Oxford University Press The Formal and Informal Politics of British Rule In Post-Conquest Quebec, 1760-1837: A Northern Bastille

Review There is much to be praised in this book ... Nancy Christie has done yeoman service in rewriting and re-energising the story of early British rule in Québec. ― Todd Webb, British Journal of Canadian StudiesRecommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty. ― B. M. Gough, CHOICE Product Description Nancy Christie innovatively and significantly transforms the writing of Quebec history between 1763 and 1837 by locating Quebec within new British practices of imperial governance asserted in the wake of the Seven Years War. Breaking with the conventional master-narrative of the era as one of gradual integration between French- and English-speaking communities, accompanied by incremental political and social liberalization, Nancy Christie presents the six decades following the Conquest as a period of assertive British strategies for assimilating Quebec's French and Catholic majority, and refurbished authoritarianism deployed to arrest the spread of revolution in the Atlantic world. Brilliantly advanced, this new narrative of post-Conquest Quebec builds upon entirely new research meticulously gleaned from over 20,000 cases from the criminal and civil judicial archives and a sustained examination of both official and unofficial political and social discourses. This study charts both the British practices of colonial rule, which sought the assimilation of non-British 'others' through both formal modes of law and governance, and the consumption of British manufactured goods, and the contestation of these through the daily resistance of ordinary men and women. In so doing, Christie identifies Quebec as a case study with which to open a new trajectory in the wider study of the British Empire. Her striking conclusion urges a shift in historical focus from the interaction between European colonizers and racialized others, to the centrality of practices of rule designed to govern European subaltern peoples. About the Author Nancy Christie was a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Sydney where she received her PhD in 1987. She has taught at various universities in Canada, including the University of Manitoba, the University of Winnipeg, Queen's University, McGill-University, Trent University, and the University of Western Ontario. She has written many books and has been awarded two national book awards for her scholarship which has ranged over two centuries and covered a diverse range of themes, all of which has sought to place the history of Canada in a global perspective.