From the expansionist fervour of the late nineteenth century through both world wars and the Cold War, a varied and ever-changing group of dreamers campaigned for Canada’s union with the British Caribbean colonies. They hoped to diversify Canada’s climate and agricultural capabilities, spur economic development, boost the nation’s autonomy and stature in the Empire-Commonwealth and the world, temper American power, and secure a tourist paradise. Dominion over Palm and Pine traces the transnational ebb and flow of these union campaigns, situating them in the global history of colonialism and white supremacy, Black activism, and decolonization. Paula Hastings centres the British Caribbean in historical narratives that rarely take account of the region, challenging us to rethink the history of Canadian expansionism and its entangled relationship with nation building, the struggle for sovereignty at home and abroad, and Canada’s evolving role and reputation on the world stage. Widely conceived, the brokers of Canada’s international histories included a multiplicity of actors who shaped the evolving contours and outcomes of the debate: Canadian legislators, civil servants, businessmen, and social justice activists; Caribbean migrants, intellectuals, and anti-colonial nationalists; and British colonial officials, absentee planters, and politicians. Canada’s lack of an overseas empire is often vaunted as a national characteristic that sets Canada apart from the United States and the old European powers. In excavating the dogged resilience of Canadian designs on the Caribbean, Dominion over Palm and Pine unsettles notions of Canadian goodness that rest on this self-righteous observation.

The Music of the Spheres in the Western Imagination describes various systematic musical ecologies of the cosmos by examining attempts over time to define Western theoretical musical systems, whether practical, human, nonhuman, or celestial. This book focuses on the theoretical, theological, philosophical, physical, and mathematical concepts of a cosmic musical order and how these concepts have changed in order to fit different worldviews through the imaginations of theologians, theorists, and authors of fiction, as well as the practical performance of music. Special attention is given to music theory treatises between the ninth and sixteenth centuries, English-language hymnody from the eighteenth century to the present, polemical works on music and worship from the last hundred years, the Divine Comedy of Dante, nineteenth- and twentieth-century English-language fiction, the fictional works of C. S. Lewis, and the legendarium of J. R. R. Tolkien.