Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada

by Allan Greer

Traditional historical approaches to state formation dwell on legal and constitutional developments that theoretically subject government to the control of citizens. This collection of essays departs sharply from that traditional approach. Its authors focus on the practices - administrative and economic as well as legal - by which citizens came under the control of the state. Included are studies of the law of associations, the bureaucracy of public schooling, and the establishmnet of police forces. Other contributions focus on the railway construction boom, the revolution in government finances, the post-Rebellion transformations effected by the Lower Canadian Special Council, and the utilitarian inspiration of changes in imperial administration. One paper examines the entire process of state formation from the point of view of gender, while another discusses the isses raised from a Maritime perspective. The article offer, for all their diversity, a common chllaenge to what might be called the liberal myth of the liberal state. State formation, they suggest, was a powerful and wide-ranging shift that involved far more than a simple 'growth of government.' As against those who take at face value the nineteenth-century rhetoric of 'limited government' and laissez-faire, the contibutors point to the unprecedented expansion of state institutions and the increasing attempts at government supervision of civic life.

Genres: Canada

328 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Allan Greer is a professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Colonial North America at McGill University, Montréal.