Foreign borrowing provided the foundation for the Canadian economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For an economist, the rationale for that borrowing is straightforward: the economy was resource-rich and capital-poor, so it was cost-effective to borrow from Great Britain. This book accepts the centrality of public debt in creating “Canada” but argues that the goal of the borrowing was to alienate Indigenous land and that it was only possible because the loans were secured by the taking of Indigenous land. This claim is then nested in a broader argument that Canada’s public debt enabled a transition from British imperialism to Canadian imperialism.

The author’s thesis is unambiguous: public debt was “a set of practices and policies whose purpose was to capture the territories of Indigenous nations to generate market value for a select few and to produce a white settler state” (p. 174). The argument begins with a discussion of the origins of the London Stock Exchange followed by case studies of the role of public debt in nineteenth-century Ontario (Upper Canada) and Prince Edward Island (PEI), and in underpinning Confederation. Each case study employs thorough historical research but in each case the connection between the debt and the taking of Indigenous land remains incomplete.

Tozer documents how in Upper Canada the government granted the (private) Welland Canal Company the right to expropriate Indigenous land and also how the government invested Indigenous funds held in trust in that unprofitable venture. These are significant injustices, but this does not mean that the Upper Canadian government borrowed with the goal of alienating Indigenous land. Similarly, in PEI, Tozer describes the government’s borrowing to buy land from British absentee landlords to resell it to settlers, as an arrangement to “take out a public debt to appropriate Mi’kmaq territory” (p. 126); yet the land had been appropriated earlier by British and French administrations. Again, with respect to Rupert’s Land, Tozer describes the sale of Rupert’s Land (indirectly) to the new Canadian state and the borrowing to finance a national railroad. Borrowing was indeed essential for building the railroad that went through traditional Indigenous lands. But there is no discussion of the extent to which the borrowed funds went to fund payments required under the numbered treaties by which Indigenous nations surrendered their lands. (Notably treaties with Indigenous nations, with the exception of the eighteenth-century Peace and Friendship Treaties, are not mentioned in the Index and are not discussed in the book.)

Tozer’s goal was not to “rehash the well-researched land appropriation model of eighteenth and nineteenth-century settler colonialism” but to understand the connection between public debt and dispossession (p. 56). It would have strengthened our understanding of that connection if the channels had been made more explicit. In the nineteenth century, much undeveloped land was given away (by governments to settlers), so land sales would not be expected to generate loan repayments; rather, it was the taxation of economic activity of those settlers that would provide the funds.

A detailed study of the interface between government finance and the use of Indigenous monies held in trust by the Canadian government is long overdue, and the research documented in this book provides a significant step in addressing those issues and of the role of Indigenous land in the process of Canadian economic development.