In this paper I will study the presence of the North West Mounted Police (NWMP) in the West between 1875 and 1919 with the purpose to find out what role they played in the frontier development. The question is whether the NWMP were a colonizing agent or were they a positive instrument of nation-building that secured Canadian sovereignty and the rule of law in the rapidly developing state. This paper will argue that the NWMP embraced both roles at different points of their history. They followed the colonization agenda by suppressing of aboriginal cultures and styles of living, inclining the Aboriginal to sign treaties and allocating them to reserves (Brown, 1973). At the same time the NWMP were the agents of the National Policy being engaged…show more content… As any historical event, a particular retrospective view of the NWMP is a point of view of a particular historian influenced by his personal insight into the topic. Moreover there exist two broad schools of historical interpretations: legal historical and “whiggish” (Wright, 2015, L.2) and as it will be shown later in the paper the roles of NWMP in the West can be explained differently depending on the school of thought. In this paper firstly I will provide some background information on the situation that preceded and necessitated the emergence of the NWMP. Secondly I will show the historical interpretations of the NWMP’s performance in the West from the legal history and “whiggish” perspectives. Then I will analyze the NWMP’s roles as of a colonizing agent and as of a force that the Canadian government applied to promulgate the rule of law and general Canadianization in the Western…show more content… The amalgamation of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in 1867 was the first step in the agenda of the politicians. The next step was to spread their sphere of influence northwest thus to support “the needs of commercial and industrial interests centred in Toronto and Montreal with connections in London” (Brown, 1973, p.8). Political ambitions of that period were inextricably intertwined with commercial and industrial gains which required expanded westward markets for raw materials as much as for final products. The idea of transcontinental railway could assure the transportation of production to St. Lawrence River, hence facilitate and accelerate the trade. Moreover the expansion to the West also promised profitable investments in timber production, mine development and land. The political idea was to spread federal government influence from the Pacific to the Atlantic and to entice British Columbia into the union of provinces. Besides financial vested interests there existed a firm intention of the government to seize the control over the rich territories of the indigenous inhabitants and to enclose / confine them to reservations. It was necessary for the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and for the liberation of the land for new settlers that were expected to stream with the opening of the railway (Brown, 1973).
|Carleton University |Department of Law and Legal Studies |
Course Outline
|Course: | |LAWS & HIST 3305 C & V – Crime and State in History |
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|Term:…
