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.

E.A. Heaman teaches history at McGill University and is the author of Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917.

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"This book shows that the history of taxation is not only important – it can also be provocative, infuriating, and exciting. Tax, Order, and Good Government is an essential read for all historians of Canada." Eric Sager, University of Victoria

"E.A Heaman has produced a decided masterpiece on a topic too often thought to be dry as a bone. This terrific book helps us better understand the contested nature of fiscal citizenship and our inevitable rendezvous with the quintessentially political issues of revenue, wealth, and poverty." BC Studies

"Elsbeth Heaman's outstanding book places taxation where it belongs, at the heart of Canadian history. She explores with great discernment and lucidity issues ranging from the nature of Confederation, and the changing ideologies of parties and their coalitions of interests, to the meanings of race, poverty, wealth and fairness, and the treatment of land, business, and finance. This is no narrow and technical account of taxation, but a brilliant use of fiscal politics to illuminate the major questions in Canadian history. Historians of other countries will gain from her insights, for she is alert to the connections between debates in Canada and in the United States and Britain and many of the same issues arose in Australia and New Zealand. The book is a contribution not only to Canadian history but also to that of the wider world." Martin Daunton, Faculty of History, Cambridge University

"Elsbeth Heaman provides a path-breaking history of Canadian taxation from Confederation up until the introduction of the progressive income tax. All Canadians interested in the history and growth of the nation will want to read this meticulously research

"Tax, Order, and Good Government will not appeal to those who want a quick fix. It is dense and detailed. It is also artfully written and a good deal wittier than a 460-page book on taxation has any right to be." Quebec Writer's Federation Mavis Gallant P

"Heaman's work drives home the centrality of tax debate and even tax revolt in the founding of Canada. Some themes of Canada's early tax history have been covered by other scholars and are by now familiar (for example, the tension between the federal and