Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917

Heaman, Elsbeth

ISBN 10: 0773549625 / ISBN 13: 9780773549623

Editore: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017

Riguardo questo articolo

Former library book; Missing dust jacket; May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.

Codice articolo G0773549625I4N11

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917
• Editore: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2017
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0773549625
• ISBN 13: 9780773549623
• Rilegatura: Hardcover
• Edizione: seconda edizione
• Condizione: Very Good
• Condizione della sovraccoperta: No Jacket
• Peso: 2,25 libbre

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

Was Canada’s Dominion experiment of 1867 an experiment in political domination? Looking to taxes provides the answer: they are a privileged measure of both political agency and political domination. To pay one’s taxes was the sine qua non of entry into political life, but taxes are also the point of politics, which is always about the control of wealth. Modern states have everywhere been born of tax revolts, and Canada was no exception. Heaman shows that the competing claims of the propertied versus the people are hardwired constituents of Canadian political history. Tax debates in early Canada were philosophically charged, politically consequential dialogues about the relationship between wealth and poverty. Extensive archival research, from private papers, commissions, the press, and all levels of government, serves to identify a rising popular challenge to the patrician politics that were entrenched in the Constitutional Act of 1867 under the credo “Peace, Order, and good Government.” Canadians wrote themselves a new constitution in 1867 because they needed a new tax deal, one that reflected the changing balance of regional, racial, and religious political accommodations. In the fifty years that followed, politics became social politics and a liberal state became a modern administrative one. But emerging conceptions of fiscal fairness met with intense resistance from conservative statesmen, culminating in 1917 in a progressive income tax and the bitterest election in Canadian history. Tax, Order, and Good Government tells the story of Confederation without exceptionalism or misplaced sentimentality and, in so doing, reads Canadian history as a lesson in how the state works. Tax, Order, and Good Government follows the money and returns taxation to where it belongs: at the heart of Canada’s political, economic, and social history.

Informazioni sull'autore

E.A. Heaman is associate professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University.