A Northern Vision: Frontiers and the West in the Canadian and American Imagination
Two decades after Innis, J.M.S. Careless further examined the systems of transportation and communication that "could transfer immigrants, ideas, and impulses" from distant centers of power "into the heart of the continent."(28) The frontier is, he said, "developed by a metr...
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Veröffentlicht in: | The American review of Canadian studies 2003-12, Vol.33 (4), p.543-563 |
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Zusammenfassung: | Two decades after Innis, J.M.S. Careless further examined the systems of transportation and communication that "could transfer immigrants, ideas, and impulses" from distant centers of power "into the heart of the continent."(28) The frontier is, he said, "developed by a metropolitan centre of dominance which supplies its capital, organizes its communications and transport, and markets its products." Like Innis, he connected the staples economy to politics and culture.(29) "The frontier's culture, too, originally stems from a metropolitan community; at root, learning and ideas radiate from there--and thus is Turner answered." In short, trade and culture went "hand in hand, as newspapers, books, and men of education spread from the centre."(30) Careless studied distant imperial centers of power as well as regional ones, such as Montreal and Toronto. "London and New York are of course the classic examples of modern metropolitanism," he explained. "But the metropolitan relationship is a chain, almost a feudal chain of vassalage, wherein one city may stand tributary to a bigger center and yet be the metropolis of a sizable region of its own."(31) He thus demonstrated how the Northwest could be a "colony" of central Canada at the same time that the country as a whole was a hinterland of Europe and the U.S. In arguing this, Careless did not claim that Canadian history was unique. Just the opposite. Canadian scholars had arrived at a new framework, one that "pays heed both to the distinctive features of the history of this country and to a notable modern phenomenon, the rise of metropolitanism all around the world."(32) The ideology of Canada as a Northern nation initially took coherent form in the Canada First movement of the 1860s and 1870s. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries of Copenhagen, Robert Grant Haliburton, asked rhetorically: "Can the generous flame of national spirit be kindled and blaze in the icy bosom of the frozen north?" Indeed it could. "We are the Northmen of the New World," he told the Montreal Literary Club in 1869.(41) At the time, such notions were taken seriously both as cultural descriptions and science; and, race, national character, and environment were identified with each other. Canada benefitted doubly in such thinking. It shared with other Northern nations not barbarism but moral "strenuousness" and the "germ" of liberty. Better yet, Canada was a New World nation, with the boundless opportunities and open spaces of |
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ISSN: | 0272-2011 1943-9954 |
DOI: | 10.1080/02722010309481366 |