Lord Durham’s Report: Text Abridged by Gerald M. Craig Volume 208

Janet Ajzenstat is professor emeritus, political science, McMaster University. Guy Laforest is professor of political science, Université de Laval.

In his famous 1839 call to reform, John George Lambton, Earl of Durham, recommended that Upper and Lower Canada be accorded responsible government by uniting the two provinces under a single legislative assembly--a union which would also bring about the assimilation of the French-Canadians. The Report has been criticized ever since--from British imperialists who found it dangerously liberal to French Canadians who despised Durham for his presumed racism. This new edition of Gerald Craig's abridgement retains his 1963 introduction and adds essays that debate Durham's political assumptions and goals, re-examine the philosophical and historical context in which the Report was created, and review the Report's reception and influence. Janet Ajzenstat reconsiders the report in the context of nineteenth-century debates about the relation between culture and political institutions, arguing that Durham should be seen as a progressive universalist opposed to the divisions of race and creed who wanted to give more freedom to French-and English-Canadians alike. Guy Laforest re-examines the report in terms of British liberal imperialism and twentieth-century English-Canadian perspectives to argue that Durham was a one-sided sociologist who used liberalism for imperialist purposes.