tax history | Unwritten Histories

Carmen Nielson defends E. A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917. Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017.

Please allow me to preface my comments by saying that my esteem for Heaman’s book is not a commentary on the quality of the other nominees’ books. I am fully confident that, in their own ways, each one makes a significant contribution and is deserving of recognition and praise.

I do, however, love this book. In my mind, Heaman has written the Articles of Peace definitely ending the History Wars. This is a national history that demonstrates why the nation is still an eminently useful unit of analysis and that one can write a national history that is also transnational, local, and aimed at considerations of social justice and equity. It’s unfortunate that Heaman’s Ph.D. supervisor, Michael Bliss, did not live to see this book published. It achieves what he had hoped for when he wrote “Privatizing the Mind”: readable, politically-engaged scholarship that takes seriously Canadian historians’ task of explaining who “we” are, where “we” have been, and where “we” might be going, without homogenizing or mythologizing who that “we” might be. Heaman nods to Bliss’s jeremiad in her inspired epigraph, lifted from Nickelback: “This is how you remind me of what I really am.”

If, as Heaman points out, social historians’ definition of politics is the “mediation of struggles over power and inequality,” then taxation, and in particular tax resistance on the part of interested groups, is equally relevant for political and social historians (10). The book serves as an important reminder to social historians why political economy matters in questions of the moral economy. It shows that experiences of oppression and injustice are intimately connected to the material and philosophical contexts that inform identity politics. Heaman’s book also exposes how much more ground historians have to cover in thinking about political economy as cultural history. Heaman asks us to consider how taxation and economy have been, on the one hand, reified and, on the other, elided out of historical narratives. She shows how an epistemology of ignorance has removed fiscal reform from Canadian historiography and proves not just the importance of taxation to national narratives but also the importance of local governance to national politics.

In the first part of the book, Heaman flips the script and shows that by focusing on spending, social welfare historians and historians of the state have missed that principles of economic justice were worked out first as problems of revenue. She explains that Canada’s founding document and John A. Macdonald’s brain-child, the British North America Act, deliberately shunted direct responsibility for civic entitlements that “the people” might need or demand onto local governments. Thereby, Macdonald and the Conservatives could use indirect and regressive taxation, particularly tariffs on consumables, to make money flow upwards, from the poor to the rich. This was a savvy political sleight of hand that also made invisible the social implications of tax policy. (This is a trick that, Heaman points out, historians have too often fallen for.) Provincial and municipal governments were left to sort the mess out themselves. Heaman demonstrates that more often than not they chose to use fiscal policy to both harness and spur public prejudices, and to reconfigure those prejudices into categories of citizenship that granted protection from taxation to some and resorted, at its worst, to “casual brutality” in extracting taxes from others. Heaman uses the cases of anti-Chinese sentiment in British Columbia and the repression and cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Northwest to untangle the intricate interweaving of fiscal and racist ideologies.

In the second part, Heaman explores how late nineteenth-century social reform movements’ critique of the distribution of wealth put increasing pressure on the state to devise new and fairer tax regimes. These reformers’ critiques dovetailed with academic trends that first, professionalized and legitimated political economy as a discipline and second, produced knowledge – the “facts” and data – on which a more directly interventionist and bureaucratic state could be justified. Naturally, these changes affected the means rather than the ends of political decision-making around fiscal transfers, and did little to prevent political parties from pitting identity groups against one another to shore up political capital in support of their taxation policies. What did change, Heaman explains, was the state’s capacity to call upon empirical evidence in support of its policies and to convincingly argue that government was fair, informed, and effective. Ultimately, Heaman maps the nation’s construction out of alliances between “mutually suspicious communities that found common cause with one another around the principles and practices of liberal political economy.” Although this common cause of shared self-interest was, ideally, supposed to efface identity politics, economic interests were instead translated into religious, regional, racial, and class factionalism (461).

It is easy to see that the author finds her topic fascinating and her fascination is highly contagious. You can also see that this is not a discreet project but rather the culmination of Heaman’s impressive scholarly career and her voracious and latitudianarian reading. The book skillfully touches upon and moves through the different scales of governance and society, from intra-national, national, provincial, municipal and back again. It sets Canadian events clearly into larger processes of which it was a part, whereby Heaman shares her extensive knowledge of the intellectual, economic, and political histories of Britain and the US. In relaxed, skillful prose, she sails through reformulations of her existing repertoire to connect them seamlessly to this new narrative; the history of the liberal order, the public sphere, consumption and exhibition, history of science and medicine, knowledge production and state formation pack flesh onto the bones of this story.

While Heaman has the confidence to make strong, clear, unconventional arguments, like the best of scholarship, this book also acts as a terrific stimulus to more new questions. She offers such significant shifts of interpretation, and her analysis inflects so many heretofore implacable positions that a whole generation of graduate students will feast on its fruits. I predict that this book will take up a place alongside Ramsay Cook’s Governor General Award-winning book The Regenerators in its capacity to alter historians’ sense of the dramatic ideological transformations in relationships between state and society, wealth and poverty, and the haves and the have-nots during the last decades of the long nineteenth century. It will most assuredly leave you unable to think about Canadian history quite the same again.

Carmen Nielson is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Mount Royal University, Calgary, Alberta, and the author of Private Women and the Public Good: Charity and State Formation in Hamilton, Ontario, 1846-93 (UBC Press, 2014). Her work has been published in Gender & History, Women’s History Review, and Canadian Historical Review. She is currently writing a cultural history of Grip magazine.