The Problem of “Nationalism” and “Imperialism” in British Settlement Colonies

Abstract

Nation-making, said Canadian journalist Sir John Willison, was one of Canada's infant industries. Canada had first become a nation in 1867, and, according to party literature, with every subsequent change of government “we have been made a nation over again.” Sir John was not exaggerating the number of times that writers have made Canada a nation, and, since historians have often been employed in the same nation-making industry, this paper will concern itself with the problem of the historian in dealing with the conceptions of “nationalism” and “imperialism” in Canada and other colonies of British settlement.The study of nationalism in British settlement colonies is hampered by difficulties of terminology, conceptualization, and ideological inflection. Looseness of word-usage, such as using “nation” for both state or country and as a word to describe a group of people with some common features, constitutes a major difficulty, especially when historians accept the looseness uncritically and without analysis. Sometimes “national” is used as a euphemism for the policy of protection – Sir John A. Macdonald's Canadian National Policy was originally little more than that. The same term was used by Queensland's Premier McIllwraith in 1882, and there “national” could only have meant the economic development of the Queensland “nation.” “National” sometimes simply means a geographic whole or a common, central institution – that is, a “national” government can merely mean one government governing four provinces, or six states. The word can even, as in “national schools,” mean non-denominational.