J.L. Granatstein. The Ottawa Men: The Civil Service Mandarins, 1935-1957. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Granatstein’s The Ottawa Men is at once a history of the emergence of the modern professional civil service in Canada under the long rule of the King government (and most especially in the area of foreign policy), and of the emergence of the ideal of that service as a non-partisan, politically neutral, and circumspect source of advice and information for the government in power. They were, Granatstein argues, “an extraordinary group of civil servants who collectively had great power in Ottawa from the Depression through to the late 1950s.”

They were “public servants in the best sense of that term, men who changed the way government operated and whose overall influence and impact were positive in the extreme” (xi). Granatstein’s book should be read as a significant contribution to the debates about the role of patronage in the Canadian state and about the role of Canadian foreign policy in the early Cold War. Although a masterful work for its time, its ahistorical preoccupations with the ideal civil servant and its failure to move beyond the twin spheres of foreign policy and Liberal politics limit the book’s significance beyond those debates.

Uses and Abuses of the Liberal Order Framework

The first issue of this year's Canadian Historical Review opens with an intriguing essay by Keith Walden of Trent University, ostensibly viewing turn-of-the-century tea parties in Toronto through the lens of Ian McKay's popular liberal order framework. Tea parties, Walden argues, were among the many sites at which the liberal individual was produced, urban spaces were reconfigured in the service of that individual. I liked the article and I liked the premise -- which is partially why I was ultimately left a little unsatisfied.

Perhaps the greatest strength of this article is its careful exploration of the English-Canadian urban tea party. These events were no mere leisurely activities, Walden shows: they were extremely stressful labours, for the guests but especially for the hosts. Who to invite -- and in what order? What musicians should come -- and where should they be positioned? What sort of food and drink should be prepared, and how should it be served? Who should be greeted, and who ignored? What time should the party be held at? Who should receive invitations -- and what stock of paper should be used? Should men be invited? Society columns proliferated in the newspapers, offering answers to all of these questions and more.

Nostalgic Book Review: Jennifer Brown's Strangers in Blood (1985)

Jennifer S.H. Brown's Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country is an analysis of marital relationships and status of children in “Indian country” during the 18th and 19th centuries – that is, of the partnerships entered into by Hudson Bay Company and North West Company traders and of the children that often resulted.

Brown is actually attempting to accomplish several tasks in this volume: a comparative history of the Hudson Bay- and Montreal-based fur trades, an extension of Louis Hartz’s theory of colonial fragments to fur trade society, and, finally, the titular claim that fur traders’ families occupied a socially and legally uncertain and shifting grey area often referred to in court documents as “strangers in blood.” These processes are then subdivided by trade and period: French (then French-Scottish) and British trade prior to the 1821 merger, and the Victorian and (in fur trade terms) Simpsonian period of the following decades. Brown also divides her analysis between the marital relationships themselves (the first two-thirds of the book) and the fur trade children (the final two chapters). Her work relies solely on written correspondence, which she acknowledges skews the analysis in particular directions (commissioned officers, favoured sons, etc.).