Power and Agency in Newfoundland and Labrador's History

Abstract

IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE a more important historical question than who or what actually makes history. English-Canadian historiography, like Anglo-American historiography generally, long cherished the notion that powerful elites did most of the making. The flourishing of social history since the late 1960s has meant that those old, treasured notions must take into account the importance of a popular agency in history. In the case of the writing of Newfoundland and Labrador's history, it is surprising to see that the older ideas are still alive, in the work of Jerry Bannister. Equally astonishing, Bannister's work draws on Gerald Sider's anthropological reordering of Newfoundland history. Sider's Between History and Tomorrow is ostensibly interested in the concepts of culture and class which dominated social history. However, his imposition of what Marx called a supra-historical theory of merchant capital bears little similarity to history. Although a much better researched work than Sider's, Bannister's The Rule of the Admirals argues that only the propertied classes, and their state functionary allies, are important in understanding the history of 18th-century Newfoundland. According to its title page, Sider's book is the significantly expanded and updated second edition of Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: A Newfoundland Illustration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986). The author promises that he has expanded on his original analysis of merchant capital in Newfoundland fishing communities to show its relevance in understanding the subse-