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Early Modern Imperial Governance and the Origins of Canadian Political Culture*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Elizabeth Mancke
Elizabeth Mancke
Affiliation:
University of Akron
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Abstract

For the last three decades, scholars of Canadian political culture have favoured ideological explanations for state formation with the starting point being the American Revolution and Loyalist resettlement in British North America. This article challenges both the ideological bias and the late eighteenth-century chronology through a reassessment of early modern developments in the British imperial state. It shows that many of the institutional features associated with the state in British North America and later Canada—strong executives and weak assemblies, Crown control of land and natural resources, parliamentary funding of colonial development and accommodation of non-British subjects—were all institutionalized in the imperial state before the American Revolution and before the arrival of significant numbers of ethnically British settlers to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Quebec. Ideological discourses in the British North American colonies that became Canada, unlike those that became the United States, traditionally acknowledged the presence of a strong state in its imperial and colonial manifestations. Rather than challenging its legitimacy, as had Americans, British North Americans, whether liberals, republicans or tories, debated the function of the state and the distribution of power within it.

Résumé

Au cours de trois dernières décennies, les spécialistes de la culture politique canadienne ont prôné une approche idéologique à propos de la formation de l'État, ayant comme point de départ la Révolution américaine et le peuplement Loyaliste en Amérique du Nord. Suite à une réévaluation des premiers développements modernes de l'État britannique impérial, cet article remet en question et la tendance idéologique et la chronologie de la fin du 18e, siècle. Il démontre que plusieurs des caractéristiques institutionnelles associées à l'État en Amérique du Nord britannique et, plus tard, au Canada—de puissantes administrations et de faibles assemblées, le contrôle des resources naturelles et foncières par la Couronne, les subventions parlementaires du développement colonial, ainsi que l'accommodation des sujets non-britanniques—étaient toutes institutionnalisées dans l'État impérial avant la Révolution américaine et avant l'arriveée de bon nombre de colons d'origine britannique à Terre-Neuve, en Nouvelle-Écosse et au Québec. Les discours idéologiques dans les colonies de l'Amérique du Nord britannique qui devinrent le Canada, contrairement à celles qui devinrent les États-Unis, confirmaient, traditionnellement, la présence d'un État fort à travers ses manifestations impériales et coloniales. Plutôt que contester sa légitimité, comme l'avaient fait les Américains, les Américains du Nord britannique, qu'ils soient libéraux, républicans ou conservateurs, discutèrent de la fonction de l'État et de la répartition des ses pouvoirs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 3 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1999

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References

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13 Despite my reservations with the way Horowitz shaped the discussion of Canadian political culture, his formulation did have the salutary utility of invigorating scholarship.

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