Canada and the British Empire marks another valuable contribution to the Companion Series of volumes in Oxford's histories of the British Empire. This particular collection of essays has developed out of the editor Phillip Buckner's twofold concern: (1) that historians of the British Empire have overlooked Canada, both in its colonial manifestations and as a dominion; (2) that Canadian historians have tended to overlook or discount the importance of imperial ties (12–15). To be sure, Canadian historiography over the past thirty years cannot be accused of being parochial or narrowly conceived; Canadian historians have participated in international debates over questions of class, gender, and ethnicity (to name but a few). Nevertheless, the nation-state, regional, provincial, or local frameworks have delineated much of this scholarship; broader colonial or imperial links have tended to be downplayed or ignored.

The essays in this collection demonstrate both the multiple links that existed between the North American colonies and the Dominion of Canada and the increasing interest of Canadian historians in probing them; in some cases doing so by asking questions shaped by scholarship in the imperial historiography of the last two decades. Buckner has assembled a group of sophisticated and well-regarded historians who illuminate the multiple linkages of colony, dominion, and empire in both the “grand sweep” of things and from more finely grained perspectives. Much of the collection explores empire's reach from particular historical vantage points and chronologies. John G. Reid and Elizabeth Mancke examine the “global processes” and “continental strategies” that shaped the emergence of British North America up to 1763, while J. M Bumsted, Buckner, and John Herd Thompson point to the various political and economic manifestations of empire within British North America and the dominion, starting in 1783 and ending in 1982. Other chapters tackle more discrete themes, which in some cases have to do with the historical particularities of the Canadian context: James K. Hillier's analysis of the particular position of Newfoundland in the empire from 1869 to 1949; the two chapters, written by, respectively, Elizabeth Jane Errington and Marjory Harper, on British migration from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries; and Colin M. Coates's discussion of French-Canadian ambivalence to the British Empire. Douglas McCalla's study of colonial and national economic developments and Philip Girard's work on law and justice speak primarily to the specificities of Canada's link to empire; they also, though, would have meaning for other colonial and imperial locations. Finally, Sarah Carter's discussion of aboriginal peoples’ relationship to empire and Adele Perry's examination of women and gender are more self-consciously shaped by contexts and historiographies both Canadian and international.

The collection's wide range and the number of essays that detail the multiple levels on which “empire mattered” for Canadians makes this a particularly valuable collection for undergraduate teaching (although I would note that the present lack of a more affordable paperback edition will hamper its usefulness). The contributors are sensitive to the various nuances and complicated nature of imperial ties, ones shaped by the particulars of Canadian histories. Reid's and Mancke's thoughtful essay is a particularly illuminating example of the interplay of both local events and structures and global forces. Moreover, as Errington and McCalla point out, after 1783 the imperial ties of British North America and Canada continued to be interwoven with links south of the Canadian border. McCalla, for example, wryly notes that the number of American businessmen who perished on the Titanic had invested in Canada but also were tied to London: “That the Titanic's passengers included an Astor, a Gugenheim, a Strauss, and a Widener illustrates the impossibility of making the economic history of British investment in Canada in this period into a purely imperial story” (256).

Any collection that takes as its purview four hundred years, multiple colonial locations and affiliations, and far-flung geography—all this treated in a relatively short number of pages—is bound to have some gaps. Harper's piece, for example, does not consider the significance of the internal migration, within Canada, of those who considered themselves “British” as an important means of spreading imperial sentiments and practices within the dominion. Although some chapters—those by Coates and Carter, most obviously, but also Perry's and Errington’s—are attentive to the perspectives of those non-British members of both colony and dominion, reading the collection in its entirety leaves one with a sense of a more seamless or unproblematic acceptance of empire than Canadian (and other) historiographies would suggest. Furthermore, devoting a number of chapters to chronologies of empire's manifestations leads to a degree of repetition, particularly vis-à-vis those that deal with migration and the economy, repetition that comes at the expense of other, equally important ways of conceiving of imperial ties. While topics such as religion, culture, and education are not ignored, nevertheless they are subsumed within so-called “larger” narratives: a pity, since these topics have been important sites of knowledge of and affect for empire (a comparative volume in this series, Australia's Empire, devotes considerable attention to them). Moreover, with a few notable exceptions, the majority of these historians are self-identified scholars of Canada, less so of the British Empire; thus, in many cases we are left without much understanding of how “Canada,” both discursively and in practice, was linked to other imperial projects. But as Buckner argues, other colonial and imperial events and processes had meaning and weight in both British North America and the dominion (75); I would add, though, that this is a line of research yet to be pursued in any great depth. The lines of imperial affiliation considered in this collection tend to stretch back and forth across the Atlantic; however, building on this book's arguments, I would suggest that the next step is to conceive of these British colonies and the Dominion of Canada as part of wider transimperial and transnational networks.