From the 17th to the 20th centuries was an imperial age for leading European countries. They explored, traded, colonized and built empires around the world. Then they gave them up, returning their ill-gotten lands to the locals or bequeathing them to settlers. All but two.
Russia and the United States incorporated their conquests into their nations. And whereas the other imperialists abandoned the imperial urge, these two cling to manifest destiny, their god-given right to expand their territories.
They were long an imperial pair, one steadily expanding west, the other east, encountering and overcoming nomadic or feudal societies and incorporating their lands into the state.
Russia, cleaving to the memory of Peter the Great, insists on regaining lost territory, currently by exercising brute force in Ukraine. The U.S. has seen its imperial ambition suddenly reawakened by its current president, threatening annexation of Panama, Greenland and our very own Canada, although not yet at least putting words into action.
I once posted how when Donald Trump was first elected I expected he would do some damage, however I never imagined he could threaten American democracy.
I was forgetting my history. As he began to undermine one democratic institution after another—the press, the courts, the military, even elections—my memory stirred. It reminded me how in America between the wars, fascism, indeed Nazism, was alive and well. In 1939, the German American Bund held a rally of 20,000 in New York’s Madison Square Garden where they booed President Roosevelt and chanted “Heil Hitler.” Prominent Americans such as the radio priest Father Coughlin, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and industrialist Henry Ford, praised the Third Reich. And then there was the Ku Klux Klan—on August 8, 1925, 50,000 Klansmen marched through Washington. Trump was reviving America’s intrinsic fascism. And now in his new term he’s reviving America’s intrinsic imperialism.
And that imperialism has long been directed at us, as is thoroughly narrated in an article in the recent issue of Canada’s History appropriately titled “Friend or Foe.” The article points out that covetous eyes were looking north from long before the English American colonies became the US of A and the French colonies to the north became Canada.
The colonies were at war as England and France were at war. The first recorded hostility between them occurred in 1613 when Virginia colonists captured a group of French attempting to settle in Maine. The Virginians magnanimously let the settlers go, after warning them that the East Coast belonged to the English.
In 1629, British privateers captured Quebec City and its founder Samuel de Champlain. King Charles I gave it back in exchange for the second half of a dowry the French King Louis XIII had promised when Charles wed his sister.
English colonists, tired of raids on frontier settlements in New York and Massachusetts by the French and their First Nations allies, made assaults on French colonies in 1690 and 1711 with limited success. In 1745 however they captured Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, a prize indeed that Britain handed back to France in a 1748 peace treaty.
The imperial struggle culminated in the Seven Years’ War during which British-colonial forces captured Quebec City at the famous Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759 and Montreal the following year. The Treaty of Pairs followed in 1763 and France abandoned Canada, “a few acres of snow.”
This brought no pleasure to the American colonies. The conquered French territory would retain its borders and the people their religion and their laws. That the religion was Catholicism was particularly offensive and the Americans could not understand, then as now, why these people wouldn’t want to adopt their way of doing things.
To add insult to injury, the British made it clear that the American colonies were to be restricted to lands east of the Appalachians. Land to the west belonged to the indigenous people and that was to be respected. The rich lands of the Ohio river valley were to be denied to the colonist land speculators. This became one of the causes of the American Revolutionary War. The Americans were empire builders from the beginning.
They invaded Canada in 1775, future founding father John Adams declaring “The unanimous voice of the continent is Canada must be ours, Quebec must be taken.” It wasn’t. Poor intelligence, lack of funds, food and equipment, opposition of the French-Canadian clergy, and an outbreak of smallpox doomed the invasion.
The war of 1812 was up next with more invasions. Whether these were an attempt to annex Canada or simply to stop Britain from interfering with American ships is debatable. In any case the British Army, Canadian regulars and militia, and First Nations warriors repulsed the Yankee invaders.
In 1845, the border on the west coast was up for negotiation. The Americans talked about manifest destiny and pushing the border north but were too busy stealing Texas and California to press the issue. They were content to negotiate the current border with Britain.
Calls for annexation continued throughout the 19th century but there were no more invasions. Canadian leaders remained concerned. PM Mackenzie King believed that every American president, including even Franklin Roosevelt, wanted to own our country. It seems that only since the Second World War and our teamwork in that effort did the concern vanish from our consciousness.
We have survived the Americans’ long-standing ambition for a variety of reasons: their distraction by other goals, problems at home, the notion we would have the good sense to join them voluntarily, and a strong British arm protecting us.
So we’re still here. But apparently so is the threat. This isn’t something new but, like fascism, the revival of an American proclivity. We have been warned.