Dominion of Race

How has race shaped Canada’s international encounters and its role in the world? How have the actions of politicians, diplomats, citizens, and nongovernmental organizations reflected and reinforced racial power structures in Canada? In this book, leading scholars grapple with these complex questions, destabilizing conventional understandings of Canada in the world.

Dominion of Race exposes how race-thinking has informed priorities and policies, positioned Canada in the international community, and contributed to a global order rooted in racial beliefs. While the contributors reconsider familiar topics, including the Paris Peace Conference and Canada’s involvement with the United Nations, they enlarge the scope of Canada’s international history by subject, geography, and methodology.

By demonstrating that race is a fundamental component of Canada and its international history, this important book calls for reengagement with the histories of those marginalized in, or excluded from, the historical record.

Laura Madokoro is an assistant professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. She is the author of Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War.

Francine McKenzie is a professor of history at the University of Western Ontario. She is the author of Redefining the Bonds of Commonwealth 1939–1948: The Politics of Preference and the co-editor of Parties Long Estranged: Canada and Australia in the Twentieth Century (with Margaret MacMillan) and A Global History of Trade and Conflict since 1500 (with Lucia Coppolaro). She is currently writing a book on postwar reconstruction after the Second World War.

David Meren is an associate professor in the Département d’histoire at the Université de Montréal. He is the author of With Friends Like These: Entangled Nationalisms and the Canada-Quebec-France Triangle, 1944–1970.

Contributors: Dan Gorman, Paula Hastings, P. Whitney Lackenbauer, Laura Madokoro, Francine McKenzie, David Meren, Sean Mills, John Price, Kevin A. Spooner, Ryan Touhey, David Webster, and Henry Yu

Dominion of Race is a bold and self conscious assault on the traditional notion of Canada’s international history as a nationalist story of inexorable progress down a liberating road from ‘‘colony to nation.’’