From Dogmatic Slumbers

Half a century ago, the historian Carl Berger published The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914. This was a remarkably fascinating foray into a rather fallow field, Canadian intellectual history. Since then, the field has become far more fertile, with more Canadianists identifying as intellectual historians and with more Canadian scholarship showing an awareness of the European and, latterly, global history of ideas.

The subtitle of Berger’s book indicated its subject: imperialism. Given the growing attention to post-colonial and subaltern studies in recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in this subject, with a notable shift away from the colonizers to the colonized. Current culture wars about statues, commemoration, and the significance of such figures as Cecil Rhodes, Egerton Ryerson, and Sir John A. Macdonald tend to turn on an assessment of whether nineteenth-century empires — the British one...