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rfmcdonaldI've decided to go back to an old Tuesday night habit of posting DBWI reviews of books from alternate histories. Reactions, please.
***
I picked up this book, an Iroquoia State University book listed as required reading on some syllabuses I read online, in Cataraqui just before I finished my visit to Ontario and New York. I was familiar with the story of British Ontario from the Canadian perspective. What, I wondered, was the American perspective? It turns out that it was not very different from the Canadian perspective at all.
The textbooks I remember from Canadian history emphasize the extent to which the Loyalist settlement in what was then Upper Canada was transitory, the extent to which many of the settlers brought over under Britain were not Loyalists as such but rather Americans interested in settling a new frontier. That so few of the Loyalists accepted resettlement to Nova Scotia or the Ottawa Valley after 1815 has been seen as proof that the British identity proclaimed by so many locals on the eve of the Napoleonic Wars actually was not durable at all. Canadians are taught that redrawing the frontier between British North America and the United States of America, west of New England, to run along the 45th parallel established a durable frontier with little chance of spillage from one side over to the other.
This, it turns out, is almost exactly what Iroquoia Under Britain says. It's somewhat more generous, placing Ontario alongside rest of the Midwest as a space of mixed and debatable loyalties that could have gone either way. I suspect that this might be history written from the comfortable victor's perspective. Certainly visiting Toronto and Cataraqui I saw little enough sign of any British heritage, downtown street gridworks aside. The locals even talk with their own, non-Canadian, accent. Iroquoia is where its majority population wants it, and I cannot imagine any Canadian who would want to change this.
There are certainly uchronical possibilities here. United, American Iroquoia and Canadian Ontario have a combined population of nearly 13 million. It's unlikely that an *Upper Canada would approach this population, if traditional Canadian immigration restrictionism has anything to do with it, but even so an Upper Canada could be a force indeed inside Canada. It could plausibly challenge Laurentia for dominance in Canada, even, and undermine the whole French-dominant bilingualism of the country. In the United States, meanwhile, the changes could be more subtle. Iroquoia likely would not have become American if the Napoleonic Wars hadn't been taken over here so early, and if the Union had not needed compensation for the split of New England. Would the Civil War have been postponed?
***
I picked up this book, an Iroquoia State University book listed as required reading on some syllabuses I read online, in Cataraqui just before I finished my visit to Ontario and New York. I was familiar with the story of British Ontario from the Canadian perspective. What, I wondered, was the American perspective? It turns out that it was not very different from the Canadian perspective at all.
The textbooks I remember from Canadian history emphasize the extent to which the Loyalist settlement in what was then Upper Canada was transitory, the extent to which many of the settlers brought over under Britain were not Loyalists as such but rather Americans interested in settling a new frontier. That so few of the Loyalists accepted resettlement to Nova Scotia or the Ottawa Valley after 1815 has been seen as proof that the British identity proclaimed by so many locals on the eve of the Napoleonic Wars actually was not durable at all. Canadians are taught that redrawing the frontier between British North America and the United States of America, west of New England, to run along the 45th parallel established a durable frontier with little chance of spillage from one side over to the other.
This, it turns out, is almost exactly what Iroquoia Under Britain says. It's somewhat more generous, placing Ontario alongside rest of the Midwest as a space of mixed and debatable loyalties that could have gone either way. I suspect that this might be history written from the comfortable victor's perspective. Certainly visiting Toronto and Cataraqui I saw little enough sign of any British heritage, downtown street gridworks aside. The locals even talk with their own, non-Canadian, accent. Iroquoia is where its majority population wants it, and I cannot imagine any Canadian who would want to change this.
There are certainly uchronical possibilities here. United, American Iroquoia and Canadian Ontario have a combined population of nearly 13 million. It's unlikely that an *Upper Canada would approach this population, if traditional Canadian immigration restrictionism has anything to do with it, but even so an Upper Canada could be a force indeed inside Canada. It could plausibly challenge Laurentia for dominance in Canada, even, and undermine the whole French-dominant bilingualism of the country. In the United States, meanwhile, the changes could be more subtle. Iroquoia likely would not have become American if the Napoleonic Wars hadn't been taken over here so early, and if the Union had not needed compensation for the split of New England. Would the Civil War have been postponed?
