Republicanism and Responsible Government: The shaping of democracy in Canada and Australia by Benjamin Jones (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Republicanism and Responsible Government: The shaping of democracy in Canada and Australia by Benjamin Jones Dan Horner Republicanism and Responsible Government: The shaping of democracy in Canada and Australia By Benjamin Jones. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2014. Benjamin Jones’ Republicanism and Responsible Government begins with a simple question: Why did the British colonies that would go on to be reconstituted as Australia and Canada forsake independence from the metropole? That they maintained their connection to the crown in the face of clumsily autocratic colonial regimes might seem particularly curious. Jones argues that we need to reflect on the agitation for democratic reform in the mid-nineteenth century in order to make sense of this. He helpfully reminds us that just because these colonial societies eschewed independence does not mean they were not grappling with republican ideas. If we conceptualize republicanism as being inextricably linked to independence from the crown, Jones argues, we risk losing sight of the full impact these political ideas had on the nineteenth-century British world. Jones pitches Republicanism and Responsible Government as a work of intellectual history. At its core, it is a book about how ideas circulated around the British Empire. Many of the connections that Jones unearths—like Chartists working on the goldfields of Victoria and settlers in Van Diemen’s Land poring over Lord Durham’s report on the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada—are fascinating examples of a shared experience of public life in the British world. Lord Durham and his famous report looms heavily over Jones’ narrative. Durham’s endorsement of the principle of colonial self-government was embraced by reform-oriented elites across the British Empire. Jones’ view of Durham is unabashedly celebratory. Figures like William Lyon Mackenzie, Louis Joseph Papineau, John Dunmore Lang and Joseph Howe were, by the 1830s, beginning to develop a popular following with their pointed critiques of imperial meddling in colonial affairs. Growing demands for effective representative government, Jones suggests, could have ultimately led to the dismantling of the British Empire. Durham’s endorsement of responsible government, he argues, created a desperately needed escape hatch. Responsible government allowed democracy to flourish in White settler societies without forcing them into the choice that Americans made to sever their connection with the crown. Durham’s solution was embraced by the advocates of democratic reform in White settler societies because the vast majority of them remained deeply committed to maintaining their connection to the British Empire. They identified closely with a set of political and cultural values that they conceptualized as British, and defended their political activism on the grounds that their support for democratic reform was essentially an effort to have their rights as British subjects recognized. Advocates of democratic reform were driven by a set of political values that Jones refers to as civic republicanism. This ideology, shared by advocates of democratic reform from Nova Scotia to New South Wales, tempered the rampant individualism of Lockean liberalism with an overarching emphasis on serving the public good and an openness to collective endeavours. Jones very effectively demonstrates the genealogy of this perspective, tracing it back to antiquity and through Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu. He also notes the important influence nonconformist Christianity had on civic republicanism. These were ideas that became deeply entrenched in the intellectual culture of the British Empire, and the emphasis on mixed government and the common good helped fuel public animosity towards colonial regimes that were seen to be corrupt and unjustly governed. Jones argues that it was through the principles of civic republicanism that ideas about republicanism were grappled with in colonial societies where actual separation from the crown failed to gain traction. These ideas helped reform-oriented elites build their case against anti-democratic Tories in British North America and the proponents of transportation as an engine of colonial settlement in New South Wales. In lauding Durham for his diplomatic prowess, Jones explicitly asks the reader to downplay the report’s notoriously anti-French passages. He justifies this approach by stating that Durham’s apparent disdain for Lower Canada’s French population was based on the belief—widely held during this period—that democratic governance was an...