of the British paternalists in India, seeking to “sustain the communal property of the village. But the administration’s inexorable demands for revenue, and its dispossession of defaulters, collapsed all intentions. After these came the Utilitarians, a modernizing urban liberalism of individualism, money, and the market, contemptuous of the landed aristocracy and of ‘Gothic’ or Hindu custom, and (with Bentham and James Mill) eager to impose administrative accidental despotism upon the East.”345 Indeed, when Metcalfe’s successor, Sir Edward Colebrooke, was sacked for corruption in 1829, he insisted that he had merely, like Metcalfe before him, engaged in ordinary cultural reciprocity. But reciprocity was coming to seem like corruption when it made concessions to conquered subjects. Colebrooke’s twenty-one-year-old accuser, Charles Trevelyan (who itemized Metcalfe’s luxurious bed as one of Colebrooke’s illicit gains), would co-author the classic British civil service code of 1854.346 The utilitarian liberals were already too much in command of Canada in the 1840s, the greatest good of the greatest number of settler-citizens justifying instrumentalism in economics and politics. Metcalfe was out of step, just as in India he had championed autonomous village self-organization against new imperial impositions. The old local obstacles to state overreach were tumbling down, thanks to the financial turn that better aligned colonial institutions with British interests. Metcalfe also distrusted finance as a threat to politics: he fulminated against a Eurasian banking firm, Palmer and Company, that it had “usurped power and authority no other merchants possesses, and which no merchants ought to possess.”347 The British public, increasingly weighted towards the investing classes, dismantled older protections and institutions of subjugated peoples to get better returns on investment. Liberal reformers had always pushed for cuts to the imperial soldiery; now conservatives joined in the demand. They no longer needed or wanted the British state heavily invested in Canada: finance made a more discreet and lucrative connection. Elgin assured Grey that he could shrink the troops without “encreasing the tendency towards annexation – provided always that you make no noise about it.”348 This was Wellington’s solution for France in 1817, now applied to Canada.

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Responsible government in Canada was made to look like the Great Reform Bill, with an air of finality about it. The conservatives got there before the liberals in Britain, at least in Gladstone, who briefly replaced Stanley as colonial minister in 1845. In 1837, Gladstone had dismissed Canadian grievances as merely speculative; in 1840 he still defended centralized rule as necessary to “maintain a connexion between societies which, though still politically one, are not yet socially one.” But when he assumed office in 1845, he was startled to be told by undersecretary Stephen that Canada had “become in everything but the name a distinct state,” and that Stanley had respected that principle, refusing to fetter the governor’s discretion. (Stephen, it bears noting, shared a cab that year with Charles Buller from Paddington to Piccadilly, “talking chiefly of Canada.”349) Gladstone’s instructions to Cathcart, Metcalfe’s replacement, were to avoid collisions and to defer to local public opinion.350 If the choice was the sword or consent, then Gladstone would choose consent, so long as the colony was white. Where it was not, Gladstone chose the sword.351 James Stephen took the view in 1850 that the only colonies to be deprived of responsible government were those posing “grave risk of racial war.”352 The new, reformed Indian Department would exceed the old in its complete lack of accountability to the people that it administered. Where, as John Leslie observed, the Bagot Commission upheld the vote, statute labour, taxes, and liability for debt as “the vital elements of full citizenship,” that’s not what the electorate wanted. Indigenous people would become wards of the state, lacking the ordinary rights and duties of the citizen. Their choices would be checked and scrutinized at every step. The agents of scrutiny and governance – Indian agents and residential schools – lacked oversight of their own machinations. The schools were run by so many Mr Bumbles, they cost a fraction of what was spent educating non-Indigenous children, and their death rates were comparable to those of soldiers at the front during the First World War. That, too, was taken as a sign of backwardness and failure to adapt. The theory and evidence of civilization tautologically defined one another. French Canadians were subjected to much the same sorts of sneers. To the 1960s, whole branches of Canadian political science took shape as a cottage industry devoted to finding ways that French Canadians, too, were using democratic institutions less rationally and more backwardly than English Canadians. The more sophisticated the political scientist, the more subtle the reading of backwardness into what might seem modern to the uneducated eye. But these were political dialogues, not monologues, more academic than public: in Parliament, French-Canadian votes counted. By contrast, state and academe spoke with one voice in regard to Indigenous peoples and heard only an echo in reply. Civilization policy, mandated to diminish a purported gap between Indigenous and Eurowestern uses of

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property and reason, read a growing distance between them and inscribed it into a documentary trail. The new knowledge technologies that might have checked bias became its instruments. Sentiment and humanitarianism made workhouse abuses and sexual abuses notorious in England.353 When Metcalfe tallied his views, “Amelioration of the Poor Laws for the benefit of the Poor” appeared alongside equal rights to all men.354 The abusive conditions in Canadian residential schools only began to get traction a century later. Canadian jealousy was too powerful and unifying. Canadians formed a party around dispossession of racialized peoples and concomitant security of possession for even the most speculative forms of property in the “right” hands. If Europeans had “the passions and the interests,” Canadians had the passions and the interest. By insisting on the racial differences between Indigenous and white, they could disrupt Indigenous property without disrupting Eurowestern security of tenure. The Bagot report confirmed the observations of Durham and Darling. But in one important respect, it went beyond them to observe how that corruption played out in the workings of a commercial market in land well apprised of it, as a feedback loop. The Bagot commissioners blamed the “present quasi corporate character of the Indian community” for obstructing “their advancement in civilization” on a “footing of equality with the whites to which it is their interest to attain.” The chief superintendent of Indian Affairs recommended large leasehold properties, leased out to settlers. The Bagot report disagreed. Settlers insisted on the “political rights” that went with freehold tenure.355 They were leasing Indigenous land and then turning that leasehold into a de facto freehold by refusing either eviction or payment. Leases would not protect encroachment, the Bagot Commission observed (reiterating Darling’s diagnosis), that was widespread and essentially unpoliced. At Rama, Anderson reported, the Chippewa had not had any complaints against them for breach of laws, save for one fence removed in ignorance, even though they were “obliged frequently to submit to irritating and extremely unjust treatment on the part of the neighbouring white settlers.”356 And that problem was general and, indeed, predictable, according to the Bagot report. Indigenous communities had large blocks of land that they held as corporations and that was a recipe for jealousy. Their properties made them “objects of jealousy and dislike to their neighbours,” the more “unprincipled” of whom sought “to plunder them of their improvements and other property.”357 In such holdings, the property of a Corporation becomes an object of cupidity and jealousy: of cupidity because it supplies wealth and comforts to its owners beyond that enjoyed by the rest of the community, derived from sources to which

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the latter imagine they once had an equal title; and of jealousy, because it confers privileges and an influence which are always obnoxious, and often perverted to evil purposes. It appears most important to place the property of the Indians as much as possible beyond the reach of popular convulsions: to deprive any body of men of an interest in their expulsion from the Province, or in the confiscation or spoliation of their property.358 Land companies with large, undeveloped holdings felt that same jealousy. In 1843, Hincks warned Galt, the land company agent, that a heavy wild-land tax was coming.359 Even the mighty English landed interests lost the battle to keep the corn laws in 1846. Indigenous proprietors had only the Royal Proclamation to protect their tenure. But what made the Canadian situation so problematic during the age of reform was the connivance and corruption of the officials tasked with protecting the land according to both the Durham and the Bagot report. Settlers monopolized the state and they monetized that use. Intruders claimed the right to intrude, the commission noted, notwithstanding “Proclamations” that warned against either trespass or illegal sales. Samuel Jarvis told the Bagot Commission that intruders had been in situ too long to be reasonably expelled, and hundreds of industrious inhabitants would be ruined in the process, many of them government employees who had “held out to them the prospect, that at no distant day the lands thus acquired would be confirmed by Patent under the Great Seal of the Province” so that Indigenous peoples “must soon be deprived of the best portions of their inheritance.”360 Admitting that the choice was between inexpedient expulsion and an unjust confirmation, Jarvis recommended injustice over inexpediency. The very officials supposed to protect Indigenous lands were orchestrating and undertaking its spoliation and their special status lent legitimacy and predictability to the process. Unaccountable, oligarchic rule just does prey corruptly as well as tyrannously upon the ruled; ‘twas ever thus. But in regard to dispossession, that illiberal governance dovetailed with the illiberal tyranny of the majority that transferred power, on Tocqueville’s rendering, from crude physical to psycho-social form. Tocqueville was struck by the power of opinion to govern choices that were at once a promise of freedom and a pattern of conformity. That’s where Rawson made his most original observation. Dispossession in Canada was done through crowd psychology, not through violence. It was done as commerce and converse, monetization and risk assessment. The Bagot Commission noticed the pattern in Peter Jones’s account of the problems that had dogged the Credit Mississauga and in the experiences of the Six Nations on the Grand River. The original grant had been 694,910 acres. But there had then been pressure for cessions, leading to alienation of 352,707 acres in 1798, another 807 acres in 1830, 20,670 in 1831, 50,212

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in 1834, and then another major cession in 1841 of 220,000 acres, leaving them with only 20,000. That wasn’t enough. They demanded 50,000, better located, along with better management of their funds. The Bagot Commission seconded their demands and recommended the government repay the monies that had been drawn from the band account and squandered on the disastrous Grand River Navigation Company. The Six Nations had been scandalously treated: their assets forcibly taken and mismanaged. “If the property of those Indians had been properly managed, they would, at the present time, have been an independent and opulent people.”361 That was the critique of unaccountable oligarchy. But public opinion was also to blame. The commissioners noted the invidious effect that the pressure for cessions had on the value of land: “These Indians, however, suffer a good deal from the encroachments of the whites, against whom it has been found impossible entirely to protect them; and they have been rendered very uneasy and unsettled by the uncertainty attending the possession of their farms, in consequence of the frequent removals rendered necessary by the successive surrenders of portions of their tract.”362 And that was a generalizable observation: psychological unsettling and colonial resettling proceeded together. The Mississaugas at the Credit River enjoyed a high standard of civilization; “however, their progress has been retarded by the uncertainty which has prevailed as to their stay in the present settlement.” The general recommendations made the point explicitly: the mode of tenure and uncertainty of title to their lands caused great uneasiness among the more enlightened Indians in Upper Canada. They apprehend that as the tide of settlement flows on, and the pressure of the whites to possess their lands increases, they may at some future day be dispossessed or forced to surrender on disadvantageous terms, because they can shew no title deeds for their reserves. With regard to the mode of tenure, experience has taught them that while the lands are held in common, and an individual may at any time be deprived of his farm, and be forced to abandon his improvements, perhaps without any compensation, by a decision of the majority of the Tribe to surrender their lands to the Government, there is no real security for property, and no encouragement for industry.363 A squatter on reserve land had a better probability of holding it securely and realizing the value of any improvements than did an Indigenous owner, simply because he was white. Allan Greer has noted that “the commons” was a mechanism of dispossession in North America, as land lost value for Indigenous people, who became less able to live on its dwindling resources, even as that land gained value for whites.364 The Bagot report identified both the loss of fish and

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game and the rise in value where whites congregated. It contrasted two kinds of value: value that predated and value that accompanied settlement. Unsettled land had resources but none of “the present value of the land, which has been created solely by the presence and industry of the white settlers. Its only value to the denizen of the forest, was as a hunting ground, as the source of his supply of game and furs … The progress of settlement, and the consequent destruction of the forest, with the operations of the lumberer, and the fur trader, was shortly about to destroy this value,” leaving Indigenous peoples to remain on large hunting grounds without any power to subsist on the hunt, or to retreat to more distant hunting grounds.365 Land lost subsistence value and gained monetary value as Europeans congregated around it. Thanks to such congregation, happily, “the Indians are now in possession of advantages which far exceed those of the surrounding white population, and which afford them the means, under a proper system of mental improvement, of obtaining independence, and even opulence.”366 But they became impoverished just the same. Not because they lacked resources or capacities but because political and economic opinion conduced to their impoverishment. In the world ruled by commercial sociability, the value of a piece of property lay in the value that commercial opinion, from the frontier to the central bankers, attached to it. As Roebuck observed, confidence in the security of the investment determined its value. That’s why the predictions of speculating state officials were accepted as virtual title by buyers. Patronage wasn’t just a job but also a privileged claim to value and credit. But it followed that the officials most able to protect Indigenous property had least interest in doing so. Indigenous people could hold land on terms satisfactory to themselves but they could not hold it on terms that inspired Eurowestern confidence in the security of their property, because it was not in the interests of those Eurowesterners to have such confidence. Racialized distrust was more lucrative. Legal liminality, the failure of British protections and local policing, ensured that value could not adhere to Indigenous people because everyone was calculating and speculating on the probability of dispossession and none more jealously than officials. Thus did public opinion serve as an advance vanguard of dispossession. The Royal Proclamation with its monopoly-purchase provision exacerbated the problem: the state could impose a made-up value without any danger of market demand debunking it. The Proclamation checked public opinion in the one place where it might have served Indigenous vendors: competitive market value. Even in a place like the Grand River reservation, where land had been held under warrant for decades by wealthy and prominent people, it could not be held securely enough to benefit from improvement. Haldimand had conveyed the land in positive form, but you could always find a way to undermine inconvenient laws, in this case with allegations that he used the wrong

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seal of office. British humanitarianism had come to depend, one Aborigines’ Protection Society member lamented in 1840, on having a right-minded colonial governor in place.367 But so long as a right-minded governor could protect Indigenous lands and treaties, settlers were not free and responsible. There must be no permanence in the pledge of a governor. Promises and conveyances became ancient history, like the Magna Carta, and both were repudiated when land was disseised. Contracts were, after all, only promises that we obey when it is in our interest to do so, as Hume had observed of Hobbes’s social contract. Amidst the intense pressure on space in the 1830s and 1840s, older treaty promises came to seem as unfashionable as Tudor tyrannies seemed to a Stuart public: incompatible with modern progress and freedom. Hume’s observation of that earlier process seemed to legitimate it, even without the specious Lockean arguments for dispossession. Lord Elgin responded to Kahnawa’kehró:non of Kahnawà:ke complaining about injury from railway construction: “No one, whether white man or Indian, is allowed to stand in the way of improvements.”368 But in legal inventories, white men’s uses of property were presumed improving; others less so. Complex and diverse pressures around confidence and permanence in a historicizing age buffeted Canada in the 1840s. The colonial reformers wanted an absolute and permanent pledge from the governor general for their political platforms. Investors wanted absolute and permanent pledges from colonial and metropolitan authorities that debts would be honoured. Settlers wanted absolute certainty of property, absolute security of law. And they all also wanted the promises and pledges made to Indigenous people to be overturned and overturnable at will, victims to historical contingency. The value and security of all the other promises rested on the undermining of that specific kind of promise. A racial double standard was being written into the unwritten Canadian constitution. Civilization justified the distinction: only civilized peoples could summon sufficient agency and credibility to create historical conventions that could escape their context to become enduring truths and laws.369 But that same civilization, understood as the irony of history, justified repudiation of promises and treaties whenever value increased by such repudiation. Property embedded in customary relationships, alliances, and obligations was not as lucrative as property freed from such customary obligations and embedded, instead, in more purely financial relationships. The more that property was socially autonomous and legally embedded, the more valuable it was to those with the most influence; and the more, therefore, that the benefits of credit could freely and cheaply flow to the generality of male property holders in the colony. In Britain, gentlemanly sociability knit together Whitehall and the City of London. But Canadians needed a more fictive version of gentility and used the state to do that work. Settlers with a colonial state at their disposal were well

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disposed to make and keep fiscal pledges. Michael Piva describes a financial crisis from 1847–50 that saw Francis Hincks as inspector general struggling to secure the continued flow of British investment to Canada for public works that would open up new lands for settlement and get immigrants to work, even as returns on existing infrastructural investments faltered (canals and railways consistently paid less than projected) and an unexpected flood of distressed immigrants consumed his budget. In 1848 his attempt to float a loan of £200,000 in England failed; the next year, to succeed, he had to offer better interest but also better reassurances for the province’s creditors. His Act for the Better Management of the Public Debt guaranteed payment of a sinking fund, legalized cash advances from local banks, provided for paying contractors with debentures rather than cash, and transferred some public works to municipal jurisdiction – an anticipation, Piva remarks, of forthcoming legislation to allow and guarantee municipal debt. In 1849, in the weeks before and after they debated and rioted over the Rebellion Losses Bill, the same legislators unanimously passed a Railway Guarantee Act to support construction costs (initially only guaranteeing interest payments). Hincks introduced it, noting that it harmonized labour and capital by offering jobs for workers as well as profits for investors: “the furtherance of an extensive scheme of colonization may safely be combined with the profitable investment of capital.” Another champion was tory leader Sir Allan Napier MacNab, president of the Great Western Railway. Yet another was Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, who saw the opportunity to challenge “the Anglophone Tory merchant and banking elite.”370 That the Canadians were looking to American markets and winter ports was no objection to the security of investment: commerce would be connection enough, in what MacNab insisted was “not a political matter.” In 1852, by which time Hincks was premier and E.P. Taché his inspector general, legislation increased municipal responsibilities and debts, but also lent them provincial backing. Hincks explained to his British bankers, Baring Brothers, that “the policy of the Canadian Government adopted by your advice and your concurrence is to throw what may be considered as Local improvements on the several localities.”371 Barings still worried that the guarantee might cause the province to default. But, although debts and guarantees piled up catastrophically, the confidence was born out. Canadians did not repudiate their national debt. But that confidence rested on projections of future growth, that is, Indigenous insecurity and dispossession. British humanitarians breathed a sad sigh; British financiers breathed very differently. Debt became the sine qua non for “responsible” and effective administration in the 1840s. West London and the Canadas both had housing booms with rising property values and rising investment in “public” infrastructure. Montreal, too, had its first housing boom during the 1840s, according to Robert Sweeny, such that value increased by 250 per cent over values

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in 1825. More people bought landed property, almost half of them as an investment.372 Property owners remade the city both socially and materially, with new associational life and new investments in infrastructure, including cathedrals, banks, roads, canals, and public squares, facilitated by the tearing down of the old city walls.373 Viger Square, gifted to the city in 1818, was transformed from a swamp to a marketplace and then, in the 1850s, to a scenic garden, to “foster a new kind of sociability.”374 A liberal reading of “the social” was becoming a conservative financial reading. The lesson of municipal self-government, a bulwark of Durham’s liberal project, was not individual judgment but collective debt, built up with enabling legislation, as a more reliably conservative and racially specific mode of rule. Improved methods of holding property collectively were orchestrating the dispossession of lands deemed insecure because held collectively. Appeals to “civilization” were the bedrock of the legal double standard. Credit was confidence. White propertied men wielded it most convincingly and they protected one another’s command of it. French-Canadian and Scottish networks remained largely closed to Jewish, Irish, and American businessmen and networks.375 You could make your state more formally impartial while discriminating informally through the financial sector. If responsible government was a norm rather than a law, the unwritten constitution could as easily unmake as make it. Confidence in the state and in public debt proceeded together. Piva notes that the big picture, from the late 1840s to the early 1850s, was increasing networks of trade and finance, grounded on a continuing British diaspora, all of these things entirely unimpaired by the retreat of empire.376 The dangers of political democratization were contained. Liberal theories of property as an identity-neutral gatekeeper for political agency failed to negotiate the dense social ascriptions that denied security of property to the “wrong” kind of people. Unprogressive elements of colonial public opinion would be denied recognition and credit. Like Ellen Rogers pursuing charges against the young and genteel men that raped her in the shadow of Osgoode Hall, Indigenous people were “entitled to the protection of the law” but “not entitled to credit.” Yet without credit, the value of property evaporated. Value was discreet enough and political enough to follow popular or executive fiat. Canadians wanted to wield the kind of authority that American secretary of state James Monroe had wielded in 1813 when he dismissed Moraviantown in the Thames Valley, recently burned by American troops, as “a worthless Indian village,” even though the Lenape Delaware people living there had better, more valuable homes, barns, and fences than their white neighbours.377 Or, a decade later, when, as president, he enacted the Monroe Doctrine, whereby the United States declared new European intervention in the Americas effectively illegal, under a very unilateral model of international law.378

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Authoritative opinion could make and unmake wealth, as Rawson knew too well, having seen the Mexican silver crash wipe out his family’s wealth (and forcing its relocation from Mayfair to Marylebone, a trajectory he would later reverse). Even though the “Mexican” crash had begun in England, the English blamed it on colonial backwardness. That was a double injury and a long-lasting blight on those colonial economies. The crash of 1837 had been another such painful lesson for Anglo-Americans and one that showed economic change occurring “inside individual minds.”379 Credit was like modesty: it existed in the imagination of other people and made individuals and nations in thrall to amour propre. In a credit economy, even the most propertied might experience unexpected reversal, like Shakespeare’s Venetian merchant Antonio. The prisons were full of debtors, accounting for as many as half of all inmates in England and Wales, according to John Howard’s late eighteenth-century tally.380 Canadians struggled to maintain their credit against black marks that might lower it: perhaps a sighting of typhus in a Montreal slum, or a local collapse of prices, or political métissage. Responsible government, itself a form of political métissage, had to be defended as a civilizing form of enlargement. The best demonstration was to impose an unbounded will upon the supposedly uncivilized. Where Americans sought deliberate and violent assertions of purpose, Canadians preferred comity and loyalty and paced their acquisition of the land. The British reports confirmed those leanings but also observed that comity could yield the same fruits that American violence had done. The payoff began to be seen in the Robinson Treaties of 1850 negotiated by William Benjamin Robinson (a miner and the brother of the chief justice) that were not so flagrantly unconstitutional as Bond Head’s but still more unilateral than negotiated: the first without any doodems affixed to show legitimacy and public consent amongst the Indigenous signatories.381 Public opinion was, like the Wizard of Oz, both great and terrible. It could tend towards generalized sympathy, prosperity, and liberty, or illiberal plunder. Canada saw both. British commissioners eschewed glib solutions and tried to push back against the worst of the racism and plunder. But the new knowledge technologies, well equipped to identify deep “social” causes to liberal political economy, provided no protection against the tyranny of the majority. The Bagot report had no audience for any findings that challenged racism. Durham had told Canadians that they had no social-political problems but only racial-cultural ones, and Canadians clung to that understanding. Beginning in the 1850s and the Pennefeather report with its logic of racial rather than social splitting and segregation, Canadians rebuffed Rawson’s struggles to insinuate a social logic into the field, and they racialized Indigenous poverty. Laurence Oliphant (a cousin of Margaret Oliphant, his family intimate with Lord Elgin, whom he served under) was

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named superintendent of the Indian Department, and he began to reconstruct it on plans that he admitted were “a little arbitrary and despotic.”382 Direct Indigenous relationships with the British crown were severed and a Chadwickian machinery of governance through austerity and physical coercion began.383 Settlers were, like Boyd Hilton’s no-longer-atoning businessmen, hardly to blame, after all, for business cycles.384 Civilization, like business, had its booms and busts, its winners and its losers. Que sera sera. The 1830s liberal turn and 1840s social turn that challenged racialization were undone by the next generation of officials and scholars. Unable to reconcile the social and the imperial, Rawson chose the latter. At the Colonial Office, James Stephen was succeeded by Herman Merivale, who took a harder line in favour of cultural “euthanasia” of Indigenous peoples.385 Stephen’s sons, one a lawyer and legal reformer in India, another an author and historian, were prominent Victorian moralists, their views shading into eugenics.386 It was on such logic that civilization became assimilation.

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Democratic Civilization in the 1850s: Joseph-Charles Taché and Political Voice

From the 1840s, Canadians were largely governing themselves and writing their own political philosophies. Here, the analysis turns from British analyses of Canada to the Canadianization of the discourse in three prominent figures of the 1850s and 1860s: Joseph-Charles Taché, John A. Macdonald, and Daniel Wilson. All were steeped in a vibrant, popular historical field. All three read and expounded history in speeches and/or writings and reasoned creatively from the lessons of history to contemporary politics and knowledge. Joseph-Charles Taché was a “man of letters,” a renaissance type with successive careers as a doctor, a politician, a writer, and a civil service mandarin; he also wrote an influential argument for British North American Confederation, one dictated, he argued, by history. John A. Macdonald was always a politician, never a historian, but a constitution is also a kind of history and he largely authored Canada’s new constitution with its debts to political history. Daniel Wilson was the first professor of history and English at the University of Toronto, and an internationally esteemed archaeologist, albeit one who increasingly found himself on the wrong side of history. The three men were of a generation, born between 1815 and 1820 and dying between 1891 and 1894 (Taché 1820–1894, Macdonald 1815–1891, and Wilson 1816–1892). They were stamped by the great political events of the 1830s and 1840s in Canada, Britain, and Europe, and carried those experiences and reflections into their careers at mid-century. All were, in their own way, patriots and liberal-conservatives. And all of them lived through a historiographical revolution that John Higham describes as “perhaps second only to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century in transforming Western thought and shaping our modern mentality.”1 Philosophical and conjectural history was replaced by something more historicizing and more concerned with national character, as described by

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Donald Kelley, breathing life back into Leopold von Ranke’s famous formula for studying the past: “Not universal and unchanging law but particular and changing custom was the concern of the historical school; not abstract and classifying reason but concrete and localized memory; not mechanical or mathematical models but human language and culture; not the imperialism of liberal economics but the realities of national development – not, in short, the way the world should be (according to revolutionary, Bonapartist, Liberal, or Hegelian prescription) but the way it really was.”2 Taché, Macdonald, and Wilson came of age at a time when history writing was popular and universal literature, and they watched it become scholarly and nationalist. All three had a good high school education; Taché received both a classical education at the Quebec seminary (where he delighted to read Montesquieu and Rousseau) and advanced studies in medicine, whereas Macdonald and Wilson were apprenticed and largely self-educated. But all three were masterly wielders of history at a time when its popular currency was high. According to Stefan Berger: “What made it so popular was its ability to mobilize people by giving them an identity and orientation. The construction of national identity through history and the interpretation of ruptures in national development, such as revolutions, became the main concern of historians during the nineteenth century.”3 Canadians took to the new, romantic forms of national history with enthusiasm,4 including my three subjects: Taché wrote romantic tales of early Canada; Macdonald tended to idealize a British-historical world view; Wilson learned to love history from reading Sir Walter Scott. But all three also recognized the dangers of a romantic nationalism clearly on the upswing, seeing a form of chauvinism that threatened Canadien and Indigenous people. Taché and Macdonald advocated and organized FrenchCanadian political agency as a check on that English-Canadian chauvinism, and also sought to bring in enfranchised “Indians” as an ally in that project. Daniel Wilson, less political and more academic, championed Indigenous history and agency in its own right. All three of my subjects recognized that a proper reading of British enlightenment constitutionalism mandated Indigenous enfranchisement. But none was prepared to make the kind of frontal attack on the Canadian national project needed in order to recognize and preserve Indigenous rights to their lands. Any such diminution of the Canadian state predicted a weakening credit rating and an increase in the American state. If the Canadian state was to resist American encroachment, it must be strong in the way of states, with a settler population. Taché wanted to have his cake and eat it too. Macdonald made the hard choice. Wilson lamented it. It was on their watch, and according to their logic, that civilization became “civilization” and the Humean project of a cosmopolitan self-civilizing process was relegated to history in Canada.

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Joseph-Charles Taché was Canada’s Tocqueville, that is, its foremost early theorist of democracy. Janet Ajzenstat sees Durham in that light but Durham was concerned with the “British liberalism in a colonial context” problem, and that’s not a democracy problem.5 Taché, by contrast, came out swinging, in 1857, in favour of “universal suffrage.” It wasn’t really universal, because he was no fan of women’s rights. (Women were also written out of the new romantic national histories.6) But Taché did advocate the abolition of property and racial disqualifications: any man of sound mind and age of majority should vote. Nor was Taché’s argument merely academic: he wrote it in a newspaper series, republished as a monograph (Des provinces de l’Amérique du nord et d’une union fédérale), that became a first draft of the British North America Act.7 That’s well known. A booklet by Jean-Charles Bonenfant begins with the observation by Joseph Blanchet in 1865 that, “in the division of powers between the local governments and the central government, the plan of the conference was almost word for word the work of Monsieur Taché.”8 Taché, a prominent public intellectual and architect of the late Victorian Canadian state, is well known amongst francophone scholars – there exist two biographies – and amongst historians of mid-Victorian politics and the state, especially readers of Arthur Silver and Bruce Curtis.9 Michel Ducharme, a prominent historian of Canadian political ideas, closely examines Taché’s politics in a recent collection of essays on Taché’s polymath writings.10 And yet Taché’s foundational Canadian text has never been translated into English and gets overlooked by political scientists puzzling out the British North America Act.11 I see several reasons for the neglect of Taché’s democratic manifesto. First, the radically democratic appeal was entirely at odds with the essentially anti-democratic political culture of the day, well portrayed by Colin Grittner.12 Second, the odd balance of federalism and ethnic nationalism alienated both federalist and nationalist scholars, who had little to gain in excavating it. Third, the unusually cosmopolitan and transnational quality of Taché’s vision and project also came to work against him over time. His thoughts on what Canada could and should do with itself reflected profound engagement with what other North Atlantic countries were doing with themselves, seen from his standpoint as an intellectual, a legislator, and a bureaucrat. Taché saw in Britain, France, and the United States a series of ironic gaps and contrasts between their ways of describing and of negotiating their worlds. Those ironic gaps were, by dint of Canada’s history and geography, inscribed into Canada as a spectrum of choices. The cultural pluralism seen in the Canadas, and more broadly in British North America, long understood to be a significant cause of political and economic weakness, promised on Taché’s reading to be a source of strength. The strange pleas for conservatism and democratization, and federalism and

6.1 | Joseph-Charles Taché, shown around 1875, a sober, established, and conservative civil servant, who wrote a democratic manifesto in favour of Canadian Confederation. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec p560,s2,d1,p1294.

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nationalism, conspired to make his project invisible to later generations, but so too did his remarkable and ultimately successful translation of a transnational perspective into a national one. A closer reading of that complex document is long overdue. If civilization projects are sometimes self-civilizing processes and sometimes imperial projects, Taché mediated between the two, in ways that complicated the Anglo-Protestant versions formulated in England, America, and Toronto. He was among the first Canadians to imagine a transcontinental state and “civilization” project. By mid-century he already had established himself as an important cultural broker, nationalist politician, and scientific expert, someone of enormous erudition.13 After acquiring an md in 1844, he practised medicine at Rimouski for twelve years. A “seminal figure in the development of French Canadian literature,” he helped found the St Jean Baptiste Society in 1842 and the Mouvement littéraire in 1860.14 He also threw himself into the intense politics of the day, acclaimed as the mpp for Rimouski in 1848, supporting the nationalist party in which his uncle, E.P. Taché, was prominent; during the Rebellion Losses riots in 1849, he shot dead a rioter attacking L.-H. Lafontaine’s house. He was an energetic politician, doing important work on agricultural education, roads and pilotage, sanitarian and seigneurial reform. He also represented Canada at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855 and again in 1867. But his seigneur-friendly reforms and other things compromised him, and in December of 1856 he quit politics to co-found, with Hector Langevin and the backing of the Catholic Church, the Courrier du Canada, where he published his constitutional reflections beginning in July 1857. Biographer Éveline Bossé observes: “Sous sa direction, le Courrier du Canada se révéla fertile en polémiques, trait characterique des journaux de son temps.”15 Upper Canadian premier John A. Macdonald knew how to value such things. In 1859 Taché quit the journal to become an inspector of asylums and prisons. He also wrote memoranda for Macdonald and served as deputy minister for agriculture and immigration from 1864 into the 1880s. That was a big job and Taché made the most of it. He orchestrated the census of 1871, which Curtis described as a project of “feudal science” that showcased Taché’s nationalist and ultramontane (which is to say conservative Catholic) leanings.16 Taché’s ultramontanism has made him seem uninteresting. When Taché says that “authority is important,” everyone knows he means the pope and everyone yawns. It’s all too predictable. But viewed up close, there’s not much here that’s predictable. Early scientists, ultramontanes, and conservatives weren’t usually democrats. Moreover, those democratic and pluralist leanings made him hostile to any state-led imposition of “civilization” on Indigenous peoples, on grounds that they didn’t want it. Taché’s project was antagonistic to the spirit that, for S.F. Wise, made the British North

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America Act “a triumph of Upper Canadian ‘imperialism.’”17 The Canadian founders distorted Taché’s constitutional reform to make it more patrician and Toronto-centric. And yet in many ways Taché got what he wanted. Macdonald thought that the constitutional division of powers would work against the provincial governments, reducing them to insignificance. According to Richard Gwyn, Canadians of the 1860s didn’t have much use for an interventionist state and didn’t see it coming.18 But Taché did. He wanted a busy provincial state able to sustain French-Canadian nationality, culture, and politics, and to ward off Anglo-Protestant supremacy. That’s exactly what he got in Quebec, albeit without the democracy and transnational alliances that he also tried to engineer. It’s worth digging beneath the patrician, Toronto-centric overlay to the more democratic and pluralist vision that underpinned it. Bruce Curtis describes Taché as an early sociologist, combining a grounding in European social science and Canadian censuses, as well as Catholic inventories of the faithful and the faith, and tending to inspire similar inventories in subsequent nationalist writings.19 But it’s also worth noting that Taché insisted his project was grounded on his reading of history. Taché wrote to exalt a French and conservative history in opposition to existing liberal and English histories. François-Xavier Garneau’s riposte to Durham, a liberal history of Canada that began to appear from 1845 and which reappeared in a short précis in 1856, argued that French Canada had been preserved by its conservatism, but also that it had been feebly influenced by religion.20 The two historians disagreed on such points, but still had much common ground. Taché hired Garneau’s son as an assistant and defended Garneau against critics as one of the most distinguished and congenial men of “notre nationalité,” while Garneau passed on Taché’s demographical calculations when pressed for information on the persistence of French Canada.21 The two fought a common battle against Anglo-Canadian triumphalism that celebrated large states over small ones and Anglo-Saxon virtues over all the others.22 In 1850, for example, the Scottish doctor Robert Knox, who had notoriously patronized the murdering resurrectionists Burke and Hare, published The Races of Men: it attacked not just the “dark races” but also the “Celtic” ones, as seen in Britain and in France. “As a race,” Knox argued, “the Celt” had no “literature, nor science, nor arts”: the British Celts were “profoundly ignorant” and the French ones had borrowed their literature from Rome and Greece. So, too, the Canadian “Habitans,” were “Celtic to the core, as when they first left France,” and like all their race despised “the peaceful arts, of labour, of order, and of the law.”23 The North American continent and wider world was ceding to the “self-confident Saxon” with his “go-ahead principles … What to him is a patch of ground? All the earth he is prepared to cultivate, and to sell to the

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highest bidder, so that it suits his purpose.” Two illustrations juxtaposed a classic Saxon house, standing apart, and then a crowded and thuggish-looking “Celtic Group, such as may be seen at any time in Marylebone.”24 Knox’s arguments were not yet orthodox. Colonial Canada had a richly diverse population, including a great many Irish, both Catholic and Protestant, with a vibrant institutional life and many newspapers well able to uphold the honour and reputation of their communities against accusations of backwardness and lack of civilization. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, an Irish Catholic radical who emigrated in 1857 to Canada where he became a member of the provincial legislature, wrote innumerable editorials and published histories, including one of Ireland and another of the Irish contribution to “civilizing America.”25 So, too, did Black emigrants to and inhabitants of colonial Canada insist on their being numbered amongst the civilized peoples of the world. In 1852, a fugitive Black American who settled in Canada and also toured and spoke widely against slavery, Samuel Ward, spoke to a crowd in Toronto gathered to recognize West Indies Emancipation Day, on the question “Who are we colored men?” in the past, present, and future. As regards the past, Ward observed that “the acknowledged source of the world’s civilization was Africa.” As regards the present, Black people were fully civilized, described by many different sources as such, both in Africa and in other parts of the world. As for the future, Ward saw himself as a civilizing agent, bringing God’s will into real existence. Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie argues that Samuel Ward “laboured to make imperialism subject to alternative understandings of liberty and freedom in the modern world.”26 Mary Ann Shadd Cary, a collaborator with Ward, insisted on Black women’s voices in those alternative understandings.27 Cosmopolitan citizenship had many outspoken champions in mid-Victorian Canada. But it also had many enemies, in Canada as in Europe. At their forefront in the public sphere was the Orange Order, which enjoyed terrific growth in British North America between 1854 and 1860, especially in Ontario, where, D’Arcy McGee argued in 1857, there were already “three Orange cabinet members, fourteen Orange mp s, twenty Orange newspapers, eight hundred Orange Lodges, and at least 50,000 Orangemen in Canada West, with increasing numbers of ‘English and Scotch evangelicals’ joining the order.”28 The Order’s impressive mechanisms of solidarity and propaganda had always made them a powerful counterweight to Catholic influence and now they increased their power and patronage, as well as their ability to get out the anti-Catholic vote. There were also academic champions of a specifically British form of civilization. In 1859, a Scottish-born clergyman lecturing at Queen’s College in Kingston, James George, gave a public address under the title “What Is Civilization?” It was not, he insisted, wealth, nor refinement, nor literature, but “the conscience and intellect of a people

6.2 and 6.3 | John Knox’s Races of Men, published in 1852, celebrated Anglo-Saxon races and denigrated all the others, including Celts in Britain, France, and Canada. Representative illustrations contrasted an Anglo-Saxon preference for detached and isolated houses with the denizens of urban density, a sinister-looking “Celtic groupe; such may be seen at any time in Marylebone, London.” Courtesy of Osler Library, McGill University.

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thoroughly cultivated, and the intellect in all cases acting under the direction of an enlightened conscience. This is the basis of all true civilization – or to change the figure – it is the central power which produces or directs all the other powers that civilize men.” The first and “indispensable” requirement was “a good moral condition. Impossible to civilize either “a horde of Hottentots” or the “outcasts of London or Glasgow” without divine morality. Civilization, in short, must be both Christian and centralized, as well as properly deferential to authority. Commerce and converse were nothing alone, he argued, pointing to “the rum trade” as decivilizing “our Indians.”29 Moralizers were loath to recognize civilization in rival parties, churches, and races, and they also blamed Canada’s inability to exercise a properly moral and progressive, centralized and collective agency on party politics seen to cater to the most corrupt, base, and backwards elements in the country. French Canadians were singled out for special opprobrium as the most politically influential and organized yet “inferior” group holding Canada back from achieving continental greatness. When Sir Edmund Head (another poor law commissioner) arrived in Canada in 1856, he praised English racial superiority. Taché’s was just one response among many, including Etienne Parent’s recommendations for more commercialism and Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s arguments for northern colonization.30 Taché first produced an optimistic analysis of Canada’s resources and future in 1855 for a competition, the winning essay to be distributed at the Canadian section of the Paris Exposition.31 But his essay lost to another by John Sheridan Hogan, a Toronto journalist, which Taché then had to circulate in the Canadian court in Paris. One can only imagine the injury to Taché’s feelings by the hurtful clichés in a chapter by Hogan entitled “The Habitant, or Lower Canadian Farmer.” It began: “No person can contrast more strongly than the habitant of Lower Canada and the farmer of Upper. The latter is enterprising, adventurous, and cosmopolitan in his feelings.” Hogan’s habitant, though, preferred to remain at home mired in poverty: “In vain for him has the magnificent West been opened up, in vain for him have America and Europe been filled with accounts of prosperity in it.”32 French Canadians were amiable, simple, happy, and civilized: “all that America can teach them in enterprise would not exceed what they could teach America in the finest features of civilization – namely, gentleness and good manners.” But they were “unquestionably far behind the rest of America” in enterprise. Happily, the reform of feudal tenure, Hogan reassured readers, promised to enable them to acquire and hold property in their own right. Nothing had done so much good for America “as the feeling that a man could win for himself an estate … It has infused the poetry of refinement, respectability and civilization into natures accustomed to all the rudeness of extreme pover