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Distributed for University of British Columbia Press

Fighting with the Empire

Canada, Britain, and Global Conflict, 1867–1947

Canadians often characterize their military history as a march toward nationhood, but in the first eighty years of Confederation they were fighting for the British Empire. War forced Canadians to re-examine their relationship to Britain and to one another. As French Canadians, Indigenous peoples, and those with roots in continental Europe and beyond mobilized for war, their participation challenged the imagined homogeneity of Canada as a British nation. Fighting with the Empire examines the paradox of a national contribution to an imperial war effort, finding middle ground between affirming the emergence of a nation through warfare and equating Canadian nationalism with British imperialism.

Table of Contents

Introduction / Steve Marti and William John Pratt

Part 1: Mobility and Mobilization

1 Fathers and Sons of Empire: Domesticity, Empire, and Canadian Participation in the Anglo-Boer War / Amy Shaw

2 Daughter in My Mother’s House, but Mistress in My Own: Questioning Canada’s Imperial Relationship through Patriotic Work, 1914–18 / Steve Marti

3 Postal Censorship and Canadian Identity in the Second World War / William John Pratt

Part 2: Persons and Power

4 Guardians of Empire? Imperial Officers in Canada, 1874–1914 / Eirik Brazier

5 Francophone-Anglophone Accommodation in Practice: Liberal Foreign Policy and National Unity between the Wars / Robert J. Talbot

6 Claiming Canada’s King and Queen: Canadians and the 1939 Royal Tour / Claire L. Halstead

Part 3: Hardly British

7 For King or Country? Quebec, the Empire, and the First World War / Geoff Keelan

8 Anti-fascist Strikes and the Patriotic Shield? Canadian Workers and the Employment of “Enemy Aliens” in the Second World War / Mikhail Bjorge

9 First Nations and the British Connection during the Second World War / R. Scott Sheffield

Conclusion / Steve Marti

Selected Bibliography; Index

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