Tyler A. Shipley, Canada in the World: Settler Colonialism and the Colonial Imagination (Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing, 2020)

Canada in the World is an idiosyncratic and polemical survey of Canada’s international history. Political scientist Tyler A. Shipley seeks to demonstrate that colonial dispossession, white supremacy, and capitalist accumulation have defined Canada’s foreign engagements. The book prioritizes continuity, tracking how Canadian state actors pursued capitalist imperatives abroad and justified imperial actions with racialized ideas that Shipley calls “the colonial imagination” (1–2, 8). While demonstrating considerable limitations, the book unwaveringly shows that Canadian interventions deliver and sustain violence.

Shipley promises to revise the conventional wisdom that Canada is a peaceable, generous, and just international actor – a popular view that no doubt exists. Yet the text includes many evidence-less generalizations about how the public perceived Canadian participation in certain events. Vignettes on school textbooks (14), Canada’s 150 celebrations (37–38), and Heritage Minutes (246–252) provide limited grounds for a public history critique. Equally, despite occasional asides about “the dominant scholarly dynamic” (16), the book is a synthesis based largely on secondary sources. Shipley builds on, rather than refutes, critical histories. The analysis, then, mainly takes issue with past state actions and how government officials justified foreign interventions at the time.

The book joins recent histories of settler colonialism in reassessing the material and ideological foundations of Canada. Yet the analysis is hindered because settler colonialism, extractive colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism are never disentangled. Shipley also signals a desire to transcend diplomacy to consider the wider range of ways that Canadians engaged with the world. Still, by stressing what “Canada” did, he focuses especially on the actions of the Canadian state and its agents.

The narrative is highly empirical. Arranged into four parts, the chapters march in largely chronological fashion from European imperial expansion in the 15th century to 21st-century authoritarianism, or from Christopher Columbus (19–20) to Don Cherry (488–489). Accessible chapter openings and adequate chapter conclusions are wanting, crowded out by attempts to set the record straight through a succession of detail-minded case studies. These tendencies are most evident in the madcap chapter nine, whose implied theme is the defeat of governments critical of capitalism. The chapter opens with a critique of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” before doubling back to summarize the sixties social movements in Canada. A section on Israel in the 1960s and Iraq in the 1980s is followed by further passages about the Central America wars, East Africa, apartheid, Afghanistan, and Vladimir Putin – all before a closing lament about how the Soviet Union, prior to its collapse, had “opened a window to the possibility of a better world” (332). By contrast, Chapter 11 is much more successful. Developing examples – from Afghanistan to Honduras – of Canadian imperialism during the late 2000s, Shipley nicely mixes the kinds of material central to his account, analyzing: how violence and dehumanization were the rules, rather than the exception, in Canadian interventions abroad; how racist ideas were scarcely concealed by the paternalistic rationales offered by officials; how peacekeeping was understood and misunderstood; and how colonial history and Canadian capital were relevant.

Given the number of endnotes, this may sound apocryphal, but the book is under-researched, not least from the perspective of Canadian history. Sections on Zionism (205–207, 414–421) and Ukrainian nationalism (452–458) – which are bound to be contentious (and borderline libelous when it comes to Chrystia Freeland) – do not draw on relevant histories of the Canadian expressions of either movement. As a shortcut, at least nine Canadian history textbooks or introductory volumes are cited (along with at least eight polemical histories). Eclipsing 500 pages, Canada in the World is a textbook atop textbooks (as well as a polemic atop polemics) without the same degree of concision. A shorter interpretation with fewer, more deeply researched examples could be more effective as an introductory text.

As the book moves propulsively through historical material, a dominant theme emerges. Shipley shows that the Canadian state repeatedly used military, paramilitary, and police force to achieve its ends. No one perpetration of war, repression, or sexual violence was an aberration since imperial and racist violence formed an important and consistent pattern of Canadian engagement with the world. The most compelling analysis pays attention to how Canadian forces viewed their involvement. There are glimpses of Canadian soldiers growing disillusioned with the Korean War (224) or concluding that peasant revolt was justified in El Salvador in 1932 (145). A close treatment of Roméo Dallaire’s self-perception in relation to the Rwandan genocide is strong (365–371).

Although the thesis stresses the connection between colonialism and capitalism, the former takes precedence. The imbalance is evident from Part 1, which makes the intriguing case that prairie settlement was Canada’s “first foreign policy.” Chapter 2 presents confederation as an annexationist pact, of which the Numbered Treaties and the Indian Act – a “blueprint for genocide” – were extensions (42–58). Shipley describes violent dispossession without showing that settlement and genocide served capitalist ends. Standard elements of prairie history would be useful for making a clearer argument about capitalism, from the transformation of land into private property to the rise of state-subsidized monopoly capitalism in transportation, manufacturing, and the grain trade. Chapter 3 further develops the storey of cultural genocide while nodding toward the proletarianization, as well as the displacement of Indigenous peoples. Yet Shipley’s assessment of residential schools does not mention that students were compelled by school authorities to perform domestic and farm labour, which was said to instill work discipline suitable for the labour market. A section on potlatches is similarly unsatisfying because it ignores how commercial exchange and wage labour shaped the material conditions and dispossession of Pacific Northwest First Nations. A discussion of the commodification of Indigenous women’s sexuality is welcome but could do with a more direct analysis of sex work (72-85). Since a similar critique could be applied to the other parts of the book, the larger argument is applied unevenly, with relations of domination taking precedence over attention to capitalist social relations.

Given the book’s anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-fascist themes, Shipley’s concluding remarks are anticipated. Suggesting that the global situation is more dire than ever, he rejects the Canadian national project and supports building a revolutionary “socialist or communist project,” one presumed to be anti-colonial. But a callback to “individuals who chose differently” is unsatisfying (504–510). Resistance is mentioned in many episodes in the book, especially among non-Canadians or Indigenous peoples. But activists are sometimes introduced only to have them trampled a sentence or two later, a narrative approach that hinders gaining an understanding of counterhegemonic movements (e.g., 469). Overall, the book lacks a consistent strategy for discussing the movements mobilized among Canadians to oppose capitalism and colonialism. Passages on the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion (150–155) or interwar labour radicalism (135–137) contrast with single sentences on anti-apartheid activism (322), or Indigenous feminists securing redress (84). Unmentioned are other movements directly relevant to the text, from demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq to decades of Haiti solidarity activism. As an activist history, Canada in the World is deficient in its ad hockery, charting a grim history of exploitation and violence without introducing readers to a counter-narrative of resistance and leftist solidarity.

Canada in the World powerfully suggests that, whatever was said otherwise, state-led Canadian international engagement was consistently violent and imperial. The book could be argued with greater discipline, fuller research, and tighter organization. Is it too presumptuous to ask for a revised edition?

Will Langford

Dalhousie University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2022v89.0025.