Where Once They Stood: Newfoundland’s Rocky Road to Confederation. By Raymond Blake and Melvin Baker (Regina, University of Regina Press, 2019) 397 pp. $89.00 cloth $27.95 paper

Abstract

When representatives of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island began to discuss a possible union of Britain’s North American Maritime colonies, they included Newfoundland as something of an afterthought. Accordingly, the colony sent no official representative to the Charlottetown Conference (1864), the first formal meeting to discuss confederation. Nevertheless, the meeting generated impassioned debates about the proposed union among Newfoundland’s politicians. The question was at the center of the colony’s election in 1869, and even though Newfoundland rejected union with other British North American colonies at this point, the question hardly faded from view. To the contrary, confederation remained a part of the colony’s political discourse from the later 1860s to 1949, when residents of the colony voted to join the neighboring dominion.Blake and Baker trace the issue of confederation in Newfoundland’s political discourse from the 1860s to the 1940s. As they demonstrate in this carefully researched work, confederation sometimes served mainly as a means of deriding political opponents. At other times, however, it loomed as a real possibility, especially when Newfoundlanders, heavily dependent on the fisheries and often volatile export markets, found themselves facing economic and ecological changes and crises. Some of the episodes that Blake and Baker detail will be familiar to historians of Newfoundland, Canada, and the British Empire. Hiller, for example, wrote an earlier account of the first rejection of confederation in 1869.1 The personalities and referenda surrounding the union of Canada and Newfoundland have also been carefully assessed previously. Yet, much of Where Once They Stood is fresh and insightful, particularly Blake and Baker’s detailed discussion of the talks between Canadian and Newfoundland politicians in the closing years of the nineteenth century after the collapse of the colony’s financial institutions. One of the central contributions of this work is how it ties together the often disparate studies of confederation and confederation talk to show how this contentious subject has been a persistent feature of political discussion in Newfoundland from the 1860s to the present day.Indeed, as Blake and Baker note, the circumstances leading directly to formal political union in 1949 remain a point of debate within and outside academic circles, as scholars, journalists, and other writers continue to disagree about whether Newfoundland’s ultimate entry into Confederation was the result of conspiracy or choice. For their part, the authors come down firmly on the side of choice. They note that those who see conspiracies often rely on explanations that cast ordinary Newfoundlanders as dupes who were incapable of developing sophisticated political analyses. Rejecting this premise, Blake and Baker argue that the electorate, when voting against or for confederation, made reasonable decisions given the contexts in which they operated and the narratives that they received. In 1869, fears that a union with other British North American colonies would lead to heightened taxes and decreased control of local resources helped to foster anti-confederation sentiment. About eighty years later, after a depression and a war, large numbers of working people in Britain, the United States, and Canada demanded that ideals of citizenship be broadened to include what Marshall called “social citizenship”—a minimally decent standard of living (usually provided through welfare-state institutions) and basic political rights.2 Newfoundlanders, the authors suggest, came to believe that the best hope of achieving those rights was through union with Canada, and voting decisions based on that conviction, rather than shady dealings, is what ultimately led to Newfoundland’s entry into confederation.Where Once they Stood is a carefully researched study, written in a highly accessible way, that will interest professional historians as well as anyone concerned with the history of Newfoundland, Canada, and the British Empire. It deserves the wide audience for which it is so well suited.