In the past decade Canadian history has become a hotly contested subject. Iconic figures, notably Sir John A Macdonald, are no longer unquestioned nation-builders. The narrative of two founding peoples has been set aside in favour of recognition of Indigenous nations whose lands were taken up by the incoming settlers. An authoritative and widely-respected Truth and Reconciliation Commission, together with an honoured Chief Justice of the Supreme Court have both described long-standing government policies and practices as “cultural genocide.”

Historians have researched and published a wide range of new research documenting the many complex threads comprising the Canadian experience. As a leading historian of labour and social movements, Bryan Palmer has been a major contributor to this literature. In this first volume of a major new survey history of Canada, he offers a narrative which is based on the recent and often specialized research and writing of his historian colleagues.

One major theme in this book is the colonial practices of the authorities as they pushed aside the original peoples of this country. While the methods varied, the result was opening up Canada’s rich resources for exploitation by the incoming European settlers. The second major theme is the role of capitalism in determining how those resources were exploited, and who would reap the enormous power and wealth that accrued.

The first volume of this challenging and illuminating new survey history covers the period that concludes in the 1890s after the creation out of Britain’s northern colonies of the semi-autonomous federal Canadian state. Volume II, to be published in spring 2025, takes the narrative to the present.

BRYAN D. PALMER is Professor Emeritus and former Canada Research Chair, Canadian Studies, Trent University, Peterborough, Canada. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, former editor of Labour/Le Travail, and has published extensively on the history of labour and the revolutionary left. Among his many books are Canada’s 1960s and the co-authored, Toronto's Poor: A Rebellious History. He lives in Warkworth, Ontario.

Bryan D. Palmer's profile page

Bryan D. Palmer has done something no else has done, not even Bryan Palmer. He has written a serious, sustained, and accessible account of colonialism and capitalism. It is a history of Canada that is also the story of creative resistance on the part of Indigenous Peoples, workers, Québécois, and others.

Like the juggler who has three bowling balls and a chainsaw in the air while riding a bicycle, Palmer keeps his themes, subjects, and dramatis personae moving, yet always visible for the reader, never dropping them and explaining change over time. Reading these books, like watching a juggler, I was in awe. You will be too.

University of New Brunswick

Great historians are the ones who are able to explain to us what we do, [why we] relate to each other as we do, show us the kinds of compromises we have made, the tensions we have created, the injustices we have left unremedied. This marvellous book by Bryan Palmer does all of these things and more . . . It is a clarion call for change.

Harry Glasbeek, Author Capitalism: A Crime Story (2018) and Law at Work: The Coercion and Co-option of the Working Class (2024)

"Bryan Palmer's magisterial study reveals the wages of settlement in colonial Canada: an original work of scholarship of worker exploitation on lands simultaneously dispossessed from Indigenous peoples. Palmer offers complexity to our understanding of class on settler politics, but also deft, intersecting analysis of how capitalism simultaneously transformed Indigenous territory into property. This book shows how colonization takes work, revealing the tension between labour struggles for a greater share of the value they create, which is also a fight for greater access to the loot of colonial theft. Anti-capitalist struggle, in other words, is not always anti-colonial. A must-read book and a timely intervention."

Associate Professor, Department of Criminology, Toronto Metropolitan University and author of Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State (2017)

Shiri Pasternak

Colonialism and Capitalism: Canada's Origins, 1500-1890 is what we have been waiting for, a history that links the material ideological conditions of state-making to the centrality of Indigenous dispossession. Palmer offers an expansive and exhaustive overview of the inextricable relation of colonialism and capital accumulation. The ways in which race, class, and gender feature in the varied subordinations critical to bringing Canada as a nation state into being, and giving rise to many and varied forms of resistance, are given careful and nuanced consideration. This is a much-needed origin story.

This is a book of huge importance, one of awesome depth and range. As I read Colonialism and Capitalism: Canada's Origins, 1500-1890, I had a sense of learning about the history of Canada for the first time. Canadians, and people in many other parts of the world for which the forces of colonialism and capitalism are troubling and urgent issues, will be deeply interested and, I suspect, deeply affected by this book. It sheds intellectual light in every historical direction.

Hugh Brody, filmmaker and author, Maps and Dreams (1981) and Landscapes of Silence: From Childhood to the Arctic (2022)