Dear Reader,
The 19th century is the century that made the Americas. Columbus may have arrived in the 15th century, and the other Europeans finally established permanent footholds in the 17th century, but it is the 19th century that made the Americas. During that century, most of the countries that make up the Western Hemisphere became either independent or gained practical autonomy. But only the United States became a world power. However, there was another de facto superpower for most of the century: Canada.
After the Napoleonic Wars weakened Spain and Portugal, the Latin American states broke free. Brazil declared independence under its own member of the Portuguese royal family. Spain lost basically everything except Cuba and Puerto Rico to creole rebels, and the Americans, led by President James Monroe, snatched Florida. The USA was afraid of Europeans reestablishing themselves, and Monroe issued his doctrine against them doing such a thing. America had no power to back it up; the Monroe Doctrine was a desperate diplomatic move—except for the British Empire. The mother country, rejected by America in 1776 and fought again in 1812, was on board with the plan. The British were just fine with the Americans thinking they were accomplishing something. Who cares about credit when you get the spoils?
Something most American textbooks leave out of their interpretations of the post-War of 1812 Era of Good Feelings is this: with Spain and Portugal out, and Louisiana lost to France, Britain achieved hegemony over the Americas. The position of dominance lost in 1783 was almost reversed by the verdict of the Napoleonic Wars. The British Empire was the last of the old colonial powers left standing, and the heart of the British Empire in the Americas was the Canadian colonies—the Upper and the Lower. As America discovered in 1812, any fight with Canada was a fight with the British Empire.
Consequently, de facto, Canada was a great power as an critical part of the British Empire. Originally the Province of Quebec after the French and Indian War, in the 1790s it was then split into Upper Canada, populated with refugee American loyalists, and Lower Canada—largely, but not exclusively, the home of the former colonists of France. For almost three generations, they grew side by side until in 1841 they were partially reunited into the Province of Canada, and Newfoundland, which was the northernmost part of old Lower Canada. Slowly, “Canada” was taking shape—gaining political power and responsible British-style government while remaining in the Empire.
It was almost an alternative universe: Canada as an alternative to the United States and also an echo of what the American Founders had wanted back in 1775—autonomy from Westminster, but under the Crown. Canada is what America would have looked like if Parliament had common sense in 1774. But that is what gave the Canadian founding fathers the advantage; Westminster was frightened of repeating the mistakes of the 1770s, and Canadian rebellions in the later 1830s demonstrated the reality of the threat.
British colonies along the Atlantic coast continued to grow, and agitation was made for uniting them all to strengthen the Empire’s position in North America. The British North America Act of 1867 created the government of Canada that has evolved into the union of provinces we know today. From 1867 to 1949—excepting the creation of Nunavut—Canadian provinces expanded from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This relative political stability set Canada apart from their neighbors to the south, especially the Latin American states. The stable and steady evolution of the Canadian union fufillied the ambitions of its founders that under the Crown they would enjoy laws promoting the “Peace, Order, and good Government of Canada.”
Because of the success of the British Empire in Canada, the USA, even as it rose to become a world power, had to keep watch on the old mother country. But also, because of the existience of Canada, Bermuda, and the British colonies in the Caribbean, when the UK went to war in 1914, the Western Hemisphere was brought into the conflict. Too often we think of the Great War as a European problem until 1917, when the USA and Brazil declared war on Germany—but forgetting the Canadians means misremembering how geopolitics functioned during the Pax Britannica. Canada was a source of British power; it made Britain a North American power, and the Empire included Canada in the structures of a global superpower. However, the consequences of the Great War would reshape the Americas, highlighting the relative weakness of the Latin American states and reshaping Canada’s relationship with the Empire.
My first visit to Canada took place in the middle of the centennial remembrances of the Great War. It brought home to me that the USA’s own entry into the war and how the war impacted the Altantic world is incomplete unless we reckon with the Canadian experience. In future posts I will return to the importance of Canada’s alternative path of development to inter-American relations.