Advanced SearchThis is Prof. John English, the author of a recent best-selling biography of Trudeau. Prof. English will be participating in the forthcoming Canadian history and globalization workshop.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Thank goodness for European overseas imperialism!
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to get minimize the impact of European colonization on indigenous peoples on other continents. However, the age of European overseas expansion did leave us some fantastic archival sources useful to climate history. I’m speaking about the weather records created by ship captains in the Royal Navy and other European navies.
The Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans is an online database of weather data for the world’s oceans between 1750 and 1850. The database was created by several European Universities and was funded by the European Union between 2001 and 2003. You can download the database free of charge.
The Network In Canadian History and Environment describes the database as follows: “The database includes information from ship logs on British, Dutch, French and Spanish vessels. These logs almost invariably show daily records of weather conditions at noon local time each day. Thousands of log books were examined and uploaded to the database, which includes 280 280 individual entries. Most of the points appear in the North Atlantic Ocean, but extensive data for the southern tip of Africa and the Indian Ocean are also available. The most prominent period for data is 1778-1780, with relatively little data between 1808 and 1835. All of the original log books are housed in European archives.”
Ship's Log
“Each entry may include climatological information such as date, longitude and latitude, wind speed, wind direction, precipitation, temperature, air pressure and humidity – though the completeness of records varies widely. Because the instruments used by the sailors often pointed to the magnetic north rather than true north, the precise location of the record is difficult to discern. CLIWOC has provided a formula to correct for this but this is a complicated correction that casual users are unlikely to make.”
More information on the use of archival records in reconstructing climate history is available here.
Polar Bear at Cape Churchill (Wapusk National Park, Manitoba, Canada). Photo by Ansgar Walk
The great climate change conference has opened in Copenhagen. Some are branding this gathering as the most important international meeting since the Congress of Vienna. It remains to be seen what future historians have to say about it. Most historians hesitate to predict the future or how our descendants will view present-day events. In any event, historians have already said a great deal about past climate changes. You might think that climate change is a purely scientific topic about which historians would have relatively little to contribute. The reality is that historians’ work has been important in advancing the scientific community’s understanding of past climate changes and their impact on societies. Moreover, many of the existing climate models depend on data that historians have carefully gathered from archives all over the planet.
Patrick D. Nunn , Climate, environment and society in the Pacific during the last millennium; Brian Fagan; The Little Ice Age : how climate made history 1300-1850 ; The way the wind blows : climate, history, and human action edited by Roderick J. McIntosh, Joseph A. Tainter, Susan Keech McIntosh; Richard H. Grove, Ecology, climate and empire : colonialism and global environmental history, 1400-1940.
Canadian historians have researched a variety of topics related to climate change. The Hudson’s Bay Company archive is a particularly useful resource for climate-change historians because the clerks at HBC posts were required to record the daily temperature. The post records provide information about climatic conditions in the days before national weather services began collecting records. A list of other records related to the climate history of Canada is available here.
Last year, an academic conference on Canadian history and climate change was held at the University of Western Ontario. The presentations were recorded and are available online here. More information about the Early Canadian Environmental Data project is available here.
Athabasca Tar Sands, Early Twentieth Century. Image Source: Library and Archives Canada
Also, check out: Paul Chastko’s history of the Alberta tar sands, Developing Alberta’s Oil Sands : from Karl Clark to Kyoto.
Update: the blog at Activehistory.ca has some more information on historians and climate research.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Check out this excellent animated overview of the history of climate change.
Scotland's Flag
The British business and economic historian Kevin Tennent has published some thoughts about whether an independent Scotland would be a viable economic unit. On Monday, Scotland’s first minister announced that the country would soon be holding a referendum on independence. Monday was, of course, St Andrew’s day, the national day of Scotland– and the day of your humble narrator’s patron saint!
Tennent’s blog post draws on his extensive knowledge of Scottish, British, and global economic history. He begins his analysis with a discussion of the Darien scheme of 1690, the abortive attempt by Scotland to establish a colony in Panama. His blog post also pays attention to more recent developments. Dr Tennent writes:
“The collapse of Iceland’s banking system forced it to seek a £6bn emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund; unfortunately much of this will end up being spent recompensing savers abroad. Had Scotland been independent during the present crisis, then with RBS alone loosing around £24bn in 2008 the country would also have been driven to seek aid from the IMF; the whole of Scotland’s GDP was £86bn in 2006 (although this excludes oil and gas revenue). To cover this loss alone Scotland would have been forced to spend a more than a quarter of its GDP.”
This post should interest Canadians for two reasons. First, there is an obvious parallel between the question of Scottish independence and the separatist movement in Quebec. Would Quebec, which lacks North Sea oil, be a viable state? Second, there is the less obvious but even more important parallels between Scotland’s relationship with England and Canada’s relationship with its wealthy and populous southern neighbour. Most English-speaking Canadians would be in favour of Canada remaining independent of the USA. If they had an opinion on Scottish independence, it would probably be that Scotland should stay in the United Kingdom. Canadians are conservative in the deepest sense of the word and generally prefer to keep things as they are. But we need to ask ourselves why, if independence is a good thing for Canada, would it be a bad thing for Quebec and Scotland? What’s good for the goose may also be good for the gander.
George Monbiot of the Guardian has published an article attacking Canada’s track-record on the issue of climate change.
Monbiot is quite right to attack Canada’s foot-dragging on the issue of climate change. His criticisms of the party currently in power in Ottawa are also justified, although it must be said that the old government’s _revealed preferences_ were basically the same. I find, however, that Monbiot’s article lacks historical context. I don’t know if Canada’s record on the environment is significantly better or worse than that of the other settler countries, such as the USA or Australia. These are all societies based on consuming vast quantities of natural resources. That’s how they’ve been doing things for the past couple of centuries. The people in these countries are basically the same: big farms, big houses, big cars, and, quite literally, big people. Given the attitudes to the environment that people in settler countries have inherited from their land-raping grandparents from the period in which their societies grew mainly through extensive economic growth, there is a limit as to how much even a centre-left government can do. After all, the government needs to get re-elected and people in new world societies are far less willing to make sacrifices for the environment than their European cousins. It’s clear to anyone who walks into a British supermarket that British consumers are more interested in helping the environment than Canadian ones. These preferences need to be taken into account in designing a climate change strategy. I admire the committment to the environment of the former leader of the Liberal Party, but I must say that running a campaign promising a carbon tax was a foolish political tactic. Sometimes I think that Mr Dion forgot that he was now back in Canada, not in Paris.
I admit that Canada’s stand on CO2 has become a little bit worse under Harper than it was under the Liberals. But the Liberals did little on the CO2 file aside from pay lip service to the issue. The Liberals of the Jean Chrétien era were astute to enough to realize they needed the votes of minivan driving couch potatoes. But it is a bit unfair to compare white Canadians’ level of concern for the environment to that of people in a densely settled countries where most of the population is descended from people who have lived in the same region for millenia and have a deep attachment to the soil. In general, New World folk are footloose people with less attachment to particular biomes. Canadians are less interested in solving the CO2 problem and that attitude is a product of our history. It would be foolish to predict that North Americans would behave like Europeans when it comes to political and consumer choices about the environment.
It may be that North Americans will have to be coerced into making the right choice.
In 1880, a group of Inuit were transported to Germany to be exhibited in a zoo alongside wild animals. One of the Inuit, Abraham Ulrikab (c. 1845-1881) kept a diary during his captivity in trip to Europe. This diary was recently translated into English and published by the University of Ottawa Press. Ideas, CBC’s Radio 1’s flagship documentary program, is currently broadcasting a two-part documentary based on the diary. You can download the podcasts and check out images here. It is worth checking out.
Kudos to Ideas director Paul Kennedy for his stewardship of this program. Ideas has been broadcasting some very good documentaries of late.
The image above is of boys playing hockey in Sarnia, 29 December 1908. Source: Library and Archives Canada.
Andrew Cohen, Ottawa-based public intellectual
Historica-Dominion Institute, the Canadian history think-tank, recently published the results of a survey on Canadians and hockey. The poll reveals that a third of Canadians believe that the Montreal Canadiens best represent Canada’s sport. Andrew Cohen, the representative of the institute, was interviewed about the results of the study. Interviewed by CBC Montreal, Cohen said he actually thought support for the Habs would be higher. “A third of Canadians — which is still higher than any other team — is still a substantial number of Canadians,” he said. “It may be because the Canadians haven’t won a Stanley Cup since 1993, and when you’re not winning, as it were, you’re not top of consciousness.” In an interview with Montreal’s La Presse, Cohen attributed the popularity of the Canadiens to “le populaire livre pour enfants «Le chandail de hockey» de Roch Carrier”.
Andrew Ross, Canadian Historian
Andrew Ross of the Department of History, University of Guelph has some thoughts about this poll on his blog. Dr Ross has written about the history of the NHL and is probably the leading academic historian of professional hockey in Canada. Ross is also an economic and business historian and is currently working on a business history of the NHL. His other publications include “Arenas of Debate: The Continuance of Commercial Hockey in the Second World War,” in John Wong, ed., Coast to Coast: Hockey in Canada (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming); “The Paradox of Conn Smythe: Hockey, Memory, and the Second World War,” Sport History Review 37 (May 2006), 19–35; “‘All this Fuss and Feathers’: Plutocrats, Politicians and Changing Canadian Attitudes to Titular Honours,” in Colin M. Coates, ed., Majesty in Canada (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2006), 119–141; and “Hockey Capital: Approaches to the Study of Sports Industry,” Business and Economic History On-Line 3.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
The Past Speaks 