In 1838 Lord Melbourne's Whig government in Britain sent the radical Lord Durham to Canada as Governor-General to deal with a colony in the aftermath of a rebellion. Durham's vanity and arrogance made him a poor choice for the post, and he resigned a few months later after the government had been forced to overrule him for exceeding his powers. After his return to Britain he wrote his Report on the Affairs of British North America - and its unauthorized publication in the Times caused a sensation. This report - the famous 'Durham Report' - has been seen as the starting point of the British tradition of colonial self-rule leading through the Statute of Westminster of 1931 to the independent self-governing Commonwealth of today.

Lord Durham's Report on the Affairs of British North America is usually discussed only in terms of its historical context - the events that brought Durham to Canada and the consequences of the Report's reform proposals. In a markedly different approach, Janet Ajzenstat treats the Report as a text in modern political thought. She develops Durham's underlying arguments and assumptions, demonstrating the essentially liberal character of his recommendations and revealing a tough-minded argument about political freedom and the place of national minorities in a free society.

While the standard interpretation has portrayed Durham as prejudiced and ignorant about French Canada, Ajzenstat shows that, on the contrary, the assimilation proposal follows from Durham's consideration of ways of opening the widest political and economic opportunities for French Canadians. She argues that far from being "racist," as so many historians have suggested, Durham's proposals reflect the tolerance at the heart of liberalism which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, origin, or creed. To illuminate the Report's argument, Ajzenstat draws on Durham's speeches, letters, and dispatches, as well as material on Canada which he consulted before arriving at his final proposals. One of his sources, she argues, was Tocqueville's Democracy in America. She compares Durham's position on political reform in Britain and in the colonies and concludes that his ideas on reform, empire and revolution, political constitutions, nationality, and political culture form a single forceful theory. Ajzenstat suggests that Durham's argument clarifies what she sees as a present dilemma for Canada: that legislation intended to protect cherished minority traditions necessarily erodes liberal rights that those minorities hold equally dear.

The premier monument is Durham Cathedral, greatest of English Norman churches. Lovers of the Middle Ages will also seek out the county's exceptional Anglo-Saxon churches, while many of its great castles - Brancepeth, Raby, Auckland, Lambton - conceal palatial Georgian and Victorian interiors. The landscape varies dramatically, from the wilds of Teesdale and Weardale, in the west, to the pioneering industrial ports of Sunderland and Hartlepool on the coast, including fine gentry houses and stone-built market towns. South Tyneside and northern Cleveland, historically part of County Durham, are also covered.

In nineteenth-century settler colonies such as Upper Canada, New South Wales and New Zealand, governors not only administered, they stood at the head of colonial society and ordered the festivities and ceremonies around which colonial life centred. Governors were expected to be repositories of political wisdom and constitutional lore. Governors and Settlers explores the public and private beliefs of governors such as Sir Thomas Brisbane, Sir John Colborne, Sir George Grey and Lord Elgin as they struggled to survive in colonial cultures which both deified and vilified their personal qualities.