The History of British Canada

The history of British Canada begins with the British conquest of New France in 1759–1760 and extends through the achievement of Canadian Confederation in 1867 to the full constitutional independence of 1982. The story involves the integration of French and British colonial traditions, the gradual achievement of responsible government, the building of a continental nation, and the development of one of the most distinctive societies in the contemporary era. The British North America Act of 1867 created the Dominion of Canada as a federation of four provinces, and the Canada Act of 1982 patriated the Canadian constitution and entrenched the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

What makes Canadian history distinct from American history is, in the judgment of the historian Christopher Moore, Three Weeks in Quebec City (2021), “the fact that the British took seriously their responsibility to the French.” That decision, made under pressure of the American war in 1774 and 1791, set the conditions for a different kind of colony — one in which the Indigenous nations, the French, and the British were obliged to find ways of living together that the Americans had not.

The Conquest of New France

The Seven Years’ War of 1756–1763 was the decisive event in the British conquest of Canada. The British campaigns of 1759, led by General James Wolfe, culminated in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham on 13 September 1759, in which the British defeated the French under the Marquis de Montcalm and captured Quebec; both Wolfe and Montcalm were killed in the battle. The subsequent capitulation of Montreal in September 1760 brought the rest of New France under British control, and the 1763 Treaty of Paris confirmed the cession of Canada, Cape Breton, and the territory east of the Mississippi to Britain.

The population of the new British province of Quebec, of whom the great majority were French-speaking and Catholic, was about 70,000 in 1763. As the historian J. M. S. Careless showed in his Canada: A Story of Challenge (1963), the British had captured a country, not a colony; the inherited population, the seigneurial system, the Catholic Church, and the French civil code had to be accommodated, and the accommodation was the founding compromise of British Canada.

The Quebec Act of 1774 and the Integration of French Canada

The integration of French Canada into the British Empire was a major political and constitutional challenge. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 had established a system of British law and government for the new province, but the result was a period of uncertainty. The Quebec Act of 1774, passed by the British Parliament under the ministry of Lord North, addressed the problem by recognising the rights of French Canadians to practise their Catholic religion, to use French civil law, and to be governed by an appointed council rather than an elected assembly. English criminal law was retained, and the boundaries of the province were extended south to the Ohio River, a provision that infuriated the American colonies and contributed to the list of “Intolerable Acts” that helped to precipitate the American Revolution. A related article, Quebec Act and Constitutional Act examines this legislation in detail.

The Quebec Act was, in the judgment of the historian Ged Martin, “the first deliberate attempt by the British to govern a colony by a constitution imposed by Parliament.” The American colonies were to object precisely to that principle; the French Canadians were to accept it as the price of their survival.

The Constitutional Act of 1791 and the War of 1812

The Constitutional Act of 1791 divided the province of Quebec into Upper Canada (predominantly English-speaking, in present-day Ontario) and Lower Canada (predominantly French-speaking, in present-day Quebec). The act established representative government in the two provinces, with elected assemblies, but real power remained in the hands of the governor and the appointed legislative and executive councils. The War of 1812 between Britain and the United States, fought from June 1812 to February 1815, produced a wave of British and Canadian patriotism and reinforced the political distinctiveness of Canada. The war ended in a draw, with the boundary of the United States and Canada confirmed at the Great Lakes and the Columbia River established as the southern boundary of British claims in the Pacific Northwest.

The Durham Report and Responsible Government

The 1837–1838 rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada, led by William Lyon Mackenzie in Upper Canada and Louis-Joseph Papineau in Lower Canada, prompted the British government to dispatch Lord Durham as Governor-General and High Commissioner. The Durham Report of 1839 recommended the union of Upper and Lower Canada, the establishment of responsible government (the principle that the executive should be responsible to the elected assembly), and the gradual assimilation of French Canadians into English-speaking culture. The recommendations on union and responsible government were accepted; the recommendation on assimilation was not. The achievement of responsible government in the 1840s marked a pivotal moment in the history of British Canada and laid the political foundations for Confederation. Durham’s famous dismissal of the French Canadians as “a people with no literature and no history” was, in retrospect, the more lasting offence: the recommendation of assimilation was the one the French refused to forget.

Confederation and the British North America Act

By the 1860s, the political integration of the British North American colonies was being driven by several factors: the threat of American expansionism in the wake of the Civil War, the desire for economic union, and the completion of the inter-colonial railway. The Charlottetown Conference of September 1864 and the Quebec Conference of October 1864 set out the terms of a federal union, and the British North America Act of 1867, passed by the British Parliament, created the Dominion of Canada as a federation of four provinces — Canada West (formerly Upper Canada), Canada East (formerly Lower Canada), Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. Sir John A. Macdonald became the first prime minister, and the new dominion was given a constitution modelled on the British parliamentary system. Macdonald was, in the judgment of his biographer Donald Creighton, “the man who made Canada by making it impossible for Canada not to be made.”

The Expansion of Canada

The western provinces of Canada were added to the Dominion over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The purchase of Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1870, followed by the admission of Manitoba as a province, marked the first major step in the westward expansion of the new state. British Columbia joined the Dominion in 1871, partly in response to the prospect of a transcontinental railway; Prince Edward Island joined in 1873; and the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were carved from the Northwest Territories in 1905. The construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, completed in 1885, was a major factor in the integration of the western provinces, although the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the west, including the resistance led by Louis Riel, was a dark chapter in the history of Canadian state formation.

Canada as a Dominion and Beyond

The Statute of Westminster of 1931 recognised Canada as an autonomous dominion, with full power to make its own laws. The Canada Act of 1982, passed by the British Parliament at the request of the Canadian government, gave Canada full constitutional independence, including the power to amend its own constitution, and entrenched the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The principal unresolved question in the history of British Canada has been the relationship between the French-speaking province of Quebec and the rest of the country. The Quiet Revolution of the 1960s transformed Quebec society and politics; two referendums on the sovereignty of Quebec, in 1980 and 1995, were narrowly lost. Pierre Trudeau’s 1980s constitutional project was, in the judgment of the historian Philip Resnick, “the first time that the Canadian state had tried to make itself into a nation in its own right.” The verdict of 1995 — the 50.58 percent no vote — was close enough that the question has not gone away.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of British Canada has been transformed. The older imperial school — represented by George Monro Grant and the early twentieth-century loyalist historians — treated the British period as a foundation story. The Laurentian school led by Donald Creighton, the revisionist school led by J. M. S. Careless, and the post-revisionist work of Christopher Moore, Ged Martin, and the contributors to the Oxford Handbook of Canadian History, have produced a more nuanced picture, in which the British period is read as a contested terrain. The current debate, exemplified in the recent work of Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel, is over how far Canadian history can be told as a story of the British Empire and how far it should be read as a distinct North American narrative.

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