History

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Open Access
'A Flag that Knows No Colour Line': Aboriginal Veteranship in Canada, 1914-1939
(2018-03-01) Macdowall, Brian Robert; Wicken, William Craig
Historians have rightly considered the period from 1914 to 1939 as the time when Canadian Indigenous soldiers and veterans of the First World War faced unique challenges because of their legal status as Indians. But their acceptance of the idea that Indigenous veterans were victims of discrimination has led them to overlook the unique nature of these Indigenous peoples identities as Indians and veterans. The prevailing assumption is that Indigenous veterans were not an influential group politically, socially, or culturally and Indigenous veterans political awakening occurred only in the mid-1940s. This study contends that Indigenous veterans relationship with the state in the interwar period was more complicated than previously thought. Their war service created a fundamentally different and important legal relationship with the state from other soldiers or Indigenous peoples. Military service suspended soldiers Indian status temporarily, and this experience created a new set of expectations for Indigenous men upon their return home. As veterans, they expected material benefit and recognition for their sacrifices, and support for killed or wounded soldiers and their families. These expectations did not fit with government officials understanding that Indigenous men returning from the war would re-integrate into their communities as Indians and wards of the state. The dissertation offers an overview of Indigenous war service in the context of debates over status and citizenship, and then sketches how these debates informed developments in soldiers demobilization, re-establishment, re-integration, and restoration. Through the examination of Indigenous soldiers service records, pension and Soldier Settlement case files, and government records, this work argues that Indigenous soldiers and veterans experience from 1914 through 1939 should not be seen primarily as victims of the state, but rather as a group whose complicated identity of Indian and veteran, and as citizens, began to coalesce.
Open Access
A Longing for Saint-Domingue/A Longing for Haiti:Haiti and the Rise and Fall of French Africa
(2025-04-10) Robertshaw, Matthew James; Lovejoy, Paul
In 1804, the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue—erstwhile the most lucrative plantation colony in the world—declared its independence as Haiti. The new country, with its population overwhelmingly made up of formerly enslaved people, became the first Black Republic in the modern world. This was a turning point in world history. It was so unprecedented that its effects are still not fully appreciated over two hundred years later. To expand our understanding of the significance of the event, this dissertation examines the interplay between the legacy of the Haitian Revolution and later French colonialism in Africa. Despite its pathbreaking defiance of the colonial system, Haiti played an ambivalent role in the rise and fall of the second French colonial empire. Beginning in 1830, nostalgia for their most lucrative colony pushed France to pursue new colonies partly to compensate for the loss of Saint-Domingue. At the same time, however, the spectre of the violent revolution that produced Haiti constrained French efforts in Africa. But it was not just the idea of Haiti that affected French colonialism. Haitian people also brought their perspective to bear on this second era of French overseas ambitions. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as a Haitian community emerged in Paris, these migrants found themselves placed to comment on French activities in Africa. While they rejected any notion of racial inequality, some truly believed in French cultural superiority and actually spoke in favour of French attempts to bring “civilization” to Africa. A few even travelled to the continent as agents of French imperialism. Into the twentieth century, however, most Haitians came to oppose European imperialism in all forms. As members of militant groups in Paris, as delegates at international gatherings, and even as teachers, specialists and civil servants in the emerging African countries, numerous Haitians played significant roles in the destabilization of the French empire and in the nation- and state-building projects that followed. In so doing, they carried Haiti’s revolutionary, anti-racist and anti-colonialist heritage into the twentieth century and—for the second time in history—helped precipitate the end of the French colonial empire.
Open Access
Allies, Accomplices, Avengers: The Alliances of Non-Elite Women in Seventeenth-Century England
(2022-12-14) Couling, Marlee Jane; Cohen, Elizabeth S.
This dissertation examines the alliances of non-elite women in England in the decades between 1630 and 1700. It is the first scholarly work to focus on the positive interactions of plebeian women and the important role which female networks played in their lives, both as a part of ordinary sociability and in times of need. Using ecclesiastical and secular judicial records, it shows that non-elite women formed a wide variety of legal and illegal alliances as a means to mitigate their social, legal, physical, and economic vulnerabilities in this period. These alliances hinged on the sites and issues that early modern women were associated with in daily life, namely the female body and the expectations ascribed to it—motherhood, feminized labour within and outside the home, and beliefs, both negative and positive, about the ‘natural’ moral roles of women. Although female alliances and sociability were viewed negatively in early modern popular culture, including scripture, law and medicine, this dissertation shows that women needed female allies and, in fact, were expected to have them. Seventeenth-century patterns of labour and sociability encouraged the formation of female alliances. The rituals of childbirth reveal networks of women, as do trials for slander, illicit pregnancy, divorce, and infanticide. Central to these alliances was the female body. Ordinary women wielded considerable authority, socially and legally, as the only true experts on their bodies. They provided important evidence for the prosecution and punishment of crimes ranging from defamation to murder. In some of these cases, female allies contributed towards life-or-death decisions. Furthermore, this dissertation shows that the body connected women’s legal and illegal alliances. The likelihood of experiencing poverty, unwanted pregnancies, damaged reputations, and violence encouraged the formation of emotional communities among some women. Sometimes this involved competing alliances, or a collective against an individual, as in bastardy cases. In the end, few women were truly without allies in this period.
Open Access
Anishinaabe Treaty-Making in the 18th-and-19th-Century Northern Great Lakes: From Shared Meanings to Epistemological Chasms
(2020-05-11) Corbiere, Alan Theodore Ojiig; Podruchny, Carolyn
This dissertation looks at the evolution of Anishinaabe treaty-making process via the diplomatic language and implements used (wampum, calumet pipes, medals, clothing, texts, and paper). Anishinaabe people include the Ojibwe, Odaawaa, Potawatomi, Mississauga, Algonquin, Nipissing and Saulteaux. Treaties amongst Indigenous people are explored as foundational precursors to treaties with colonial entities. Continuity in procedures, forms, discourse, metaphors and implements, are revealed. The Anishinaabe treaty process is an oral-based practice that combines material elements which are used as mnemonic devices while colonial treaty partners emphasize text-based procedures and materials, resulting in a tension between literacy and orality. The analysis adopts an Anishinaabe-centric perspective utilizing council proceedings, treaty councils, and petitions, privileging Anishinaabe voices through time. The analysis is also informed by explicating sources such as wampum belts and strings, medals, calumets, and Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe language) to produce a more nuanced interpretation of Anishinaabe governance structures and their role in treaty procedures.
Open Access
At the Intersections of Nations, Diasporas, and Modernities: North American Finns in the Soviet Union in the 1930s
(2015-08-28) Efremkin, Evgeny; Perin, Roberto
In the early 1930s, approximately seven thousand North American Finns, many of whom were born in Canada and the United States, left for Soviet Karelia, an autonomous republic in north-western Russia, bordering on Finland. Through the case study of the Karelian fever (a term by which North American Finnish migration to Soviet Karelia is now known), this work analyzes processes of identity construction at individual, regional, and national levels. My argument is that transnational migrant labour became a means by which diasporic, regional, and national leaders defined and redefined the cultural and political borders of their imagined communities. Whereas the movement of people was physically and psychologically transnational, national and diasporic imaginaries on both sides of the Atlantic were engaged in a perpetual effort to include, and in other instances reject, the cultural, social, economic, and political memberships of these migrants in their communities. The study focuses on a specific community, but transcends geographical boundaries in a period of less than a decade and shows a vibrant, tumultuous historical process of identity formation, both structural and subjective. In addition to analytical frameworks of nation and diaspora, my work looks at immigrant lives in dissimilar and competing versions of modernity, western capitalism and Soviet socialism. Finns on the move across the Atlantic in the 1920s and the 1930s were transnational agents, who by virtue of their mobility infused elements of western modernization into the Soviet society. As a result, these Finnish migrants who moved across land and sea borders in search of a social, economic, and political haven, became embroiled in the process of modern nation-state construction, but also found themselves within a larger, global contest of alternative modernities, that is between competing notions of what the new subject of the modern nation-state should look like. What follows is a multi-sited ethnographic analysis of the way immigrants’ ethnic identities were forged, and contested in different social contexts and varying levels of scale. In other words, what were the ways by which social spaces such as diasporas (locally), nations (regionally), and modernities (globally) were culturally produced.
Open Access
Au nom du Bon Dieu et du Buffalo: Metis Lived Catholicism on the Northern Plains
(2018-03-01) Pigeon, Emilie Marie Catherine; Podruchny, Carolyn
This dissertation argues that Metis lived Catholicism was a tool of identity formation, resistance to colonialism, and political action among bison hunters of the northern plains in the long nineteenth century. The Catholicity of Metis bison hunters quotidian is highlighted through the extensive Michif French written legacy of Turtle Mountain historian ChWeUm (William Jr.) Davis (1845-1937). Daviss biography anchors a Metis national memory, weaving stories and events from both sides of the Medicine Line. His life story and the religious experiences of his relatives come together to explain why some Metis people adhered to Catholicism and its practices. Sustained experiences of the divine helped Metis families adapt and resist the effects of settler colonialism on the northern plains, including the end of organized bison-hunting expeditions. This dissertation blends several methodologies social history, biography, ethnohistory, and social network analysis from the digital humanities to interrogate the history of Catholicism among Metis peoples.
Open Access
Belonging to Greece and the Soviet Union: Greeks of Tashkent, 1949-1974
(2015-08-28) Lampropoulos, Elaina Maria; Gekas, Athanasios
This thesis illustrates the narrative of the Greek political refugees of Tashkent and seeks to recognize their Greek and Soviet identity. By examining the public and private spaces of Greek political refugees in Soviet Tashkent between 1949-1974, the thesis identifies the beliefs, symbols and practices, which reveal the hybridity of Greek-Soviet identity. Research was based on oral histories and Greek-language newspapers published during the period as well as on memoirs of Greeks who lived in Tashkent. This will aid our understanding of the collective memory and homemaking narrative of the Greek experience in Soviet Tashkent. The collective narrative of Greeks of Tashkent was very positive and idealized. Greeks legitimized their settlement in Tashkent by defending Soviet ideology and contributing to and developing Soviet society. The homemaking narrative allowed Greeks to belong to the imagined Greek Soviet Community, the imagined Soviet community and the imagined Greek community.
Open Access
Building and Breaking Nations: The Metis, Capitalism, and States in the North American West, 1870-1935
(2024-11-07) Murchison, Daniel Robert; Wicken, William
This dissertation examines how settler colonization and state formation impacted an Indigenous nation and their identities in the North American West over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than commonalities, I explore how Métis communities experienced Canada and the United States differently. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the Métis witnessed the bison, an essential source of food and trade goods, be nearly eliminated from the northern Great Plains. Canada and the United States had begun to expand national economies westward, leading to mass settlement, commercial agriculture, and continent-wide industrial capitalist and market systems. Although bison hunting had been socially and economically important, I emphasize Métis communities' adaptations to these circumstances. I use census records, estate files, tribal court documents, and other archival material to understand household structures, livelihoods, land tenure, and geographic divisions after the end of the fur trade and during Canadian and American nation-building. In doing so, I highlight Métis socioeconomic cohesion and division over time but show how distinct political and legal contexts shaped family strategies, economic opportunities, and political consciousness. I reveal that Métis communities gradually reworked the concepts of collective identity, governance, and rights depending on their position north or south of the border. I show that this process led to the formation of a distinct Métis national identity in Canada, which did not come together in the United States. By centring the view from below and human agency where possible, this dissertation brings historical processes to the forefront and emphasizes the historical construction of collective identities.
Open Access
Building Boys, Building Canada: The Boy Scout Movement in Canada, 1908-1970
(2015-08-28) Trepanier, James Daniel; Martel, Marcel
This dissertation examines Canada’s largest organization for boys of the twentieth century - the Boy Scouts. In Scouting for Boys [1908], Robert Baden Powell argued that Scouting provided a universal model for countries of the British Empire to develop the physical, mental and spiritual development of boys. The process of transplanting Baden-Powell’s movement to Canada led to the establishment of two separate organizations, divided along linguistic and religious lines. The movement also extended its reach to the Canadian North as missionaries and government officials adopted the movement in residential and day schools across the country. The Canadian Scout movement provides a compelling lens to understand how language, religion, race and class shaped the construction of Canadian boyhoods. This dissertation taps into the archival records of the Boy Scout movement, Canadian churches, state records, and private collections from the 1910s through to the 1960s to examine the motivations, objectives and tensions within the Scout movement’s network of institutional and cultural support. It argues that, as part of the frequent renewal of masculinities, Scouting and its supporters embraced the modern and the antimodern in order to shore up, revive, or reinvigorate masculinities that were deemed to be threatened. Perceptions of what boys needed were not always complementary and reflected broader religious, linguistic and racial assumptions and expectations about masculinity. The relationship between Scouting and Canadian churches, for instance, was fluid - reflecting a more complicated picture of religiosity in the postwar period than existing scholarship has considered. The relationship between French-Canadian and English-Canadian Scouting was also complex and symptomatic of larger shifting relationships between the French-Canadian diaspora, Quebec and English-speaking Canada. Northern nationalists, meanwhile, latched onto the Scout movement as a means of promoting particular “ideas of north” for southern boys and northern Aboriginal and Inuit boys. These different supporters were, however, tied together by a shared desire to mitigate the perceived “feminizing” effects of modern life through a “modernizing antimodernism.” Masculinity’s ties to political and social citizenship remained strong well into the 1960s as Scouting’s coalition of supporters sustained the belief that building better boys was the key to building a better Canada.
Open Access
Canada's Greek Moment: Transnational Politics, Activists, and Spies During the Long Sixties
(2017-07-27) Grafos, Christopher Elliot; Perin, Roberto
This dissertation examines Greek immigrant homeland politics during the period of Greeces military dictatorship, 1967 to 1974, in Toronto and Montreal. It carefully considers the internal dynamics of anti-junta activism in Canadas Greek populations, but it also contemplates the meanings of external perceptions, particularly from the Canadian state and Canadian public discourse. The study acknowledges the dominant paradigm of Greek immigrants as unskilled workers, however, it demonstrates that this archetype is not monolithic. In many ways, it is challenged by a small number of Greeks who possessed skills to write letters to politicians, create petitions, organize public rallies, and politically mobilize others. At the same time, this dissertation carefully considers Canadas social and political environment and shows how uniquely Canadian politics ran parallel to and informed Greek homeland politics. Transnationalism is used as an analytical tool, which challenges the meaning of local/national borders and the perception that they are sealed containers. The main argument expressed here is that environments shape movements and migrant political culture does not develop in a vacuum. Each chapter deals with specific nuances of anti-junta activism in Toronto and Montreal. Chapter One examines the organized voices of the Greek communitys anti-dictatorship movement. The chapters latter section looks at how the Panhellenic Liberation Movement (PAK), led by Andreas Papandreou, consolidated itself as the main mouthpiece against Greeces authoritarian regime. Chapter Two demonstrates that social movements occurring in Canada meshed neatly with anti-junta sentiment, mobilizing many Canadians against the dictatorship. Chapter Three shows how a few skilled Greeks shaped transnational narratives of resistance in local Greek leftist press. Chapters Four and Five examine RCMP surveillance documents related to local politics in Toronto and Montreal. In doing so, the chapters reveal that regional circumstances, particularly Quebecs Quiet Revolution, shaped security concerns and definitions of Greek subversive activities. Overall, Canadas Greek moment was a complex tale of activism, surveillance, and transnational politics.
Open Access
Children and Childhood in Wendat Society, 1600-1700
(2021-03-08) Jackson, Victoria Catherine; Podruchny, Carolyn
This dissertation examines Wendat childhood in the 17th century. Contrary to European expectations, Wendat child-rearing practices emphasized independence, empowerment, and respect for all individuals, encouraging children to pay attention to and contribute to the safety, health, and well-being of their families and community. As a result, I argue that children and youths took on essential and important roles in Wendat society, including teaching, diplomacy, and spiritual leadership, often in ways that were distinct from that of adults. Youths were often at the heart of Wendat-settler relations in those roles, and helped greet, teach, and support European newcomers. Children and youths helped teach newcomers to speak and act like a Wendat, served as intermediaries and translators between Wendat and non-Wendat leadership, and took on important political and spiritual roles to foster long-term friendships with French visitors. Wendat children and youths were loved, respected, and treated as uniquely important contributors to Wendat society. Children were raised by the entire community, not just the biological parents, and everyone had a role in caring for the youth and preparing them for their life-long responsibilities to family and community. The care for children also extended to Wendat mortuary customs, as childrenespecially infantssometimes had unusual, age-determined burials. This dissertation emphasizes a biographical case study approach, focusing on what the stories of individuals can tell us about the society as a whole. In looking for the stories of individuals, it is apparent that personhood and personal agency were important factors in how different individuals responded to the widespread changes in Wendat society in the wake of French arrival to the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence regions. This dissertation also takes an interdisciplinary and ethnohistorical approach, using archaeological, linguistic, and anthropological sources to complement the analysis of historical documents. Children often fulfilled roles that were different from, and inappropriate for, adults, and their roles were often complimentary to those of child-bearing adults and Elders. For a more complete understanding of 17th century Wendat society, this dissertation argues age must be considered as an important category of analysis.
Open Access
Comfortable, Honest and Unpretentious: A Cultural History of Canadian Arts and Crafts Movement
(2020-05-11) Gamble, Adrian David; Shore, Marlene G.
The arrival of the Arts and Crafts Movement into Canada at the end of the nineteenth century intersected with several interrelated developments. Art, architecture, education, and the process of professionalization, were all affected. Controlled by a close-knit community of cultural leaders, connected through a web of private and public associations, a Canadian Movement was formed, one which helped shape middle-class notions of domestic space and design. This dissertation examines the influence of three architects: Eden Smith in Toronto; Percy Nobbs in Montreal; and Samuel Maclure in Victoria. Together with other artists, architects, and craftspeople, and connected by organizations such as the Ontario Association of Architects, Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, Group of Seven, Arts and Crafts Society of Canada, and the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, they laid the groundwork for the Canadian Craft Movement. This dissertation also incorporates interviews with owners of Arts and Crafts homes by Smith, Nobbs, and Maclure, as a means of considering the Movements Canadian legacy. This study arrived at three main findings. The first was an affirmation of a Canadian Arts and Crafts Movement, separate from its counterparts in Britain and the United States. The second uncovered the roots of the Movements cultural support network, as it existed primarily (though not exclusively) among Canadas urban, white, male, middle-class, English Canadian, cultural elite. The third, the issue of the Movements legacy, was affirmed through the fieldwork, supported by archival and other research materials. This dissertation demonstrates that the Canadian Arts and Crafts Movement was its own development, largely the product of an urban, Anglo-centric, cultural elite, and has survived the last century as a guiding, cultural force.
Open Access
Defining Supremacy: Walter J. Bossy and the Conceptual Origins of the Canadian ‘Third Force’ (1931-1972)
(2024-11-07) Molas Gregorio, Barbara; Perin, Roberto
This dissertation, entitled “Defining Supremacy: Walter J. Bossy and the Conceptual Origins of the Canadian ‘Third Force’ (1931-1972)”, examines a neglected aspect of the history of Canadian multiculturalism to illuminate the ideological foundations of the concept ‘third force’. Focusing on the particular thought of ultra-conservative Ukrainian Canadian Walter J. Bossy during his time in Montreal (1931-1970s), I demonstrate that the idea that Canada was composed of three equally important groups emerged from a context defined by reactionary ideas on ethnic diversity and integration. Two broad questions shape this research: first, what the meaning originally attached to the idea of a ‘third force’ was, and what the intentions behind the conceptualization of a trichotomic Canada were; second, whether Bossy’s understanding of the ‘third force’ precedes, or is related in any way to, postwar debates on liberal multiculturalism at the core of which was the existence of a ‘third force’. Based upon Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen’s theory of conceptual change (2008), this study concludes that Bossy’s conceptualization of the ‘third force’ shares the core idea of a trichotomic definition of Canada with postwar liberal multiculturalism, but radically differs from it in that Bossy’s ideas at the margin of the ‘third force’ (Christian and European supremacy, for example) never evolved. It was progressive sectors of the Canadian population who altered existing ideas at the margin of ‘third force’ and ultimately used the concept to propose a more plural and egalitarian society. This dissertation constitutes a contribution to the study of Canadian multiculturalism, radical-right ideology, and the history of concepts.
Open Access
Drawing The Line: An environmental history of the Westcoast Transmission natural gas pipeline, 1948-1982
(2024-03-16) Van't Veen, Esther; Kheraj, Sean R.
This dissertation is an environmental history of Westcoast Transmission Company Limited (Westcoast), which built Canada’s first big-inch natural gas pipeline and inaugurated large-scale natural gas usage in British Columbia. The study starts in the late 1940s, when the company was founded, and ends in 1982 when it effectively concluded its first encounter with substantial public resistance to its natural gas pipeline ventures. The dissertation asks to what extent Westcoast shaped human-nature relations and argues that Westcoast’s energy transition was about more than technological innovations and economic questions of supply and demand. Instead, natural gas usage and exploitation were intertwined with gender identity, community building, geopolitical questions, colonial ambition, and the definition of modernity. Relying primarily on three archival collections in two Canadian cities, parts of which are newly available to the public, this dissertation explains how Westcoast developed, operated, maintained, and expanded its complex energy system and sheds light on Canada’s relatively late transition to fossil fuels and the persistent nature of Canada’s fossil fuel reliance.
Open Access
Drowned: Anishinabek Economies and Resistance to Hydroelectric Development -in the Winnipeg River Drainage Basin, 1873-1975
(2020-05-11) Luby, Brittany Alexandra; Podruchny, Carolyn; Coates, Colin
In 1893 the Keewatin Lumber and Power Company planned the first hydroelectric generating station on the north shore of Lake of the Woods (near present-day Kenora, Ontario). Approximately fifty years later, federal officials seeking employment for Canadian veterans turned to Northwestern Ontario and its underutilized water resources, envisioning a manufacturing hub on the Precambrian Shield. Between 1950 and 1958, the Hydroelectric Power Commission of Ontario remodeled the Winnipeg River drainage basin to produce power for federally-sanctioned peacetime industries, namely pulp and paper production. To redesign the Winnipeg River drainage basin, however, hydro officials needed to encroach on Anishinabek lands: both federally-recognized reserves and unrecognized, but heavily occupied, ancestral territories. This dissertation tells the story of how Anishinabek families used a diverse array of strategies adaptation, cooperation, and passive resistance to manage environmental change caused by Whitedog Falls Generating Station. Anishinabek families worked to stabilize their communities in an era of imposed environmental and economic change. Historians have long argued that hydroelectric development is necessarily at odds with Indigenous culture and subsistence economies. This dissertation provides a counter-narrative, arguing that cultural and economic damage, although linked to environmental damage, correlated more strongly with Anishinabek exclusion from resource negotiations. Moreover, this work complicates historical representations of a uniform Indigenous response to development. Given limited negotiations between the Hydro-Electric Power Commission and local First Nations, Anishinabek families did not respond to industrial incursions with one representative voice. The process of development itself, I argue, prevented a unified community response. As a result, Anishinabek communities fractured in response to hydroelectric development.
Open Access
Ducks and Deer, Profit and Pleasure: Hunters, Games and the Natural Landscapes of Medieval Italy
(2015-12-16) Arrigoni Martelli, Cristina; Hoffmann, Richard C.
This dissertation is an ample and thorough assessment of hunting in late medieval and Renaissance northern and central Italy. Hunting took place in a variety of landscapes and invested animal species. Both of these had been influenced by human activities for centuries. Hunting had deep cultural significance for a range of social groups, each of which had different expectations and limitations on their use of their local game animal-habitat complexes. Hunting in medieval Italy was business, as well as recreation. The motivations and hunting dynamics (techniques) of different groups of hunters were closely interconnected. This mutuality is central to understanding hunting. It also deeply affected consumption, the ultimate reason behind hunting. In all cases, although hunting was a marginal activity, it did not stand in isolation from other activities of resource extraction. Actual practice at all levels was framed by socio-economic and legal frameworks. While some hunters were bound by these frameworks, others attempted to operate as if they did not matter. This resulted in the co-existence and sometimes competition between several different hunts and established different sets of knowledge and ways to think about game animals and the natural world. The present work traces game animals from their habitats to the dinner table through the material practices and cultural interpretation of a variety of social actors to offer an original and thorough survey of the topic.
Open Access
Duty and Dependency: The Life and Career of Edward James Jarvis, 1788-1852
(2024-11-07) Jarvis, Anna Karin; Girard, Philip
Edward Jarvis was a colonial judge during the late Georgian and early Victorian periods whose career encompassed more than one jurisdiction within the British Empire. Following several years of study at the Inns of Court in London, he secured positions as a judge in the colonies of New Brunswick and Malta before being appointed Chief Justice of Prince Edward Island in 1828, a position he held until his death in 1852. Throughout Jarvis’s life duty and dependency were constant themes. He was one of a group of second-generation Loyalists who began their careers in the colony of New Brunswick, and brought many of his generation’s beliefs regarding law and empire to his judicial roles, whether confronting piracy in Malta in the early 1820s or land protests in Prince Edward Island during the 1830s. In his rulings he sought to administer colonial law in a fair and impartial manner, thereby consolidating the property regime in the latter colony. His role as Chief Justice, however, meant that he was dependent upon the British Government for his livelihood, a situation that ultimately became untenable when the granting of responsible government led to a substantial cut in his salary in his final years. Both duty and dependency were part of Jarvis’s personal as well as professional life: as household patriarch he supported his family and other dependents, who in turn gave him emotional support, loyalty, and deference. The private world of family enabled him to function in the “public” sphere, but also brought bereavement and practical challenges. This study suggests that, while Jarvis did carry out his professional function of upholding British law, particularly property law in the face of a popular protest movement, it came at a cost, both financial and personal, not evident in the public record.
Open Access
"Enough is Enough": The Right to Privacy Committee and Bathhouse Raids in Toronto, 1978-83
(2017-07-27) Hooper, Thomas Harold; Martel, Marcel
On Thursday February 5th, 1981, 200 agents from the Metropolitan Toronto Police raided four of the citys gay bathhouses. Codenamed Operation Soap, 286 men were charged with the criminal offense of being found in a common bawdy house, 20 men faced the more serious charge of keeping a common bawdy house. Operation Soap was known for its scale, but also for its destruction and brutality. This dissertation focusses on the history of the Right to Privacy Committee (RTPC), a group formed in 1978 in response to Torontos first bathhouse raid. This study utilizes oral history from 25 interviews, the gay liberation news journal The Body Politic, as well as archival material from the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. The bathhouse raids are situated within the broader history of queer consciousness, resistance, and political organizing, both in Toronto and across North America. The 1969 amendments to the Canadian Criminal Code partially decriminalized certain sexual acts, provided they took place under a strict set of circumstances: namely, that only two people could be present. If more than two people were present, the space was deemed by police to be a public place and subject to the bawdy house law. Building on the work of queer theorists, this project argues that the ideal of private sexual monogamy, or mononormativity, was the primary point of conflict between law enforcement discourse of morality and the sexual practices performed within a bathhouse. This is a history of the RTPC and the various tactics they employed in resisting the police. The RTPC became best known for its various political actions, coordinating the successful defence of 90% of the men charged, and for raising $224,000 to subsidize the cost of their legal fees. However, the RTPC reflected some of the divisions and complexity of an increasingly diverse queer political community, including gay business owners, Marxists, feminists, and people of colour. The central theme of this project is that the RTPC was not a singular organization, it consisted of various resisters of social control who were influenced by their own identities and experiences.
Open Access
Exhalted Order: Muslim Princes and the British Empire 1874-1906
(2014-07-09) Radford, Kristopher Donald; Peers, Douglas
This dissertation charts the genealogy of a particularly British Indian form of colonial government called indirect rule. Indirect rule, which came to be deployed across several Muslim dominated states of Africa and Asia in the late Victorian period, was by that time a century old British colonial strategy. First employed by agents of the East India Company in the middle of the eighteenth century, this form of imperialism subsumed many of the states which comprised the Indian political landscape in the post-Mughal period. These so-called princely states were not conquered outright by the British, but rather came under their control though a range of technologies, from the deployment of powerful agents and coercive treaties, to the establishment of a discursive framework which conceived of these states as ‘oriental’ and hence requiring of a special form of government. Indirect rule, however, was never the most common form of administration in the British Empire. Even in India, direct rule, where precolonial social and political structures were replaced by new modes of government, was much more common. This work, therefore, explores why in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the architects of British rule in Malaya, Egypt, the Persian Gulf, Zanzibar, and Northern Nigeria all elected to impose variants of this unusual form of government invented in eighteenth-century India. It does so by examining the ideas, assumptions, and strategies of the officials who were chiefly responsible for the form of these colonial regimes through a variety of archival and other documentary evidence. In so doing this work seeks to demonstrate that British Indian ideas and technologies had a definitive impact on the development of the British Empire across Africa and Asia.
Open Access
"Family is Really All Over The Place:" Ethnic Identity Formation Within A Transnational Network
(2018-05-28) Liberatori, Abril Martina; Perin, Roberto
This dissertation explores the process of ethnic identity formation in immigrants from the Campania region of Italy who settled in Ontario (Canada) and Buenos Aires (Argentina) after the Second World War. It centres on the collection of twenty-five original testimonies from narrators from the Campania who travelled from Italy between 1949 and 1979. Testimonies are complemented by ethnic newspaper archives and a diverse collection of archival materials from Canada, Argentina, and Italy. Campani understood their ethnic identities not via national boundaries, nor by a hyphenated or binary relationship; they did so using a shared imagined space that formed part of a multi-directional and transnational network, a mental map that included nodal points across the globe. This project argues that the identity of Campani depended less on formalized ethnic associations and more on informal networks of family to develop a sense of identity. Focusing on this unorganized group offers an intriguing perspective on how immigrants develop ethnic identities in situations where regional ties or formalized institutions are not strong enough to adhere to as a viable source of ethnic identity. Women were a vital part of these transnational networks, and this dissertation explores how networks of transmission work within this category of analysis. Language, food, and music are some of the means of forging and affirming ethnic identity that operate within the transnational network. Hyphenated identities are unsatisfactory, since they rely on a linear connection between two places and obfuscate the existence of other nodal spaces. Instead, Campani turned to other identifiers for constancy. Discussions of identity centre on the family or use familial terms to describe that tension. Campani had multiple identifiers at their disposal, and they adopted them strategically to navigate the situation at hand. The dissertation complicates the presence of hybrid or hyphenated identities by considering the vast but understudied transnational network that provided Campani with a domain for ethnic identity formation. It explores immigration as a process of non-linear mobility that transcends borders by creating nodes of settlement and streaks of movement that together create a picture of how identity is defined.