Upper Canada’s Empire: Liberalism, Race, and Western Expansion in British North America, 1860s – 1914

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article recovers a long-forgotten tradition of Canadian political thought – a Liberal idea of nation-building premised on the expansion and consolidation of an Upper Canadian empire. Combining a staunch imperial ‘Britishness’ with visions of western expansion and colonisation, Liberal politicians and intellectuals from the province of Ontario conceived Canada’s vast North-West territory as an Upper Canadian colony – an Anglo-Saxon settler empire that linked Ontario and its metropolis, Toronto, by rail and settlement to the Prairie West, British Columbia, and beyond to Britain’s Pacific empire. Between 1860 and 1914, this vision of western expansion underpinned Canada’s political and economic development, bringing ‘greater Ontario’ Liberals into contact with a series of racial others who were either incorporated into the Dominion or else disenfranchised and excluded.