Reframing Canada’s Great War: Liberalism, sovereignty, and the British Empire c. 1860s–1919
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702018765936 |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essays |
Scholarly Essay
Reframing Canada’s
Great War: Liberalism,
sovereignty, and the
British Empire c.
1860s–1919
Graeme Thompson
Faculty of History, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Abstract
This article examines how Canadian Liberals understood Canada’s international rela-
tions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, situating their political
thought within the British imperial world and their views of the Great War in a broader
historical context. It argues that while Liberals regarded Canadian participation in the
war as an affirmation of nationhood, they nonetheless conceived of Canada as a ‘‘British
nation’’ and an integral part of a British imperial community in international politics.
The article further illuminates the growth of an autonomous Canadian foreign policy
within the British Empire, and shows that even the staunchest Liberal proponents of
independence upheld the Dominion’s British connection. In so doing, it connects the
history of Canadian Liberalism to a wider British Liberal tradition that advocated the
transformation of the relationship between the United Kingdom and its settler
Dominions from one of imperial dependence to that of equal, sovereign, and freely
associated nations.
Keywords
Liberalism, Canada, British Empire, Great War, Wilfrid Laurier, foreign policy,
sovereignty, Canadian international relations, intellectual history
International Journal
2018, Vol. 73(1) 85–110
!The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0020702018765936
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Corresponding author:
Graeme Thompson, University of Oxford, Faculty of History, St. Antony’s College, 62 Woodstock Rd.,
Oxford, OX2 6JF United Kingdom.
Email: thompson.graeme@outlook.com
‘‘[W]hen the time comes in the history of any colony that it has ...entered on a career
of permanent progress and prosperity, it is only fair and right that it should contribute
its quota to the defence of the empire.’’
1
– George Brown, 1865
‘‘The storming of Vimy Ridge ...was the first cleancut definite stoke by the Canadian
Corps acting as a recognized unit of the greater British army[.]’’
2
– John W. Dafoe, 1919
Introduction
The centenary of the Great War has revived historical debate over the legacies of
the conflict that convulsed the globe from 1914–1918: a world war that entailed far-
reaching consequences for the European empires, their subject peoples, and the
prevailing imperial world order. By 1919, as empires teetered and collapsed,
national self-determination and internationalism appeared ascendant. In Canada,
which—in common with Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and tiny
Newfoundland—joined the distant overseas war as a Dominion of the British
Empire, historians have emphasized the Great War’s seemingly pivotal role in
the development of a post-imperial national identity. In this line of argument,
the crucible of the Western Front, and the Battle of Vimy Ridge in particular,
marked the symbolic departure toward a new Canadian nationalism and an inde-
pendent foreign policy.
3
This ‘‘Liberal-nationalist’’ interpretation remains deeply influential in Canadian
historiography, though new works have increasingly challenged and contextualized
its claims.
4
In recent years, moreover, imperial historians have rediscovered the
significance of the British Dominions and their central role in Britain’s imperial
world-system. There was, in fact, a ‘‘British World’’ in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries: a transoceanic imperial community—both real and imagined—that
linked the United Kingdom and its settler empire in tightly integrated networks
1. Quoted in Alexander Mackenzie, ed., The Life and Speeches of Hon. George Brown (Toronto: The
Globe, 1882), 333.
2. John Dafoe, Over the Canadian Battlefields: Notes of a Little Journey in France, in March 1919
(Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1919), 48–49.
3. Eminent Canadian historians even labelled the Great War as a ‘‘war of independence.’’ Desmond
Morton and J. L. Granatstein, Marching to Armageddon: Canadians and the Great War, 1914–1919
(Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989), 1. On the post-war world order, see Erez Manela, The
Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Susan Pederson, The Guardians: The League of Nations
and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Adam Tooze, The Deluge:
The Great War, America, and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Viking, 2014).
4. See especially Tim Cook, Vimy: The Battle and the Legend (Toronto: Allen Lane, 2017); Ian McKay
and Jamie Swift, The Vimy Trap: Or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War
(Toronto: Between the Lines, 2016); Jonathan Vance, Maple Leaf Empire: Canada, Britain, and Two
World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
86 International Journal 73(1)
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