Commonwealth Origins, 1839–67 English Thinking and the Canadian Experiment

Abstract

British North America was deemed an important, but by no means necessarily the most important, of British overseas possessions in that second British Empire which came into being with the secession of the American colonies. But among the colonies of settlement, as distinct from colonies of conquest or administration such as the West Indies or even India – nominally under the control of the East India Company until the mutiny in 1857 – those in British North America occupied a preeminent position. This was as much by virtue of their geographical position, their extent and their comparatively long period of colonisation as by any immediate strategic or economic significance. In a very particular sense they were a test case. First settled by the French in the early sixteenth century, they became British under the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Some two decades later the St Lawrence and lake region settlements, designated the province of Upper Canada in 1791, became a principal (though by no means the only) refuge of United Empire loyalists – in 1783 some ten thousand had also arrived in the St John’s district on the bay of Fundy, mostly military personnel with their wives and children; separating from Nova Scotia they formed in 1784 the province of New Brunswick – men resolved to escape from the claims of republican allegiance.