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Journal of the Canadian Historical AssociationRevue de la Société historique du Canada
Presidential Address: Whatever happened to the BritishEmpire?Phillip Buckner
Volume 4, Number 1, 1993
URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/031054arDOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/031054ar
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Publisher(s)The Canadian Historical Association/La Société historique du Canada
ISSN0847-4478 (print)1712-6274 (digital)
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Cite this articleBuckner, P. (1993). Presidential Address: Whatever happened to the BritishEmpire? Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Sociétéhistorique du Canada, 4 (1), 3–32. https://doi.org/10.7202/031054ar
Article abstractSince the 1960s historians of the second British Empire have been seeking toredefine their field in ways that would give it continuing relevance.Unfortunately, in the process, they have lost sight of one of the most importantcomponents of the nineteenth-century empire. Even the most promising of thenew approaches — the effort to reintegrate imperial history with domesticBritish history — is flawed by the failure to recognize, as J.C.A. Pocock hasinsisted, that Greater Britain included not only the British Isles but also theBritish colonies of settlement. Because historians of the second British Empireno longer have much interest in colonization, they have glossed over thedifferences between the colonies formed in the first wave of Europeanexpansion prior to 1783 and those formed during the much larger second wavethat commenced in 1815 and they have underestimated the long-termsignificance of those colonies in helping to shape the sense of identity held bythe British at home. But historians of the colonies of settlement must also takesome of the responsibility for this myopia because they have lost sight of thesignificance of the empire to those Britons who established themselves abroadin the nineteenth century. In fact, Canadian historians have locked themselvesinto a teleological framework which is obsessed with the evolution of Canadianautonomy and the construction of a Canadian national identity and thusdownplayed the significance of the imperial experience in shaping the identityof nineteenth-century British Canadians. It is time now not only to place thenineteenth-century colonies of settlement back on the agenda of imperialhistorians but also to put the imperial experience back where it belongs, at thecentre of nineteenth-century Canadian history.