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In this concluding volume of the biography of the great Nova Scotia tribune, Joseph Howe extends his horizon well beyond his native province and in the climactic period of a tumultuous political career accepts the union of the British North American colonies and "becomes a Canadian."
Professor Beck shows how, in Churchillian fashion, the final resolution was preceded by a series of setbacks and disappointments in Howe's public life. These were the result of a bold colonization scheme encompassing an inter-colonial railway between Halifax and Quebec; a quixotic mission of recruitment in the United States for the British armies in the Crimea; the embattled leasdership of an unstable provincial administration in the early 1860s; and the hard-fought campaign to prevent passage of the British North America Act. Disillusioned by the indifference of British politician to his long-standing advocacy of a refurbished British Empire in whose government colonial leaders could share, Howe turned his energies to making the new Canadian federation work. A whole-hearted supporter of Confederation in his later years, Howe displayed an irrepressible vitality that Professor Beck sees as the trademark of the man.
Without pressure from a small but influential group of London financiers, Confederation would not have occurred in 1867, if at all. These financiers supported the unification of the British North American colonies because they believed it would rescue their under-performing investments and keep British North America within the British Empire. Andrew Smith discusses the role of British investors in Canadian Confederation, covering the period from the construction of the Grand Trunk Railroad in the 1850s to Canada's purchase of Rupert's Land in 1869-70. He describes how some investors lobbied the British government for the policies that made Confederation possible, working closely with the Fathers of Confederation, many of whom were participants in the same trans-Atlantic crony-capitalist system. British factory owners with classical liberal beliefs, however, disliked Confederation because they believed it would delay the political independence of the North American colonies, something they saw as beneficial. British Businessmen and Canadian Confederation reminds Canadians that most contemporaries of Confederation saw it as a way to preserve the colonists' bonds with Britain rather than to expand their political autonomy. It should interest a wide audience - from students of Canadian political history to historians interested in Victorian globalization.
In Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation, 1837-1867, Ged Martin offers a sceptical review of claims that Confederation answered all the problems facing the provinces, and examines in detail British perceptions of Canada and ideas about its future. The major British contribution to the coming of Confederation is to be found not in the aftermath of the Quebec conference, where the imperial role was mainly one of bluff and exhortation, but prior to 1864, in a vague consensus among opinion-formers that the provinces would one day unite. Faced with an inescapable need to secure legislation at Westminster for a new political structure, British North American politicians found they could work within the context of a metropolitan preference for intercolonial union.
Analytical index to the entire series of twenty volumes, p. vii.