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The Problem of “Nationalism” and “Imperialism” in British Settlement Colonies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Douglas Cole
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Nation-making, said Canadian journalist Sir John Willison, was one of Canada's infant industries. Canada had first become a nation in 1867, and, according to party literature, with every subsequent change of government “we have been made a nation over again.” Sir John was not exaggerating the number of times that writers have made Canada a nation, and, since historians have often been employed in the same nation-making industry, this paper will concern itself with the problem of the historian in dealing with the conceptions of “nationalism” and “imperialism” in Canada and other colonies of British settlement.

The study of nationalism in British settlement colonies is hampered by difficulties of terminology, conceptualization, and ideological inflection. Looseness of word-usage, such as using “nation” for both state or country and as a word to describe a group of people with some common features, constitutes a major difficulty, especially when historians accept the looseness uncritically and without analysis. Sometimes “national” is used as a euphemism for the policy of protection – Sir John A. Macdonald's Canadian National Policy was originally little more than that. The same term was used by Queensland's Premier McIllwraith in 1882, and there “national” could only have meant the economic development of the Queensland “nation.” “National” sometimes simply means a geographic whole or a common, central institution – that is, a “national” government can merely mean one government governing four provinces, or six states. The word can even, as in “national schools,” mean non-denominational.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , May 1971 , pp. 160 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1971

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References

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2. “Imperialism,” as used in the settlement colonies, did not mean expansion, but the attempt to consolidate the unity of the Empire. The essay concentrates on Australia and Canada, the only two settlement countries where the writer has had an opportunity to do personal research. Occasional reference will be made to New Zealand. English-speaking South Africa is omitted from consideration, though not because the conceptions, with variation, may not apply. The author is obliged to the President's Research Fund, Simon Fraser University, and the J. S. Ewart Memorial Fund, University of Manitoba, for research aid.

3. The usage of “national” for a school system is of Irish origin, though it tended to assume various shades of meaning in the colonies and has even been considered as a nationalistic system, e.g., Mackenzie, T. Findlay, Nationalism and Education in Australia (London, 1935)Google Scholar.

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70. Since Britain was relatively isolated from the influences of nineteenth century continental movements, it escaped a good deal of the nationalist ideology. It seems quite possible that some, especially those further isolated in the colonies, missed almost completely this nationalist impulse. For a useful corrective to the exaggerated nationalism-is-everywhere idea, see Kedourie, Nationalism.

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