Colonialism, capitalism, and Canada, 1500-2025: How the past is before us

 

An excerpt from Bryan D. Palmer’s new book, to be published October 1 by Lorimer

Bryan D. Palmer, a long-time contributor to Canadian Dimension, and one of Canada’s leading historians of labour and the left, has written a bold, wide-ranging interpretation of the country’s history. In two volumes to be published in October 2024 and May 2025—Colonialism and Capitalism: Canada’s Origins, 1500-1890 and Capitalism and Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada, 1890-2025—Palmer places the accent on Canada’s entwined colonial and capitalist development. These two structures of determination are not separable, he argues, but intricately embedded in one another, and have been for centuries.

This challenging and illuminating account is truly a new history for the twenty-first century, one that lays out how the country’s past lies before us, demanding redress. The two books that comprise this retelling of Canada’s rise from a colony to a nation that has routinely and relentlessly colonized, should and will be widely read by all concerned with basic issues of social justice.

Based on an impressive command of scholarly literature as well as a familiarity with activist writing, Palmer’s reassessment of the making of Canada is written with panache and a prose as accessible as it is engaging, Old and tired mythologies of Canada as a “peaceable kingdom” are laid to waste, as are misrepresentations of the acquiescence of the oppressed and exploited. Palmer highlights how colonialism and capitalism, as the two overarching influences in the development of Canada as a nation state, have given rise to resistance. The struggles of Indigenous peoples and many others, including the Québécois and the working class, are never sidelined in this important and timely study.

A master storyteller who combines meticulous scholarship with engagement with the political issues of our times and their deep roots in the history of Canada, Palmer explores the many dimensions of conquest and inequality, poverty and plunder, that are the sordid underside of Canadian nation building and state formation and the individual riches and corporate fortunes accruing from the profit system.  (more...)

Colonialism, capitalism, and Canada, 1500-2025: How the past is before us