Transatlantic Subjects diverges from four decades of scholarly writing on colonial Canada by taking the British imperial context - rather than the North American environment - as a conceptual framework for interpreting patterns of social and cultural life in the colonies prior to the 1850s. Anchored in "the new British history" advanced by J.G.A. Pocock, David Armitage, and Kathleen Wilson, this collective work explores ideas, institutions, and social practices that were adapted and changed through the process of migration from the British archipelago to the new settlement societies. Contributors discuss a broad range of institutional and social practices, including education, religion, radical politics, and family life. Transatlantic Subjects offers a new perspective for the writing of Canada's history. A self-conscious response to the plea for a broader British history that includes the overseas settlement colonies, it makes a significant contribution to the new cultural history of the British Empire.

"The peoples settling Upper Canada and the Maritimes in the third decade of the nineteenth century, I have learned from this volume, . defined their "Britishness" from their mixed origins in that union of multiple identities and from their vigorous and articulate involvement in the religious and political contentions that they had brought with them and continued to import. They did not regard either "identity" or its loss as imposed on them by an alien and imperial Other; colonial they were, but post-colonial they were not. That is why this volume has something to teach the reader about Canadian history, British history, and history as experience." From the foreword by J.G.A. Pocock Book jacket.