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Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada (English and French Edition) - Hardcover
Synopsis
Traditional historical approaches to state formation dwell on legal and constitutional developments that theoretically subject government to the control of citizens. This collection of essays departs sharply from that traditional approach. Its authors focus on the practices - administrative and economic as well as legal - by which citizens came under the control of the state.
Included are studies of the law of associations, the bureaucracy of public schooling, and the establishmnet of police forces. Other contributions focus on the railway construction boom, the revolution in government finances, the post-Rebellion transformations effected by the Lower Canadian Special Council, and the utilitarian inspiration of changes in imperial administration. One paper examines the entire process of state formation from the point of view of gender, while another discusses the isses raised from a Maritime perspective.
The article offer, for all their diversity, a common chllaenge to what might be called the liberal myth of the liberal state. State formation, they suggest, was a powerful and wide-ranging shift that involved far more than a simple 'growth of government.' As against those who take at face value the nineteenth-century rhetoric of 'limited government' and laissez-faire, the contibutors point to the unprecedented expansion of state institutions and the increasing attempts at government supervision of civic life.
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About the Author
Ian Radforth is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.
From the Inside Flap
'These coherent, lucid and tightly organized essays offer a new and valuable perspective on the development of Canada and its institutions of government.'
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