Beverley Baxter in Empireland

The British Empire/Commonwealth, earlier a staple of Canadian historical writing, has fallen out of fashion. That partly reflects the adjournment sine die of the once acrimonious debates about Canada’s place in an empire on which the sun was said never to set. Neville Thompson’s new book is both an attempt to revive a neglected historical subject and an account of one man’s effort to prevent the sunset. In those historical and political debates, one side was often called “imperialist,” the other “nationalist” even though the reality was far more complex. As Carl Berger argued in a superb book entitled The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867–1914, “Canadian imperialism was one version of Canadian nationalism … which rested upon a certain understanding of history, the national character, and the national mission.” That could be called British-Canadian nationalism. Most French Canadians, and many other Canadians, thought of themselves...