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The Habit of Deference: The Imperial Factor and the “University Question“ in Upper Canada*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Fred D. Schneider
Fred D. Schneider*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
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Extract

“Imperialism,” like “empire,” is a word with many connotations; briefly, it describes an attitude of mind to the possession and use of dependent territories by the metropolitan power and the effect of colonization on the society and polity of the colonized. Despite attempts to discover a common basis to imperialist thinking at all times in history, most historians perceive differences, both in degree and kind, between different empires and at various times in the history of a single empire. They approach their task either with a definition of “imperialism” or a theory about the phenomenon it is meant to describe, and are concerned primarily with the effects of policies rather than how and why they were made; or they ask why something happened when it did, in the way it did, and are concerned primarily with the making of policy and the motives of the policy-makers.

Following the second approach, this paper explores one of the most crucial and continuous questions that imperial administrators had to resolve: the problem of self-government in colonies of European settlement, leading to the ultimate transfer of power; and by looking at the “University Question” in Upper Canada during the half-century after 1791, it examines how the perpetual adjustment that was “policy-making” actually happened. More specifically, in answering the question, “Who ran the British Empire?”, it is concerned not so much with the effects of Britain's control over subject peoples as with the method by which it exercised that control.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , Fall 1977 , pp. 82 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1977

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Footnotes

*

Professor A. P. Thornton, of the University of Toronto, has read and criticized this paper; he should not, of course, be held responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation.

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