Many scientists believe that the first people to settle in the Americas came from Siberia during the ice age, when a land bridge connected Asia to North America ... (today USA and Canada)
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UPDATE: - BEST ARTICLE EVER... CANADA...
Scapegoating
Cornwallis: Who are we to judge history?
July
17, 2015-07-19
When an expedition from New England captured Louisbourg in 1745, no one was more surprised than the New Englanders. The next year, a French fleet under the Duc D’Anville that was sent out to retake the fortress anchored in Bedford Basin, which resulted in countless Mi’kmaq dying from European diseases, writes John Boileau. (LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA)
While conducting research for my 2012 book, Halifax and Titanic, I came across the following quote from Daniel Allen Butler, the American author of another Titanic book:
“There is something horribly hypocritical about passing judgment on another human being’s actions from the comfort and safety of an armchair. Even more hypocritical is making moral pronouncements on others’ actions having judged them by moral standards that they neither knew nor could conceive.”
This phenomenon has become so common that it has even been given a name: “Presentism” is the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past.
I believe that’s what Dan Paul has done in his July 9 letter (“Reconciliation When?”). His treatment of Edward Cornwallis (governor of Nova Scotia/Acadia from 1749 to 1752) is one-sided, unbalanced, revisionist and applies today’s standards to 18th century colonial warfare.
Conquest and colonization
did not suddenly begin around 1500 when Western Europeans commenced the
founding of their overseas empires. Conquest was not just something undertaken
by “dead white men.” Many other races and ethnic groups established empires during
the course of history.
Conquest
and colonization date back to the time when humans first walked erect.
Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Chinese, Arabs, Ashanti,
Moguls, Mongols, Angles, Saxons, Normans, Incas, Aztecs, Zulus and Turks — to
name but a few — invaded other regions, conquered locals and took over their
areas for their own. Western Europeans are simply among the latest groups in
this timeless march of conquest. This does not make it right; it is simply an
indisputable fact of human history.
Outside
the British House of Commons — the “Mother of Parliaments” — stands a
magnificent equestrian statue of William the Conqueror. When the Norman duke
invaded England in 1066, he expropriated Saxon property, replaced Saxon
aristocratic, governmental, judicial and clerical elites and imposed Norman
laws, language and way of life on the country. Many Saxons were driven away and
many others died. Do we condemn him?
Thomas
Jefferson was an American founding father, the principal author of the
Declaration of Independence, the third president and one of the most
intelligent men of his time and perhaps all time. Yet the man who coined the
phrase “all men are created equal” believed that blacks were racially inferior
and “as incapable as children.” In his lifetime, he owned more than 600 slaves
and even fathered six children to one of them, Sally Hemming. They remained
slaves until they came of age. Do we condemn him?
Pre-contact
native North and South Americans indulged in warfare, took prisoners and kept
them as slaves for small-scale labour, where they were treated like animals:
caged, beaten, tortured and starved. John Gyles was captured in present-day
Maine in 1689 by Maliseet warriors and kept prisoner for nine years in today’s
New Brunswick. His journal provides a good description of slave life under the
natives. Do we condemn the Maliseet?
What
Hitler and his Nazi henchmen did was wrong today and wrong then: sending Jews
and many other “undesirables” to concentration camps where millions died. What
the Japanese did in creating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
concurrently with Hitler’s rise to power was wrong now and wrong then: invading
and conquering much of East Asia, killing thousands of non-combatants,
imprisoning Korean and Chinese females as “comfort women” to service soldiers
sexually and treating prisoners of war (including Canadians) inhumanely through
beatings, torture, starvation, denial of medicine and execution.
What
Cornwallis did would be wrong today, but it was certainly accepted practice in
18th century colonial and other warfare. Atrocities were not just perpetrated
against natives, but against white enemies as well, such as the English
fighting the Scots.
By
the treaty of 1726, the Mi’kmaq agreed not to attack any British settlements
“already made or lawfully to be made.” The founding of Halifax had the full
backing of the British government through the Board of Trade and Plantations
and was therefore legal. After meeting with Cornwallis personally, Mi’kmaq representatives
promised to be friendly with the British. But it was the Mi’kmaq who broke both
the treaty and their word when they attacked Halifax, Dartmouth and Lunenburg.
Is
it possible that the Mi’kmaq were dupes of disgruntled Acadians, egged on by
French officials who had been forced to leave mainland Nova Scotia for Cape
Breton by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht? Or were their actions the result of
agitation by Abbé Jean-Louis Le Loutre, leader of the Acadian/Mi’kmaq
resistance against the British? In a letter to the French Minister of the
Marine, responsible for the colonies, Le Loutre wrote: “As we cannot openly
oppose the English ventures, I think that we cannot do better than to incite
the Mi’kmaq to continue warring on the English; my plan is to persuade the
Mi’kmaq to send word to the English that they will not permit new settlements
to be made in Acadia .... I shall do my best to make it look to the English as
if this plan comes from the Mi’kmaq and that I have no part in it.”
Cornwallis’s
orders in reaction to the raids were lawful at the time and he had full
authority to issue them. The 18th century was a much harsher time than our own.
Ordinary people were subject to a wide range of punishments for common crimes.
Hanging was used not only for murderers, but also against perpetrators of
property crimes. Children, youths, women and the mentally ill were not exempt
from this punishment.
Claims
of genocide of the Mi’kmaq made against Cornwallis simply do not hold up under
scrutiny. For him to attempt to exterminate the entire Mi’kmaq race, he would
have had to have jurisdiction over them. Yet Cornwallis’s authority extended
only over mainland Nova Scotia; the rest of traditional Mi’kmaq territory —
Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, eastern New Brunswick and parts of the Gaspé
— remained firmly under French control until after Cornwallis departed.
The
proposal to remove the statue of Cornwallis or remove his name from features is
as silly as proposing the removal of the magnificent equestrian statue of
William the Conqueror outside the British House of Commons. The Thomas
Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., is one of the finest monuments in that
city. Similarly, the statue of Glooscap at Truro is a great tribute to the
Mi’kmaq Creator. I am unaware of any movements by Saxons to remove William’s
statue, Afro-Americans to dismantle the Jefferson Memorial (or change the name
of many cities named after him) or whites to take away the statue of Glooscap.
Rather
than accuse Cornwallis, the blame — if there is any — should be focused on the
laws of the times. But laws are not concrete objects, and it is much easier to
demonize an individual than a concept. We cannot simply apply today’s norms to
the past. They would be incomprehensible to 18th century Europeans, who
regarded all resources as theirs to be exploited.
After
the founding of Port Royal in 1605, European diseases — especially smallpox,
measles and tuberculosis — to which the Mi’kmaq had never before been exposed,
devastated large segments of the native population whenever they struck, and
they struck repeatedly, inflicting losses of 50 per cent or more. Additionally,
changes in the Mi’kmaq diet resulting from more European foods weakened their
resistance to common diseases they could have shrugged off earlier.
Both
French and Mi’kmaq noticed the association between contact and a decline in
native population, even if they did not initially identify the cause.
Membertou, the great Mi’kmaq chief, told Acadian chronicler Marc Lescarbot that
when he was young, his people had been “as thickly planted there as the hairs
upon his head,” but since the arrival of the French, their numbers had
diminished dramatically. The comparable course of action to removing
Cornwallis’s statue is to destroy the Port Royal Habitation near Granville
Ferry, where the French occupation of Nova Scotia started.
Additional
thousands of Mi’kmaq deaths followed as a result of the disastrous French
attempt to retake Louisbourg from the New Englanders who had captured it in
1745. The fleet sent the next year, under the Duc d’Anville, anchored at Birch
Cove in Bedford Basin, where hundreds of sick and dying Frenchmen were put
ashore to recover. Thousands of Mi’kmaq caught their diseases and spread them
throughout the province. Between one-third and one-half of the entire
aboriginal population of mainland Nova Scotia may have died during the fall and
winter of 1746-47; thousands more than were killed under Cornwallis’s edicts.
Obviously,
the only appropriate action is to dismantle Fortress Louisbourg, as its
recapture was the reason why D’Anville’s fleet came here. And while we’re at
it, let’s destroy Fort Beauséjour and any other remnants or reminders of the
European conquest and colonization of Canada. Next, let’s move on to the United
States, Central America, the Caribbean, South America and anywhere else
Europeans colonized.
I
personally deplore what happened to the Mi’kmaq, but no one can change it. If
we eradicate Cornwallis’s name, where do we ever stop?
John Boileau is the author of several books and articles about
Nova Scotia’s history.
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QUOTES ABOUT HISTORY:
QUOTES ABOUT HISTORY
What should they know of the present who only the present know?
- Blair Worden
- Blair Worden
Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times.
- Gustave Flaubert
- Gustave Flaubert
"History ought never to be confused with nostalgia. It's written
not to revere the dead, but to inspire the living. It is part of our cultural
bloodstream, the secret of who we are. And it tells us to let go of the past,
even as we honour it; to lament what ought to be lamented; and to celebrate
what should be celebrated."
- Simon Schama, "A History of Britain"
- Simon Schama, "A History of Britain"
In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of
thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have
promised, not just instruction but pleasure.
- Simon Schama, " History of Britain"
- Simon Schama, " History of Britain"
In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides
onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the
present.
- Simon Schama
- Simon Schama
"History, Macauley says, is a debatable land. It lies on the margin
of two disputed territories; those of poetry and those of philosophy; that of
reason and that of the imagination."
- Simon Schama, introducing Thomas Macauley, "Historians of Genius"
- Simon Schama, introducing Thomas Macauley, "Historians of Genius"
"If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care
who should make the laws of a nation."
- Andrew Fletcher (1653-1716), Scottish patriot
- Andrew Fletcher (1653-1716), Scottish patriot
"We do not live in the past, but the past in us."
- Ulrich Phillips, "The Slave Economy of the Old South"
- Ulrich Phillips, "The Slave Economy of the Old South"
A generation which ignores history has no past: and no future.
- Lazarus Long, from the works of Robert Heinlein
- Lazarus Long, from the works of Robert Heinlein
To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain
forever a child.
- Cicero
- Cicero
There is no present or future, only the past happening over and over
again - now.
- Eugene O'Neill
- Eugene O'Neill
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in
the effect is already in the cause.
- Henri Louis Bergson
- Henri Louis Bergson
Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend. To their
minds there is no past and no future. There is only the everlasting present of
a single generation, its trails in the forest, its hidden pathways in the the
air and in the sea. There is nothing in the Universe more alone than Man. He
has entered into the strange world of history.
- Loren Eiseley
- Loren Eiseley
Without history we are infants. Ask what binds the British Isles more
closely to America than to Europe and only history gives a reply. Of all
intellectual pursuits, history is the most supremely useful. That is why people
crave it and need ever more of it.
- Simon Jenkins, "The London Times"
- Simon Jenkins, "The London Times"
The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know
the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men
see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.
- GK Chesterton
- GK Chesterton
A person with no sense of the past is a person who is a stranger both to
his or her own roots and to the human condition more generally. For human
beings are not creatures of nature; we are inheritors of the history that has
made us what we are. Not to know our history is not to know ourselves, and that
is the condition not of human beings, but of animals. And even from a practical
point of view, to be ignorant of the past is to make us impotent and unprepared
before the present. How can someone without a sense of medieval history have
the slightest inkling of the meaning of the current impasse the West finds
itself in in its dealings with Islam? The Crusades were not, as is often
implied by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, a unique moment of anti-Islamic
aggression. They were actually but one blip in the astonishing growth of
Islamic empires in Europe and elsewhere, from the time of Mohammed onwards,
right up to 1683 when the Turks were turned back from the gates of Vienna and
1686 when they were expelled from Budapest. But who now remembers any of this,
or ponders its consequences? It is not, needless to say, taught in National
Curriculum history, which prefers to dwell on the Aztecs, about whom we have
only the vaguest knowledge in comparison, and (endlessly) on the rise of
Fascism (not communism) in Europe, studied by pupils who know nothing of the
history of Italy and Germany before the 20th century.
Is it any wonder that, with no sense of our past or identity — as, in other moods, politicians increasingly complain — we are a culture obsessed with celebrity, football, and reality television? Most of our population know nothing else, and they have no yardstick from either history or culture with which to judge.
- Anthony O'Hear, "The Telegraph"
Is it any wonder that, with no sense of our past or identity — as, in other moods, politicians increasingly complain — we are a culture obsessed with celebrity, football, and reality television? Most of our population know nothing else, and they have no yardstick from either history or culture with which to judge.
- Anthony O'Hear, "The Telegraph"
The Crusaders have been regarded — and not only by Muslims — as an
advance force of western imperialism. This is an odd judgment, given that they
were responding to expansionist Islam. Still, the intensity of their faith, and
the brutality of some of their actions, have sat ill with liberal anti-colonialist
attitudes. There are many more eager to offer understanding to Islamic
jihadists today than to the crusaders, who had more in common with these
jihadists than either had or have with western liberals. History, however, is
not a matter of passing judgment, and real historians don't put past ages in
the dock. Their business is to show what happened and, if possible, why it
happened, to open our eyes and so enlarge our understanding. Jonathan Phillips
does this admirably. The past may be another country where they do things
differently, as L P Hartley suggested; but it is a country open for
exploration, and the voyage Phillips takes us on is fascinating.
- Allan Massie, reviewing "The Second Crusade", "The Telegraph"
- Allan Massie, reviewing "The Second Crusade", "The Telegraph"
When Cromwell instructed his portraitist to paint him ‘warts and all’,
he meant both halves of that equation. To teach the warts alone is morbid and
unhealthy.
- Mark Steyn,"The Spectator"
- Mark Steyn,"The Spectator"
The historian ought to be an educated person, writing for other educated
people about something which they don't know about, but wish to know about in a
way that they can understand.
- Sir John Keegan
- Sir John Keegan
The older I get the more I'm convinced that it's the purpose of
politicians and journalists to say the world is very simple, whereas it's the
purpose of historians to say, 'No! It's very complicated.'
The job of the historian is to help give people a sense of existence in time, without which we are really not fully human.
- David Cannadine
The job of the historian is to help give people a sense of existence in time, without which we are really not fully human.
- David Cannadine
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not
historians behave.
- from a review of the work of Edward Gibbon
- from a review of the work of Edward Gibbon
"Historians of every generation, I believe, unless they are pure
antiquarians, see history against the background — the controlling background —
of current events. They call upon it to explain the problems of their own time,
to give to those problems a philosophical context, a continuum in which they
may be reduced to proportion and perhaps made intelligible."
- Hugh Trevor Roper, valedictory address to Oxford University (1980)
- Hugh Trevor Roper, valedictory address to Oxford University (1980)
The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that Once, on
this earth, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as
actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own
passions, but now all are gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as
utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cockcrow.
- G.M. Trevelyan
- G.M. Trevelyan
Time's glory is to calm contending kings, to unmask falsehood, and to
bring truth to light.
- Oedipus Rex
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with
blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians
usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love,
raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of
civilization is what happened on the banks.
- Will Durant,
"The History of Civilization"
Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each
generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century,
civilization would die, and we should be savages again.
- Will Durant, "The
Lessons of History"
Civilization is the result of human action, but not the execution of any
human design.
- Adam Ferguson, "A
History of Civil Society", 1767.
History is a record of exploded ideas.
- Admiral Fisher
- Admiral Fisher
History is an argument without end.
- Pieter Geyl
- Pieter Geyl
One can shape history as much through the facts one omits as through the
facts one includes.
- David Frum
- David Frum
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and
efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings
and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values
in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual
achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in
absolute oblivion.
- George Santayana,
The Life of Reason: Reason in Science, 1918
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
- George Santayana
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most
important of all the lessons of history.
- Aldous Huxley
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
- George Bernard Shaw
History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
- Mark Twain
- Mark Twain
History is tangled, messy, contradictory. But is where we are.
- Eamon Duffy, "Faith of our Fathers"
- Eamon Duffy, "Faith of our Fathers"
We need open minds and open hearts when we wrestle with the past and ask
questions of it, and the answers it will provide are in nobody's pocket... We
should let nobody tell us that they know all that it contains, or try to
prescribe or constrain in advance what it has to tell us.
- Eamon Duffy, "Faith of our Fathers"
- Eamon Duffy, "Faith of our Fathers"
If history offers no obvious solutions, however, it does at least
provide the comfort of knowing that failure is nothing new.
- Eamon Duffy, from "Scandals in the Church"
- Eamon Duffy, from "Scandals in the Church"
Symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of
all human attempts to make sense of the present.
- Eamon Duffy
- Eamon Duffy
History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be
surprised yet again.
- Kurt Vonnegut
- Kurt Vonnegut
Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.
- Ernest Renan
- Ernest Renan
History is a lie agreed upon.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
- Napoleon Bonaparte
People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to
their ancestors.
- Edmund Burke, "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790)
- Edmund Burke, "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790)
History is the torch that is meant to illuminate the past, to guard us
against the repetition of our mistakes of other days. We cannot join in the
rewriting of history to make it conform to our comfort and convenience.
- Claude G. Bowers, "The U.S. and the Spanish Civil War"
- Claude G. Bowers, "The U.S. and the Spanish Civil War"
History is what we read, write and think about the past.
- Sir Michael Howard
- Sir Michael Howard
I make no apologies for any inconsistencies or contradictions in my
essays. Those who do not change their minds in the course of a decade have
probably stopped thinking all together.
The true use of history, whether civil or military, is not to make man
clever for the next time, it is to make him wise forever.
- Sir Michael Howard,
"The Causes Of War"
People often of masterful intelligence, trained usually in law or
economics or perhaps in political science, who have led their governments into
disastrous decisions and miscalculations because they have no awareness
whatever of the historical background, the cultural universe, of the foreign
societies with which they have to deal.
- Sir Michael Howard, "The Lessons of History"
- Sir Michael Howard, "The Lessons of History"
"History is philosophy teaching by examples."
- Lord Bolingbroke, 18th century political philosopher
- Lord Bolingbroke, 18th century political philosopher
Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom — not a guide by which
to live.
- Robert Kennedy
- Robert Kennedy
History is either a moral argument with lessons for the here-and-now, or
it is merely an accumulation of pointless facts.
- Andrew Marr
- Andrew Marr
"The strife of the election is but human nature practically applied
to the facts of the case. What has occurred in this case must ever recur in
similar cases. Human nature will not change. In any future great national
trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as
silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents of
this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be
revenged."
- Abraham Lincoln, looking forwards after re-election in 1864
- Abraham Lincoln, looking forwards after re-election in 1864
The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical
expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.
- George Will, "The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts"
- George Will, "The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts"
History is a tragegy, not a morality tale.
- Isidor F Stone
- Isidor F Stone
History is what the evidence compels us to believe.
- Michael Oakshot
- Michael Oakshot
Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.
- RG Collingwood
- RG Collingwood
What interests us about the past is at least partly a function of what
bothers us or makes us curious in the present.
- Adam Garfinkle
- Adam Garfinkle
History is past politics, and politics is present history.
- Edward Freeman
- Edward Freeman
History is the projection of ideology into the past.
- Unknown
- Unknown
Historians are not just dispassionate chroniclers. By their selection,
ordering, highlighting, attribution and analysis of facts they fashion a particular
version of the past. And they also play a part in the disputes of the present,
by legitimising or undermining the rationales, heroes and myths which influence
current debates. Historical figures are forever being conscripted for fresh
cultural battles.
- The Times, "Truth, trust and rewriting history" 4/4/02
- The Times, "Truth, trust and rewriting history" 4/4/02
Western elites — the beneficiaries of 60 years of peace and prosperity
achieved by the sacrifices to defeat fascism and Communism — are unhappy in
their late middle age, and show little gratitude for, or any idea about, what
gave them such latitude. If they cannot find perfection in history, they see no
good at all.
- Victor Davis Hanson, "Remembering World War Two", "National Review"
- Victor Davis Hanson, "Remembering World War Two", "National Review"
"The great tragedies of history occur not when right confronts
wrong but when two rights confront each other."
- Henry Kissinger
- Henry Kissinger
"History is a conversation with the dead."
- Keith Hopkins
- Keith Hopkins
"Every piece of history is a piece of human nature."
- Joss Whedon
- Joss Whedon
Peter Jones's is a vital public service. He reminds us that while we
shouldn't live in the past, we are wiser and stronger when we live with it.
- Bettany Hughes, reviewing "Vote For Caesar" by Peter Jones
- Bettany Hughes, reviewing "Vote For Caesar" by Peter Jones
History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines.
- AN Wilson, "The Victorians"
- AN Wilson, "The Victorians"
The past is dead, and nothing that we can choose to believe about it can
harm or benefit those who were
alive in it. On the other hand, it has the power to harm us.
- ATQ Stewart, "The Shape of Irish History"
alive in it. On the other hand, it has the power to harm us.
- ATQ Stewart, "The Shape of Irish History"
If we are to understand anything of the human mind we must approach the
people of the past with humility rather than an overconfident superiority.
- ATQ Stewart, "The Shape of Irish History"
- ATQ Stewart, "The Shape of Irish History"
History is a dead thing brought to new life. It is fragments of a past,
dead and gone, resurrected by historians. It is in this sense like
Frankenstein's monster. It threatens our versions of ourselves.
- Richard White, "Remembering Ahanagran"
- Richard White, "Remembering Ahanagran"
Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be
comfortable. The past should not be a familiar echo of the present, for if it
is familiar why revisit it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how
you and people you know and love could come from such a time.
- Richard White, "Remembering Ahanagran"
- Richard White, "Remembering Ahanagran"
What any of us know of our births, we learn from others. It is a
beginning we ourselves cannot recall, so we commit the story to memory. We
claim it and incorporate it into our story of ourselves. We thus begin the
story of our lives with an intimate event that we can only know second hand.
And so the confusion of history and memory begins.
- Richard White, "Remembering Ahanagran"
- Richard White, "Remembering Ahanagran"
History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is
the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have
to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even
— if we dare, and we should dare — a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is
the enemy of abstraction.
- Stephen Fry, "History Matters"
- Stephen Fry, "History Matters"
History is not made, or lived, in hindsight.
- Eoghan Harris
- Eoghan Harris
History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.
- Bruce Catton
- Bruce Catton
One might say that history is not about the past. If you think about it,
no one ever lived in the past. Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, and their
contemporaries didn't walk about saying, "Isn't this fascinating living in
the past! Aren't we picturesque in our funny clothes!" They lived in the
present. The difference is it was their present, not ours. They were caught up
in the living moment exactly as we are, and with no more certainty of how
things would turn out than we have. History is — or should be — a lesson in
appreciation. History helps us keep a sense of proportion. Is life not
infinitely more interesting and enjoyable when one can stand in a great
historic place or walk historic ground, and know something of what happened
there and in whose footsteps you walk? Why would anyone wish to be provincial
in time, any more than being tied down to one place through life, when the
whole reach of the human drama is there to experience in some of the greatest
books ever written. History is a larger way of looking at life.
- David McCullough, from the 2003 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities
- David McCullough, from the 2003 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities
No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to
read.
- David McCullough
- David McCullough
By and large "history", when taken to a mass audience by a
television documentary or a newspaper, is usually only a kind of fraud, in
which viewers and readers are induced to take an interest by the promise that
people in the past were "just like us", comforted all the while by an
unspoken assumption of their own innate superiority. Most contemporary values
and nearly everything trading under the banner of modern liberalism, it seems
fair to say, are built on the notion of the past's inferiority to our own arrangements.
Queerly enough, being honest about modern life involves acknowledging that
television sets and share-option schemes are not an instant guarantee of
spiritual worth. Patronising your ancestors is simply a form of moral cheating.
Whatever we may feel about Dickens's Mr Gradgrind, he was a product of the
environment which created him. Our first duty, consequently, is to examine him
on his terms, not ours.
- DJ Taylor reviews Matthew Sweet's "Inventing The Victorians" for The Times
- DJ Taylor reviews Matthew Sweet's "Inventing The Victorians" for The Times
More and more, we are projecting our own values on to those who lived in
the past as though there can be no other way to live, or to think, than the way
we live and think now... All ages have their prejudices. We're no different. We
are different in one respect, though. Ours is the only one ever to think that
it has nothing at all to learn from the past. One result of this is that it has
become all but impossible for us to make a drama set in the past in which a
credible character doesn't think exactly like us. The writer CS Lewis called
this kind of attitude 'chronological snobbery', meaning the belief that the
latest thing is always the best. We're all chronological snobs now.
- David Quinn, "The Irish Independent"
- David Quinn, "The Irish Independent"
We must not look at the past with the enormous condescension of
posterity.
- EP Thompson
- EP Thompson
"Pearl Harbor" is strenuously respectful of contemporary
sensitivities, sometimes at the cost of accuracy.
- A.O. Scott, film critic for "The New York Times"
- A.O. Scott, film critic for "The New York Times"
Early 21st-century man prefers, like Chairman Mao, to let the past serve
the present. If he stopped making jejune moral judgments about his ancestors
and tried to understand what made them tick instead, he might make less of a
mess of his own times.
- Robert Salisbury, "The Spectator"
- Robert Salisbury, "The Spectator"
The 20th century is already slipping into the "obscurity of
mis-memory", writes Tony Judt in the introduction to this superb
collection of essays. Global capitalism has dissolved most of the old national
and ideological hatreds, leaving those under 40 puzzled as to what all the fuss
was about. History has become either a source of nostalgic reminiscence
("heritage") or a chronicle of victimhood. Politicians raid it for
"lessons"; fashion designers for styles. Gone is the sense of
carrying forward some great project, be it of national glory or social
liberation.
- Edward Skidelsky, reviewing "Reflections on the Forgotten 20th Century", "The Telegraph"
- Edward Skidelsky, reviewing "Reflections on the Forgotten 20th Century", "The Telegraph"
One of the rules of history is that people do not write about what is
too obvious to mention. And so the information, having never been recorded, is
now lost for ever.
- Michael Bywater, "Lost Worlds"
- Michael Bywater, "Lost Worlds"
Knowing what not to learn from the past is more important than knowing
what to learn.The fly sat upon the axle-tree of the chariot wheel and said
"What a dust do I raise"
- Michael Handel,
"War, Strategy & Intelligence"
He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is
the greatest innovator.
- Francis Bacon
Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain
constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.
- Herb Brody
If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But
passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a
lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind.
- Samuel Coleridge
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
- L. P. Hartley
The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal
in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation,
not repetition.
- Israel Zangwill
- Israel Zangwill
Perhaps the most tantalising sort of history is the kind that is just
out of reach — the stories of peoples whose deeds and style of living helped to
form our own world, but of whom we know almost nothing, because they left no
written records.
- Jane Shilling, "The Times"
- Jane Shilling, "The Times"
All my life I’ve been aware of the Second World War humming in the
background. I was born 10 years after it was finished, and without ever seeing
it. It formed my generation and the world we lived in. I played Hurricanes and
Spitfires in the playground, and war films still form the basis of all my moral
philosophy. All the men I’ve ever got to my feet for or called sir had been in the
war.
- AA Gill, "The Times"
- AA Gill, "The Times"
Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.
- Frank Herbert
- Frank Herbert
I had nothing but sympathy for the reporter who, after listening in
court to David Irving's insistence that the elevator to the ovens simply
couldn't have carried as many bodies as the defence expert had claimed,
confessed: 'On the way home in the train that night, to my shame, I took out a
pocket calculator and began to do some sums. Ten minutes for each batch of 25.
I tapped in. That makes 150 an hour. Which gives 3,600 for each 24-hour period.
Which gives 1,314,000 in a year. So that's fine. It could be done. Thank God,
the numbers add up.'
- DD Guttenplan, "The Holocaust On Trial"
- DD Guttenplan, "The Holocaust On Trial"
Journalism is merely history's first draft.
- Geoffrey C. Ward
- Geoffrey C. Ward
History, it used to be said, is written in four drafts. The first is the
account of a big event in the next day's newspapers. The second is the
hot-on-the-heels analysis of that event in the weekly columns. The third
becomes possible when fresh detail emerges from the memoirs and diaries of key
players. Eventually, decades later, the fourth and final draft of history is
etched in stone after all the earlier versions have been graded and revised by
learned academics with access to the archives.
In reality, this courtly ritual was never the whole story. But it barely constitutes a sub plot today. Television has transformed the rules that govern how history is made and recorded.
The judgment of posterity is no longer left to historians, or indeed the future. Today, it's the prestigious television documentary series that settles the score and sets the record straight, often while the ink is still wet on the peace treaty and the blood still visible on the combatants' hands. History is no longer written by the victors alone; even the losers can get a look in as long as they win the sympathy of the prime-time viewer.
- Liam Fay, "The Times"
In reality, this courtly ritual was never the whole story. But it barely constitutes a sub plot today. Television has transformed the rules that govern how history is made and recorded.
The judgment of posterity is no longer left to historians, or indeed the future. Today, it's the prestigious television documentary series that settles the score and sets the record straight, often while the ink is still wet on the peace treaty and the blood still visible on the combatants' hands. History is no longer written by the victors alone; even the losers can get a look in as long as they win the sympathy of the prime-time viewer.
- Liam Fay, "The Times"
For many of us, history class is a nightmare from which we are trying to
awake. Evocatively conveyed, history can be a superior form of infotainment: a
thrill-ride through the follies, triumphs and misfortunes of our ancestors. All
too often, however, the subject is reduced, by uninspiring teachers, to tedious
dates, facts and figures — the navigational co-ordinates of a forgotten world.
- Liam Fay, "The Times"
- Liam Fay, "The Times"
The book begins by pointing out that history can offer simplicity and
support to just about anybody who is willing to twist and distort its lessons.
If you believe that Man is acting out God's purpose, or progressing towards
liberal democracy, or moving towards the inevitable dictatorship of the
proletariat, you will always be able to find examples from the experience of
the past to confirm such a prejudice. Equally, if you think that history has
largely been responsible for most of the world's recent woes - and anyone
living in Ireland, Bosnia, Kashmir or the Holy Land could be forgiven for
suspecting as much - you might yearn for Man to unlearn the past. This has in
fact been tried on occasion: the Emperor Qin of China destroyed all history
books and the scholars who wrote them, vowing to start history over again - the
same nirvana that was later offered by Robespierre's new calendar, Pol Pot's
Year Zero and Chairman Mao's cultural revolution. Yet none of these attempts
worked, and Clio wreaked her own revenge on the reputation of all four
dictators. Trotsky has now been digitally restored to the photographs from
which Stalin had him airbrushed in the 1920s. Whether we like the idea of
history and its capacity for inflaming conflict or not, we are nonetheless
stuck with it.
- Andrew Roberts, reviewing Margaret McMillan's "The Uses and Abuses of History", "Standpoint"
- Andrew Roberts, reviewing Margaret McMillan's "The Uses and Abuses of History", "Standpoint"
The Somme (BBC1) was more fashionable push-me-pull-you, contrarian TV
history. Except that the belief that the battle was not so much a desperate
disaster as a postponed and expensive triumph is really more revisionist and
much closer to the official view in 1919. The Great War was the defining
tragedy of Britain, France, Germany and Russia, and a new beginning for much of
the rest of Europe. But, at the time, most of those who had been through it saw
it as a great victory; The current received wisdom of the conflict sounds like
having the history of the past 50 years recorded solely by Harold Pinter. We
are reaching the end of living contact with the Great War and it’s not a
question of “lest we forget” so much as “what we choose to remember”.
- AA Gill, reviewing a documentary in "The Times"
- AA Gill, reviewing a documentary in "The Times"
In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the
materials for future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind. It
may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine... supplying the means of keeping
alive, or reviving, dissesions and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury.
History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world
by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal,
and all the train of disorderly appetites which shake the public. These vices
are the causes... religion, morals, laws, perogatives... are the pretexts...
Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of
evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and
the transitory modes in which they appear... whilst you are discussing fashion,
the fashion is gone by. The very same vice assumes a new body... it walks
abroad, it continues its ravages, whilst you are gibbeting the carcase, or
demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourself with ghosts and apparitions,
whilst your house is the haunt of robbers.
- Edmund Burke, "Reflections on the Revolution in France"
- Edmund Burke, "Reflections on the Revolution in France"
Continue to instruct the world; and — whilst we carry on a poor unequal
conflict with the passions and prejudices of our day, perhaps with no better
weapons than other passions and prejudices of our own — convey wisdom to future
generations.
- Edmund Burke, in a letter to historian William Robertson
- Edmund Burke, in a letter to historian William Robertson
It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and
discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the story
in such a way that bias cannot be recognized.
- Herbert Butterfield, "The Whig Interpretation of History" (1931)
- Herbert Butterfield, "The Whig Interpretation of History" (1931)
It is AD 5000, and Professor Ostrich, hard at work in his study-pod on
Mars, has just made a stunning discovery. Up to that time, it had been assumed
that Ian Fleming's books about the hero James Bond, published some 3,000 years
earlier, had been fiction. But idly perusing some of the archive material that
had been saved from 'Planet' Earth, he found that the old Japanese for
'foreigner' had been 'gaijin'. This rang a bell, and on downloading You Only
Live Twice from his ear-piece into his brain, he found this was the very word
Bond had used for it too. Curious, he looked up Mount Fuji, also referred to in
that book. It existed! Becoming more and more excited, he found that 'Dunhill',
'Martini', 'White's', 'Boodles' - obviously silly names, made up for the
occasion - and even 'St James' Street' could all be attested from those
long-lost times. Incredible! Surely this must mean that the Bond stories, far
from being works of fiction, were history! And Bond, therefore, a real person!
An analogous process of reasoning has led a number of businessmen and
academics, Professor Barry Strauss of Cornell University among them, to believe
that the story Homer tells in his Iliad c 700 BC offers an accurate account of
a real war fought between Greeks and Trojans over a woman in Mycenaean times,
around 1200 BC... He solemnly adduces political reasons for Paris' abduction of
Helen (Homer gives none), dissects the military tactics of the Greeks and
Trojans (no such thing), discusses the economics and domestic politics of Troy
(non-existent) and compares it with the Hanseatic League of the late Middle
Ages (sounds of helpless laughter). Probingly, he wonders whether Achilles was
a war criminal. 'A new history', Strauss calls it, and it certainly is that. No
history ever paid so little attention to evidence or argument or any of the
usual historiographical constraints. No history has ever been so replete with
'would haves' and 'mights'. Was the Trojan king Priam able to look his soldiers
in the eye when the Greeks landed? Or would he have been too ashamed of 'his
family's policy'?
- Peter Jones, reviewing "The Trojan War" by Barry Strauss, "The Telegraph"
- Peter Jones, reviewing "The Trojan War" by Barry Strauss, "The Telegraph"
"Was there a war fought for love?"
- BBC Horizon asks the essential question of the Trojan War
- BBC Horizon asks the essential question of the Trojan War
THEORIES OF HISTORY
If the history of mankind were to begin over, without any change in the
world's surface, it would broadly repeat itself.
- Edmond Demolins
- Edmond Demolins
History followed different courses for different peoples because of
differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences
among peoples themselves.
- Jared Diamond, "Guns, Germs and Steel"
- Jared Diamond, "Guns, Germs and Steel"
Any study of mankind is incomplete which ignores the predominant
influence exerted on all human development, be it physical, political or
social, by man's geographic environment, and it is therefore necessary to know
something of the land in which he lived.
- Joseph Raftery, "Prehistoric Ireland"
- Joseph Raftery, "Prehistoric Ireland"
People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.
- Karl Marx
- Karl Marx
Athens built the Acropolis. Corinth was a commercial city, interested in
purely materialistic things. Today we admire Athens, visit it, preserve the old
temples, yet we hardly ever set foot in Corinth.
- Harold Urey
- Harold Urey
At the bidding of a Peter the Hermit millions of men hurled themselves
against the East; the words of an hallucinated enthusiast such as Mahomet
created a force capable of triumphing over the Graeco-Roman world; an obscure
monk like Luther bathed Europe in blood. The voice of a Galileo or a Newton
will never have the least echo among the masses. The inventors of genius hasten
the march of civilization. The fanatics and the hallucinated create history.
- Gustave Le Bon
- Gustave Le Bon
In Italy under the Borgias, they had 30 years of warfare,terror,murder
& bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, DaVinci, and the Renaissance.
In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and 500 years of democracy and peace,
and what did that produce? The Cuckoo Clock.
- Orson Welles as Harry Lime in "The Third Man"
- Orson Welles as Harry Lime in "The Third Man"
"A great man represents a strategic point in the campaign of
history, and part of his greatness consists of his being there."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Counterfactual experiments in history should always include two
limitations: the 'minimal rewrite rule' (only small and plausible changes should
be made to the actual sequence of events) and 'second order counterfactuals'
(after a certain time, the previous pattern may reassert itself).
- Geoffrey Parker, in "What If?"
- Geoffrey Parker, in "What If?"
France would pay huge reparations, enough to keep it underarmed and
angry for another generation. Anti-Semitism, ever the bane of defeated European
nations, would become a problem for it and not Germany.
- Robert Cowley, "Germany Wins The Marne" from "What If?"
- Robert Cowley, "Germany Wins The Marne" from "What If?"
QUOTATIONS FROM HISTORICAL WORKS & REVIEWS
In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome
comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of
mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient
renown and disciplined valour. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and
manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful
inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image
of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman senate
appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all
the executive powers of government. During a happy period (A.D. 98-180) of more
than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and
abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the design of
this, and of the two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition
of their empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce
the most important circumstances of its decline and fall; a revolution which
will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth.
- Edward Gibbons, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", 1776.
- Edward Gibbons, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", 1776.
The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were
all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally
false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.
- Edward Gibbons, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"
- Edward Gibbons, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"
Who knows but that hereafter some traveller like myself will sit down
upon the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where now, in the
tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the
multitude of sensations? Who knows but he will sit down solitary amid silent
ruins, and weep a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty
name?
- Volney, "Ruins"
- Volney, "Ruins"
She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigour
when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude,
take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St.
Paul's.
- Thomas Macauley, on Ranke's "History of the Popes"
- Thomas Macauley, on Ranke's "History of the Popes"
The Spartan, smiting and spurning the wretched Helot, moves our disgust.
But the same Spartan, calmly dressing his hair, and uttering his concise jests,
on what the well knows to be his last day, in the pass of Thermopylae, is not
to be contemplated without admiration.
- Thomas Macauley, from "The History of England"
- Thomas Macauley, from "The History of England"
"For Leonidas and for the 300 Spartan warriors who had accompanied
him, Thermopylae was more than a strategic strongpoint, it was the place where
they intended to show the world what it meant to be a Spartan. As a whole the
Greeks made a great deal of noise about the nobility of dying for your country.
But for the Spartans, it was far more than just a platitude. In battle they
were ordered to see out a beautiful death... embracing death like a lover. The
beautiful death was a sacrifice in the true sense of the word. Turning
something mortal into something sacred."
- Bettany Hughes, "The Spartans"
- Bettany Hughes, "The Spartans"
Augustus gradually increased his powers, taking over those of the
senate, the executives and the laws. The aristocracy received wealth and
position in proportion to their willingness to accept slavery. The state had
been transformed, and the old Roman character gone for ever. Equality among
citizens was completely abandoned. All now waited on the imperial command.
- Tactitus, on the transition from Republic to Empire
- Tactitus, on the transition from Republic to Empire
In Europe, the Enlightenment of the 18th century was seen as a battle
against the desire of the Church to limit intellectual freedom, a battle
against the Inquisition, a battle against religious censorship. And the victory
of the Enlightenment in Europe was seen as pushing religion away from the
center of power. In America, at the same time, the Enlightenment meant coming
to a country where people were not going to persecute you by reason of your
religion. So it meant a liberation into religion. In Europe, it was liberation
out of religion.
- Salman Rushdie, interviewed in "Reason" magazine
- Salman Rushdie, interviewed in "Reason" magazine
Michael Burleigh is not the first of them to trace the antecedents of
20th century totalitarianism to the well-documented aspiration of Jacobinism to
enclose all French people within its intellectual compass by a ruthless
stamping out of dissent in the name of progress, liberty and equality.
Jacobinism triumphant was an unedifying spectacle, and Burleigh attributes its
bloody excesses to the fanaticism of politics as religion. It is true that in
their messianic zeal for the regeneration of the French nation the Jacobins
sought to remould the minds and manners of the French people in ways that foreshadowed
Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The enduring legacy of the 18th century and the
French revolution was the demise of the assumption that had so long prevailed
in Europe that successful government required the ethical foundation that only
religion could provide. The most potent offspring of the revolution was
nationalism. Just as religion did, nationalism offered, in Burleigh’s words,
'to fulfil a human need for intense belonging'. The instrument of that
fulfilment was no longer to be the church, but the nation-state.
- Robin Stewart, reviewing "Earthly Powers" in "The Spectator"
- Robin Stewart, reviewing "Earthly Powers" in "The Spectator"
The Dutch must be understood as they really are, the Middle Persons in
Trade, the Factors and Brokers of Europe... they buy to sell again, take in to
send out again, and the greatest Part of their vast Commerce consists in being
supply'd from All Parts of the World, that they may supply All th World Again.
- Daniel Defoe, commenting on the success of the 17th century Dutch Republic
- Daniel Defoe, commenting on the success of the 17th century Dutch Republic
The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun.
- RR Palmer, describing the events of 1793
- RR Palmer, describing the events of 1793
The history of Napoleon now becomes, for 12 momentous years, the history
of mankind.
- John Holland Rose, on the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars in 1803
- John Holland Rose, on the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars in 1803
By the summer of 1807, Napoleon ran a one-man European Union with more
efficiency and less argument than achieved by Brussels 186 years later. France,
Benelux, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany were ruled by directives from
Napoleon's quill.
- Richard Gordon
- Richard Gordon
What finally scuppered Napoleon's Europe was of course the fatal
combination of the English Channel and the Russian winter; the same unlikely
partnership that also did for Hitler's Europe.
- Andrew Roberts, "The Telegraph"
- Andrew Roberts, "The Telegraph"
Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as
much as he loved his own.
- David McCullough
- David McCullough
A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man
of his bones. But if you break a person's nationality it will think of nothing
else but getting it set again.
- George Bernard Shaw
- George Bernard Shaw
Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of
history.
- A.J.P. Taylor
- A.J.P. Taylor
Rather an end in horror, than horror without end.
He could not condemn principles he might need to invoke and apply later.
The wolf cannot help having been created by God as he is, but we shoot
him all the same if we have to.
The great player in diplomacy, as in chess, asks the question,"Does
this improve me?", not look at the possible fringe benefits
If you can't have what you like, you must like what you have.
- AJP Taylor,
"The Struggle For Mastery In Europe 1848-1918"
James Sheehan commences his account amidst a peaceful fin de siècle
Europe, whose nations none the less regarded the military as the apogee of
patriotic values, and then traces the bitter 50-year process of
disillusionment. Unlike America, which has to go back to the mid-19th century
for an equivalent experience, Europeans have seen what wars can do to their own
towns and villages rather than those of other people. The two destructive
conflagrations of the first half of the 20th century, and the long armed peace
imposed by the two Cold War superpowers, have made war between Europe's
'citizen states' virtually inconceivable.
- Michael Burleigh, reviewing "The Monopoloy of Violence", "The Telegraph"
- Michael Burleigh, reviewing "The Monopoloy of Violence", "The Telegraph"
Many years ago, AJP Taylor pointed out that too much attention is paid
to how wars start, rather than the equally important question of how they end.
- Brendan Simms reviews "Poisoned Peace" by Gregor Dallas in "The Times"
- Brendan Simms reviews "Poisoned Peace" by Gregor Dallas in "The Times"
A Peace to End All Peace.
- David Fromkin, on the post WW1 settlement
- David Fromkin, on the post WW1 settlement
It is
hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the
phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their
aim.
- AN Wilson, on Versailles, "After The Victorians"
- AN Wilson, on Versailles, "After The Victorians"
The reorganization of the map of Europe at Versailles did not solve
anything except maybe sowing the seeds of the next war. To give justice to
those who wanted to redraw the European borders for them to be more consistent
to the ethnic picture, it should be added here that it was an impossible
task. There was no possibility of creating viable states without
incorporating ethnic minorities within them. In all of Europe, but especially
in the eastern half, the ethnic communities were so intertwined that there was
no logical way to disentangle them.
- EG Ban
- EG Ban
One consequence of the continuing and unhealthy fascination in this
country with the Third Reich has been an ignoring of the Second, whose Faustian
story had yet more terrible consequences. At the beginning of the last century
Germany could claim to lead the world; not only in industry, science and
technology, but in what she proudly termed Kultur: philosophy, poetry, music,
philology, historiography, law. As a welfare state Bismarck had provided a
model that Britain was only beginning to follow a generation later. Germany’s
constitution may have given too little power to the legislature to suit
Anglo-Saxon tastes, but few people complained: the French, after all, gave
rather too much. Yet 40 years later the German nation was in the grip of a
psychopath who led her to utter disaster. So what went wrong? What went wrong,
of course, was that Germany lost the first world war — a war, most historians
agree, that, if she did not provoke, she did nothing to prevent, and which she
fought in a manner that ultimately left her friendless.
- Michael Howard, from his review of "The War Lords" in "The Spectator"
- Michael Howard, from his review of "The War Lords" in "The Spectator"
It is a strange irony that the war-winning weapons that emerged from the
First World War were subsequently neglected by the states that had invented
them - but were seized on and developed by the opposition. Thus Britain's
secret weapon, the tank, was enthusiastically taken up by the Wehrmacht,
leading to the Nazi Blitzkrieg; while the heavy four-engined bomber - unleashed
against London in 1917 - was forgotten as Germany's Luftwaffe concentrated on
light, short-range planes such as the Stuka. Instead it was left to the RAF to
develop such heavy-lifting blockbusters as the Lancaster which so devastated
Germany's cities in 1943-45. By comparison, the 1940-41 London Blitz was a
flesh wound. Both the Blitz and Bomber Command's answering offensive - the wind
and the whirlwind in Arthur 'Bomber' Harris's evocative phrase - grew out of
the first sustained attempt to destroy a city from the air: the raids by the
aptly named Giant and Gotha bombers of Germany's England Squadron that are the
subject of Neil Hanson's engrossing and eye-opening book.
The first sorties were mounted over eight successive nights in 1917. The following summer, as the war on the Western Front reached its climax, the bombers were back - this time armed with a fearsome new weapon - the Elektron bomb, an incendiary deliberately designed to create a city-consuming firestorm to rival Pepys's conflagration in 1666. Fortunately for London, the bombs were too unreliable, the bombers too few in number, and the London air defences - belatedly set up after the Zeppelin raids of 1916 - too effective, for the 'Fire Plan', as the Germans called their raid, to have the desired effect. The dead totalled 835, and the damage was similarly limited. However, both sides drew lessons from the brief campaign, even if they were the wrong ones. The British, paralysed by fear of what devastation future raids might bring, backed Chamberlain's craven appeasement policy and sank resources into both Bomber Command and co-ordinated air defences - guns, gas masks, searchlights, balloons, shelters and, above all, radar, the Spitfire and the Hurricane. The Germans, concluding after 1918 that the big bomber could not deliver the desired total destruction, failed to build the sort of planes that would reduce their own cities to ashes. They were hoist by their own petard.
- Nigel Jones, reviewing "First Blitz" by Neil Hanson, "The Telegraph"
The first sorties were mounted over eight successive nights in 1917. The following summer, as the war on the Western Front reached its climax, the bombers were back - this time armed with a fearsome new weapon - the Elektron bomb, an incendiary deliberately designed to create a city-consuming firestorm to rival Pepys's conflagration in 1666. Fortunately for London, the bombs were too unreliable, the bombers too few in number, and the London air defences - belatedly set up after the Zeppelin raids of 1916 - too effective, for the 'Fire Plan', as the Germans called their raid, to have the desired effect. The dead totalled 835, and the damage was similarly limited. However, both sides drew lessons from the brief campaign, even if they were the wrong ones. The British, paralysed by fear of what devastation future raids might bring, backed Chamberlain's craven appeasement policy and sank resources into both Bomber Command and co-ordinated air defences - guns, gas masks, searchlights, balloons, shelters and, above all, radar, the Spitfire and the Hurricane. The Germans, concluding after 1918 that the big bomber could not deliver the desired total destruction, failed to build the sort of planes that would reduce their own cities to ashes. They were hoist by their own petard.
- Nigel Jones, reviewing "First Blitz" by Neil Hanson, "The Telegraph"
"How would the British and American publics have responded, if
early in 1945 they had been told that the bomber forces had been stood down,
while German and Japanese troops were still fighting furiously to kill Allied
soldiers?"
- Michael Howard
- Michael Howard
"A simple survey of the records show that between twenty and
twenty-five million people perished in World War II and more of them in the
later years than in the earlier years. Every month by which the war was
shortened would have meant saving of the order of half a million to a million
lives. Among those granted life would have been my brother Joe, killed in
October 1944 in the Battle for Italy. What a difference it would have made if
the critical date (of the atomic bomb's first use in the war) had been not
August 6, 1945, but August 5, 1943."
- John Archibald Wheeler
- John Archibald Wheeler
The kamikazes... exacted a terrible cost. Some 2800 kamikaze attacks
killed nearly 5000 Americans and wounded 4800 more. Ominously, Japan had
reserved more than 5000 suicide aircraft to be used against the expected
invasion of the home islands. A gruesome scenario that would have magnified the
immense human toll of the kamikaze.
- from "The History Channel: Dogfights"
- from "The History Channel: Dogfights"
The book uses personal accounts to illuminate the effects of policy
decisions. It includes a generous number of Asian voices, Filipino and Chinese
as well as Japanese, which provide a sense of overwhelming American
technological and industrial superiority – "assault by abundance" –
and the ultimate futility of Japanese resistance. In describing systematic
Japanese brutality towards both Allied prisoners and fellow Asians, Hastings is
also careful to shade the coin, showing that not all Japanese were sadists. But
if today some of them suggest such inhumanity was no worse than the Allied
bombing, he notes that having started the war, they "waged it with such
savagery towards the innocent and impotent that it is easy to understand the
rage which filled Allied hearts in 1945". He makes clear the scale and
horror of Japanese atrocities, their strategic myopia and military ineptitude –
and the effects of these on Allied decision-making. Of the invasion of Okinawa,
Hastings notes that the Japanese reasoned that if the US could be made to pay
dearly enough for winning a single offshore island, America's leaders would be
put off attacking the main ones. "They were correct in their analysis, but
utterly deluded about its implications." The horror of the atomic bombs is
put in context by the description of the firebomb raid on Tokyo of March 9,
1945, in which as many as 100,000 people died. And the significance of aerial
bombardment is put in context with the submarine campaign that effectively
crippled Japan's economy. He does not dwell on the effects of the bombs
themselves, but describes the inevitability of their use in balanced terms.
- Jon Latimer, reviewing "Nemesis: The Battle for Japan" by Max Hastings, "Telegraph"
- Jon Latimer, reviewing "Nemesis: The Battle for Japan" by Max Hastings, "Telegraph"
Ian Kershaw makes the point that, of Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini,
Konoe, Tojo, Stalin and Roosevelt, the last was the only one constrained and
guided by public opinion. His eye was constantly on the polls, and his
decisions were weighted, trimmed and timed in accordance with them. By
contrast, Britain’s decision to fight on was taken by five men — Churchill,
Chamberlain, Halifax, Attlee and Greenwood; they did not pause to consult public
opinion even if, perhaps, they did think they reflected it. On the other hand,
Roosevelt was surprised that Churchill found it necessary to keep his Cabinet
informed and seek its approval of what was going on in the discussions at
Placentia Bay in 1941. Roosevelt’s Cabinet probably did not even know where the
president was at the time.
- Noble Frankland, reviewing Kershaw's "Fateful Choices", "The Spectator"
- Noble Frankland, reviewing Kershaw's "Fateful Choices", "The Spectator"
It was a crucial victory for liberal democracy, the very system that had
seemed to be on the brink of destruction four years earlier. It was that system
that Hitler and others had blamed for plunging the world into the Great
Depression, and which he promised to crush by defeating the liberal democracies
and their "Jewish capitalist warmonger" allies. To Hitler, Britain
and America represented a way of life that was decadent, corrupt, and grossly
self-serving — precisely the same complaints voiced by Osama bin Laden and
today's Islamic terrorists. And it was a way of life that in the fall of 1940
seemed about to pass into history.
It is important to remember how many people, especially Europeans, wanted democracy to lose and hoped Hitler would win. They included the world's Communist parties, who followed the directions of their leader Josef Stalin in enthusiastically embracing his alliance with Nazi Germany. They included politicians and intellectuals who, after Hitler's lightning victories in Poland and France, saw a new world order arising and wanted to be part of it. Today, it is sobering to contemplate how close Hitler came in the early summer of 1941 to achieving that new order.
- Arthur Herman, commenting on World War Two for America's "National Review"
It is important to remember how many people, especially Europeans, wanted democracy to lose and hoped Hitler would win. They included the world's Communist parties, who followed the directions of their leader Josef Stalin in enthusiastically embracing his alliance with Nazi Germany. They included politicians and intellectuals who, after Hitler's lightning victories in Poland and France, saw a new world order arising and wanted to be part of it. Today, it is sobering to contemplate how close Hitler came in the early summer of 1941 to achieving that new order.
- Arthur Herman, commenting on World War Two for America's "National Review"
The Nazi occupation of Europe is not often considered in imperial terms
- probably because it was so short-lived, but also because it does not
correspond to our usual concept of empires, in that it sought to dominate and
reshape continental Europe rather than exploit overseas territories.
By the end of 1942, the Nazis controlled approximately one-third of the European land mass and half its inhabitants, and Hitler personally appointed the officials who ran these territories. Nobody since Napoleon ever held such sway. But it was also a product of the imperialism of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and for that reason bears scrutiny as such... The overriding impression created by Mark Mazower's overview of the political and economic basis of their imperial plans is one of monumental stupidity. Germany faced a severe manpower crisis during the war but, blinded by their racial prejudices, they implemented measures that only made things worse... Germany was so short of workers to replace men conscripted to fight that the Nazis had to resort to impressment of hundreds of thousands of foreigners, making a mockery of their racial attitudes and ultimately proving counter-productive. Between 1939 and 1944 they shrunk the German labour force from 39 to 29 million... In the end, Germany could have racial purity or imperial dominion, but it could not have both.
- Jon Latimer reviews "Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe", "The Telegraph"
By the end of 1942, the Nazis controlled approximately one-third of the European land mass and half its inhabitants, and Hitler personally appointed the officials who ran these territories. Nobody since Napoleon ever held such sway. But it was also a product of the imperialism of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and for that reason bears scrutiny as such... The overriding impression created by Mark Mazower's overview of the political and economic basis of their imperial plans is one of monumental stupidity. Germany faced a severe manpower crisis during the war but, blinded by their racial prejudices, they implemented measures that only made things worse... Germany was so short of workers to replace men conscripted to fight that the Nazis had to resort to impressment of hundreds of thousands of foreigners, making a mockery of their racial attitudes and ultimately proving counter-productive. Between 1939 and 1944 they shrunk the German labour force from 39 to 29 million... In the end, Germany could have racial purity or imperial dominion, but it could not have both.
- Jon Latimer reviews "Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe", "The Telegraph"
One single Anne Frank moves us more than countless others who suffered
just as she did, but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is
better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those
people, we would not be able to live.
- Primo Levi
- Primo Levi
World War II proved a hypothesis that Alexis de Tocqueville advanced a
century before: the war-fighting potential of a democracy is at its greatest
when war is most intense; at its weakest when war is most limited. This is a
lesson with enduring relevance to our own times — and our own wars.
- David Frum, "National Review"
- David Frum, "National Review"
They fought on with a devotion which would puzzle the generation of the
1980s. More surprising, in many instances it would have baffled the men they
themselves were before Pearl Harbor. Among MacArthur's ardent infantrymen were
cooks, mechanics, pilots whose planes had been shot down, seamen whose ships
had been sunk, and some civilian volunteers.
- William Manchester, on the US defence in Bataan against the Japanese
- William Manchester, on the US defence in Bataan against the Japanese
Vichy proves one thing: if you don’t want to know how low your fellow
citizens can fall, and crawl, don’t lose a war.
- Frederic Raphael reviews "Verdict on Vichy" by Michael Curtis for The Times
- Frederic Raphael reviews "Verdict on Vichy" by Michael Curtis for The Times
The victory of liberalism enables them to sue their victors.
- Hugh Trevor Roper, commenting on the Nazis
- Hugh Trevor Roper, commenting on the Nazis
Six years ago Michael Burleigh, with a magisterial study of the Third
Reich, placed the theme of 'political religion' at its heart. The flummery of
Nazism – its cult of martyrs, invented ceremonies, and of course Führer-worship
– was, for all its tawdriness, no side-show; rather, it was an expression of
the fundamental cultic character of the movement, without which it could not
have bound so many hearts and minds together. Political religion could seldom
break completely free of the traditional religion that preceded it; much of its
energy was devoted either to demolishing the old structure of Christianity, or
to taking it over and feeding off it, as a parasite feeds off its host. Both
Hitler and Stalin had dual strategies towards the Christian Churches –
manipulating them when it was convenient to do so, but humiliating and
persecuting them whenever they looked like a rival authority or power.
- Noel Malcolm, reviewing "Sacred Causes", "The Telegraph"
- Noel Malcolm, reviewing "Sacred Causes", "The Telegraph"
Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who
without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual
of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer
of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed
oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him... Hitler's
success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an
intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness
masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his
path.
- Pat Buchanan, from a 1977 column
- Pat Buchanan, from a 1977 column
At its best, the book gives fascinating little glimpses into the poverty
and backwardness of the country Mussolini ruled. Four years after the March on
Rome, the headquarters of the Italian secret police contained only one working
phone line. Even by 1940, there were only half a million telephones in the
whole country. There were just 1 million radios - a shortfall that deeply
irritated Mussolini, because it meant almost nobody could hear his speeches. It
was the Italian fascists who coined the term "totalitarian," but
their state never approached this perverse ideal. Bosworth nicely says that
Mussolini's Italy combined the theory of a strong state with the practice of a
weak one. Bosworth argues strongly that most Italians experienced fascist rule
only very remotely...
Mussolini's great vice, though, was his rhetorical ferocity - a ferocity that could only be redeemed from absurdity by launching actual wars. In 1935 he embarked on the conquest of Ethiopia, a war that left who knows how many tens of thousands of Ethiopians dead, dismembered, and starving. Wars in the Balkans and Greece came next, plus the bankrolling of the vicious Croatian Ustasha - and then of course the calamity of his entry into World War II... The war ended in 1945 with the communist party, the Catholic church, and the Mafia as the country's only functioning organizations.
- David Frum, reviewing RJB Bosworth's "Mussolini's Italy", "National Review"
Mussolini's great vice, though, was his rhetorical ferocity - a ferocity that could only be redeemed from absurdity by launching actual wars. In 1935 he embarked on the conquest of Ethiopia, a war that left who knows how many tens of thousands of Ethiopians dead, dismembered, and starving. Wars in the Balkans and Greece came next, plus the bankrolling of the vicious Croatian Ustasha - and then of course the calamity of his entry into World War II... The war ended in 1945 with the communist party, the Catholic church, and the Mafia as the country's only functioning organizations.
- David Frum, reviewing RJB Bosworth's "Mussolini's Italy", "National Review"
Britain entered the main European theatre only when the (Napoleonic) war
had reached its final and decisive stage. Its direct military presence acted to
inhibit any other continental power from attempting to take France’s place in
the continental power structure and reinforced the legitimacy of Britain’s
claim to a dominant say in peace negotiations. In parallel fashion, the United
States entered the European theatre only in the last and determinant phase of
World War II. Operation Overlord, its invasion of France in June 1944, and its
push eastward into Germany similarly restrained potential Russian ambitions in
the west and assured America’s seat at the head of the peace table.
- Thomas McCormick, "America’s Half-Century"
- Thomas McCormick, "America’s Half-Century"
The Anglo-Saxon powers have been triumphant in every major global
conflict for the past 300 years. This is the kind of statement that is so
sweeping that you desperately want it to be wrong. But it is right. Either
Britain or America — or both — emerged victorious from the war of the Spanish
succession, the war of the Austrian succession, the Seven Years’ war, the
French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the first world war, the second world
war and the Cold War. Explaining why is the task that Walter Russell Mead, the
Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has set
himself in his new book God and Gold.
- James Forsyth, "The Spectator"
- James Forsyth, "The Spectator"
This (Vietnam) was a land of rebellious barons. It was like Europe in
the Middle Ages. But what were the Americans doing here? Columbus had not yet
discovered their country.
- Graham Greene, on historical and chronological time, "The Quiet American"
- Graham Greene, on historical and chronological time, "The Quiet American"
Only on the surface has the strategic missile race reflected competition
between the United States and the Soviet Union; the real struggle is between
the US Air Force and its archrival the US Navy.
- Samuel H. Day, Jr
The path of progress is strewn with the wreck of nations
- Anon
A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
- Unknown
There has been opposition to every innovation in the history of man,
with the possible exception of the sword.
- Benjamin Dana
Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason? Why, when it prospers,
none dare call it treason.
- Sir John Harrington
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
- Mignon McLaughlin
The great of this world are often blamed for not doing what they could
have done. They can reply : Just think of all the evil that we could have done
and have not done.
- Georg Christoph
Lichtenberg
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten
your aim.
- George Santayana
NIALL FERGUSON & THE WAR OF THE WORLD
The Armenian genocide showed what could happen when empires were beaten
into nations.
- on the collapse of empires following Versailles
- on the collapse of empires following Versailles
In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class
warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of
forced resettlement.
In the old days it would have been a relatively simple matter to have
checked Hitler's territorial ambitions. All you'd have needed would have been
the 1914 combination of Britain, France and Russia. Indeed, if such an alliance
had acted decisively to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938, Hitler might even have
been overthrown by his own military. But it was not to be.
Even as late as 1939 Hitler had still done nothing to compare with the
campaign of violence unleashed by Stalin against the peoples of the Soviet
Union. Appeasers turned one blind eye to the realities of Nazi rule, but many
more people on the British Left shut both eyes to the horrors of Stalinism, and
they took much longer to open their eyes.
- On why Britain appeased Germany at Munich
- On why Britain appeased Germany at Munich
To make a living space, there first had to be a killing space.
Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every
rational hope of victory had disappeared?
The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a
cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel.
[The Lethal Century]
Three things seem to me necessary to explain the extreme violence of the 20th century, and in particular why so much of it happened at certain times, notably the early 1940s, and in certain places, specifically Central and Eastern Europe, Manchuria and Korea. These may be summarised as: ethnic conflict, economic volatility and empires in decline. By ethnic conflict, I mean major discontinuities in the social relations between certain ethnic groups – specifically, the breakdown of sometimes quite far-advanced processes of assimilation. This was greatly stimulated in the 20th century by the dissemination of the hereditary principle in theories of racial difference (even as that principle was waning in the realm of politics) and by the political fragmentation of ‘borderland’ regions of ethnically mixed settlement. By economic volatility, I mean the frequency and amplitude of changes in the rate of economic growth, prices, interest rates and employment, with all the associated social stresses and strains. And by empires in decline, I mean the decomposition of the multinational European empires that had dominated the world at the beginning of the century and the challenge posed to them by the emergence of new empire-states in Turkey, Russia, Japan and Germany. This is also what I have in mind when I identify the ‘descent of the West’ as the most important development of the 20th century. Powerful though the United States was at the end of the Second World War – the apogee of its unspoken empire – it was still much less powerful than the European empires had been 45 years before.
Three things seem to me necessary to explain the extreme violence of the 20th century, and in particular why so much of it happened at certain times, notably the early 1940s, and in certain places, specifically Central and Eastern Europe, Manchuria and Korea. These may be summarised as: ethnic conflict, economic volatility and empires in decline. By ethnic conflict, I mean major discontinuities in the social relations between certain ethnic groups – specifically, the breakdown of sometimes quite far-advanced processes of assimilation. This was greatly stimulated in the 20th century by the dissemination of the hereditary principle in theories of racial difference (even as that principle was waning in the realm of politics) and by the political fragmentation of ‘borderland’ regions of ethnically mixed settlement. By economic volatility, I mean the frequency and amplitude of changes in the rate of economic growth, prices, interest rates and employment, with all the associated social stresses and strains. And by empires in decline, I mean the decomposition of the multinational European empires that had dominated the world at the beginning of the century and the challenge posed to them by the emergence of new empire-states in Turkey, Russia, Japan and Germany. This is also what I have in mind when I identify the ‘descent of the West’ as the most important development of the 20th century. Powerful though the United States was at the end of the Second World War – the apogee of its unspoken empire – it was still much less powerful than the European empires had been 45 years before.
[Ethnic Conflict]
The question the historian must address is why race has been such a powerful and violent preoccupation of modern times. An answer that suggests itself is that racism, in the sense of a strongly articulated sense of racial differentiation, is one of those ‘memes’ characterised by Richard Dawkins as behaving in the realm of ideas the way genes behave in the natural world. The idea of biologically distinct races, ironically, has been able to reproduce itself and retain its integrity far more successfully than the races it claims to identify. The notion of immutable racial identity came late to human history. The Spanish expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was very unusual in defining Jewishness according to blood rather than belief. A central paradox of the modern era (is that) even as the hereditary principle ceased to govern the allocation of office and ownership, so it gained ground as a presumed determinant of capability and conduct. Men ceased to be able to inherit their fathers’ jobs; in some countries during the 20th century, they even ceased to be able to inherit their estates. But they could inherit their traits, as legacies of their parents’ racial origins.
The question the historian must address is why race has been such a powerful and violent preoccupation of modern times. An answer that suggests itself is that racism, in the sense of a strongly articulated sense of racial differentiation, is one of those ‘memes’ characterised by Richard Dawkins as behaving in the realm of ideas the way genes behave in the natural world. The idea of biologically distinct races, ironically, has been able to reproduce itself and retain its integrity far more successfully than the races it claims to identify. The notion of immutable racial identity came late to human history. The Spanish expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was very unusual in defining Jewishness according to blood rather than belief. A central paradox of the modern era (is that) even as the hereditary principle ceased to govern the allocation of office and ownership, so it gained ground as a presumed determinant of capability and conduct. Men ceased to be able to inherit their fathers’ jobs; in some countries during the 20th century, they even ceased to be able to inherit their estates. But they could inherit their traits, as legacies of their parents’ racial origins.
[Empires in Decline]
Empires matter, first, because of the economies of scale that they make possible. There is a demographic limit to the number of people most nation-states can put under arms. An empire, however, is far less constrained; among its core functions are the mobilisation and equipping of large military forces recruited from multiple peoples and the levying of taxes or raising of loans to pay for them, again drawing on the resources of more than one nationality. Thus, many of the greatest battles of the 20th century were fought by multi-ethnic forces under imperial banners; Stalingrad and El Alamein are only two of many examples. Second, the points of contact between empires – the borderlands and buffer zones between them, or the zones of strategic rivalry they compete to control – are likely to witness more violence than the imperial heartlands. The fatal triangle of territory between the Baltic, the Balkans and the Black Sea was a zone of conflict not just because it was ethnically mixed, but also because it was the junction where the realms of the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Romanovs and Ottomans met, the fault line between the tectonic plates of four great empires. Manchuria and Korea occupied a similar position in the Far East. With the rise of oil as the 20th century’s principal fuel, so too did the Gulf in the Near East.
Empires matter, first, because of the economies of scale that they make possible. There is a demographic limit to the number of people most nation-states can put under arms. An empire, however, is far less constrained; among its core functions are the mobilisation and equipping of large military forces recruited from multiple peoples and the levying of taxes or raising of loans to pay for them, again drawing on the resources of more than one nationality. Thus, many of the greatest battles of the 20th century were fought by multi-ethnic forces under imperial banners; Stalingrad and El Alamein are only two of many examples. Second, the points of contact between empires – the borderlands and buffer zones between them, or the zones of strategic rivalry they compete to control – are likely to witness more violence than the imperial heartlands. The fatal triangle of territory between the Baltic, the Balkans and the Black Sea was a zone of conflict not just because it was ethnically mixed, but also because it was the junction where the realms of the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Romanovs and Ottomans met, the fault line between the tectonic plates of four great empires. Manchuria and Korea occupied a similar position in the Far East. With the rise of oil as the 20th century’s principal fuel, so too did the Gulf in the Near East.
The new empires of the 20th century were not content with the somewhat
haphazard administrative arrangements that had characterised the old – the
messy mixtures of imperial and local law, the delegation of powers as well as
status to certain indigenous groups. They inherited from the 19th-century
nation-builders an insatiable appetite for uniformity; in that sense, they were
more like empire-states than empires in the old sense. The new empires
repudiated traditional religious and legal constraints on the use of force.
They insisted on the creation of new hierarchies in place of existing social structures.
They delighted in sweeping away old political institutions. Above all, they
made a virtue of ruthlessness. In pursuit of their objectives, they were
willing to make war on whole categories of people, at home and abroad, rather
than on merely the armed and trained representatives of an identified enemy
state.
[Descent of the West]
In 1900, the West really did rule the world. From the Bosphorus to the Bering Strait and beyond, nearly all of what was then known as the Orient was under some form or another of Western imperial rule. The British had long ruled India, the Dutch the East Indies, the French Indo-China. The Americans had just seized the Philippines; the Russians aspired to control Manchuria. All the imperial powers had established parasitical outposts in China. The East, in short, had been subjugated, even if that process involved far more complex negotiations and compromises between rulers and ruled than used to be acknowledged. What enabled the West to rule the East was not so much scientific knowledge in its own right as it was its systematic application to both production and destruction.
In 1900, the West really did rule the world. From the Bosphorus to the Bering Strait and beyond, nearly all of what was then known as the Orient was under some form or another of Western imperial rule. The British had long ruled India, the Dutch the East Indies, the French Indo-China. The Americans had just seized the Philippines; the Russians aspired to control Manchuria. All the imperial powers had established parasitical outposts in China. The East, in short, had been subjugated, even if that process involved far more complex negotiations and compromises between rulers and ruled than used to be acknowledged. What enabled the West to rule the East was not so much scientific knowledge in its own right as it was its systematic application to both production and destruction.
It is only when the extent of Western dominance in 1900 is appreciated
that the true narrative arc of the 20th century reveals itself. This was not the
‘triumph of the West’, but rather the crisis of the European empires, the
ultimate result of which was the inexorable revival of Asian power and the
descent of the West. Gradually, beginning in Japan, Asian societies modernised
themselves or were modernised by European rule. The relative decline of the
West became unstoppable. This was nothing less than the reorientation of the
world, redressing a balance between West and East that had been lost in the
four centuries after 1500.
At the centre of this story are the events we know as the Second World
War. But only as I tried to write an adequate sequel to my earlier book about
the First World War did I come to appreciate just how unilluminating it would
be to write yet another book within the chronological straitjacket of 1939 to
1945 – yet another book focused on the now familiar collisions of armies,
navies and air forces. Was there, I began to ask myself, really such a thing as
the Second World War? Might it not be more correct to speak of multiple Second
World Wars?
After all, what began in 1939 was only a European war between Poland and, on the other side, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with Britain and France siding with the underdog more in word than in deed. Poland’s Western allies did not really enter the fray until 1940, whereupon Germany won a short continental war in Western Europe.
In 1941, even as the war between Germany and Britain was in its infancy, Hitler began a quite different war against his former ally Stalin. Meanwhile, Mussolini pursued his vain dreams of an Italian empire in East and North Africa and the Balkans. All of this was more or less entirely unrelated to the wars that were launched by Japan in Asia: the one against China, which had begun in 1937, if not in 1931; the one against the British, Dutch and French empires, which had been won by the middle of 1942; and the one against the United States, which was unwinnable. Meanwhile, civil wars raged before, during and after these interstate wars, notably in China, Spain, the Balkans, the Ukraine and Poland.
After all, what began in 1939 was only a European war between Poland and, on the other side, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with Britain and France siding with the underdog more in word than in deed. Poland’s Western allies did not really enter the fray until 1940, whereupon Germany won a short continental war in Western Europe.
In 1941, even as the war between Germany and Britain was in its infancy, Hitler began a quite different war against his former ally Stalin. Meanwhile, Mussolini pursued his vain dreams of an Italian empire in East and North Africa and the Balkans. All of this was more or less entirely unrelated to the wars that were launched by Japan in Asia: the one against China, which had begun in 1937, if not in 1931; the one against the British, Dutch and French empires, which had been won by the middle of 1942; and the one against the United States, which was unwinnable. Meanwhile, civil wars raged before, during and after these interstate wars, notably in China, Spain, the Balkans, the Ukraine and Poland.
>> Read more extracts from the
book\series at Channel 4
You do wonder if historians don’t all sign a secret make-work pact,
agreeing that, whenever writing a new book, they’ll weave a few errors into
their tapestry. This creates the opportunity for another historian to saunter
along a few years later, shake his head with affectionate incredulity that a
colleague could have been so wrong-footed by the facts, proceed to unravel his
predecessor’s tapestry, and re-weave it to reflect his own reading of events.
It’s a clever way of ensuring that there is always work for historians in a
world in which any rational person might easily assume that, for instance, the
16th century happened so long ago that historians would, by now, have nailed
down everything that happened in it.
- Joe Joseph, reviewing Niall Ferguson's "War of the World", "The Times"
- Joe Joseph, reviewing Niall Ferguson's "War of the World", "The Times"
It is interesting but perhaps not surprising that, as this conflict-torn
century nears its end, the shadows cast over it by the Great War of 1914-1918
seem in some ways longer, darker, and more daunting than ever before. For what
that struggle meant and did changed the course of history more than any other
in modern times, including its great successor war of 1939-1945. Consider only
a few of the consequences of the Great War, offered here in no particular
order. It brought the end of the Romanovs, the rise of the Bolsheviks, and the
emergence of a Communist system that blighted so much of humanity for the rest
of the century. The war also made possible the growth of Fascism and its
peculiar German variant, anti-Semitic National Socialism. This ghastly and
expensive struggle shattered a Eurocentric world order, shifted the financial
center of gravity to New York, nurtured Japanese expansionism in East Asia,
and, at the same time, stimulated anticolonial movements from West Africa to
Indonesia.
The aerial bomber, the U-boat, and poison gas brought mechanization to the art of killing, making the latter less personal and yet also more far-reaching in its effects. Industrialized labor, trade unions, and socialist parties gained in power, while the landed interest declined. The social and political position of women was transformed in various aspects, despite predictable resistance. The war produced a cultural crisis, in the arts, in ideas, religion, literature, and life styles. It also exacerbated ethnic and religious hatreds, in Ireland, the Balkans, and Armenia, that scar the European landscape today. The Great War is therefore not some distant problem about dead white males on and off the battlefields. Its origins, course, and consequences are central to an understanding of the twentieth century.
- Paul Kennedy, reviewing Niall Ferguson's "The Pity of War", "NY Review of Books"
The aerial bomber, the U-boat, and poison gas brought mechanization to the art of killing, making the latter less personal and yet also more far-reaching in its effects. Industrialized labor, trade unions, and socialist parties gained in power, while the landed interest declined. The social and political position of women was transformed in various aspects, despite predictable resistance. The war produced a cultural crisis, in the arts, in ideas, religion, literature, and life styles. It also exacerbated ethnic and religious hatreds, in Ireland, the Balkans, and Armenia, that scar the European landscape today. The Great War is therefore not some distant problem about dead white males on and off the battlefields. Its origins, course, and consequences are central to an understanding of the twentieth century.
- Paul Kennedy, reviewing Niall Ferguson's "The Pity of War", "NY Review of Books"
EARLY MODERN EUROPE
The events of 1588 would show that, once they got their Armada to sea,
the Spaniards experienced little difficulty in moving 60,000 tons of shipping
from one end of the Channel to the other, despite repeated assaults upon it.
The Armada's undoing was caused, ultimately, by the decision to unite the fleet
from Spain with army from the Netherlands as the obligatory prelude to
launching the invasion."
- Geoffrey Parker, the Spanish Armada, "Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe"
- Geoffrey Parker, the Spanish Armada, "Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe"
News of the sack of Drogheda swiftly produced the surrender of other
neighbouring garrisons. Its fate, like Mechelan and Magdeburg, was thus no sectarian
massacre — let us recall once more that many of the defenders and townsfolk
were Protestant — but an action carried out for strategic (not religious)
reasons, and as such, largely sanctioned by the contemporary Laws of War.
- Geoffrey Parker, Cromwell in Ireland, "Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe"
- Geoffrey Parker, Cromwell in Ireland, "Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe"
The 'war of the three kingdoms' in the 1640s, far more than the 'war of
the three kings' in 1688-91, decided the fate of Ireland for over two
centuries. Between 1641 and 1649, an independent Catholic Irish government in
Kilkenny conducted its own foreign policy, layed host to several foreign
ambassadors, and maintained its own armies and navy, for the first time - and
the last until 1922. The success of this confederacy in importing the 'Military
Revolution' enabled it to hold the Irish Protestants at bay, but not to defeat
the English veterans led by Oliver Cromwell. Nevertheless, the failings were
not all, and perhaps not primarily military: Cromwell did not face a united
Irish opposition. Catholic Ireland's defeat and subjugation by England stemmed
essentially from political factors.
- Geoffrey Parker, 17th century Ireland, "Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe"
- Geoffrey Parker, 17th century Ireland, "Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe"
Four key developments, sometimes termed the 'Military Revolution', are
at issue: the artillery fortress, the naval broadside, the reliance on
firepower in combat, and the application of strategies that deployed several
armies in concert. All four appeared in Ireland during the 1640s, and
transformed the nature of the conflict.
- Geoffrey Parker, 17th century Ireland, "Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe"
- Geoffrey Parker, 17th century Ireland, "Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe"
"Superior firepower, particularly on shipboard, and fortresses,
which they could make virtually impregnable, and local allies."
- Anthony Reid, explaining the success of Western armies around the globe
- Anthony Reid, explaining the success of Western armies around the globe
The resistance of even a solitary artillery fortress could waste a
powerful army, because it could only be starved out and few non-European states
could maintain their forces in the field beyond a single campaigning season.
- Geoffrey Parker, the Artillery Fortess, "Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe"
- Geoffrey Parker, the Artillery Fortess, "Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe"
Cooperation between enemies requires neither rationality (for if it
works, it will continue), nor trust (thanks to the penalties of defection), nor
mutual communication (deeds speak louder than words). Only durability is
essential: some recognition of adversaries from earlier encounters and some
certainty that the two sides will meet again. The absence of this vital precondition
helps to explain not only the brutality of colonial wars but also the hard war
policies followed by Sherman's army on its march through Georgia during the
American Civil War, by the German army against Soviet soldiers and civilians
during WW2, and by the Red Army during its conquest of Germany, just as it had
played its part in the destruction of native America. There was no time for
reciprocity to develop.
- Geoffrey Parker, the 'Etiquette of Atrocity', "Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe"
- Geoffrey Parker, the 'Etiquette of Atrocity', "Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe"
Through a combination of education and discipline, most Scots came to
accept that intercourse would only take place between married partners (and the
practice of handfasting, whereby parties cohabited as soon as they were
bethrothed, entirely died out); that insults should be swallowed rather than
expresses; that one should be sober in food, drink and apparel; and that
everyone should go to church on Sunday. Scotland was not alone in its attempts
to inculate godly discipline and inward piety, but where Scotland excelled them
all was in the intensity of control exercised by her church courts... the
ecclesiastical tribunals of Scotland remained supreme until the mid 18th
century, when first a serious schism in the church, then spectacular
improvements in transport, and finally industrial growth began to erode
traditional society and its values.
- Geoffrey Parker, the 'Taming of Scotland', "Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe"
- Geoffrey Parker, the 'Taming of Scotland', "Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe"
For generation after generation, the Spanish Habsburgs married close
relatives. Philip II's oldest son Don Carlos, arrested and imprisoned because
of his dangerously unstable behaviour, could boast only four grandparents
instead of eight, and only six great-grandparents instead of sixteen. This
endogamy - or as Spain's enemies termed it, incest - arose from the desire to
join territories together. Don Carlos descended from three generations of
intermarriage between the ruling dynasties of Portugal and Spain. This policy,
although technically successful (the kindgoms were united in 1580), literally
carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. No wonder the Spanish
Habsburgs died out out after only two more generations of endogamy.
- Geoffrey Parker, "The Repulse of the English Fireships" from "What If?"
- Geoffrey Parker, "The Repulse of the English Fireships" from "What If?"
From a Renaissance state very similar to her neighbours the country
[France] developed into a distinctive 'absolute' monarchy which was widely
admired and copied... By the last decades of Louis XIV's reign, however, many
of his subjects were coming to feel that the king's power had not only grown
excessive, but was being seriously misused. A few daring spirits looked further
still, seeing the need to check, and preferably to reverse, the trend towards
increasing social inequality of France were to fulfil her economic potential.
The monarchy's inability to satisfy either set of critics would eventually
prove to be its downfall... all the power the monarchy had amassed apparently
enabled it to do no more than fight wars and repress internal disorder.
Traditional monarchy had perhaps reached its ultimate form in the state of
Louis XIV, exposing its own contradictions in the process.
- Robin Briggs, "Early Modern France: 1560-1715"
- Robin Briggs, "Early Modern France: 1560-1715"
The French crown had succeeded in establishing the classic
extortion-coercion situation, with heavy taxes supporting a repressive force
capable of meeting any likely challenge, and of compelling payment of those
same taxes. Once a regime has reached this point, it takes a massive convulsion
to bring it down, or even to shake its hold on power.
The maintenane of a level of tax revenue previously only seen in wartime enormously enhaned royal power. The money made possible the building of Versailles, the creation of a navy and the remodelling of the army.
- Robin Briggs, "Early Modern France: 1560-1715"
The maintenane of a level of tax revenue previously only seen in wartime enormously enhaned royal power. The money made possible the building of Versailles, the creation of a navy and the remodelling of the army.
- Robin Briggs, "Early Modern France: 1560-1715"
Obstinately continental in his outlook, Louis XIV grossly underestimated
the power of the United Provinces and England, whose enmity he so casually incurred.
The king saw only the apparent instability and political fragility of states
built on a different model, which combined a weak executive with a strong civil
society. Even in defeat there is little sign that he or his ministers
appreciated the extraordinary economic and military vitality of these untidy,
irritating neighbours. French policy towards them was so inept precisely
because of this fundamental incomprehension, whose consequences were very
serious. The great wars between 1689 and 1713 not only pushed back France's
frontiers, and wrecked her primitive system of public finance; they also
confirmed her opponents in their domination of the wide world beyond the seas.
- Robin Briggs, "Early Modern France: 1560-1715"
- Robin Briggs, "Early Modern France: 1560-1715"
"Louis 14, King of France and Navarre, died on September 1st of
this year [1715], scarcely regretted by his whole kingdom, on account of the
exorbitant sums and heavy taxes he levied on all his subjects. He is said to
have died 1,700,000 livres in debt. These debts were so great that the Regent
has not been able to lift those taxes which the King promised to remove three
months after the peace... It is not permissible to repeat all the verses, all
the songs, or all the unfavourable comments which have been written or said against
his memory. During his life he was so absolute, that he passed above all the
laws to do his will. The princes and the nobility were oppressed, the
parlements had no more power. The clergy were shamefully servile in doing the
King's will... only the moneylenders and tax-collectors were at peace, living
joyfully with all the money of the kingdom in their possession."
- Epitaph by unnamed French Parish Priest, quoted in "Early Modern France" by Robin Briggs
- Epitaph by unnamed French Parish Priest, quoted in "Early Modern France" by Robin Briggs
>> Read on: Quotes about British History
>> Read on: "The Shape of Irish History" by ATQ Stewart
>> Read on: John D. Thiesen's History quotes page [external site]
>> Read on: "The Shape of Irish History" by ATQ Stewart
>> Read on: John D. Thiesen's History quotes page [external site]
http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/History/Historians.html
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All people are living histories – which is why History matters
Penelope J. Corfield
Historians are often asked: what is the use or relevance of studying History (the capital letter signalling the academic field of study)? Why on earth does it matter what happened long ago? The answer is that History is inescapable. It studies the past and the legacies of the past in the present. Far from being a 'dead' subject, it connects things through time and encourages its students to take a long view of such connections.
All people and peoples are living histories. To take a few obvious examples: communities speak languages that are inherited from the past. They live in societies with complex cultures, traditions and religions that have not been created on the spur of the moment. People use technologies that they have not themselves invented. And each individual is born with a personal variant of an inherited genetic template, known as the genome, which has evolved during the entire life-span of the human species.
So understanding the linkages between past and present is absolutely basic for a good understanding of the condition of being human. That, in a nutshell, is why History matters. It is not just 'useful', it is essential.
The study of the past is essential for 'rooting' people in time. And why should thatmatter? The answer is that people who feel themselves to be rootless live rootless lives, often causing a lot of damage to themselves and others in the process. Indeed, at the most extreme end of the out-of-history spectrum, those individuals with the distressing experience of complete memory loss cannot manage on their own at all. In fact, all people have a full historical context. But some, generally for reasons that are no fault of their own, grow up with a weak or troubled sense of their own placing, whether within their families or within the wider world. They lack a sense of roots. For others, by contrast, the inherited legacy may even be toopowerful and outright oppressive.
In all cases, understanding History is integral to a good understanding of the condition of being human. That allows people to build, and, as may well be necessary, also to change, upon a secure foundation. Neither of these options can be undertaken well without understanding the context and starting points. All living people live in the here-and-now but it took a long unfolding history to get everything to NOW. And that history is located in time-space, which holds this cosmos together, and which frames both the past and the present.
The discussion is amplified under the following headings:
- Answering two objections to History
- Noting two weak arguments in favour of studying History
- Celebrating the strong case for History
- The repentance of Henry Ford: History is not bunk
- Summary
Answering two objections to History
One common objection that historians encounter is the instant put-down that is derived from Henry Ford I, the impresario of the mass automobile. In 1916 he stated sweepingly: 'History is bunk'. Actually, Ford's original comment was not so well phrased and it was a journalist who boiled it down to three unforgettable words. Nonetheless, this is the phrasing that is attributed to Ford and it is this dictum that is often quoted by people wishing to express their scepticism about the subject.
Well, then, what is the use of History, if it is only bunk? This rousingly old-fashioned term, for those who have not come across it before, is derived from the Dutch bunkum, meaning rubbish or nonsense.
Inwardly groaning, historians deploy various tactics in response. One obvious reaction is to challenge the terms of the question, in order to make questioners think again about the implications of their terminology. To demand an accountant-style audit of the instant usefulness of every subject smacks of a very crude model of education indeed. It implies that people learn only very specific things, for very specific purposes. For example, a would-be voyager to France, intending to work in that country, can readily identify the utility of learning the French language. However, since no-one can travel back in time to live in an earlier era, it might appear – following the logic of 'immediate application' – that studying anything other than the present-day would be 'useless'.
But not so. The 'immediate utility' formula is a deeply flawed proposition. Humans do not just learn gobbets of information for an immediate task at hand. And, much more fundamentally, the past and the present are not separated off into separate time-ghettos. Thus the would-be travellers who learn the French language are also learning French history, since the language was not invented today but has evolved for centuries into the present. And the same point applies all round. The would-be travellers who learn French have not appeared out of the void but are themselves historical beings. Their own capacity to understand language has been nurtured in the past, and, if they remember and repeat what they are learning, they are helping to transmit (and, if needs be, to adapt) a living language from the past into the future.
Education is not 'just' concerned with teaching specific tasks but it entails forming and informing the whole person, for and through the experience of living through time.
Learning the French language is a valuable human enterprise, and not just for people who live in France or who intend to travel to France. Similarly, people learn about astronomy without journeying in space, about marine biology without deep-sea diving, about genetics without cloning an animal, about economics without running a bank, about History without journeying physically into the past, and so forth. The human mind can and does explore much wider terrain than does the human body (though in fact human minds and bodies do undoubtedly have an impressive track record in physical exploration too). Huge amounts of what people learn is drawn from the past that has not been forgotten. Furthermore, humans display great ingenuity in trying to recover information about lost languages and departed civilisations, so that everything possible can be retained within humanity's collective memory banks.
Very well, the critics then sniff; let's accept that History has a role. But the second criticism levelled at the subject is that it is basic and boring. In other words, if History is not meaningless bunk, it is nonetheless poor fare, consisting of soul-sapping lists of facts and dates.
Further weary sighs come from historians when they hear this criticism. It often comes from people who do not care much for the subject but who simultaneously complain that schoolchildren do not know key dates, usually drawn from their national history. Perhaps the critics who complain that History-is-so-boring had the misfortune to be taught by uninspired teachers who dictated 'teacher's notes' or who inculcated the subject as a compendium of data to be learned by heart. Such pedagogic styles are best outlawed, although the information that they intended to convey is far from irrelevant.
Facts and dates provide some of the basic building blocks of History as a field of study, but on their own they have limited meaning. Take a specific case. It would be impossible to comprehend 20th-century world history if given nothing but a list of key dates, supplemented by information about (say) population growth rates, economic resources and church attendance. And even if further evidence were provided, relating to (say) the size of armies, the cost of oil, and comparative literacy levels, this cornucopia of data would still not furnish nearly enough clues to reconstruct a century's worth of world experience.
On its own, information is not knowledge. That great truth cannot be repeated too often. Having access to abundant information, whether varnished or unvarnished, does not in itself mean that people can make sense of the data.
Charles Dickens long ago satirised the 'facts and nothing but the facts' school of thought. In his novel Hard Times,(1) he invented the hard-nosed businessman, Thomas Gradgrind, who believes that knowledge is sub-divided into nuggets of information. Children should then be given 'Facts' and taught to avoid 'Fancy' – or any form of independent thought and imagination. In the Dickens novel, the Gradgrindian system comes to grief, and so it does in real life, if attempts are ever made to found education upon this theory.
People need mental frameworks that are primed to understand and to assess the available data and – as often happens – to challenge and update both the frameworks and the details too. So the task of educationalists is to help their students to develop adaptable and critical minds, as well as to gain specific expertise in specific subjects.
Returning to the case of someone first trying to understand 20th-century world history, the notional list of key dates and facts would need to be framed by reading (say) Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century(2) or, better still, by contrasting this study with (say) Mark Mazower's Dark Continent(3) or Bernard Wasserstein's Barbarism and Civilization(4) on 20th-century Europe, and/or Alexander Woodside's Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea and the Hazards of World History(5) or Ramachandra Guha's India after Gandhi: the History of the World's Largest Democracy(6) – to name but a few recent overview studies.
Or, better again, students can examine critically the views and sources that underpin these historians' big arguments, as well as debate all of this material (facts and ideas) with others. Above all, History students expect to study for themselves some of the original sources from the past; and, for their own independent projects, they are asked to find new sources and new arguments or to think of new ways of re-evaluating known sources to generate new arguments.
Such educational processes are a long, long way from memorising lists of facts. It follows therefore that History students' understanding of the subject cannot be properly assessed by asking single questions that require yes/no responses or by offering multiple-choice questions that have to be answered by ticking boxes. Such exercises are memory tests but not ways of evaluating an understanding of History.
Noting two weak arguments in favour of studying History
Some arguments in favour of studying History also turn out, on close inspection, to be disappointingly weak. These do not need lengthy discussion but may be noted in passing.
For example, some people semi-concede the critics' case by saying things like:'Well, History is not obviously useful but its study provides a means of learning useful skills'. But that says absolutely nothing about the content of the subject. Of course, the ability to analyse a diverse array of often discrepant data, to provide a reasoned interpretation of the said data, and to give a reasoned critique of one's own and other people's interpretations are invaluable life- and work-skills. These are abilities that History as a field of study is particularly good at inculcating. Nevertheless, the possession of analytical and interpretative skills is not a quality that is exclusive to historians. The chief point about studying History is to study the subject for the invaluable in-depth analysis and the long-term perspective it confers upon the entire human experience – the component skills being an essential ingredient of the process but not the prime justification.
Meanwhile, another variant reply to 'What is the use of History?' is often given in the following form: 'History is not useful but it is still worthwhile as a humane subject of study'. That response says something but the first phrase is wrong and the conclusion is far too weak. It implies that understanding the past and the legacies of the past is an optional extra within the educational system, with cultural value for those who are interested but without any general relevance. Such reasoning was behind the recent and highly controversial decision in Britain to remove History from the required curriculum for schoolchildren aged 14–16.
Yet, viewing the subject as an optional extra, to add cultural gloss, seriously underrates the foundational role for human awareness that is derived from understanding the past and its legacies. Dropping History as a universal subject will only increase rootlessness among young people. The decision points entirely in the wrong direction. Instead, educationalists should be planning for more interesting and powerful ways of teaching the subject. Otherwise it risks becoming too fragmented, including too many miscellaneous skills sessions, thereby obscuring the big 'human story' and depriving children of a vital collective resource.
Celebrating the strong case for History
Much more can be said – not just in defence of History but in terms of its positive advocacy. The best response is the simplest, as noted right at the start of this conversation. When asked 'Why History?' the answer is that History is inescapable. Here it should be reiterated that the subject is being defined broadly. The word 'History' in English usage has many applications. It can refer to 'the past'; or 'the study of the past'; and/or sometimes 'the meaning(s) of the past'. In this discussion, History with a capital H means the academic field of study; and the subject of such study, the past, is huge. In practice, of course, people specialise. The past/present of the globe is studied by geographers and geologists; the biological past/present by biologists and zoologists; the astronomical past/present by astrophysicists; and so forth.
Among professional historians, the prime focus is upon the past/present of the human species, although there are some who are studying the history of climate and/or the environmental history of the globe. Indeed, the boundaries between the specialist academic subjects are never rigid. So from a historian's point of view, much of what is studied under the rubric of (for example) Anthropology or Politics or Sociology or Law can be regarded as specialist sub-sets of History, which takes as its remit the whole of the human experience, or any section of that experience.
Certainly, studying the past in depth while simultaneously reviewing the long-term past/present of the human species directs people's attention to the mixture of continuities and different forms of change in human history, including revolution as well as evolution. Legacies from the past are preserved but also adapted, as each generation transmits them to the following one. Sometimes, too, there are mighty upheavals, which also need to be navigated and comprehended. And there is loss. Not every tradition continues unbroken. But humans can and do learn also from information about vanished cultures – and from pathways that were not followed.
Understanding all this helps people to establish a secure footing or 'location' within the unfolding saga of time, which by definition includes both duration and change. The metaphor is not one of fixation, like dropping an anchor or trying to halt the flow of time. Instead, it is the ability to keep a firm footing within history's rollercoaster that is so important. Another way of putting it is to have secure roots that will allow for continuity but also for growth and change.
Nothing, indeed, can be more relevant to successful functioning in the here-and-now. The immediate moment, known as the synchronic, is always located within the long-term unfolding of time: the diachronic. And the converse is also true. The long term of history always contributes to the immediate moment. Hence my twin maxims, the synchronic is always in the diachronic. The present moment is always part of an unfolding long term, which needs to be understood. And vice versa. The diachronic is always in the synchronic: the long term, the past, always contributes to the immediate moment.
As living creatures, humans have an instinctive synchro-mesh, that gears people into the present moment. But, in addition to that, having a perspective upon longitudinal time, and history within that, is one of the strengths of the alert human consciousness. It may be defined as a parallel process of diachro-mesh, to coin a new term. On the strength of that experience, societies and individuals assess the long-term passage of events from past to present – and, in many cases, manage to measure time not just in terms of nanoseconds but also in terms of millennia. Humans are exceptional animals for their ability to think 'long' as well as 'immediate'; and those abilities need to be cultivated.
If educational systems do not provide a systematic grounding in the study of History, then people will glean some picture of the past and the role of themselves, their families, and their significant associations (which include everything from nations and religions to local clubs and neighbourhood networks) from a medley of other resources – from cultural traditions, from collective memories, from myths, rumours, songs, sagas, from political and religious teachings and customs, from their families, their friends, and from every form of human communication from gossip to the printing press and on to the web.
People do learn, in other words, from a miscellany of resources that are assimilated both consciously and unconsciously. But what is learned may be patchy or confused, leaving some feeling rootless; or it may be simplified and partisan, leaving others feeling embattled or embittered. A good educational system should help people to study History more formally, more systematically, more accurately, more critically and more longitudinally. By that means, people will have access to a great human resource, compiled over many generations, which is the collective set of studies of the past, and the human story within that.
Humans do not learn from the past, people sometimes say. An extraordinary remark! People certainly do not learn from the future. And the present is so fleeting that everything that is learned in the present has already passed into the past by the time it is consolidated. Of course humans learn from the past – and that is why it is studied. History is thus not just about things 'long ago and far away' – though it includes that – but it is about all that makes humanity human – up close and personal.
The repentance of Henry Ford: History is not bunk
Interestingly, Henry Ford's dictum that 'History is bunk' now itself forms part of human history. It has remained in circulation for 90 years since it was first coined. And it exemplifies a certain no-nonsense approach of the stereotypical go-ahead businessman, unwilling to be hide-bound by old ways. But Ford himself repented. He faced much derision for his apparent endorsement of know-nothingism. 'I did not say it [History] was bunk', he elaborated: 'It was bunk to me'. Some business leaders may perhaps affect contempt for what has gone before, but the wisest among them look to the past, to understand the foundations, as well as to the future, in order to build. Indeed, all leaders should reflect that arbitrary changes, imposed willy-nilly without any understanding of the historical context, generally fail. There are plenty of recent examples as well as long-ago case-histories to substantiate this observation. Politicians and generals in Iraq today – on all sides – should certainly take heed.
Model-T Ford 1908
After all, Ford's pioneering Model T motor-car did not arrive out of the blue in 1908. He had spent the previous 15 years testing a variety of horseless carriages. Furthermore, the Model T relied upon an advanced steel industry to supply the car's novel frame of light steel alloy, as well as the honed skills of the engineers who built the cars, and the savvy of the oil prospectors who refined petroleum for fuel, just as Ford's own novel design for electrical ignition drew upon the systematic study of electricity initiated in the 18th century, while the invention of the wheel was a human staple dating back some 5,000 years.
It took a lot of human history to create the automobile.
Ford Mustang 2007
And the process by no means halted with Henry Ford I. So the next invention that followed upon his innovations provided synchro-mesh gearing for these new motorised vehicles – and that change itself occurred within thediachro-mesh process of shared adaptations, major and minor, that were being developed, sustained, transmitted and revolutionised through time.
Later in life, Henry Ford himself became a keen collector of early American antique furniture, as well as of classic automobiles. In this way, he paid tribute both to his cultural ancestry and to the cumulative as well as revolutionary transformations in human transportation to which he had so notably contributed.
Moreover, for the Ford automobile company, there was a further twist in the tale. In his old age, the once-radical Henry Ford I turned into an out-of-touch despot. He failed to adapt with the changing industry and left his pioneering business almost bankrupt, to be saved only by new measures introduced by his grandson Henry Ford II. Time and history had the last laugh – outlasting even fast cars and scoffers at History.
Summary
Because humans are rooted in time, people do by one means or another pick up ideas about the past and its linkages with the present, even if these ideas are sketchy or uninformed or outright mythological. But it is best to gain access to the ideas and evidence of History as an integral part of normal education.
The broad span of human experience, viewed both in depth and longitudinally over time, is the subject of History as a field of study.
Therefore the true question is not: 'What is the use or relevance of History?' but rather: 'Given that all people are living histories, how can we all best learn about the long-unfolding human story in which all participate?'
- C. Dickens, Hard Times (London, 1854).
- E. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century (London, 1994).
- M. Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (London, 1998).
- B. Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilisation: a History of Europe in Our Time(Oxford, 2007).
- A. Woodside, Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea and the Hazards of World History (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).
- R. Guha, India after Gandhi: the History of the World's Largest Democracy(London, 2007).
Suggested further reading
H. Carr, What is History? (rev. edn., Basingstoke, 1986).
Drolet, The Postmodern Reader: Foundational Texts (London, 2003).
J. Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997).
Gunn, History and Cultural Theory (Harlow, 2006).
Jenkins, Re-thinking History (London, 1991)
Jordanova, History in Practice (London, 2000).
The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, ed. A. Munslow (London, 1999).
P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London, 1978).
Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History (many edns., London, 1984–).
Penelope J. Corfield is professor of history at Royal Holloway, University of London. If quoting, please kindly acknowledge copyright: © Penelope J. Corfield 2008
http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/why_history_matters.html--------------------------
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What Europe’s past can tell us of its future
Can European policymakers draw on lessons from the past to shape our thinking on the future? Élie Barnavi, one of the driving forces behind the “Musée de l’Europe” project in Brussels, explains why history matters
On the face of it, the question of whether history matters is banal, and so is the answer. Yes, history understood as the sum of past events matters a great deal. History made us what we are, whether we are aware of it or not (most often not, but that is immaterial). Even the idea of a revolutionary tabula rasa is an illusion. Alexis de Tocqueville showed in his celebrated book “The Ancien Regime and the Revolution” that revolutionary France retained many more features of the old monarchical France than people realised. What was true for France is true for any society, for any nation. And it’s true for Europe.
Europe’s past leads us to an inescapable conclusion: Out of a patchwork of nations and cultures, and of endless wars and conflicts of interest, history produced a single European civilisation. On the foundations laid by the Greeks and the Romans, Europe as an entity – distinct from, say, Asia, Islam or Byzantium – was born in the Middle Ages. Of course, it was Antiquity that coined the concept; but Antiquity had other dichotomies: Greeks and Barbarians, citizens and slaves, Romans and foreigners. And when mediaeval Europe was born, the Church was its midwife.
The Church was “Roman”, not only because the Papal See was located in Rome, but above all because it considered itself the rightful heir to the Roman Empire. And it was “Catholic”, that is universal, because it wanted to unify the entire human race under its wing. By blending together the remnants of Greco-Roman civilisation and new socio-cultural realities, the learned men of the Church laid the foundations of a new civilisation: the civilisation of the Christian West and thus the first cultural map of Europe.
The outlines of this map emerged in the Middle Ages: A single, uniform way of worship; a network of religious orders that ignored political or “national” boundaries; pilgrimage and trade routes with their traditional stations – places of devotion in the one case, periodic fairs in the other; feudal society and court life – the tournament, courtly love, the poetry of minstrels; and, of course, the university, perhaps the brightest expression of this unified cultural space. Paris and Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge, Heidelberg, Salamanca and Tübingen, shared the same language (Latin), the same doctrine (Aristotle’s philosophy), the same curriculum, the same methods, the same intellectual tools (formal logic based on syllogism), and the same textbooks. Professors, students, ideas and books roved from country to country, from town to town, from university to university. Faculties of Arts – our Humanities – gave generations of students a unique European general culture, a common European background of knowledge and thought.
The boundaries of the Occident were somewhat vague, but the meaning was quite clear: Poland, Hungary and Bohemia were in; Russia was outside. Sixty years ago, Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” cut through these two worlds, but the first outline of a united Europe coincided more or less with the boundaries of Charlemagne’s Empire. The great crises that opened the modern Western Age – humanism, the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, the birth of the territorial state – did not affect this striking continuity. They broke the religious and political unity of the Christian West – that is, of Europe – but not its cultural unity: the cultural framework remained what it had been since the Middle Ages. The humanists of the Renaissance cast their values in that very framework, as the neo-humanists of the Enlightenment would do three centuries later. Without Thomas Aquinas, there could have been no Erasmus, without Erasmus no Voltaire. “Historical reality”, wrote 19th century Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, “taught me to recognize that the unity of Europe as a society is no ideal, but an old-established fact.”
It took a while for this “old-established fact” to become fully recognised. Two immense challenges helped: one, external, was the threat of Turkish Islam; the other, internal, was the growth of the modern state. From then on, Europe began to take the place of the decaying Christian Republic in the European’s heart and mind. For the intellectuals of the Enlightenment, Europe, European civilisation, European cultural superiority, the European unity of fate, were commonplace. A century later, Victor Hugo is believed to have coined the phrase “les États-Unis d’Europe”; from then on, through all the vicissitudes of history, the “European idea” has never left the European agenda. Those are the facts.
But history is more than the sum of past events; it is also an intellectual discipline designed to produce a reasoned interpretation of the past and its projection into the future. In that sense, the question posed by the title of this article is certainly less banal, and much more problematic. For it remains to be seen what “lessons” can be drawn from past events, and how these “lessons” are supposed to influence our decision-making process. It is no easy matter. Even if we consider that the historical facts are well known by leaders and citizens, which is of course a large assumption, two traits of the human soul greatly complicate things. One is hope, which tends to devalue others’ experience, or even one’s own. The other is our propensity to frame our desires and aspirations in ideological terms. In other words, the “lessons of history” are infinitely interpretable. There are, to be sure, crazy interpretations of historical facts, which distort them. But even if the facts are well established and accepted, there is certainly no single interpretation of these, let alone a clear-cut principle of action to be drawn from them. All we can say is that once the aim is defined, as always according to ideological preferences, action must be founded on sound historical facts. With this in mind, let us go back to Europe.
Their making of Europe was an astonishing revolution. It had no historical precedent from which lessons could be drawn. For the first time in the history of mankind, sovereign states freely relinquished chunks of their sovereignty for the benefit of a supranational entity. In that sense, it may be argued that history has nothing to “teach” us, since there are no “historical lessons” available. That may hold true for the shape of Europe’s institutions, the depth of its integration and the nature of the link between the member states and its central organs. But the geographical and mental framework within which this revolution is taking place must obey some sort of historical logic; otherwise it is doomed to fail.
The double question of identity and borders needs to be looked at within this framework. For half a century, Europeans put it to one side, sheltering behind the artificial border that cut across the continent. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it cannot be avoided anymore. What does it mean to be a European? Who is to be a citizen of Europe and who is to be left out? These are fundamental questions on which history obviously offers some insights. Admittedly, history is not deterministic; it leaves room for human choice, that is, for politics. What has been is not necessarily what will be, or ought to be. But what has been cannot be ignored as if it has never been. Political will must take the past into consideration, if only to shape, as much as possible, the future course of history.
And so, looking to Europe’s future also means looking into its past. European education is by definition historical. Those who lament the lack of a “European spirit” need to know that it will not emerge miraculously; it has to be built, just as national awareness was in the 19th century, through history books and textbooks. A common European historiography must not replace national narratives, but run alongside them. Only in this way will generations of young Europeans discover that what they may see as national phenomena – feudalism and state-building, the Renaissance and the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution – were also, perhaps primarily, European ones too. So yes, history does matter when building Europe’s future. That is precisely why we are setting up a Museum of Europe in the heart of its capital.
Europe’s past leads us to an inescapable conclusion: Out of a patchwork of nations and cultures, and of endless wars and conflicts of interest, history produced a single European civilisation. On the foundations laid by the Greeks and the Romans, Europe as an entity – distinct from, say, Asia, Islam or Byzantium – was born in the Middle Ages. Of course, it was Antiquity that coined the concept; but Antiquity had other dichotomies: Greeks and Barbarians, citizens and slaves, Romans and foreigners. And when mediaeval Europe was born, the Church was its midwife.
The Church was “Roman”, not only because the Papal See was located in Rome, but above all because it considered itself the rightful heir to the Roman Empire. And it was “Catholic”, that is universal, because it wanted to unify the entire human race under its wing. By blending together the remnants of Greco-Roman civilisation and new socio-cultural realities, the learned men of the Church laid the foundations of a new civilisation: the civilisation of the Christian West and thus the first cultural map of Europe.
The outlines of this map emerged in the Middle Ages: A single, uniform way of worship; a network of religious orders that ignored political or “national” boundaries; pilgrimage and trade routes with their traditional stations – places of devotion in the one case, periodic fairs in the other; feudal society and court life – the tournament, courtly love, the poetry of minstrels; and, of course, the university, perhaps the brightest expression of this unified cultural space. Paris and Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge, Heidelberg, Salamanca and Tübingen, shared the same language (Latin), the same doctrine (Aristotle’s philosophy), the same curriculum, the same methods, the same intellectual tools (formal logic based on syllogism), and the same textbooks. Professors, students, ideas and books roved from country to country, from town to town, from university to university. Faculties of Arts – our Humanities – gave generations of students a unique European general culture, a common European background of knowledge and thought.
“History is more than the sum of past events; it is also an intellectual discipline designed to produce a reasoned interpretation of the past and its projection into the future”The monk, the soldier, the merchant, the professor, the student, the pilgrim, the builder of cathedrals traced the map of European civilisation with their feet. It was then that Europe as we know it was born – in opposition to the “Roman” Empire of the East, Byzantium. Here, “Latins”, there Greeks; here Catholics, there the Orthodox Church; here a dual political reality (Pope and Emperor), there a caesaro-papism which united the temporal and the spiritual in the same hand. In other words, here the “Occident”, with all its cultural, political and ethical implications; there, the “Orient”.
The boundaries of the Occident were somewhat vague, but the meaning was quite clear: Poland, Hungary and Bohemia were in; Russia was outside. Sixty years ago, Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” cut through these two worlds, but the first outline of a united Europe coincided more or less with the boundaries of Charlemagne’s Empire. The great crises that opened the modern Western Age – humanism, the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, the birth of the territorial state – did not affect this striking continuity. They broke the religious and political unity of the Christian West – that is, of Europe – but not its cultural unity: the cultural framework remained what it had been since the Middle Ages. The humanists of the Renaissance cast their values in that very framework, as the neo-humanists of the Enlightenment would do three centuries later. Without Thomas Aquinas, there could have been no Erasmus, without Erasmus no Voltaire. “Historical reality”, wrote 19th century Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, “taught me to recognize that the unity of Europe as a society is no ideal, but an old-established fact.”
It took a while for this “old-established fact” to become fully recognised. Two immense challenges helped: one, external, was the threat of Turkish Islam; the other, internal, was the growth of the modern state. From then on, Europe began to take the place of the decaying Christian Republic in the European’s heart and mind. For the intellectuals of the Enlightenment, Europe, European civilisation, European cultural superiority, the European unity of fate, were commonplace. A century later, Victor Hugo is believed to have coined the phrase “les États-Unis d’Europe”; from then on, through all the vicissitudes of history, the “European idea” has never left the European agenda. Those are the facts.
But history is more than the sum of past events; it is also an intellectual discipline designed to produce a reasoned interpretation of the past and its projection into the future. In that sense, the question posed by the title of this article is certainly less banal, and much more problematic. For it remains to be seen what “lessons” can be drawn from past events, and how these “lessons” are supposed to influence our decision-making process. It is no easy matter. Even if we consider that the historical facts are well known by leaders and citizens, which is of course a large assumption, two traits of the human soul greatly complicate things. One is hope, which tends to devalue others’ experience, or even one’s own. The other is our propensity to frame our desires and aspirations in ideological terms. In other words, the “lessons of history” are infinitely interpretable. There are, to be sure, crazy interpretations of historical facts, which distort them. But even if the facts are well established and accepted, there is certainly no single interpretation of these, let alone a clear-cut principle of action to be drawn from them. All we can say is that once the aim is defined, as always according to ideological preferences, action must be founded on sound historical facts. With this in mind, let us go back to Europe.
“Those who lament the lack of a “European spirit” need to know that it will not emerge miraculously; it has to be built, just as national awareness was in the 19th century, through history books and textbooks”The founding fathers of today’s Europe drew the lesson of recent history and did not repeat the tragic mistake of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Out of the ruins of the most terrible war ever ignited on European soil, the victors of World War II had wanted to build a new order with their former enemy – a totally new notion. They also understood that Europe was sidelined by the two superpowers the United States and the Soviet Union, and had lost her dominant position; Europeans therefore had no choice but to unite if they wanted a say in world affairs. But they also knew that the recent and bitter past was only part of the story, the immediate context of their endeavour. They built on the layers of a long-shared past without which the immediate context would hardly have produced a united Europe.
Their making of Europe was an astonishing revolution. It had no historical precedent from which lessons could be drawn. For the first time in the history of mankind, sovereign states freely relinquished chunks of their sovereignty for the benefit of a supranational entity. In that sense, it may be argued that history has nothing to “teach” us, since there are no “historical lessons” available. That may hold true for the shape of Europe’s institutions, the depth of its integration and the nature of the link between the member states and its central organs. But the geographical and mental framework within which this revolution is taking place must obey some sort of historical logic; otherwise it is doomed to fail.
The double question of identity and borders needs to be looked at within this framework. For half a century, Europeans put it to one side, sheltering behind the artificial border that cut across the continent. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it cannot be avoided anymore. What does it mean to be a European? Who is to be a citizen of Europe and who is to be left out? These are fundamental questions on which history obviously offers some insights. Admittedly, history is not deterministic; it leaves room for human choice, that is, for politics. What has been is not necessarily what will be, or ought to be. But what has been cannot be ignored as if it has never been. Political will must take the past into consideration, if only to shape, as much as possible, the future course of history.
And so, looking to Europe’s future also means looking into its past. European education is by definition historical. Those who lament the lack of a “European spirit” need to know that it will not emerge miraculously; it has to be built, just as national awareness was in the 19th century, through history books and textbooks. A common European historiography must not replace national narratives, but run alongside them. Only in this way will generations of young Europeans discover that what they may see as national phenomena – feudalism and state-building, the Renaissance and the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution – were also, perhaps primarily, European ones too. So yes, history does matter when building Europe’s future. That is precisely why we are setting up a Museum of Europe in the heart of its capital.
http://europesworld.org/2008/06/01/what-europes-past-can-tell-us-of-its-future/
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Public Lecture by Timothy Snyder: "Not Even Past: Ukrainian Histories, Russian Politics, European Futures"
July 2014
May 15-19, 2014, Kyiv
International conference "Ukraine: Thinking Together"
International conference "Ukraine: Thinking Together"
I'm going to say a very quick word about something you all know, that is to say, about the European history of Ukraine. And then, I will try to develop an argument about how the European history of Ukraine mattered, as the national way of seeing the world came to be prominent, and then say a word about how the European history of Ukraine matters as Europe itself becomes the way that we think about the past.
So, it's controversial where I come from, but you all know that Ukraine has a European history. In fact, it's a very typical European history. The beginnings of Ukrainian history, or the beginnings of Kyivan Rus, in a confrontation between Vikings and local peoples, this is central to the history of France. It's central to the history of Great Britain. These are central European themes. The next stage in the history of Kyivan Rus, the confrontation between Eastern Christianity and Western Christianity, the various bargains, the various betrayals that were made in Kyiv as in Warsaw, as in Prague, as in Bulgaria, as East European leaders oscillated between Rome and Byzantium, trying to find the best possible bargain: this is also a very typical European story. After the end of Rus, the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania - which is, I think, the step in Ukrainian history which is most often forgotten: it's forgotten in Lithuania, it's forgotten in the West - is a very interesting stage, because it is in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that the Kyivan inheritance is preserved: the Kyivan language, the language of state; also the Kyivan law code. These things are preserved precisely in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
The next stage in the European history of Ukraine is, of course, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, after 1569, after the Union of Lublin. The Union of Lublin is a very important moment, because it draws a line between what is now Belarus and what is now Ukraine, for the first time in history. Ukrainian territory falls under the Polish crown, the rest falls into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. And it is during this period, the period of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, that the history of Ukraine is, so to say, most recognizably European. This is the period when we see a Renaissance, a Reformation, a Counter-Reformation, all of these nice things. It's a period when we see a Republic. The specialty of Polish history at this moment is that Polish history recreates all the things that it didn't really have: so, Polish history has a renaissance, but it doesn't have a “naissance.” There was no classical history in Poland, but there is a renaissance all the same. And Ukraine takes part in that renaissance. Poland calls itself a republic; it has no ancient republican traditions, but it refers to them all the same. Ukraine is part of that republic. But within that republic, we have a very important tension, a tension that is worth recalling today. The tension is between the very few Ukrainians, the magnates, the great aristocrats, the "mahniteria," who did extremely well in this republic, and the vast majority of the population that did not.
And so the rebellion, which is against actually the rulers of Ukraine, the rebellion against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which is in fact against the rulers of Ukraine, is a rebellion against inequality, it's a rebellion on behalf of people who are excluded from the system, people who call themselves Cossacks. It's a very important moment in Ukraine's European history, but it's also the moment when a certain stage of that history breaks down. Because, as you all know, the Cossacks find themselves in an alliance with Muscovy, the Cossacks then find themselves under Muscovy, and after 1667 this city, and all of right-bank[KP1] Ukraine, finds itself under Muscovy, then under the Russian Empire. It's a very important turning point because from 1667 onwards, until, let's say, about two decades ago, the elites from this city primarily moved northwards, to Moscow.
Now, that is a very short sketch of a certain history. In the 19th century, all Europeans, not just Ukrainians or Poles or Russians, but all Europeans, had to remake their history in a national form. That was the dominant spirit, the dominant ethos, of the day. Everyone had a complicated history, which was reshaped, remade, reconstructed - as Konstantin was nice enough to refer to my book - reconstructed as a new sort of history, as a national sort of history. And here, too, it's striking how typical Ukraine is. The move to romanticism, to populism, that begins in Kharkiv, which spreads to Kyiv, and then to Lviv - Lviv was actually at the end of this, and not at the beginning - is very typically European. The idea that you have to move history away from the elites and in Eastern Europe away from the state and towards the people and their language and their stories and their songs is quintessentially European. It's something that is absolutely typically European. It begins in Germany, it spreads elsewhere. Now, what's worth noticing here - and this is a crucial moment too - is that Ukrainian romanticism, Ukrainian populism, the move in Ukrainian history to put the people at the center of the story, is primarily against the history of the Commonwealth. It's primarily against Poles, or Poles identified, as Shevchenko put it, as the aristocrats and the priests. Populism is directed against the western neighbor, and thus in some sense against Europe. And this is a very important tendency to watch play out. In other words, Ukrainian patriots, or people who were identifying with the Ukrainian speaking population, always had at least two problems. They had the problem of the Russian Empire, and they had the problem of Poland. And from the point of view of the 18th and 19th century, you could make an argument about which of these was Europe. You can certainly make an argument that St. Petersburg was Europe. You could also make an argument that Warsaw was Europe. But in both cases, they seemed to be a problem. And this is a development that we're going to watch.
So, these tensions - the multiple problems that Ukrainian patriots faced, the multiple problems that Ukrainian state builders faced - become apparent in 1914. 1914 is a moment where I would say things start to become very unusual. Thus far I've emphasized how typically European Ukrainian history is. In 1914 something unusual happens. The First World War in Eastern Europe - and now I'm going to lose all my Polish and Czech and Romanian friends - is generally a moment when you do nothing for statehood, but you get it anyway. There went my chance to write the Polish history textbooks. But in general, there's very little connection between how hard you fight for national independence and whether you get national independence. So, Romania does very little in the First World War but it gets a lot of territory. Czechoslovakia, the Czechs and the Slovaks are fighting on the wrong side, but they get an entirely new state. The Polish movement for independence exists, but it's very minor, and nevertheless an entirely new Polish state is created. And so on and so on. In general, you don't have to do very much. Serbia started the war - the war was Serbia's fault - and yet Serbia ends the war as the central part of a much bigger state, Yugoslavia. But the Ukrainian case here is atypical: after the war, many Ukrainians do fight for independence. There are two major efforts to create a Ukrainian state, one based in Kyiv, one based in Galicia. All of you already know this. There are a huge number of casualties on the part of people fighting for Ukrainian independence: Kyiv eastward, and then all the way back to Warsaw, in fact. As you probably know, there are a good number of Ukrainian soldiers buried in Polish military cemeteries in Warsaw because they were fighting all the way back to Warsaw in August 1919. So here you have this unusual situation: you have a lot of conflict, a lot of people who are dying to create a state, but at the end of it no state. At the end of it, the failure to create a state. The failure to create a state because the Russian Whites are against this, because the Poles only support it very late and within certain boundaries, but ultimately because it's the Red Army that wins this very complicated civil war.
Now, this brings me to the Soviet Union. And the Soviet period in Ukrainian history is extremely interesting. It's extremely interesting because the victory of the Red Army, the creation of the Soviet Union, casts the question of Ukraine and Europe in an entirely new way, because, after all, the Soviet Union - and there are many things to say about the Soviet Union; I'm only going to focus on one aspect here - the Soviet Union was, among many other things, an attempt to recreate Europe. The premise of the Soviet Union was: "We are a backward country; we need to recreate capitalism - that is to say, Europe - in order to surpass it later on." That is the premise of the Soviet Union. The second premise of the Soviet Union is that nations exist, although maybe not forever. So the Soviet Union is established as a state which is going to try to create something that looks like capitalism, in order to go past capitalism, and as something which has interior national boundaries, in order eventually to transcend them, to go beyond them. So a Ukrainian republic is created inside the Soviet Union.
Now, I know it's easy to dismiss this reality. It's easy to say the Soviet Union was just very repressive, and of course it was, and I've written about that. But there's something here to be understood, that we have to understand before we get to the end of the story, and that is the way that Europe was both a model and an enemy at the same time in the Soviet Union, and the way that this was most intense in the case of Ukraine. Europe is a model because the entire Soviet Union has to catch up to Europe, but it's also an enemy because it's capitalist. And this ambivalence is most intense in Ukraine because Ukraine is, of course, the western frontier of the Soviet Union. It's a big republic that has a long border with Poland and Romania, therefore with Europe. So in the 1920s, in this very interesting period of affirmative action for Ukrainians within the Soviet Union, of the subsidization of Ukrainian culture, of the support of Ukrainian modernism and futurism, you see this tension be resolved, because yes, a new generation of Ukrainian writers and artists and even historians grows up within the Soviet Union, making very interesting art, writing very good novels, carrying out very good scholarship. But they are generally pro-European.
And now this is a story that you know. Somewhere around 1928, 1929, 1930 it's no longer all right to be in favor of Europe. Especially after January 1930, when collectivization begins in earnest, and peasants resist collectivization in Soviet Ukraine massively. From that point forward, something turns. Europe is no longer seen as a model. It's no longer acceptable to be pro-European. Instead, all the problems of collectivization, including the famine, are now blamed on Europe. I don't know how closely the rest of you have read this propaganda - I spent a long time with it. The idea is expressed that the famine in Ukraine is the fault of Poland, because Polish agents are paying Ukrainian nationalists inside the Ukrainian Communist party and so on. And then at a slightly later stage, after the famine has happened, the discussions of the famine are blamed on Nazi Germany. So if you mention that there was a famine in Soviet Ukraine, this means, according to Soviet propaganda, that you were an agent of Nazi Germany.
Now this is a very interesting moment, of course. I mean, it's a horrible moment, it's a terrible moment, but it's an interesting moment for our story of Europe and European futures, because it's at this moment that the dichotomy, the Manichaean absolute opposition between fascism and anti-fascism is created, where anti-fascism means we have no external colonies. I quote Comrade Stalin. Unlike the Western powers, we have no external colonies, therefore we must colonize ourselves. Which means very precisely exploiting the peasants and exploiting the lands. That's one model of colonization. A second model of colonization comes from Nazi Germany: the idea of lebensraum, the idea of living space, that we all know, has a precise geography. The precise geography of lebensraum is Ukraine. Like Stalin, Hitler understood Ukraine as a breadbasket. He understood it as a place that could feed an entire continent. The question was just which continent that was going to be. Whereas Stalin presented Ukraine as the territory that must be controlled if the Soviet Union was going to survive the world capitalist conspiracy, Hitler presented Ukraine as the territory that must be controlled if Germany was going to survive the world Jewish conspiracy. So in both cases there is a regional colony that has to be mastered, that has to be controlled, in the service of a slightly lunatic but very coherent ideology about the way the world actually works. Or, to put it in more technical terms, there was a territory that had to be controlled if you wanted to be a world power, whether you were in Berlin, or whether you were in Moscow. Now, the Germans looked at collective farming and they saw it as a positive model. The German planners assumed that they were going to keep the collective farms in Ukraine as a means of controlling the population and of controlling the food supply. Their idea was that they would extract the food from Ukraine and use it to feed Germany and Western Europe, and along the way starve 30 million Soviet citizens to death in the winter of 1941. They never starved that many people, but the intention gives you a sense of what they intended to do if they could control the western Soviet Union.
So, here we see a kind of extreme. We see Ukraine at the middle of unmistakably European projects at a time when perhaps Europe deserved its good name less than it does today. This is a very different Europe. These were unmistakably European projects that put Ukraine in the middle. Ukraine was in the middle of two rival European projects based on global ideologies aiming for world power. Now, just exactly how this plays out in practice is the subject of my book Bloodlands, which Konstantin was kind enough to mention. But the general outcome you all know: between 1933 and 1945 there was no more dangerous place in the world than Ukraine. More people were killed as a result of policy in Ukraine than anywhere else in the world between 1933 and 1945.
I won't tell that whole story, but within that story of Soviet power, German power, rivalry and war, there's also a smaller story of alliance that I want to make sure that we don't skip over without mentioning. The alliance between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1941, the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, is very important for how we think about Europe today. Or, it's very important, to put it a different way, for how people in Moscow think about Europe today. Because the period of the alliance with Nazi Germany shows what anti-fascism actually was. Anti-fascism didn't mean actually opposing fascists. Anti-fascism meant strengthening and protecting the Soviet state. The alliance with Hitler, in Stalin's mind, was a way of turning Europe against itself. The idea was, and Stalin was very explicit about this, if Germany and the Soviet Union are allied, then the Second World War will be a war between Germany and France and Britain, and the result of this will be the destruction of Europe, the hastening of the contradictions of capitalism to their final collapse. So you see there's a very interesting model here between 1939 and 1941. The model is, you say you're against fascism, you make an alliance with the actual fascists, and you try to destroy Europe. We'll get back around to that.
From here, we're now at the midpoint. From here we move into a very interesting stage, which begins still before you were born - you're awfully young. I'm now going to tell you something which you will laugh at, because everyone in the world thinks this is funny. The crucial decade, and the really interesting decade, is the 1970s. Ok, you didn't laugh - that's nice. That's very respectful. The 1970s are, I think, the axial decade. They're the crucial moment that brings us to where we are today. Because in the 1970s, you begin to see a competition between two ideas of integration, a competition which is still going on, but which has to do with, in the end, where Ukraine actually is. In the 1970s in the Soviet Union, there is no longer the hope that Ukrainians will become Soviets and the Soviet Union will become a utopia, but there is the idea that Ukrainians will become Soviets. And there is the Brezhnev project of making sure that the Soviet Union just has one humanist intelligentsia, one technical intelligentsia, and that these intelligentsias speak Russian. There is the shift away from the Ukrainian language in elementary schools, high schools, and universities in this country.
That is one project of integration. And then, on the other side, there is a European project of integration, which by the 1970s has been going on for a couple of decades, which by the 1970s receives a lot of attention in the Soviet empire and a bit of attention in Ukraine itself. There is a European project that leads indirectly to the Helsinki final act of 1975, of which the European states, Canada, the United States, and the Soviet Union are all signatories. 1975 and the Helsinki Final Act is a symbolic moment in politics because here, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, people seize onto the idea of human rights, an immanently European, also of course American, idea, but less well known is what the 1970s mean for Ukrainians and Poles. And in particular for a particular conversation in which, for the first time, really, in decades, and arguably in centuries - I would say probably centuries - for some Ukrainians Poland starts to seem like Europe, and Europe starts to seem like a positive thing at the same time. Those are two very important developments. And they begin with the conversation in the 1970s in which some people here I see took part, centered around the journal Kultura, in which Poles said, "We are interested in a future independent Ukraine in its existing borders" - that is, okay, we're fine, we're not going to claim Lwów - while many Ukrainian intellectuals were moving towards a civic understanding of Ukrainian patriotism, which made it easier for them to talk about Poland. To make a long story short, this meant that in 1989 something very important, a very important success could happen. Polish foreign policy in 1989, when Poland was sovereign but Ukraine was not yet sovereign, could openly declare, "We are following a policy of European standards. European standards mean we recognize your boundaries, we recognize your western boundary. We recognize your western boundary even though you don't exist yet. We preemptively recognize your western boundary." Many preemptive things are bad. Preemptively recognizing someone's boundary is probably good. And this reference to Europe was actually true, because an essential part of the European project is that boundaries are not challenged. The boundaries of states are taken for what they are. It's assumed that then you can have movement across those boundaries, and you can create something meaningful in that way. So, in this way, something begins to shift. Another, a positive idea of Europe, in which Poland could play a positive role - because that's very important: if Poland is negative, it's very hard to code Europe as positive - anyway, that new idea begins to take shape.
I'm going to pass over the history of the last couple of decades in Ukraine, because you know it, you know it better than I do: the history of foreign policy that shifts from east to west, east to west, east to west, the history of domestic policy, which is an alternation among various oligarchical clans, the way that this ends, I think decisively, in 2013 and 2014 with the Maidan. What I want to emphasize instead is the way that another project has now in fact emerged. As of the early 21st century, the European Union seems to be the only game in town. And it is very attractive. It is attractive to a whole group of East European countries who join, a whole group of East European states who don't actually imagine themselves without Europe. It's a very striking thing that as soon as sovereignty is gained, the immediate step was to try to compromise that sovereignty. But over the course of the early 21st century, it could seem that this was the only integration project. The old Soviet integration project was gone; the Soviet Union was gone. The European project was moving onwards: in the 1990s, the early 21st century, Europe arguably presented - I now feel guilty in front of my Americans compatriots - Europe arguably presented the most impressive common market, the most impressive collective, if you like, welfare state that had ever existed. And Europeans had a certain tendency to believe that this was it, this was the only model, and everyone likes us.
Now, what's happened in the last year - and here I'm moving towards my conclusion - what's happened in the last year is that something has fundamentally changed. There is now a rival to this project. The rival is not a Soviet rival, and it's not exactly a Russian rival, although it comes from the Russian Federation. The rival is this Eurasian project. And what's special about Eurasia - both as an ideology in the words of Dugin or as a policy in the hands of Putin - what's special about Eurasia is that for the very first time, someone - I mean, aside from some of my more radical Republican friends back home - someone is treating the European Union as an enemy. Someone is treating the European Union as something which is evil and needs to be destroyed. Someone is mounting a cultural, ideological and political attack on the European Union as such. Now, I'm not telling you the history that you already know of the Maidan. You are here. What I'm trying to stress is that this counter-project revealed itself during the Maidan. For those of us who were watching from afar, who were spending the day paying attention to the Maidan and the night watching Russian television, it was very clear that something had changed fundamentally in Russian propaganda. You've all noticed this too. That the Maidan was being treated as aggression from the European Union. Not just the Americans: I mean, of course it's our fault. Let's take that for granted. But for the first time something was being presented as aggression from the European Union, and that aggression was coded in certain ways. As decadent, to use the dominant word. Where decadent means all kinds of toleration of things that I would regard as essential human freedoms: how you would like to live and with whom and in what way. Essential civil rights. So, the European Union is being coded not only as an enemy, but as decadent. And this is new, and the Maidan brought this out, because the trend of presenting - this whole trend of presenting Yevropa as Gayvropa, which was already there - it sounds funny, but it's actually not funny - which was already there in Russia came much more to the fore, because the Maidan was then described to the rest of the world in this way, as part of this offensive of this evil and decadent European Union.
This has led to a very interesting dichotomy in the way that Russia is presenting Ukraine to the rest of the world. To us in the West, as I'm sure you're aware, what the Russian propaganda says is: Ukrainians are bad Europeans, because they're fascists. Meanwhile, although that exists in Russia too, but meanwhile within Russia the problem is that Ukrainians are too good Europeans. You're too much like Europeans, that's the problem. You're different, you're like Europeans. So there's this basic contradiction in the Russian propaganda, a logical contradiction. And of course it's bound to a political contradiction, because the Eurasian project finds and seeks allies across the European far right, and this is now no longer a secret. I mean, the members of the European far right parties in France, as we see, in Austria, the smaller parties across Europe, Hungary, Greece, you name it, they have all been recruited and they have all essentially publically pledged allegiance to the Putinist project. So there is now a kind of fashion turn; there is now an international cooperative movement of far right parties, which is basically centered in Moscow. At the same time, everyone is supposed to criticize Ukraine, because Ukraine is too far to the right. So, all of the European far right is for Russia, and yet we're not supposed to like Ukraine because it's on the far right. So there's a contradiction here, which it's taken us a while to see, but which is very clear.
Now, no one in Moscow cares about these contradictions, because they assume that we in the West are simply too slow and stupid to pick them up - and, unfortunately, they're mostly right. We are very slow, and we have to be slow, because we're pluralists. We take arguments seriously, we think every argument belongs to a constituency, we have to balance it all out: on the one hand, on the other hand, and so on. And honestly, that's what's good about us. We can't be so quick because we think there are different kinds of arguments we have to...But this is not actually a difficult one to have to think through, and I'm confident that we'll think it through pretty quickly. But the contradictions don't matter; in Moscow, they're perfectly aware that these are contradictions; they just don't care. What matters is that this is a coherent project. It's not at all crazy or irrational, it's not the kind of thing that if you point out the contradictions it then goes away. It's a coherent project, the aim of which is to bring down the European Union and replace it with an alternative European project, which is where I want to conclude with this idea of European futures.
Of course the European futures have everything to do with the past, everything to do with the past as it happened, everything to do with the past as we remember it, as we constantly remember it. There are multiple European futures now. There's one European future which is not possible. That is the European future of the return to the nation-state. And this is true here just as it's true in the European Union. In different ways, Ukraine and European Union member states face the same situation. You know, or at least all sensible people in Ukraine know, that a strong Ukrainian state will exist insofar as it is integrated with other meaningful and hopefully well-meaning entities in the world. This is true in Ukraine, just like it's true in Belgium or Austria or Italy. None of those places are tenable by themselves. This is why the position is the same in the European Union: in the European Union, in the elections for Parliament which are going on right now, big important parties are campaigning on the platform of going back to the nation-state, which is a foolish utopia, a foolish, self-destructive utopia. Anyone who knows anything about Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, leaving aside the Second World War, but just the 1920s and 1930s, knows how nasty that was. How painful that was. How utterly and qualitatively different that was from the 1950s and the 1960s or today. But that is the utopia, of going back to the nation state. That future is not possible. That is a utopia. That can't happen. What can happen is Eurasia. That idea of returning to the nation-state, or of a nation-state being by itself, whether that nation-state is Austria or Ukraine, leads, so to speak, inevitably to Eurasia, because the Eurasian project is precisely to make Europe, the whole of it, look like Ukraine does now: that is, alone, without enough friends who understand it, fragmented, intervened in from the outside. That's the idea. What Russian policy towards Ukraine is now, of course it's directly a Ukrainian policy, and I don't mean to diminish that, I don't mean to diminish your very special situation, but it is also a test case for the European Union as a whole.
In this way, Ukraine and Europe are now bound together, I think, much more than Europeans or even Ukrainians have quite understood. There is a Eurasian future, which you can all go into together, and there is a European future, a European Union future, which you can all go into together. There isn't anything else. That's what you have in common. Oh, well, I didn't have applause written here. I don't mean this politically; this is just a logical deduction. Staying around as a nation-state is as much a fantasy for you as it is for the Italians, or for the Belgians. Europe will be together, or Europe will be Eurasia.
Ukraine is the European present. We have now reached a point where Ukrainian history and European history are very much the same thing, for good or for evil. The European Union is no longer alone in the world. The European Union can no longer delude itself that it has no enemies. The European Union can lose control of its own references, as is going on in this information war about the Second World War. The European Union no longer controls the history of the Second World War. German elites are losing control of the history of the Second World War, as we watch. So Europe is losing control of its history, it’s losing control of its references: the information war, which is so sharp here, is taking place across the entirety of the West. And it’s working better in Germany, by the way, than it’s working here. So, an entire European order – the entire European order – is under challenge, just as Ukraine is under challenge. Not as immediately, not as sharply, not as painfully, but it is now one challenge. And in that sense European futures depend upon Ukrainian futures, just as Ukrainian futures depend upon European futures. Thank you very much.
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CANADA'S CULTURE-
Culture Name
CanadianOrientation
Identification. The name Canada is derived from the Iroquoian word kanata, which means village.These variations have had important social and cultural effects. The largest segment of the population resides in the central Carolinian region, which has the richest and most varied agricultural land and, because the Great Lakes waterway system dominates the central portion of the country, is also where most of the major manufacturing is located. The savanna or prairie region is more sparsely populated, with several large urban centers in a network across the region, which is dominated by grain farming, cattle and other livestock production, and more recently, oil and natural gas extraction. The two coastal regions, which have some agricultural production, are best characterized by the dominance of port cities through which import and export goods move. In the northern section of the center of the country, also sparsely populated, resource extraction of minerals and lumber, has predominated. The effect of this concentration of the population, employment, and productive power in the central region of the country has been the concentration of political power in this region, as well as the development over time of intense regional rivalries and disparities in quality of life. Equally important, as employment in the center came to dominate gross national production, immigration has tended to flow into the center. This has created a diverse cultural mix in the central region of the country, while the prairie and the eastern maritime region have stabilized ethnically and culturally. The consequence of these diverse geographies has been the development of a rhetoric of regional cultures: Prairie, Maritime, Central, and because of its special isolation, West Coast.
A final differentiation is between urban and rural. Local cultural identity is often marked by expressions of contrasting values in which rural residents characterize themselves as harder working, more honest, and more deeply committed to community cooperation, in contrast to urban dwellers
Canada
Demography. The official population at the last census calculation, in 1996, was 29,672,000, an increase over the previous census in 1991 of about 6 percent in five years. The previous five-year increase was almost 7 percent. There has been a slowing population increase in Canada over the last several decades, fueled in part by a decline in the crude birthrate. This slowing of growth has been offset somewhat by an increase in immigration over the last two decades of the twentieth century, coupled with a slowing of emigration. Statistics Canada, the government Census management organization, is projecting a population increase of as much as 8 percent between 2001 and 2005, mostly through increased immigration.
Linguistic Affiliation. Canada is bilingual, with English and French as the official languages. English takes precedence in statutory proceedings outside of Quebec, with English versions of all statutes serving as the final arbiter in disputes over interpretation. As of 1996, the proportion of Canadians reporting English as their mother tongue was just under 60 percent while those reporting French as their mother tongue was slightly less than 24 percent. The percentage of native English speakers had risen over the previous decade, while that of French speakers had declined. At the same time, about 17 percent of all Canadians could speak both official languages, though this is a regionalized phenomenon. In those provinces with the largest number of native French speakers (Quebec and New Brunswick), 38 percent and 33 percent respectively were bilingual, numbers that had been increasing steadily over the previous twenty years. In contrast, Ontario, which accounts for more than 30 percent of the total population of Canada, had an English-French bilingualism rate of about 12 percent. This is in part a result of the immigration patterns over time, which sees the majority of all immigrants gravitating to Ontario, and in part because all official and commercial services in Ontario are conducted in English, even though French is available by law, if not by practice. English-French bilingualism is less important in the everyday lives of those living outside of Quebec and New Brunswick.
First Nations language groups make up a significant, if small, portion of the nonofficial bilingual speakers in Canada, a fact with political and cultural importance as First Nations groups assert greater and more compelling claims on political and cultural sovereignty. The three largest First Nations languages in 1996 were Cree, Inuktitut, and Ojibway, though incomplete census data on First Nations peoples continues to plague assessments of the extent and importance of these mother tongues.
Changing immigration patterns following World War II affected linguistic affiliation. In the period, from 1961 to 1970, for example, only 54 percent of immigrants had a nonofficial language as mother tongue, with more than two-thirds of this group born in Europe. Almost a quarter of them reported Italian, German, or Greek as mother tongue. In contrast, 80 percent of the 1,039,000 immigrants who came to Canada between 1991 and 1996 reported a nonofficial language as mother tongue, with over half from Asia and the Middle East. Chinese was the mother tongue of just under 25 percent, while Arabic, Punjabi, Tagalog, Tamil, and Persian together accounted for about 20 percent. In 1971, the three largest nonofficial mother tongue groups were German, Italian, and Ukrainian, reflecting patterns of non-English and non-French immigration that have remained relatively constant through most of the twentieth century. In the period ending in 1996, this had changed, with the rank order shifting to Chinese, Italian, and German. This is reflected in regional concentrations, with Italians concentrated heavily in Ontario, Germans in both Ontario and the Prairie regions, and Chinese and other Asians most heavily represented in southern Ontario and in British Columbia. A gradual decline in out-migration from Europe, coupled with political changes in China and throughout Asia, leading to increased out-migration from these areas, is changing the ethnic and linguistic makeup of Canada. It should be stressed, however, that these changes are concentrated in two or three key urban centers, while linguistic affiliation elsewhere in the country remains stable. This is likely to change in the early twenty-first century as an aging cohort of European immigrants declines and out-migration from Europe continues to decrease. These shifts will come to have increasingly important cultural effects as immigrants from Asia and, most recently, from certain areas throughout the continent of Africa, come to influence the political and social life of the core urban centers in which they settle.
Symbolism. This is an area of considerable dispute in Canada, in large part because of the country's longstanding history of biculturalism (English and French) and perhaps most importantly because of its proximity to the United States, whose symbolic and rhetorical influence is both unavoidable and openly resisted. Ethnic and cultural diversity in Canada, in which different cultural groups were expected to maintain their distinctiveness rather than subsume it to some larger national culture, which is the historical effect of the English-French biculturalism built into the Canadian confederation, means that national symbols in Canada tend to be either somewhat superficial or regionalized. There are, however, certain symbols that are deployed at both official and unofficial events and functions which are generally shared across the entire country, and can be seen as general cultural symbols, even if their uses may not always be serious.
Canada is often symbolically connected with three key images—hockey, the beaver, and the dress uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Hockey, often described as Canada's national sport, is a vigorous, often violently competitive team sport and, as such, it carries the same kind of symbolic weight as baseball does for many Americans. What gives it its profound symbolic importance is the way in which hockey events, such as the winning goal scored by the Canadian national team during a competition with the Russian national team in the 1970s, are used as special cultural and historical markers in political discourse. Hockey is used, in its symbolic form, to signify national unity and a national sense of purpose and community. That most Canadians do not follow hockey in any serious way does not diminish its role as a key cultural symbol.
The beaver, which appears often on Canadian souvenirs, might seem to be an odd animal to have as a national symbol. It is a ratlike character, with a broad flat tail and, in caricature, a comical face highlighted by front chewing teeth of considerable prominence. What gives the beaver its special merit as a cultural symbol, however, are its industriousness, toiling to create elaborate nesting sites out of mud and twigs, and its triumph over the seasons. The beaver is humble, nonpredatory, and diligent, values that form a fundamental core of Canadian self-identification.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), often represented in their dress uniform which includes a tight-fitting red coat, riding pants, high black boots, and broad-brimmed felt hat, also represent this Canadian concern with diligence and humility. Canada was opened to European occupation not by a pioneering spirit fighting against all odds to push open a wild and dangerous frontier, as in the United States, but by a systematic effort to bring the vastness of the Canadian landscape under police control. The RCMP, along with agents of colonial economic interests such as the Hudson's Bay Company, expanded the scope of colonial control and occupation of Canada in a systematic and orderly way, not so much by conquest as by coordination. That is, Canada was opened to European occupation and control almost as a bureaucratic exercise in extending the rule of law. Where the American frontier was a lawless and wild place, later brought under control by centralizing government bodies, the Canadian frontier never quite existed. Instead, Canada was colonized by law rather than by force.
The core values that inform these symbols are cooperation, industriousness, and patience—that is, a kind of national politeness. The Canadian symbolic order is dominated by a concern for order and stability, which marks Canadian identity as something communal rather than individualistic.
History and Ethnic Relations
Emergence of the Nation. Canada throughout its history might best be described as a nation of nations. Two European colonial powers dominate the history of Canada and its emergence as a nation: France and Great Britain. In time Britain emerged as the dominant political and cultural force in Canada, but that emergence exemplifies the sense of compromise and cooperation on which Canadian social identity is founded. While Britain, and later English Canada, came to be and remain the most powerful part of the Canadian cultural landscape, this dominance and power exists in a system of joint cultural identity, with French Canada, in Quebec and in other parts of eastern Canada, remaining a singular and distinctive cultural entity in its own right.The Canadian novelist Hugh McLennan, writing in the 1940's, spoke of the two solitudes which in many ways govern the cultural and political life of Canada. Two communities, distinguished by language, culture, religion, and politics live in isolation from each other with divergent aspirations and very divergent views of the history of Canada as a nation. The peace between the French and English sides of the Canadian coin is a peace born in war, with Britain defeating French colonial forces in the late eighteenth century. It is a peace born of common purpose when the now English colony of Canada withstood invasion from the newly formed United States, with the sometimes uneven assistance of the remaining French community in Lower Canada, later to be called Quebec. It is also a peace driven by controversy and scandal. During the opening of the westward railroad in the late nineteenth century, a process of pacification of the Canadian frontier most noteworthy for its having been planned and carried out by a series of government committees, French Canadians felt, not without cause, that they were being excluded from this nation building. And it is a peace marked, even today, by a deep sense of ethnic antagonism, most particularly in Quebec, where French Canadian nationalism is a vibrant, if not the dominant political force.
This complex antagonism, which has been a thread throughout Canada's emergence as a nation, has also led to a particular kind of nation. Most important, the development of the Canadian nation, however uneven the power of the English and the French, has been characterized by discussion, planning, and compromise. The gradual opening of all of Canada to European control, and its coming together in 1867 as a national entity, was not the result of war or revolution but instead, of negotiation and reconciliation. It was an orderly transition managed almost like a business venture, through which Canada obtained a degree of sovereignty and Great Britain continued to hold Canada's allegiance as a member of the British Empire. When, in the early 1980s Canada would take the final step towards political independence by adopting its own constitution, it would do so through negotiation as well, and again, the antagonism between English and French Canada, which resulted in the Government of Quebec refusing to sign the constitutional enabling agreement would provide both the drama of the moment, and its fundamental character, one of compromise and collaboration.
It is these qualities of combining co-operation with ethnic independence which continue to shape Canada's development as a nation. Developments in human rights law, for example, with a new emphasis on the importance of group rights and in particular group rights under conditions of inequality among groups, were pioneered in Canada. The model of universal health care for all citizens in Canada which, while currently stressed by economic changes in the final decades of the twentieth century, illustrates how a system of co-operative engagement between multiple and independent political partners can produce institutions which benefit everyone. While Canada remains an often contentious and divided place in many ways, with regional and ethnic communities making greater demands for independence, they do so because the history of Canada's emergence as a nation has been a history of interdependence in which these polarities and debates are not so much a sign of dissolution but evidence of a continued vitality. An early colonial governor of Canada is reputed to have said that it is "nearly impossible to govern a nation where one half the people are more British than the Queen, and the other more Catholic than the Pope." While he may have been right about the difficulty, nearly a century and a half of Canadian nationhood has demonstrated that it is indeed possible to build a nation where diversity serves as the keystone of unity.
National Identity. Leading up to and following the emergence of Canada as an independent political state in 1867, English Canada and English identity dominated the political and cultural landscape. The remaining French presence, in Quebec and throughout the eastern part of the country, while a strong cultural entity in itself, exercised only limited influence and effect at the national level. English symbols, the English language, and the values of loyalty to the English crown prevailed throughout the nation as the core underpinnings of national identity.
Ethnic Relations. The dominance of English Canada in terms of national identity, especially in a federal system in which binationalism and biculturalism were enshrined in the founding legislation of the country, exercised a powerful effect on ethnic relations, but that effect was not ethnic homogenization. Instead, the dominance of English Canada served as a major locus of ongoing tension between the two national identities of Canada, a tension which, in the period from the 1960s onward, has come to be expressed in growing French-Canadian nationalism and so far unsuccessful attempts on the part of French Canada to secede from the Canadian confederation. This tension—which is built into the principles of the confederation itself, which recognizes the duality of Canadian national identity— while regularly threatening the unity of the federation, has also had a mollifying effect on ethnic divisions more generally.
Canada has seen successive waves of immigration, from the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, England and Ireland, China and Japan, and more recently from south and east Asia and from many countries throughout Africa. While some of these migration waves have resulted in considerable political and social conflict, as in the large-scale migration of Chinese laborers brought into Canada to work on the national railroad, the overall pattern of in-migration and settlement has been characterized by relatively smooth transitions. This is in large part an effect of the legislated binationalism and biculturalism on which Canada is founded. Such a model of confederation, which institutionalizes cultural diversity, has meant the new cohorts of migrants have not experienced the kind of assimilationist and acculturationalist pressures which have characterized ethnic relations in the United States. Where, in the United States, there was considerable pressure on migrant cohorts to become "American," in Canada these cohorts have more often than not retained their identity of birth. This has created a kind of mosaic-like quality in Canadian ethnic relations in which being Canadian does not necessarily take precedence over being Japanese or Italian or Somalian or Pakistani. Instead, the two identities can and often do carry the same social and political weight, creating in Canada a diversity of identity unlike that found in other large nation-states. This cooperative national identity, with its multiple cultural orientations, has not been without its tensions and conflicts. English Canadian cultural domination has created flash points of assimilationist sentiment, and the fact that Japanese-Canadians, for example, were seen as being both Japanese and Canadian, helped justify the imprisonment of people of Japanese ancestry throughout Canada during World War II. Overall, however, ethnic relations in Canada have tended to not be exclusionary and assimilationist.
The main exception to this has been the relationship between the dominant French-English state and aboriginal peoples. Colonial relations with indigenous ethnic groups worldwide have often been marked by violent conquest. While violence did play a role in these relationships in Canada, more often than not aboriginal peoples simply had their ethnic and cultural identities erased. The use of forced schooling, including the removal of children from their families, for example, sought to annul aboriginal cultural identities through a process of denial. Historically the policy in Canada has been to not recognize aboriginal cultural and ethnic identity as an identity at all. In more recent years, First Nations people throughout Canada have adopted a renewed expression of ethnic and cultural identity, as part of the process of asserting claims to sovereignty and their right of historical redress. These claims have been only moderately successful, in part because First Nations people are asserting an identity and a claim to ethnic coherence that had been denied them for more than one hundred years, and in part because the dominating ethic of multi-cultural cooperation in Canadian ethnic relations, which gives their claim to ethnic identity legitimacy in the Canadian system, also diminishes and undermines their claim to a special ethnic status. While First Nations peoples are indeed emerging as real ethnic, cultural, and political entities, they do so in a system that relegates them to the position of one among many. The future direction of First Nations ethnicity, and their position within this Canadian mosaic, is likely to be complex, contentious, and a long time in its resolution.
Urbanism, Architecture, and the Use of Space
Space has symbolic importance for Canadian culture, in part because of the vastness of Canadian geography coupled with its sparse population, and in part because a sense of distance in Canada has tended to create regional tensions based on the isolation of the larger pockets of the population. Most Canadians live in towns and cities, a trend away from rural residence not unlike that found throughout the rest of the industrialized world. Canadian cities are found at important hubs of interchange between agriculture and manufacturing, such that most Canadian cities emerged as points of connection between farm production and industrial development. Because of this, Canadian cities have tended to develop haphazardly as the larger scale processes of industrialization and changes in farming have developed. Such historical processes are not amenable to planning.Canadian cities look like cities almost anywhere in the industrialized world, save the fact they tend to be cleaner due to an effect of the way that orderliness has been a dominant feature of the history of Canadian material culture. Canadian cities, even during phases of urban decay, have tended to be more carefully planned and better run, at least in terms of amenities and services, than those in many other industrialized nations.
Unlike European cities, however, space in Canadian cities tends to be privatized. While most cities have some space, such as a formal plaza at a city hall, at which public events are held, in general there are no large communal spaces in which social interactions occur. Instead, Canadians in cities of whatever size socialize in private spaces: their homes or commercial sites, such as restaurants. Like cities throughout North America, space in Canadian cities is dominated by movement, and Canadian cities are designed as networks through which goods, vehicles, and people move on their way to or from some place. As such, streets are designed to control the flow of vehicular traffic, to in some way isolate foot traffic, and in all instances to direct traffic toward destinations rather than allow traffic to accumulate. This has led, over the last several decades, to the gradual disappearance of urban commercial streetscapes, replaced by indoor shopping malls as a key destination of traffic flow. Rural towns, however, counter this trend somewhat. Many smaller towns have endeavored to revitalize their commercial streetscapes in recent decades and the decline of this streetscape is often seen as a sign of the decline and decay of the town as a whole.
Residence in Canadian cities is generally private rather than communal, dominated by private homes or residences. Vertical residence structures, such as apartment buildings, dominate much of the urban renewal of core areas in cities, while expansion of cities has been dominated by the development of large tracts of private single-family dwellings.
Official architecture in Canada has, historically, been neoclassical though not to the same extent as one finds in the United States. While official buildings in the early part of the twentieth century were often modeled on massive classical buildings, in the latter part of the century these buildings took on shapes not unlike other functional commercial buildings. Key symbolically important buildings, such as courthouses and city halls, are often grand in scale; what marks them today is their diversity rather than the application of a single stylistic model.
A house and pond in rural Nova Scotia. Most Canadians live in private homes.
Food and Economy
Read more about the Food and Cuisine of Canada.Food in Daily Life. The agricultural and ethnic richness of Canada has led to two distinctive characteristics of everyday food consumption. The first is its scale. Canadians are "big eaters," with meat portions in particular dominating the Canadian meal. There are generally three regular meals in a given day. Breakfast, often large and important in rural areas, but less so in urban areas, is most often not eaten in a group. Lunch, at midday, is most often a snack in urban areas, but remains a substantial meal in rural centers. Dinner, the final formal meal of the day, is also the meal most likely to be eaten by a residential group as a whole, and it is the largest and the most socially important meal of the day. It is the meal most often used as a social event or to which invitations to nonfamily members are extended, in contrast with lunch which is often, for adults, shared with coworkers. Meat plays a key role in all three of the formal meals, but with increasing importance at breakfast and dinner. Dinner should have some special, and most often, large, meat portion as its key component. Each of these three meals can be, and often are, very substantial. There are general rules concerning appropriate foods for each meal, rules that can be quite complex. For example, pork can figure in each meal, but only particular kinds of pork would be considered appropriate. Pork at breakfast may appear as bacon, or sausage, in small portions. Both of these products are made with the least valuable portion of the pig. At lunch, pork may appear in a sandwich in the form of processed meats, also made from the least valuable portion of the pig. For dinner, pork appears in large and more highly valued forms, such as roasts or hams, which require often elaborate preparation and which are presented to diners in a way that highlights their value and size.
The other main feature of Canadian food is diversity. The complex ethnic landscape of Canada and the tendency of ethnic groups to retain a dual cultural orientation have meant that Canadian cuisine is quite diverse in its content, with many ethnic dishes seen as somehow quintessentially Canadian as well. Whether pizza or chow mein, cabbage rolls or plum pudding, Canadian cuisine is best characterized as eclectic rather than consistent in content. There are a small number of food items that are considered distinctively Canadian, such as maple syrup, but overall the Canadian diet is drawn from a panoply of ethnic sources.
Food Customs at Ceremonial Occasions. Ceremonial food does not generally differ greatly in content from everyday foods. What distinguishes food in ceremonial settings, such as state dinners, is not the type of food but the amount of food served and the complexity of its presentation and consumption. Ceremonial dinners are often made up of a long list of dishes served in a rigid sequence, eaten with utensils specified for each portion, and presented in often elaborate arrangement either generally, on the table as a whole, or in the particular portions placed on each diner's plate.
The same general consideration applies to meals for more private special occasions, such as those marking important religious holidays such as Christmas. The number of discrete dishes is usually quite large, the preparation of each is often specialized and involved, and portions consumed are more often than not greater than what one would consume under other circumstances. These more private special occasion meals often involve entire extended families sharing in both preparing and eating the meal.
There is another special meal worth mentioning, the potluck. "Potluck" is derived from the word potlatch, a special occasion of many West Coast First Nations peoples. The potluck involves each guest preparing and bringing a dish to the event, to be shared by all the diners. The key component of this particular kind of meal is food sharing among friends as opposed to food making for family. In general, potluck meals are meals shared by friends or coworkers. They express the symbolic importance of the meal as a part of the moral geography of social relations among nonkin, but distinguish this meal as an act of food sharing rather than an act of food preparation. That is, the potluck meal expresses a sense of community and kindness, while the family meal expresses a sense of service, duty, and family solidarity.
Basic Economy. Canada is a resource rich, but land and people poor, country. While physically vast, there are geographic limitations on where people can live such that most of the population is located around the Great Lakes, and in the Saint Lawrence River Valley. This has meant, however, that the natural resources throughout the country can be exploited more fully.
Key to Canada's basic economy is its role as a resource base, not only for its own manufacturing, but for export as well. Minerals and ore, forestry products, and in particular in the twentieth century, oil and gas, have been the foundation of the Canadian economy since European conquest of the area.
Farming is also key to the Canadian economy, although most of Canada's agricultural production
A father and son celebrate their lumber heritage during the winter Lumberjack Parade in Chicoutimi, Quebec.
Manufacturing in Canada is dominated by automobile production, and by the manufacture of other large equipment and farm equipment. Canada also produces a wide range of consumer products, including furniture, electronics and building material. Since the 1980s production of high technology equipment, and especially communication equipment, has become a key sector of the economy as well.
The single largest area of economic growth in Canada since the 1970s has been in the "service" sector, the part of the economy which provides services rather than goods for sale. The financial, research, and tourist sectors have shown substantial increases during this period. Taken together, the resource sector and the service sector dominate the economy of Canada, such that Canada remains primarily a provider of resources, either in material or in labor through service, and equally important, an importer of manufactured goods. While balance of trade in the import and export of manufactured goods tends to favor Canada, factoring in service export means Canada is always somewhat at a trading deficit with its partners globally.
Land Tenure and Property. Property in Canada is primarily by rental and freehold. Immediate, and some closely related secondary kin have some claims on the disposition of property, usually through inheritance. Some land, and other kinds of property, may be held in cooperative ownership, such as, for example, land held by religious communities or farmers co-op groups. To a limited extent, the property of married couples, and some property of common-law couples, is also held in common, each partner having some degree of claim on the total joint property. This joint ownership is also being extended to same-sex conjugal partners, whose property rights are now similar to those of common-law opposite sex couples. The state has right of expropriation of privately held land, and the right of criminal seizure of other properties. Private ownership of both land and moveable property is also subject to statues governing financial solvency, such that bankrupts, for example, can have their land and other property sold to balance their debt.
Major Industries. Canadian manufacturing is dominated, in terms of economic effect, by automobile manufacturing, and to a lesser extent by resource processing such as steel and other metals production. The automotive sector is the single largest sector, but resource extraction and processing, including mineral, chemical, and forestry products taken together, is the most important productive and commercial activity in Canada. In general, Canada exports more than it imports, in large part because of the combination of its raw material resource-based economy and the automotive sector.
The provision of services is the second most important commercial activity in Canada in terms of number of people employed, accounting for slightly less than half the labor force, but manufacturing, resource extraction, and agriculture dominate employment and commercial activity.
Trade. Canada exports around the world, but its most important export and import trading partner is the United States. In recent decades Canada has had a slight balance of trade advantage with all its trading partners, including the United States, by exporting more goods than it imports from others. The automotive sector dominates Canadian manufacturing and trade, due to a preferential trade agreement with the United States through which American automobile manufacturers agreed to produce one vehicle in Canada for every vehicle it exports to Canada from its American based plants. In return, Canada waived all tariffs on vehicles exported by American manufacturers to Canada. Under pressure from non-American car makers worldwide, this agreement, which expired in February 2001, is likely not to be renewed, a change which could affect the overall importance of automobile manufacturing for Canadian trade relations.
The manufacturing and export of large equipment, and in particular farm equipment, is the second largest component of Canadian manufacturing and trade. The export of farm equipment in particular is a major component of Canada's international aid programs. Some economic analysts project that large equipment manufacturing, including the recent advance of airplane building in Canada, may supplant automobile manufacturing as the dominant sector of Canadian trade.
At the same time, Canada remains a major resource exporter. In particular, Canada exports raw materials such as petro-chemicals and oil, minerals and ores, and forestry products. This is a key trading role which Canada has played in the global economy throughout its history. This sector of the economy is subject to the most stringent rules governing foreign ownership, but the importance of resource extraction and trade for Canada is such that these rules are being loosened under pressure from bodies such as the World Trade Organization, of which Canada is a member.
Farm product export ranks fourth in overall trade importance for Canada, with special emphasis on wheat, canola and corn, soybeans and non-citrus fruit. Livestock trade, including beef, pig, and chicken products, while substantial, makes up only a very small part of Canada's agricultural exports, with most of Canada's livestock production being consumed domestically. Increased restrictions on the import, in particular of beef products due to health concerns over Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (mad cow disease), has led to a gradual increase in overall livestock production in Canada, but no significant increase in export of these goods. This is likely to change as more and more countries world wide turn to Canada and the United States for "safe" beef and other livestock products.
Finally, Canada, along with the United States and Mexico, belongs to a North American Free Trade Zone, the result of a treaty between these three countries. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) establishes preferential trading rules between the three signatories, though its administration has not been without dispute. The effect over time may be an increasing reliance on exports to and imports from NAFTA partners, with trade production in each of the three countries under pressure to address the import and export needs of the other partners, possibly limiting trade expansion in other global areas. Canada appears to be resisting this limitation on trade development by pursuing special trade arrangements with such countries as China and Indonesia. At the same time, Canada is an active participant in negotiations to extend the NAFTA agreement to include all countries in the Western Hemisphere in a mutual trade agreement.
Division of Labor. Labor in Canada is unevenly divided between skilled professional, skilled manufacturing, and general unskilled such as service workers. With increased manufacturing efficiency, the skilled manufacturing labor force has declined in size, though not in economic impact, while the general unskilled labor force has increased; at the same time skilled professionals—whether doctors, computer programmers, and other new economy professionals—has also increased. Access to different jobs is determined in part by education and training and in part by social networks. There has been a strong tendency for children to follow their parents into similar positions in the labor force, but shifts away from stable employment in manufacturing, along with the growth of the unskilled labor market in the services sector, has seen this change in recent decades. While access to and advancement in both the skilled professional and skilled manufacturing sectors is described as meritocractic, there remain strong class, ethnic, and regional factors that affect access to and promotion within labor markets.
Social Stratification
Classes and Castes. Class is a contentious issue in Canada, in no small part because the rhetoric of Canadian identity, with its emphasis on equality, unity in diversity, and mutual respect and cooperation, does not match the actual distribution of economic wealth and political power. Indeed, this culture of diversity has had the effect, on the one hand, of disguising class divisions, and on the other, of allowing them to flourish. Combined with ethnic diversity and strong regional disparities, class in Canada is a complex web of factors, which make easy descriptions of working and upper class, for example, difficult.The number of people in Canada defined as being low income by the government increased from about 17 percent in 1991 to about 19 percent in 2000. Average incomes in the central provinces are closest to the national average, but in eastern provinces average incomes can be as much as 25 percent lower than the national average. This has led to the emergence of low-skill, low-pay service sector jobs being located in the eastern provinces, creating a strong regional class division.
Class divisions can been seen in educational participation rates, with lower-class individuals less likely to participate beyond, or in some regions, to complete secondary school. Urban centers, both large and small, are divided into neighborhoods by class; in large urban centers undergoing the most recent phase of urban redevelopment, the large cohort of urban poor are increasingly being confined to smaller and smaller areas of older rental housing stock. This reaggregation of upper-class residential enclaves in revitalized urban cores is also producing greater demand for low-skill service sector employment, which reproduces the class divisions by dividing urban centers into networks of microregions defined by the class position of the residents.
Symbols of Social Stratification. Class symbolism in Canada is mostly modest, again in large part as a result of the rhetoric of identity that prizes diversity and even humility. Signs of class excess, such as massive residences, or conspicuous over-consumption, are not common in Canada, except in rare cases. Some symbolic sites of class expression, such as purchasing subscription tickets to and attending local symphony concerts, constitute a dual discourse of class. In one sense, members of a particular class express cultural solidarity, and in another sense, it is an avenue for class mobility, with members of lower classes using these events as a way of marking their movement between classes. Unlike in England, for example, where accent and dress can clearly mark class position, the symbolic expression of stratification in Canada is less obvious and so more difficult to decipher. Dark business suits, jewelry, hairstyles, and types of leisure activities and leisure sites, such as exclusive clubs, can express status, but in the absence of enforced rules concerning admission and even who may or may not employ
Agriculture is a key element of Canada's economy, especially the cultivation of grains such as corn and wheat for export.
Political Life
Government. Canada is a confederation of ten provinces and three territories, with a central federal government managing national services and international relations. Each province and, to a lesser extent, each territory has constitutional sovereignty over at least some aspects of its affairs. Each level of government is a constitutionally governed democracy, modeled on the British parliamentary system with representatives chosen in statutorily scheduled elections. Suffrage is universal for all citizens over the age of eighteen, except, in some instances, those in prison or citizens living overseas. Political control at each level of government is determined by the political party that wins the largest number of representative seats, not by proportion of popular vote. The election of each representative, however, is direct and proportional, the winner being the candidate who receives the single largest percentage of the votes cast.Leadership and Political Officials. Leadership is dominated, in particular at the provincial and national levels, by professionals, often though not exclusively, lawyers, and most often though not exclusively, men. These political leaders are selected for election by political parties, and there is an informal network of control that governs these nominations which requires service to the political party as part of the process of gaining access to that party's nomination for election by the citizens. There are no limits on the number of terms a political leader may serve. In general, these elected political officials serve two functions: representing the interests of their constituents at whatever level of government they serve, and advancing the political interests and the platform of the party that nominated them. Where these two functions come into conflict, the interests of their political party most often takes precedence, resulting occasionally in elected government officials being punished by their political parties.
Leadership and governing is carried out as well, however, by appointed officials who form a large bureaucracy that implements the decisions of elected officials. This bureaucracy is mostly drawn from middle-and upper-class, well-educated sectors of the population, and apart from a small percentage of appointments at the pleasure of the governing party, their positions in this system are lifelong if they choose. Access to this bureaucracy is in part through training and merit and in part through a network of connections outward from the bureaucracy to the business and higher educational communities.
Statutory prohibitions exist against bribery and other kinds of influence peddling in dealings with politicians and government officials, although violations do occur and often result in considerable scandal and criminal sanction.
Social Problems and Control. Social control is effected by a system of courts of law, and by local, provincial, and a national police force. The most common crimes are crimes against property, although violent crimes are also common. In recent years, the incidence of violent crime has declined somewhat, although at the same time the incidence of crime against certain vulnerable sectors of the population, such as the elderly and women, has increased. There is a strong class component to the prosecution of some crimes. Prosecution for drug offenses, which in Canada are for the most part minor offenses related to possession or small-scale trafficking of controlled substances, is most often focused on lower-class individuals. While the prison population in Canada is relatively small compared to many other industrialized nations, the percentage of the prison population who are of First Nations descent remains very high, in spite of the small number of First Nations people in the population as a whole. This suggests that other kinds of disparity are also operating in the apprehension and prosecution of crime.
All accused persons are constitutionally guaranteed an open trial and rules of evidence, fairness of prosecution, and judicial review, with several levels of appellate courts in place to oversee this process. Judges are appointed for life, though they are subject to removal by judicial review boards. Such action is rare. Police forces, which are empowered by both federal and provincial statute, are relatively independent from political interference or control, and in many instances are self-governing within the limits of their statutory authority.
Military Activity. The Canadian military was engaged almost exclusively in peacekeeping or disaster relief, both nationally and internationally, during the last four decades of the twentieth century. While Canada maintains a small standing army, at least small for the size of the country physically, because it has no border disputes with its neighbors, the army's primary role has been to assist other countries in either disputes or in the event of emergencies. Canada provided conflict forces to joint warfare efforts during this period, but these engagements have been small and most often highly specialized. Canada has about twenty-five hundred military personnel deployed worldwide in support and emergency situations in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa. As of 2001, the Canadian military was undergoing restructuring and reorganization. It was engaged in a major recruiting effort, as its numbers had declined steadily for nearly twenty years. What role the miliary will play in Canada in the coming decades remains unclear.
Social Welfare and Change Programs
Canada is an example of a capitalist welfare state, in that tax-base-funded programs exist to provide some measure of protection to the impoverished and those at risk of impoverishment. These programs, usually administered at the town or city level, but funded from taxes collected at the provincial and federal level, take two main forms. The first is an insurance program designed to provide income support in the event of unemployment. Individual workers pay premiums based on their wages, and the fund is supplemented by general tax revenue as needed. There are strict guidelines for qualification and the income support paid out of the fund represents a percentage of the unemployed person's previous income. There are also time limits on this support. This is a national program, and while guidelines regarding qualification vary from region to region, it is generally available to all employed persons. The second program, a general welfare program, provides subsistence support for persons and families unable to work or unemployed for longer periods than those covered by the insurance program. Levels of support in this program are often very low, providing incomes to both individuals and families well below the low-income cutoff points used by governments to measure poverty. Recently these programs have been altered to require recipients to perform some labor for the community in order to qualify. This change, along with reductions in levels of actual income support, have been controversial in Canada, with the debate focusing on the role of the state in providing support to the economically disadvantaged, a basic principle of the welfare state.Nongovernmental Organizations and Other Associations
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) take many shapes and have many different purposes in Canada. At least three distinctive types are quite common in all regions. The first are organizations whose aim is to raise and distribute funds to assist
The neoclassical buildings of the Canadian Parliament and the modern architecture of Hull, the city across the river, are representative of the diversity found in Canada.
The third type of NGO in Canada is activistoriented organizations. These come in several forms. There are politically focused organizations advancing particular ideological or political interests. For example, there is a national organization made up of small business owners, while another works as a taxation watchdog. Others are organized around pressing social issues, and in particular disease related issues. Many activist NGOs have as their purpose fund-raising and lobbying on behalf of research into or care for such diseases as breast cancer, arthritis, and HIV/AIDS. Other activist-oriented NGOs work on behalf of broader social issues such as poverty, homelessness, and the environment.
In all cases, NGOs rely on fund-raising from the general public, although funding assistance from different levels of government is also available. Most NGOs are staffed either completely or almost completely by volunteers. Of all the industrialized countries, Canada has the distinction of having the highest level of volunteering and the highest level of charitable support of NGO activity. It should be noted, however, that this success has also allowed tax-funded social support and improvement programs to be reduced or eliminated, placing greater and greater emphasis on voluntarism for the sustaining of the social safety net, as the welfare state comes under increasing economic pressure.
Gender Roles and Statuses
Division of Labor by Gender. There are no specific gender-based prohibitions on participation in labor, but cultural and political values enforce a system of differential access and participation in the labor force. Health-care provision exemplifies this implicit division. Medical doctors, the highest paid and highest status health-care providers, are over-whelmingly male. In contrast, so-called ancillary health-care providers such as nurses are over-whelmingly women. Several factors contribute to this division. A distinction between healing and caring, where healing is seen as the province of science and caring the province of nurturing, has the effect of steering men into the "scientific" area of health and women, culturally more closely associated with nurturing, into the "caring" area. While this tendency continues to change, the implicit rules of division of labor persist as expressions of cultural values.Statutory prohibitions exist against gender-based discrimination in labor, but their interpretation and enforcement has been complex and highly controversial because they come in conflict with often deeply held values of gender difference and gender roles. For example, the work-related recommendations of a federal commission on the status of women, which was convened in the 1960s, have not yet been implemented.
The Relative Status of Women and Men. In terms of explicit rules, women and men have equal standing and equal status in Canadian society. Both men and women may participate in political life, serve in government, own and dispose of property, and so on. That few women do successfully participate in official political life remains a contentious issue for many Canadians, because male-dominated networks of access to political authority and political participation continue, implicitly, to exclude women. Perhaps more important than political participation, however, are certain economic realities which indicate that the status of women relative to men remains uneven. Women are more likely to live below the poverty line, are more likely to head single-parent households, are more likely to work in the service sector, the lowest paying and most volatile sector of the labor market, and are more likely to be the subject of violence by their conjugal partner. It is important to note that the status of gender relations in any society has at least two components—the official version, that is the explicitly stated values and ideals of the society as a political entity, and the practical version, the actual nature and quality of life, risk, and participation of women relative to men.
Marriage,Family, and Kinship
Marriage. Except for some ethnic sectors, marriages are freely chosen by the two partners. Marriage is restricted to the union of a man and a woman by statute, although this is currently under review by the country's courts. Official marriages, officiated by either religious authorities or by municipal clerks or judges, must be dissolved by the legal procedure of divorce.A second form of marriage, the de facto or common-law union, gives the couple almost all the same privileges and obligations as official marriage. Common-law union is a matter of informal declaration by the partners. Common-law conjugal recognition has recently been extended to include same-sex partners. The dissolution of common-law unions or same-sex partnerships requires no special legal proceedings, although resolution of shared property rights and support responsibilities arising from the union often require legal intervention and enforcement.
In both cases, the marriage union involves mutuality of financial support, some degree of joint ownership of property, and joint responsibility for the care and support of children. Under Canadian law, all marriages must be monogamous. The de facto or common-law union is considered to be annulled should either partner take on a new conjugal partnership.
Marriages are most often celebrated privately between the two families involved. There is, however, an interesting rural/urban distinction. Engagement or marriage celebrations in smaller communities are often community events at which anyone may attend, usually for a small fee.
Domestic Unit. The most common domestic unit is the nuclear family, made up of both parents and their children. Almost all newlywed couples start their own family unit independent of their parents. A demographic shift, which has seen a slow and steady increase in the number of elderly in Canada, has led to an increase in the number of domestic units in which one or more elderly relative can also be present. Increases in rate of divorce since the 1970s has also meant an increase in the number of single-parent households, most often headed by women.
Authority in domestic units is generally shared by adult members, though men most often exercise more power in financial and disciplinary matters than their female partners.
Skaters on the frozen Rideau Canal celebrate the Winterlude, a festival held annually in Canada.
Inheritance. Inheritance radiates outward from the nuclear family to more distance relatives, with members of the immediate nuclear family taking precedence. All manner of property, as well as most if not all of a deceased person's debt, can be inherited. There are no gender differences in what can be bequeathed and what can be inherited, although in rural communities and areas there is a tendency for male children to inherit land, while female children inherit more liquid forms of property. In most instances, spouses take precedence over children in matters of inheritance. All inheritances can be contested through legal proceedings.
Kin Groups. Allowing for some ethnic variation, in general, kinship is a dispersed system of relatedness in Canada, and while there are general expectations of mutual support along kin lines, levels of which diminish with kin distance, there are no formal rules of kinship observance, other than those statutory prohibitions against marrying close kin, or criminal code provisions regarding incest. Kinship does not determine residence, though kin networks are often used to gain access to employment.
Socialization
Infant Care. Infant care is most often the responsibility of the female partner in a family and is most often a private matter. As more mothers of small children enter the labor market, some professional infant care is available, though this is unevenly distributed nationally and is most often found in urban settings. Siblings may play a role in infant care, but there is no general expectation of this.Young children are expected to be quiet in public, and mothers will take steps necessary to keep their infant children calm in public settings. Breastfeeding, though not prohibited, is rare in public, although feeding in other forms is common.
Child Rearing and Education. Child rearing is under the control of the natal family during the first several years of a child's life. While some monitoring of the treatment of very young children is done by the state, through child welfare organizations, for the most part children are cared for by their parents until the age of four or five, and parents have almost total control over how their children are cared for. Most child care responsibilities are carried out by the mother, in families with two resident parents of the opposite sex. In same sex parent families, child rearing responsibility is most likely to be shared by the two parents, and an increasing, though still very small number of opposite sex parent families are adopting this practice. However, the overwhelming majority of single parent headed households are headed by women, which reflects the key role women are expected to play in child rearing. While experts in childhood development have been active in promoting such things as early childhood education, the fact the majority of single parent female headed households with children have incomes at or below the poverty level suggests that the rearing and care of very young children is not considered socially important work by many Canadians.
Children are expected to be quiet, well-behaved, and relatively docile and are taught to show respect and deference to authority and to be obedient and submissive. Girls and boys are socialized into conventional gender roles early, through differences in dress and through limitations or direct instruction in appropriate play activities. Young children are, for the most part, excluded from important ceremonial activities such as church attendance. Their presence at public functions is considered to be at least potentially disruptive, and they are usually excluded. There has also been an increase in the number of child-free apartments, condominiums, and even housing developments in some suburban areas.
Children are required by law to attend school, or to be instructed at home under government guidelines, from the age of six to sixteen. In the 1980s and 1990s, the age at which children first attend school dropped, in some areas, to as young as four. This reflects the increase in two income households in Canada, which also lead to growth in professional daycare services for very young children. State funding of this early child care, however, was cut substantially in the final years of the 1990s making pre-school child care outside the home almost entirely the financial responsibility of parents.
In general, early childhood is a period of relative helplessness for the child, and during this period children are expected to be irresponsible and troublesome. Most of the effort of child rearing during this period is directed at controlling children's behavior and teaching the appropriate social roles. Corporal punishment, though allowed in Canada, is subject to criminal prosecution if it is excessive. Children under the age of twelve cannot be charged with criminal offenses, although their parents may be held financially responsible for their misdeeds. There has been some political lobbying to either lower that age to as low as six or, alternatively, to increase it to sixteen or eighteen. Once children enter school, child rearing becomes politically and socially complex, as state interests often come into conflict with the values and interests of parents, or with the concerns of communities as a whole. With increasing ethnic diversity, the potential for conflicts expands. Such issues as arranged marriage, male and female circumcision and other genital modification, and religious schooling are just three areas of child rearing and parental control producing substantial concern and debate in Canada.
Higher Education. Canada has the highest per capita level of postsecondary education participation of any industrialized country. All of its universities are publicly funded institutions, although students do pay tuition fees. National and provincial support programs are in place to assist students in postsecondary education.
Etiquette
The ethnic diversity of Canada means that rules of social propriety are quite complex. There are certain general expectations. Greeting, except in formal settings, does not require touching in the form of embraces or handshakes. Behavior in public should be subdued. Rowdiness and loud speech, for example, are considered inappropriate except under special circumstances or in places such as bars or other venues. As a community, Canadians are in general soft spoken, patient, and almost apologetic in their public behavior. They are also in general tolerant of the complex network of cultural differences in public behavior, more so in cities perhaps, where such diversity is more common place.Religion
Religious Beliefs. Religious affiliation is more prevalent than religious observance, though this varies by ethnic and religious group. Most Canadians claim some religious affiliation, most often Christian, although between the 1981 and 1991 census periods, the number of people claiming no religious affiliation has almost doubled from about 1.7 million to a little under 3.4 million. Nevertheless, there are significant practitioners of all the major world religions in Canada. Officially, Canada is a Christian nation, with respect for the Christian God enshrined in statute. Swearing on the Bible, for example, is part of most legal proceedings, though nonsecular alternatives are also practiced. Prayers open many official functions.Personal religious observance has declined in the last several decades, a phenomenon similar to that found in most industrialized countries. This appears to be mostly a Christian phenomenon. Often new Canadians will make special efforts to maintain their religious observances as part of the process of retaining their original ethnic or cultural identity. Some religious groups have grown in membership, such as those associated with evangelical Christianity, but overall the trend in Canada has been toward increasing secularism in public and in private lives. An exception is the increase in the observance of traditional religious practices among First Nations peoples in recent decades, which should be seen both as a spiritual revitalization and as part of the historic process of reasserting their ethnic and political identities in Canada.
Religious Practitioners. Most religious officials are associated with the mainstream world religions, although there are some ethnic differences. For example, specialist religious practitioners such as healers are common in Portuguese communities such as the one in Toronto. With changes in migration patterns, important religious practitioners associated with non-world religions, such as local religious traditions found among different people from Africa, are becoming common. Excepting
A group of children play hockey on the snow in Cape Dorset, Northwest Territories. Hockey, considered to be Canada's national sport, is popular across the nation.
One exception is the increasing importance of First Nations spiritual leaders, who also serve as political leaders in their communities. These practitioners are often directly involved in negotiations with the wider Canadian community, and their spiritual and political roles are indivisible.
Rituals and Holy Places. There is too much religious diversity throughout Canada to make any general observations on rituals and sacred sites. Churches of many types are important locales in almost all communities, not only to practitioners of the particular religion, but also as community centers and bases of operation in community emergencies. In both large and small communities, churches are often the site of community activism and the provision of community services, such as shelter for homeless people. While religion might be said to play less and less of a role in the cultural life of Canada, religious institutions and practitioners play significant roles in nonspiritual aspects of community life.
Death and the Afterlife. The majority of Canadians believe in the Christian model of the afterlife, of heaven and of hell. Burial practices vary by religious group, but for the most part funeral and burial observances are the responsibility of the deceased's family. Funerals are both private functions, attended by family and friends, and public, as in the funeral procession from a church to a burial site. The funerals of important political or cultural figures may be televised.
Medicine and Health Care
Basic health care is provided in all places by a taxfunded system of hospitals and practitioners. Some specialist services require either complete or partial payment by the patient. The dominant medical model is Western biomedicine, though, as is the case in all ethnically diverse societies, other traditions do flourish serving local community needs, and increasingly, also serving the needs or health interests of the larger community. These "alternative" health providers may be spiritual practitioners or practitioners from other healing traditions such as acupuncture or Asian Ayurvedic systems. There is also a system of non-biomedical Western practitioners, such as chiropractors and homeopaths, who have their own training institutions and professional organizations. Except in restricted cases, these practitioners do not participate in the publicly funded health service system.Canada has a system of public health surveillance which monitors infectious diseases, the safety of food and drinking water, and other health risks and problems.
Secular Celebrations
Canadian holidays may be either political or religious. The major celebrations, which are often marked by a statutory holiday away from work, include two religious holidays: Christmas, 25 December; and Easter, which varies from year to year. There are five main political or secular celebrations: Canada Day, 1 July; New Year's Day, 1 January; Victoria Day, which honors Queen Victoria of England and varies from year to year; Labor Day, September; and Thanksgiving, in October.The Arts and Humanities
Support for the Arts. Most artists in Canada are self supporting and there are very few artists whose entire income is drawn from their artistic efforts. Several tax-funded programs, at all levels of government, do exist to provide financial assistance to artists of all types. The Governor General's Awards are presented each year to artists, writers, musicians, and other performers. There is a federal National Art Gallery, and most provinces also have one major tax-funded art gallery, usually in the provincial capital.Literature. Canada does not have a single national literary tradition, participating instead in the wider English world of literature. While there are many internationally known writers from Canada, in general there is no single canon of Canadian literature. One exception is the province of Quebec, which has a longstanding "national" literature known for its social criticism and experimentation.
In recent decades, the number of published Canadian authors has increased dramatically, and Canadians as a community buy and read more books than in most other industrialized countries. Nevertheless, there is no special preference given to Canadian literature.
Graphic Arts. Canada has a large cohort of artists working in all media. Most small cities, and all larger ones, have many art galleries, including the tax-funded galleries. Several artist cooperatives exist in cities across the country, providing artistic and financial support for members. There is no single model for artistic presentation operating across the country.
Performance Arts. Theater ranges from professional theaters, mostly in large cities, which offer mainstream entertainment such as musical theater, to small community theater companies which can be found throughout the country. Several specialist companies or events, such as the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and the Shaw Festival, both in Ontario, take place each year and are international draws.
The city of Toronto has the distinction of hosting more theater openings per year than any other city in the English-speaking world. Its theaters include large commercial venues offering mostly musical theater, several large venues for other kinds of musical performance, and a diverse range of theaters and theater companies offering both new works original to the company and works from almost every linguistic and cultural tradition.
For the most part, attendance follows class lines but with important exceptions. Smaller theaters and theater companies, and in particular those offering new, experimental or political theater, encourage and attract audiences from all classes. Indeed, that is part of their role and their goal. Many of these theater companies see themselves as activists promoting social change. This makes these theaters both performance spaces and informal NGOs, a dual role that, while not unique to Canada, is an important aspect of its political culture.
The State of the Physical and Social Sciences
Canada has a network of publicly funded educational and research institutions; in particular, the system of universities and colleges. These institutions train successive generations of researchers and practitioners. The physical sciences dominate these institutions, attracting most of the government sponsored funding of university research. Research in the physical sciences, and increasingly in the social sciences as well, is most often done in collaboration with industry and business interests, who also provide substantial funding for university based research. The majority of students attending these institutions receive training in the physical sciences.The social sciences and humanities, however, do not receive the same collaborative support. Canadian
A church and townhouses line a street, with Quebec City, Quebec, behind them.
Although the official commitment to the humanities and social sciences, among politicians, educators, and most of the public, remains substantial, the trend has been toward an increasingly technocratic model of higher education. While education has often celebrated, championed, and enhanced the ethnic and cultural diversity of Canada, economic and political changes are shifting emphasis away from diversity in the direction of a kind of practical homogenization in which practical application and financial benefit takes precedence over the breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding. This puts the social sciences and humanities in a precarious position, as the political culture of Canada changes.
Bibliography
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Avery, Donald. Dangerous Foreigners: European Immigrant Workers and Labour Radicalism in Canada, 1896-1932, 1979.
Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, 1985.
Basran, G. S., and David A. Hay. The Political Economy of Agriculture in Western Canada, 1988.
Berry, J. W., and J. A. Laponce, eds. Ethnicity and Culture in Canada: The Research Landscape, 1994.
Brown, Graham L., and Douglas Fairbairn. Pioneer Settlement in Canada, 1763–1895, 1981.
Cairns, Allan C. Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State, 2000.
Clark, S. D. The Social Development of Canada: An Introductory Study with Select Documents, 1942.
——. Church and Sect in Canada, 1945.
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Corsianos, Marilyn, and Kelly Amanda Train. Interrogating Social Justice: Politics, Culture and Identity, 1999.
Driedger, L., ed. Ethnic Canada: Identities and Inequalities, 1987.
Easingwood, Peter, et al, eds. Difference and community: Canadian and European Cultural Perspectives, 1996.
Fleras, Augie, and Jean Leonard Elliott. Unequal Relations: An Introduction to Race, Ethnic, and Aboriginal Dynamics in Canada, 1999.
Fowke, Edith. Canadian Folklore, 1988.
Fry, A. J., and C. Forceville, eds. Canadian Mosaic: Essays on Multiculturalism, 1988.
Gleave, Alfred. United We Stand: Prairie Farmers, 1901– 1975, 1991.
Helms-Hayes, Rick, and James Curtis. The Vertical Mosaic Revisited, 1998.
Horn, Michael. Academic Freedom in Canada: A History, 1999.
Hunter, Alfred A. Class Tells: On Social Inequality in Canada, 1981; 2nd ed., 1986.
Innis, H. A. The Fur Trade in Canada, 1927.
Keohane, Kieran. Symptoms of Canada: An Essay on the Canadian Identity, 1997.
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Kymlicka, Will. Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada, 1998.
Levitt, Cyril. Children of Privilege: Student Revolt in the Sixties: A Study of Student Movements in Canada, the United States, and West Germany, 1984.
MacLennan, Hugh. Two Solitudes, 1945.
Mannion, John J. Irish Imprints on the Landscape of Eastern Canada in the Nineteenth Century, 1971.
McRae, T., et al. Environmental Sustainability of Canadian Agriculture: Report of the Agri-environmental Indicator Project, 2000.
Morgan, Henry J., and Lawrence J. Burpee. Canadian Life in Town and Country, 1905.
Morton, Desmond. Canada and War: A Military and Political History, 1981.
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Palmer, Bryan D. The Character of Class Struggle: Essays in Canadian Working-Class History, 1850–1985, 1986.
Porter, John. The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada, 1965.
Ralston, Helen. The Lived Experience of South Asian Immigrant Women in Atlantic Canada: The Interconnections of Race, Class, and Gender, 1996.
Russell, Loris. Everyday Life in Colonial Canada, 1973.
Trudeau, Pierre E. Fatal Tilt: Speaking Out about Sovereignty, 1991.
Vallières, Pierre. White Niggers of America: The Precocious Autobiography of a Quebec "Terrorist," 1971.
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O CANADA - why your immigrants matter 2
CANADA
Canada, second largest country in the world in area (after Russia), occupying roughly the northern two-fifths of the continent of North America.
![Assiniboine, Mount [Credit: © 1997; AISA, Archivo Iconográfico, Barcelona, España]](http://media-3.web.britannica.com/eb-media/91/20091-004-40FAC04E.jpg)
Despite Canada’s great size, it is one of the world’s most sparsely populated countries. This fact, coupled with the grandeur of the landscape, has been central to the sense of Canadian national identity, as expressed by the Dublin-born writer Anna Brownell Jameson, who explored central Ontario in 1837 and remarked exultantly on “the seemingly interminable line of trees before you; the boundless wilderness around you; the mysterious depths amid the multitudinous foliage, where foot of man hath never penetrated…the solitude in which we proceeded mile after mile, no human being, no human dwelling within sight.” Although Canadians are comparatively few in number, however, they have crafted what many observers consider to be a model multicultural society, welcoming immigrant populations from every other continent. In addition, Canada harbours and exports a wealth of natural resources and intellectual capital equaled by few other countries.
![Chateau Frontenac [Credit: George Hunter]](http://media-3.web.britannica.com/eb-media/81/7081-004-C5ABD892.jpg)
Canada is officially bilingual in English and French, reflecting the country’s history as ground once contested by two of Europe’s great powers. The word Canada is derived from the Huron-Iroquois kanata, meaning a village or settlement. In the 16th century, French explorer Jacques Cartier used the name Canada to refer to the area around the settlement that is now Quebec city. Later, Canada was used as a synonym forNew France, which, from 1534 to 1763, included all the French possessions along the St. Lawrence River and theGreat Lakes. After the British conquest of New France, the name Quebec was sometimes used instead of Canada. The name Canada was fully restored after 1791, when Britain divided old Quebec into the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada (renamed in 1841Canada West and Canada East, respectively, and collectively called Canada). In 1867 theBritish North America Act created a confederation from three colonies (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada) called the Dominion of Canada. The act also divided the old colony of Canada into the separate provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Dominion status allowed Canada a large measure of self-rule, but matters pertaining to international diplomacy and military alliances were reserved to the British crown. Canada became entirely self-governing within the British Empire in 1931, though full legislative independence was not achieved until 1982, when Canada obtained the right to amend its own constitution.![Louise, Lake [Credit: Setan Osolinski—Taxi/Getty Images]](http://media-1.web.britannica.com/eb-media/06/94806-004-DD6AF1C6.jpg)
Canada shares a 5,525-mile- (8,890-km-) long border with theUnited States (including Alaska)—the longest border in the world not patrolled by military forces—and the overwhelming majority of its population lives within 185 miles (300 km) of the international boundary. Although Canada shares many similarities with its southern neighbour—and, indeed, its popular culture and that of the United States are in many regards indistinguishable—the differences between the two countries, both temperamental and material, are profound. “The central fact of Canadian history,” observed the 20th-century literary critic Northrop Frye, is “the rejection of the American Revolution.” Contemporary Canadians are inclined to favour orderly central government and a sense of community over individualism; in international affairs, they are more likely to serve the role of peacemaker instead of warrior, and, whether at home or abroad, they are likely to have a pluralistic way of viewing the world. More than that, Canadians live in a society that in most legal and official matters resembles Britain—at least in the English-speaking portion of the country. Quebec, in particular, exhibits French adaptations: more than three-fourths of its population speaks French as their primary language. The French character in Quebec is also reflected in differences in religion, architecture, and schooling. Elsewhere in Canada, French influence is less apparent, confined largely to the dual use of French and English for place names, product labels, and road signs. The French and British influences are supplemented by the cultures of the country’s native Indian peoples (in Canada often collectively called the First Nations) and the Inuit peoples, the former being far greater in number and the latter enjoying semiautonomous status in Canada’s newest territory, Nunavut. (The Inuit prefer that term rather than Eskimo, and it is commonly used in Canada.) In addition, the growing number of immigrants from other European countries, Southeast Asia, and Latin America has made Canada even more broadly multicultural.
Canada has been an influential member of the Commonwealth and has played a leading role in the organization of French-speaking countries known as La Francophonie. It was a founding member of the United Nations and has been active in a number of major UN agencies and other worldwide operations. In 1989 Canada joined the Organization of American States and signed a free trade agreement with the United States, a pact that was superseded in 1992 by the North American Free Trade Agreement (which also includes Mexico). A founding member (1961) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canada is also a member of the G8, which includes the world’s seven largest industrial democracies plus Russia.
![Ottawa: Parliament Buildings [Credit: © Creatas/JupiterImages]](http://media-3.web.britannica.com/eb-media/76/93676-004-98BD385C.jpg)
The national capital is Ottawa, Canada’s fourth largest city. It lies some 250 miles (400 km) northeast of Toronto and 125 miles (200 km) west of Montreal, respectively Canada’s first and second cities in terms of population and economic, cultural, and educational importance. The third largest city isVancouver, a centre for trade with the Pacific Rim countries and the principal western gateway to Canada’s developing interior. Other major metropolitan areas include Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta; Quebec city, Quebec; andWinnipeg, Manitoba.Land
Canada’s total land area includes thousands of adjacent islands, notably Newfoundland in the east and those of the Arctic Archipelago in the north. Canada is bounded by the Arctic Ocean to the north, Greenland (a self-governing part of the Danish kingdom) to the northeast, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, 12 states of the United States to the south, and thePacific Ocean and the U.S. state of Alaska to the west; in addition, tiny Saint-Pierre and Miquelon (an archipelagic territory of France) lies off Newfoundland.
In longitude Canada extends from approximately 52° to 141° W, a distance that spans six time zones. In latitude it extends from approximately 42° to 83° N. With its vast Arctic and subarctic territories, Canada is often considered a country only of the far north; however, the peninsula of southern Ontario juts deeply south into the heartland of the United States, and its southernmost point, Middle Island in Lake Erie, is at the same latitude as northern California. Canada occupies a strategic global location, lying on great circle routes (the shortest line joining any two places on the globe) between the United States and Europe and, to a lesser degree, Asia. As a result, many international commercial flights track across Canada.
The combination of physical geography and discontinuous settlement has led to a strong sense of regionalism in Canada, and popular regional terms often overlap. The Atlantic Provinces include all of the Appalachian region except the Quebec portion. If the province of Newfoundland and Labrador is excluded, the three remaining east-coast provinces are called the Maritime Provinces or the Maritimes. Quebec and Ontario are usually referred to separately but sometimes together, as Central Canada. The West usually means all four provinces west of Ontario, but British Columbia may be referred to alone and the other three collectively as the Prairie Provinces or the Prairies. Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut are referred to as the North.
Relief
Canada contains within its borders a vast variety of geographic features. In general, the country’s landform structure can be considered as a vast basin more than 3,220 miles (5,200 km) in diameter. The Cordillera in the west, the Appalachians in the southeast, the mountains of northern Labrador and of Baffin Island in the northeast, and the Innuitian Mountains in the north form its high rim, while Hudson Bay, set close to the centre of the enormous platform of the Canadian Shield, occupies the basin bottom. The western rim of the basin is higher and more massive than its eastern counterpart, and pieces of the rim, notably in the far northwest and in the south, are missing.
The main lines of Canadian landforms continue well into the United States, intimately linking the geography of both countries. To create such a large country, Canadians had to forge transportation and communication links in an east-west direction, against the physiographic grain of the continent. The Canadian North remains one of the least settled and least economically exploited parts of the world.
Canada can be divided into six physiographic regions: the Canadian Shield, the interior plains, the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence lowlands, the Appalachian region, the Western Cordillera, and the Arctic Archipelago.
THE CANADIAN SHIELD
By far the largest of Canada’s physiographic regions, the Canadian Shield (sometimes called the Precambrian Shield) occupies about half of the total area of the country and is centred on Hudson Bay. The shield consists of some of the world’s oldest rocks, which were folded by mountain-building movements and cut down by erosion until the area was reduced almost to a plain. It was warped and folded in places, so parts of it now stand much higher than others, especially around its outer edges. In the north the rim is about 7,000 feet (2,000 metres) above sea level, and fjords with walls from 2,000 to 3,000 feet (600 to 900 metres) high extend many miles into the mountain masses. The Labrador Highlands, including theTorngat, Kaumajet, and Kiglapait mountains, lie south of Hudson Strait. Along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, the shield rim is a 2,000-foot (600-metre) escarpment, the Laurentide Scarp. The rim is almost imperceptible in southern Ontario, but in northern Ontario it rises again to almost 1,500 feet (450 metres) above the northern shore of Lake Superior. From Manitoba northwestward, the shield edge is marked by a large number of lakes.
![esker: Nunavut [Credit: © Richard Alexander Cooke III]](http://media-1.web.britannica.com/eb-media/53/3053-004-981AE21B.jpg)
Most of the shield lies at elevations below 2,000 feet (600 metres). Its lack of hills of any size produces a generally monotonous landscape, but geologically recent glaciations have had a striking effect on the surface. By stripping off the top, weathered material, they roughened the surface into a type of rock-knob, or grained, landscape, with the hollows between the knobs or the troughs between the ridges occupied by enormous numbers of lakes. In other areas the glaciers deposited till or moraine on the surface and in still others left gigantic fields of erratics (boulders and other material different from local bedrock). Eskers—long, narrow ridges of deposits—stretch across the shield, sometimes for more than 100 miles (160 km), marking the course of old, subglacial rivers. In still other places, deposits laid down by glacial lakes that have since drained away have given rise to extensive clay belts. The shield contains a large variety of minerals (e.g., copper, silver, and gold), and its exploitation has been a principal source of Canada’s wealth.https://www.facebook.com/sobadsogood/photos/a.185929708153444.48193.142358482510567/758956800850729/?type=1&theater
COMMENTED:
Hey folks... it was everywhere..... don't hide from it.... let's face it... the first white communities in Australia were British Empire Convicts..... we all know the story.... if u don't please it's important.... First Peoples and Immigration movement give us our countries we have today.... and our nations histories matter ...imho Prime Minister Rudd formally apologized on behalf of Australia in 1998- what is rather disappointing is that in Canada - over the last 50 years politicians -all parties have not actually sat down and seriously negotiated with our First Peoples of 10,000 of our Canada... and yet NOW they are all scrambling with their bullsheeet yet again.... well guess what... IDLE NO MORE... and many of us oldies of the 60s, 70s and 80s promised our beloved First Peoples we would walk the talk... cause now it's our turn... and also.... just posted First Peoples of Americas and Australia have the highest YOUTH SUICIDE... on the planet... and that's wrong on sooooo many levels... like we can afford 2 lose even one child.... imho
