Hunting for Empire: Narratives of Sport in Rupert's Land, 1840–70.

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

The acolytes of Clio, the Greek muse of history, have long been classed as either storytellers or clinicians. The former have been comfortable, entertaining types, always ready with a tale to illustrate the fundamental principle at hand. The clinicians, on the other hand, spurn narrative as shallow escapism and seek to drill down to the deeply buried reservoirs of human motivation and discover history wie es eigentlich gewesen—as it really was.

Greg Gillespie is a clinician with the technical prowess and spiritual conviction to become a clinician’s clinician. Hunting for Empire is not about Brits out to enjoy Western Canada’s  sporting opportunities.  It is a multi-layered exercise in “thick description” that offers in complex detail the imperial and class-generated motives and rituals informing and sanctifing the hunt. The cover illustration captures the idea perfectly: in the foreground lies a gigantic bull moose about to be dissected by the sport and his guide; in the middle ground is a broad river (the flowing stream of vital fluid); and in the background, towers an immense, phallus-shaped volcanic cone. Gillespie argues that the educational system favoured by the British upper classes “intertwined the concepts of [manly] sport, geography, and empire.” Subsequently, when publishing accounts of their expeditions, the sportsmen were scientific positivists loyal to rituals (such as stalking) associated with the sporting chance that would establish their credentials and sanctify their experience. Furthermore, they drew maps, gave names to assorted flora, fauna and geographical features, and ordered the landscape in ways that conformed to European aesthetic concepts of the picturesque and the sublime.

Hunting for Empire is an excellent work that will appeal to historical clinicians, academic readers, and few other rare souls who at the breakfast table would for reach for an anatomy text instead of the newspaper.