Maple Leaf Empire

Canada embodies its own unique hybrid of Britishness, emerging from a long-standing respect for British liberal ideals and a shared culture of empire. Author Jonathan Vance reminds us that Canadians fought two World Wars alongside others in defense of the ideals that the British Empire was deemed to represent. Vance looks into the shared military past of both countries. The fabric of Canadian life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries owes a great deal to the presence of the British military. And in the twentieth century, this relationship shows some reversal: during the two World Wars, close to a million Canadians travelled to the United Kingdom. They established modest outposts in Britain, and parts of the country were arguably Canadianized.