A Samaritan State Revisited: Historical Perspectives on Canadian Foreign Aid by Greg Donaghy and David Webster, (eds)
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702020954298 |
| Author | David Meren |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Greg Donaghy and David Webster, (eds)
A Samaritan State Revisited: Historical Perspectives on Canadian Foreign Aid
Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2019. 377pp. $39.99 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-77385-040-5
Reviewed by: David Meren (david.meren@umontreal.ca), Universit
e de Montr
eal
Reviewing an edited collection always risks drawing the criticism often levelled
against Canadian aid, namely that it is interested in too many things and, thus,
spread too thin to be effective. The product of a conference organized by Carleton
and Bishop’s universities and Global Affairs Canada, A Samaritan State Revisited:
Historical Perspectives on Canadian Foreign Aid employs the 50th anniversary of
Keith Spicer’s ASamaritanState?to add to a historiography on Canadian aid that
“remains a laggard” (1). The collection is organized along largely chronological
lines. The first section explores the “messy, innovative” (25) early years of a
Canadian aid shaped by the multilateral, bilateral, and domestic spheres. The
second covers the “long 1960s” of Canadian official development assistance
(ODA), assessing how aid was understood and instrumentalized by Canadian
state actors. Part three’s exploration of the intersecting of aid and national identity
departs (somewhat) from the chronologic path, although even here one finds Ted
Cogan’s survey of howgovernments from the 1950s to the 1980s “framedforeign aid
policy for their publics” (193). The march of timeresumes in the closing section, “An
exercise in contemporary history” (271), built around contributions of several polit-
ical scientists. Exploring the period from the 1980s to the present, this section traces
the decline of Canadian aid along with the bureaucracy responsible for its delivery.
This includes Stephen Brown’s effort to assess the present-day relevance of Spicer’s
book to Canadian aid efforts. Dominique Marshall, whose work looms large in the
history of humanitarianism, deftly links the practice and historiography of develop-
ment in the conclusion, staking out future research paths.
The collection is at its strongest when looking beyond Canada’s shores. This is
apparent in Jill Campbell-Miller’s flipping of the aid script to show how India
“provided a sort of apprenticeship to Canadian government and business about
how to conduct aid programming” (29). David Webster uses the figure of diplomat
and civil servant Hugh Keenleyside to situate Canada into the multilateral currents
of technical assistance and to recount a broader international history of
“development diplomacy” (91). Ryan Touhey situates Canada’s aid relations
with Pakistan into an iconoclastic tale of imperial afterlife and Cold War calcu-
lations. The collection’s engagement with Latin America is a valuable contribu-
tion, ranging from Stefano Tijerina’s analysis of how the Canadian “promotional
state” instrumentalized aid in Colombia, to Asa McKercher’s discussion of how
Canadian ODA to Chile and Cuba in the 1970s intersected with the human rights
revolution, to Laura Macdonald’s tracing of Canadian aid to Latin America from
the 1980s to the present. Sonya de Laat offers an important exploration of how
Canadian aid and its recipients are represented in the photo library of the
Book Reviews 455
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