A lively look at estate management and resistance to land reform in nineteenth-century Prince Edward Island through the life stories of four elite British women landowners.

A lively look at estate management and resistance to land reform in nineteenth-century Prince Edward Island through the life stories of four elite British women landowners.

Women in Atlantic Canada won the right to vote and to run for office only after long, vigorous, and exhausting campaigns for the Great Cause. We Shall Persist explores the distinctive political contexts and common problems faced by advocates for women’s suffrage and wider rights in the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland. Despite virulent opposition in public and at home, most nonindigenous women in the region won enfranchisement in the immediate post–First World War era. This victory curbed the most blatant political misogyny and prepared the way for other rights, such as improved social assistance and access to birth control. Yet progress was uneven and even the movement itself was marked by class and racial inequities. We Shall Persist captures both the long campaign and the years of disappointment. Suffrage victories across Atlantic Canada were steps in an unfinished march toward full gender, race, and class equality.

This collection offers new perspectives on the legacy of British colonisation by concentrating on Atlantic Canada, a region that was pivotal to safeguarding Britain's imperial ambitions, between 1750 and 1930.

This book explores the life and career of Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1826–1902). Dufferin was a landowner in Ulster, an urbane diplomat, literary sensation, courtier, politician, colonial governor, collector, son, husband and father. The book draws on episodes from Dufferin’s career to link the landowning and aristocratic culture he was born into with his experience of governing across the British Empire, in Canada, Egypt, Syria and India. This book argues that there was a defined conception of aristocratic governance and purpose that infused the political and imperial world, and was based on two elements: the inheritance and management of a landed estate, and a well-defined sense of ‘rule by the best’. It identifies a particular kind of atmosphere of empire and aristocracy, one that was riven with tensions and angst, as those who saw themselves as the hereditary leaders of Britain and Ireland were challenged by a rising democracy and, in Ireland, by a powerful new definition of what Irishness was. It offers a new perspective on both empire and aristocracy in the nineteenth century, and will appeal to a broad scholarly audience and the wider public.

Sailor's Hope provides a moving account of a multi-faceted man, tracking his engagement with the extraordinary changes occurring in the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds in the decades after the American and French Revolutions. William Cooper was born in poverty in industrializing Scotland. Without any formal education, he worked his way up through the British merchant marine to the position of captain on voyages linking Britain with Iberia and North America.

On the eve of celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote in Canada comes a book, the first in a series on women’s suffrage and the struggle for democracy, by acclaimed historian Joan Sangster. The achievement of the vote in 1918 is often presented as a triumphant moment in the onward, upward advancement of Canadian women. In this beautifully illustrated book, acclaimed historian Joan Sangster looks beyond the shiny rhetoric of anniversary celebrations and Heritage Minutes to show that the struggle for equality included gains and losses, inclusions and exclusions, depending on a woman’s race, class, and location in the nation. Beginning with Mary Shadd Cary’s demands for equal rights for women and blacks in the 1850s and ending with Indigenous women’s achievement of the vote in the 1960s, Sangster travels back in time to tell a new, more inclusive story for a new generation. The history of the vote, as Joan Sangster tells it, offers vital insights into our political life, exposing not only the fissures of inequality that cut deep into our country’s past but also their weaknesses in the face of resistance, optimism, and protest – an inspiring legacy that still resonates to this day.