George Brown wrote through the night of June 30, 1867, composing 9,000 words for the front page of his newspaper, the Toronto Globe. “With the first dawn of this gladsome summer morn, we hail the birthday of a new nationality,” he wrote. “A united British America . . . takes its place among the nations of the world.” Elsewhere, however, in this new nation, life continued much as usual, with little to distinguish the end of June from the beginning of July. British North America was on one side of the arbitrary divide, Canada on the other—at least on paper. But determining just what was meant by Canada took considerably longer, and is the topic explored in this important book by Peter Price.

Focusing not on the Confederation debates or the political machinations in the decades following the 1867 realignment but on the more accessible and broad-ranging discussions that occurred in the pages of the magazines of the late nineteenth century, Questions of Order considers the way people understood the new political arrangements. In four provocative chapters focusing on nationality, constitutions, citizenship and loyalty, Price takes us into the heart of the riddle of Confederation as people debated and puzzled and polished the meanings that would come to explain Canada by the twentieth century. Price joins scholars such as Jonathan Gienapp in the United States and Helen Irving in Australia in offering a new approach to the idea of nations and constitutions, examining what has generally been regarded as purely legal or political arrangements in much more human terms, appreciating the complex process of negotiating meaning.

In peeling back the layers of meaning that nineteenth-century commentators gave to the various elements of this new nation, Price offers us an important new way of understanding Confederation. Removed from the legislatures and courtrooms, Confederation comes to be something more than just a statement of relationship to Britain or a delineation of jurisdiction between provinces and the federal government. It becomes a lived experience of sorts. Uncovering the public meaning of Confederation—the way people understand their relationship to the state, as well as to others within that association—is a bit of a revelation for nations forged in legislatures rather than on battlefields. But as Price shows, nineteenth-century efforts to understand Confederation were far more common than the subsequent reification of July 1, 1867, would suggest. Those debates about nationality or citizenship or loyalty were also more inclusive than the so-called Confederation debates that preceded 1867.

Each element of Price's analysis is built upon a thorough reading of a broad contemporary literature, a careful consideration of the wider intellectual environment within which these questions were being mooted, and an attention to alternative interpretations. Beginning with the “Canada question”—What is a nation if it is built on something other than language or ethnicity?—Price demonstrates that older racially based senses of nation continued to coexist with the evolving legislatively constructed and politically demarcated idea of nationality. This tussling with different conceptions of nation—and in later chapters, with different constitutional origin stories or different definitions of citizenship or loyalty—drives Price's argument about the “making” of modern Canada. Modernity emerges from the debate. It is contested and fractured, achieved not through the fiat of July 1, 1867, but through a public negotiation of meaning in the pages of the periodical literature.

The evidence that Price spreads before us is comprehensive insofar as it provides a survey of material that would appeal to well-informed, educated readers in nineteenth-century Canada. The argument he offers is mainly about political ideas, not about political actions. Price convincingly demonstrates that ideas of belonging and identity and nationhood were frequent topics of conversation far beyond the legislatures, engrossing the public in ways that have been overlooked by other scholars of Confederation-era Canada. That means we hear quite a bit from people like Goldwin Smith and William Dawson LeSueur, who are hardly unfamiliar but who are cast here as characters involved in sorting through political relationships and “questions of order” in this new nation. But there are lots of other commentators in the pages of these magazines—ministers and schoolteachers and lower-level civil servants—and together they demonstrate how compelling the issues were to nineteenth-century readers.

This is not a study of identity forged on the streets. This is not about the experience of Confederation, but about the idea of Confederation—an idea that animated conversations far outside the usual halls of power but not one that drove people to take up either arms or pickets. Price does an exceptional job of illustrating the fluidity of that meaning and of disrupting the sense that Confederation was a “stable moment” that followed “a linear path of political development over time.” (161–62). In doing so, he adds to a growing literature that considers the public understanding of politics, the mutability of moments that we have used as markers or turning points, and the value of appreciating the long process of giving meaning to the legal and constitutional language of our rules-based systems of governance.