Canada and the Age of Conflict: A History of Canadian External Policies, Volume 1: 1867-1921

Lovell Clark was Professor of History at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

First published by Macmillan in 1977 and in a paperback edition in 1979 (which was allowed to go out of print), this splendid volume is once more available in paperback. The very good photographs from the hardback edition are missing, except for the one that adorns the front cover, and the price is rather steep for a paperback (five dollars more than the previous one), but all the rest is the same and the content more than compensates for the inflation. Teachers and students of Canadian external relations will be delighted to have this definitive survey by one to whom the scholarly community is already heavily indebted, but the general reader will also derive pleasure and profit, for the author writes a lively prose with many good-humoured asides and fresh insights.

Colonel Stacey, who is Professor Emeritus of the University of Toronto, intended to begin the story in 1914 — hence the rather misleading title given to this and the succeeding volume — but most fortunately for us he found himself obliged to go back to the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, to a time when we were self-governing in our domestic but not our external affairs. After a lucid discussion of the demography, economy, and what might be termed the strategic situation of the young Dominion, there follows a fascinating account of the development of Canada’s external relations through the Macdonald and Laurier eras to Borden and the years before World War I. Two chapters deal with the War and the tremendous changes it wrought on Canada; another with the peace settlement and the League of Nations. There follows a very fine chapter entitled “Reaction from the Heroic Age,” and the volume concludes with a chapter on Meighen and the Imperial Conference of 1921 (and its sequel, the Washington Conference of 1921-22) and the advent of a new government led by Mackenzie King.

What will immediately strike the attentive reader is that this survey is not based merely on secondary sources. Those indeed have been fully consulted and acknowledged, but Stacey has also done extensive research in the primary sources, so much so that he sheds new light on even well-worn topics such as the Treaty of Washington, or the Alaskan Boundary dispute, or on little known individuals such as Loring Christie. Also noteworthy are the vivid pen-portraits and the forthright, often pungent, assessments, which are always supported by evidence. Thus the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Stanley, who vetoed the title of “Kingdom of Canada” was a “spineless Little Englander” (p.2); Borden’s naval policy of 1912-13 “cannot be considered anything but a national disaster” (p.160); Mackenzie Kings book, Industry and Humanity, was “turgid, sentimental, grotesquely ill-organized, and illustrated by a set of charts that would have done credit to a graduate astrologer” (p.286). But these are only two aspects of a very readable book which abounds in wise and informed insights.

The type is easily legible. I found only one misprint — in the middle of page 200. The appendices contain useful figures on Canadian trade, 1868 to 1921. There is no bibliography apart from that contained in the voluminous footnote references.