Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation

K.A. Hamilton was an editor engaged in graduate studies at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto.

The intellectual history of any colony is easily overlooked: we are too ready to believe the colonizers are the only thinking actors. Thus we have the conception of nineteenth-century Canada as a pioneer colony, peopled essentially by peasants, whether French or Scottish, Irish, and English. Using the history of science to examine the early history of Canada, Suzanne Zeller documents the movements of a lively intellectual culture and its role in shaping the idea of Canada as a transcontinental nation.

The transition from the static, orderly world modelled by eighteenth-century mathematical physics to the world-in-process epitomized by the mid-nineteenth-century theory of evolution by natural selection is followed in four scientific fields — geology, terrestrial magnetism and meteorology, and botany. In each field, the practice of Victorian inventory science, informed by a utilitarian doctrine, provided data that was used to support the viability of a transcontinental nation. “Science became the gauge by which Canadians assessed what their country and, through it, they themselves could one day become.” Expectations aroused by the discoveries of inventory science were instrumental in making the idea of a transcontinental nation into a reality. “Like Darwin’s theory of ‘creation by variation,’ the idea of a Canadian nation was foremost a historical development in the minds of its supporters.... The ultimate proof of its existence lay in the believing.”

Zeller is a confident and skilled writer. Intellectual history, social and political history, biography and anecdote are inseparable in this scholarly study which, relying upon extensive archival researches, nevertheless is written as smoothly and seamlessly as any novel. Contemporary scientific theory is quickly and adequately presented in the context of its contribution to the intellectual background to Canadian social history, giving support to the reader unfamiliar with the history of science. The work of individuals — Sir William Edmund Logan, Sir John Henry Lefroy, George Lawson, and many other Canadians and Canadian institutions — receives detailed examination. The context of intellectual history allows the author to remark, in the conclusion, on some differences between the founding visions of Canada and the United States that arose from their different histories.

Inventing Canada is a solid contribution to Canadian history, made particularly exciting by its documentation of the contribution of ideas from a realm not overtly political to political history.