John Reid Scare Tactics

John Reid, Blair's Home Secretary, is a politician known for his tough law and order stance. Today, he declared that independence would make Scotland vulnerable to terrorists and illegal immigration. In fact, it would be a "gift" to the filthy buggers.

http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=1754072006

Sometimes I wonder if Reid is actually a member of the British Labour Party or simply a right-wing US Republican who acquired a Scottish accent for the purposes of infiltrating British politics and spreading paranoia about "homeland security."

Anyway, I wonder if in future Canadian politicians will combat separatism through similar scaremongering.

British Reaction to Quebec Nation Vote

British reactions to the Quebec-a-nation vote are interesting for several reasons. First, references to the "four nations" of the United Kingdom are not controversial here and most British people would argue that a strong identification with one of these nations does necessarily imply a desire for political independence.

The movement for outright political independence (as opposed to a desire for more powers for Scotland's Parliament) is a marginal force in Scotland (notwithstanding Blair's recent scare-mongering about the threat from the SNP. http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/iain_macwhirter/2006/11/labours_scare_mongering_on_sco.htmland

In Wales, the movement for independence is even weaker. Even in England, the most unionist part of the UK, the majority of the people will tend to describe themselves as English rather than British.

All of nations of the British Isles have teams that compete in international sporting events. The UK sends a single team to the Olympics, but the constituent nations of the UK send teams to most other international events, most notably the World Cup (England's performance at the recent World Cup were probably watched by more people than any Olympic event ever is). The British experience helps to put Guy Betrand's advocacy of a Quebec national hockey team into perspective. See http://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey/story/2006/11/02/teamquebec-hockey.html and http://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/article.jsp?content=20061102_140139_5576 and
http://www.hockeyforum.com/world-cup-hockey/3341-push-team-quebec-hockey-worlds.html

The BBC news stories on the Quebec nation vote 22 Nov http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6190162.stm
and 28 Nov http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6174986.stmon
are their first items on a Canadian-related topic since a September story on Canadian public opinion and the Afghan mission http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/5319310.stm

All of the BBC stories are narrowly descriptive and don't contain much in the way of interpretation and analysis. However, a Welsh website, icWales, has taken an interest in the "Quebec nation row".

http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0700world/tm_headline=quebec--nation--row-hits-canada&method=full&objectid=18170736&siteid=50082-name_page.html

The really interesting discussion of this issue, however, is to be found in the discussion forum hosted by the Scotsman newspaper:

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1733202006

The irony is that many people in Scotland are much more sympathetic to Quebec nationalism than the average Scottish immigrant to Canada is (trust me on this one).

NOTE:

The BBC hasn't got a full-time reporter in Canada, and instead relies on the CBC and Lee Carter, a British-born Toronto DJ, in covering Canadian events. The reports he files for the BBC are totally neutral and factual, but I wonder if he has expressed opinions about this issue on air.

http://www.spiritofradio.ca/Personalities.asp?Show=Carter%2C+Lee

Canadian War Museum

Here is a story with a (tangential) link to the British World theme of this blog:

A veterans groups have announced they are unhappy with a panel within an exhibit at the Canadian War Museum. The panel is question states that both the morality and the military effectiveness of the Allied bombing raids against Germany remain contested. The Museum does not take sides in either the dispute about morality or the empirical question regarding effectiveness, it merely notes that these issues remain controversial.


http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/story.html?id=05bb0c8c-827d-4d79-8ee3-dda6ad6b6707&k=42408

There is no way that the CWM should back down in this issue. As quoted in this news story, the panel in question seems eminently fair in its phrasing. Moreover, as part of their duty to educate the public, museums have an obligation to indicate that the past is interpreted in different ways. Most casual visitors just want the basic facts of the case (actually, many visitors are probably school kids with little interest in the topic), but a good museum will lightly refer to the historiographic debates. The Holocaust gallery of the IWM in London has a good system: the main panels give the basic facts about the Holocausts, but visitors wanting more detail can sit at special computer terminals with PowerPoint displays dealing with historiographic controversies (e.g., the failure of Western nations to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz). There are even suggestions for further reading for the tiny minority of really keen visitors.

The veterans involved are old men and one hesitates to suggest fighting them by citing fancy degrees and "books". However, the CWM should perhaps mention in its next press release the academic credentials of the people who put the exhibit together. This should silence much of the criticism.

Macdonald Letter to be Auctioned

CBC news reports that a letter John A. Macdonald wrote to the famous English legal theorist Sir Henry Maine shortly after the passage of the British North America Act will be auctioned. In the letter, Macdonald expresses his delight at the passage of BNA Act and some ideas on the possibility of war with the United States.

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/story/2006/11/24/macdonald-letter.html

The provenance of this letter has not be made public, but we are told that it is currently in private hands (perhaps those of a distant relative of Maine). It is unclear from the CBC story if any other correspondence between Maine and Macdonald will be put up for auction. It is also unknown whether there is an extant reply from Maine to Macdonald.

I take a particular interest in this story. My PhD thesis was on the role of British businessmen in Canadian Confederation, so any document relating to the Anglo-Canadian relationship in this period is naturally interesting to me. In fact, I'm fascinated by pretty much anything related to Macdonald. Moreover, Maine was an important social theorist in his own right who doubtless had an interesting perspective on Canadian Confederation and the imperial constitution.

Indeed, the role of legal ideas about the imperial constitution in the politics of Confederation would itself be an interesting topic for a book or dissertation (for someone else to write). Although 19th century British colonists generally subscribed to a Dicey-style notion of Parliamentary omnicompetence, many Anti-Confederates in Nova Scotia believed that the sovereignty of the imperial parliament was limited and that Westminster had exceeded these limits when it forced Nova Scotia into Confederation. (Ken Pryke quotes Nova Scotians who thought this way). Joseph Howe disliked this doctrine (not surprising, given that he was the son of the United Empire Loyalist), but he nevertheless raised when he discussed fighting Confederation in court with two London barristers. The barristers, however, told Howe that it was unlikely that a British court would declare the BNA Act to be ultra vires!


Let us hope that the Library and Archives of Canada will be able to purchase this important document. I suspect, however, that this letter will be snapped up by a Bay Street law firm. If so, let's hope they do the right thing and place it on permanent loan with a Canadian archive. It would be nice if this letter were placed in the Macdonald Fonds in Ottawa.

Centre for Globalisation Research

I'm posting a link to the Centre for Globalisation Research at U London's Queen Mary College.
Although it is located in a business school, the centre strives to be inter-disciplinary: historians and political scientists are among the academics who have affiliations with the centre. As someone very interested in the history of globalization, I say: three cheers for the Centre for Globalisation Research,

http://www.busman.qmul.ac.uk/cgr/index.shtml

Thanks to AR for the tip about the centre.

The Obits for Milton Friedman continue to pour in

The blogosphere discussion of Milton's Friedman's life and legacy continues to expand. Some of the laudatory posts are by conservatives who appear unaware of Friedman's early advocacy of the decriminalization of drugs and all sexual acts amongst consenting adults. Friedman was libertarian, not a conservative, a point lost on all the Republican bloggers. To paraphrase the title of a recent book on the future of the right in the US, this is the elephant in the room none of these conservatives are willing to discuss as they merrily go about appropriating the ideas and reflected glory of MF.

Many tributes have been posted on the blog of Milton's Friedman's son, the anarcho-capitalist economists David Friedman http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/

Friedman certainly wasn't a pure libertarian, however, a point brought out on a post to the Guardian's blog in the UK. http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/richard_adams/2006/11/post_650.html

Gary Becker of U Chicago has an interesting post on his first class with MF. http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2006/11/on_milton_fried.html#comments

Milton Friedman has Died

The economist Milton Friedman had died. http://www.hoover.org/bios/friedman This occasion for reflection is bound to create the same sort of interesting intellectual debates in the blogosphere that followed the death of J.K. Galbraith. I will keep people posted as I see things.

Deepak Lal's In Praise of Empires

This review of Deepak Lal's In Praise of Empires appeared earlier this year, but I'm posting a link to it now.


http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/1049.shtml

Adam Tooze Interview

This link is to the Penguin website and an interview with Adam Tooze, the author of pathbreaking economic history of Nazi Germany. Some interesting points about Tooze's background and motivations for writing this book come up, there is little on what I regard as the most interesting aspect of Tooze's research: Nazi perceptions of the causes of American prosperity. Tooze argues that the Nazi drive to acquire a vast Lebensraum in the Slavic east was inspired by America's frontier. The Nazi reasoning was that if the Americans could push Indians out of the way in order to get land and other resources, Germany could jolly well do the same. (the Nazis were clearly ignorant of the important role America's relative tolerance towards immigrants played in creating American prosperity).

Leaving aside the obvious moral dimensions of the issue, whether Hitler's plan for the east ever could have worked in the sense of creating prosperity is a question economic historians need to consider. Simply having lots of territory doesn't necessarily translate into prosperity. In fact, it can turn into a curse. This is something American economic historians (as well as Canadian and Australian) need to think about.

One counterfactual that has always intrigued me: suppose Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase never took place and the American people had been confined to the Eastern seaboard. How would their economy of have developed? Could they have reached OECD-country type living standards without tapping the natural resources of the interior? Would the US have developed electric instead of internal combustion cars?

An even more interesting counterfactual is Europeans never colonizing other continents at all. Would Europe have been able to escape the Malthusian trap with Australia and North America as a vent for surplus population?

http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780713995664,00.html?sym=QUE



Brad De Long has some thoughts on Tooze's book. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/08/the_wages_of_de.html

Farewell to Alms

I'm posting a link to an online draft of Gregory Clark's forthcoming economic history of the world. It's extremely stimulating reading, but I suspect that some critics will find his approach too eclectic. I haven't been able to discern any really ground-breaking argument in this book, but it is a very good tour of the intellectual horizon.

http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Farewell%20to%20Alms/ftahome.html

Mark Your Calendars

14 December 2006

Book Launch: Canada and the British World, edited by Phil Buckner and R.D. Francis.
5pm

Venue: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London.


http://www.americas.sas.ac.uk/events/events.php

British World Conference Bristol

I'm posting a link to the flyer for the upcoming British World Conference, to be held next July in Bristol.



http://www.bris.ac.uk/colonialstudies/events/britishworldflyer.doc.

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog, The Beaver and the British World. My name is Andrew Smith. I'm a Canadian, a historian by training, who is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. http://www.history.ac.uk/

My blog's title is a reference to my research interests. My current research project deals with Anglo-Canadian relations in 1867-1914 and is inspired by the growing body of literature on the 'British World'. The recent wave of historical writing on the many important ties that once connected the Dominions to Britain and each other helped inspire my current research, and I pay tribute to it with the title of my blog. 'Canada and the British World' might have been a good title for my blog, but it was already taken by an excellent book edited by Phil Buckner and R. D. Francis. http://www.ubcpress.ca/search/title_book.asp?BookID=4569

The major theme of this blog is Anglo-Canadian relations. However, it will also contain links to items dealing with my other academic interests. These include economic history, business history, Canadian history, federalism, and the New Institutional Economics.