This chapter explores fur trade societies in the British Northwest, including the emergence of a Métis people resulting from “county marriages” between French fur traders and Indigenous women. After 1763, competition between the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and Montreal-based traders, brought together in the Northwest Company (NWC), resulted in an explosion of posts throughout the interior and beyond the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast, which was also being approached by European explorers by sea. Britain vied with Russia, Spain, and the United States for control of the Pacific Northwest, avoiding wars by negotiating territorial boundaries that were largely set by 1846. Most Indigenous peoples welcomed the opportunities generated by European rivalries but conditions changed after Lord Selkirk sponsored a settlement in Red River (now Winnipeg) in 1812. Escalating violence between the rival companies and a depleted animal population forced a merger of the two companies in 1821. Under George Simpson’s management (1821-60), the HBC streamlined its operations to the disadvantage of their Indigenous trading partners. The HBC held a monopoly of trade in the Great Northwest, but its power and the numerical dominance of Indigenous peoples were increasingly threatened. In 1849, Vancouver Island became a Crown colony and the Métis successfully challenged the monopoly of the HBC

This chapter traces the dramatic geological history that created the terrain on which the nation of Canada is built; examines the theories on the origins of humans in the Americas; and summarizes the economic, social, and political practices that by1500 enabled diverse Indigenous inhabitants, made up of twelve major linguistic groups and more than fifty distinct cultures to thrive in the areas of northern North America that became the nation-state of Canada.

What is this thing called Canada? The second-largest country in the world geographically, it is a loose-jointed construction that seems to lack the cohesion that many other nation-states enjoy. It is so vast that it is difficult to grasp the whole; some provinces are nations unto themselves. One is at a loss even to establish a founding moment in Canada’s past. While 1867 works for the four original provinces in “confederation,” this date serves less well for other areas of northern North America that were later induced to join the improbable experiment in nation-building.

This chapter focuses on the success of the Liberal Party under its new leader Justin Trudeau in rising from its third party status in 2011 to win a majority of seats in the 2015 election. Promising to abandon austerity budgeting and boasting that “Canada is back” on the world stage, Trudeau embarked on progressive policies relating to Indigenous relations, international affairs, gender equality, climate change, admission of Syrian refugees, child care, and infrastructure spending. His progressive thrust was soon compromised by countervailing forces emanating from provinces, corporations, social conservatives, and American president Donald Trump who demanded a renegotiation of the NAFTA agreement, embroiled Canada in a trade war with China; and treated Trudeau and Canada with open contempt. Unable to square national environmental policies with demands from Alberta and Saskatchewan for more pipelines to carry their oil and natural gas to distant markets, Trudeau was brought low by his government’s decision to buy the Kinder Morgan pipeline to expand Alberta’s exports of heavy oil and by energetic efforts to protect SNC-Lavalin, a multinational corporation based in Montreal, from being persecuted for its corrupt practices in Libya and elsewhere. With Trudeau’s claims to transparency and commitment to environmental sustainability called into question, Trudeau lost the support of many progressive voters, who turned to the Green Party and the NDP in the October 2019 federal election.

This chapter analyzes the efforts of Louis XIV and his successors to create a colonial empire in North America. Through settlement, military might, and Indigenous alliances, France laid claim to territories reaching from Newfoundland and the Gulf of St Lawrence to the Great Plains and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to outlining the causes and consequences of these imperial designs, this chapter focuses on the demographic, economic, political, social, and cultural features of the settler colonies established by France, and the relationships that developed between natives and newcomers, especially in the “middle ground” of the fur trade/military frontier in the interior of the continent. Both the War of the League of Augsburg (1689-97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13) spread to the colonies, creating havoc for settlers and Indigenous allies alike. By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the French ceded Newfoundland, Acadie, and Rupert’s Land to Britain but France remained ascendant elsewhere and founded Louisbourg to serve as a major base for the fisheries, as a flourishing entrepôt for North Atlantic trade, and as a vehicle for contesting British claims to North America.

This chapter explores the conditions leading to the expansion of Europeans in the late fourteenth century; their tentative efforts to establish colonies in northern North America; and the impact of European contact on the Indigenous peoples who interacted with the intruders. The time frame is bounded by the Viking settlement at L’Anse-aux-Meadows in Newfoundland more than a thousand years ago and the founding by the English of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, which claimed trading rights in Rupert’s Land, the vast area whose rivers drained into Hudson Bay. It focuses on the reasons for and the range of European exploration and settlement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the rivalry among European countries (especially England and France) for dominance in North America; and the role of the cod fisheries and the fur trade in luring people across the Atlantic to exploit North American resources and to interact with local inhabitants in what was seen by Europeans as a “new world.” The chapter includes a discussion of the efforts by England, Scotland, and France to plant colonies in eastern North America (Newfoundland, Acadie/Nova Scotia, and Canada) in the early sixteenth century.

This chapter describes British efforts to staunch an uprising inspired by chief Pontiac among former French Indigenous allies on the fur trade frontier following the Seven Years’ War. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 excluded settlement from what was deemed “Indian Territory” in the interior of the continent but the boundary did not last long. Efforts to accommodate the new colony of Quebec bore fruit in the Quebec Act (1774), in which French civil law was restored, seigneurial land tenure recognized, and Roman Catholics appointed to administrative positions. Great Britain’s loss of thirteen colonies in 1783 after a bitterly fought war with the United States led to a reorganization of what was left of British North America, carving two new colonies out of Nova – Cape Breton and New Brunswick – in 1784 and dividing Quebec into Upper Canada and Lower Canada in 1791, to accommodate the American Loyalists and other immigrants. This chapter examines political and social developments that led the colonies ceded to Britain by France in 1713 and 1763 to remain in the British Empire in 1783 and to escape falling into the hands of the United States which invaded Upper and Lower Canada during the War of 1812.

This chapter focuses on the growing influence globally of neoliberal corporate ideology demanding lower taxes, less government regulation, and a flexible workforce. In Canada, neoliberalism found champions in the Reform Party (est.1987), which originated in and found its greatest support in oil-rich Alberta, and in the Progressive Conservative Party led by Brian Mulroney (1984-1993). Under Mulroney, Canada entered free trade agreements with the United States and Mexico, cut corporate and income taxes; introduced a General Sales Tax, and began slashing social programs. These policies were continued by his Liberal successors, Jean Chrétien (1993-2003) and Paul Martin (2003-06). By the end of the 1990s the economy was entering a period of greater stability, but the benefits were few for ordinary Canadians. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon by Muslim extremists in 2001, neoliberals founded a new Conservative Party under the leadership of Stephen Harper, who held power from 2006 to 2015. Many Canadians, suffering from the impact of the economic collapse of 2008, and troubled by Canada’s involvement in the Afghanistan War, longed for a more social democratic regime, sending enough NDP members (many of them from Quebec) to form, for the first time, the official opposition in the 2011 election.

This chapters analyzes Canada’s struggles during two world wars, a global depression, and the onset of mass consumer society. The Great War claimed the lives of 65,000 soldiers and exacerbated cultural and regional cleavages. In the 1920s mass consumer society, secularism, and youth culture began to challenge the Victorian values that had hitherto served as a basis for social cohesion. As a nation dependent on the export of primary resources, Canada suffered deeply from the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although the economic crisis lifted with the outbreak of the Second World War, social divisions persisted. The turmoil resulting from wars and depression encouraged new political parties and movements (Progressive, Farmer, Labour, Communist, Maritime Rights, Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, Social Credit, Union Nationale, and Reconstruction) that undermined the two-party system. Women struggled to translate the franchise, which they won federally in 1918, into political power. In 1929 the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (Canada’s highest court of appeal until 1947) declared women “persons” under the law but discrimination against women remained rampant. Dominions in the British Empire were accorded full autonomy by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, but internal differences blunted its practical applications in Canada until after the Second World War.

This chapter describes the processes by which the foundations were laid for Canada to become one of the world’s great industrial nations. In this period, Canadians build more railways, encouraged massive immigration, and experienced growing class, ethnic, gender, religious, and regional tensions. Immigrants flocked to jobs in urban centres, developed Canada’s resource frontiers, and swamped the Indigenous populations of British Columbia, the Prairies (from which the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and an enlarged Manitoba were carved), and Yukon Territory (where gold was discovered in 1896). Meanwhile, Montreal and Toronto emerged as nation-dominating metropolises, and progressive civil society organizations agitated for social reforms that would smooth the rough edges of industrial capitalism. Although national unity was a fragile flower and the national policy based on immigration, railroad building, and industrial development was called into question from a variety of critics, both the nation and the national policy survived all challenges, including demands for annexation to the United States and Imperial Federation.

This chapter focuses on the struggle between Britain and France for imperial dominance in North America. In this period, the French and English colonies in North America were constantly at war, officially in the War of the Austrian Succession (1744-48) and the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), and unofficially in guerilla warfare on the frontiers of settlement. The British and their colonists in New England captured Louisbourg in 1745, prompting France to launch a massive and ultimately disastrous campaign led by the Duc d’Anville to recapture Louisbourg, which was returned to France in by the peace treaty of 1748. The British founded Halifax in 1749 to counter Louisbourg’s influence, but successive governors in Nova Scotia had difficulty reconciling Acadians and Indigenous peoples to their regime. Ultimately, the Acadians were expelled by British authorities (1755-62) and Indigenous peoples were brutally suppressed. The British captured Louisbourg in 1758, Quebec in 1759, and Montreal in 1760. By the Treaty of Paris in 1763, France ceded most of its North American empire to the British, who were already undertaking a major project of mapping the territories they claimed and planting Protestant colonists from German states and New England in Nova Scotia.

This chapter chronicles Canada’s emergence as a middle power on the global stage and as a champion of peacekeeping in the Cold War environment. Canadians meanwhile embraced a range of human rights legislation, engaged in an unprecedented outpouring of cultural expression; adopted a series of welfare state measures culminating in Medicare (1968); legislated bilingualism (1969) to accommodate the “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec; and implemented a policy of multiculturalism (1971) to integrate the influx of immigrants. The postwar liberal consensus began to fall apart with the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, which blunted economic growth. The Parti Québécois won the 1976 Quebec election, promising to hold a referendum on independence; Indigenous peoples vigorously challenged centuries of settler oppression; corporate agendas began to trump all other concerns; oil-rich Alberta mounted vigorous opposition to the 1980 National Energy Policy; and environmental degradation called into question the very survival of life on Earth. With the support of Quebec, Liberal governments remained in office federally for most of this period and Pierre Elliott Trudeau cemented his place in history in 1982 by “pratriating” the Constitution, which included a popular Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Quebec refused to sign the Constitution Act leading to a decade of fruitless constitutional negotiations.

This chapter describes the Anglicization of British North America in colonies that stretched from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island. In addition to exploring the range of colonial experiences relating to British immigration and its impact on Indigenous peoples, this chapter examines political developments that led to movements for liberal reforms, including granting more power to elected colonial assemblies. Upper and Lower Canada spawned rebellions led by William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau against authoritarian colonial regimes in 1837-38, prompting a report by Lord Durham in 1839 that recommended union of the two Canadas and granting a limited form of colonial autonomy known as “responsible government.” Great Britain legislated the union of the Canadas in 1840 and, after shabby political manoeuvring everywhere, conceded responsible government to Nova Scotia and the Province of Canada in 1848. In an era of free trade and the Chartist movement, this was an easy solution to political unrest in white settler societies. In response, Conservatives in Montreal burned down the legislative buildings and a few merchants signed a manifesto advocating annexation to the United States, but, overall, Canada’s revolutionary age was a mild affair compared to developments in Europe in 1848-9.