Carl Clinton Berger, the University of Toronto historian whose 1970 debut persuaded an entire discipline that it had been reading its own country wrongly, died in Toronto on 1 October at the age of 87.
His argument, delivered with the quiet force of a man correcting a friend’s grammar, was that the imperial loyalties of English Canada between Confederation and the First World War were never really about empire at all. They were about nationhood — a young country groping for a language in which to describe itself, and borrowing the vocabulary of Britannia because it had nothing else at hand.
A Book That Turned a Field Upside Down
The volume that carried this claim was *The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867-1914*, published in 1970. It was received, at first, as a study of imperial sentiment. Readers gradually understood they were holding something else: an early and formidable work of Canadian intellectual history, an account of how ideas are made, how they travel, and what they become on arrival.
Prof. Berger’s method insisted that ideas do not float free. They have to be read inside the political, social, cultural and material circumstances that produced them — a principle that now sounds like common sense and was, at the time, a discipline-wide reorientation.
The consequence of that method was a conclusion few had expected. Strip away the flags and the rhetoric, Prof. Berger argued, and what remained was not imperialist thought with a maple-sugar coating. It was Canadian nationalism.
Historians Douglas Owram and Gerald Friesen, in their 2011 essay collection Thinkers and Dreamers, assembled in his honour, credited the book with reshaping how Canadian history was conceived, written and taught. Where earlier political history had largely confined itself to the pronouncements of politicians, the opinions of newspaper men and the occasional nod to historiography, Prof. Berger reached for a far wider body of Canadian voices. He collected the myths and legends a country tells about itself and traced where they came from. Working through textual analysis and archival research, he tried to establish what earlier writers had actually intended by their words, rather than measuring them against the standards of the present.
That the resulting book was lucid, carefully documented and stylishly written was, his colleagues noted, part of the achievement. Revisionist arguments are easy to make murky.
The Stamp on the Jacket
Prof. Berger was a serious stamp collector, and the jacket of The Sense of Power carried a Canadian two-cent stamp from Christmas 1898: a map of the world with the British Empire picked out in red. At the map’s centre sat a large red Canada, apparently poised to become the senior partner in a reorganised empire.
The image was a sly introduction to the book’s real subject. Those allusions to imperial destiny, Prof. Berger argued, were a form of Canadian self-assertion — the country’s intellectual discourse between 1867 and 1914 talking to itself about its own worth.
He was equally clear-eyed about how ugly that self-regard could be. His essay “The True North Strong and Free,” published in political scientist Peter Russell’s 1966 collection Nationalism in Canada, opens with a stanza of magnificent purple verse by William Henry Taylor — “Hail! Rugged monarch, Northern Winter, hail!” — before turning to the racial thinking that ran through Anglo-Saxon Canadian society.
Writing of Upper Canada College headmaster George Parkin (1846-1922), he recorded that Parkin “asserted, we may attribute to the Anglo-Saxon race a unique aptitude for self-government. The special importance of the Canadian climate, therefore, was not merely that it sustained the hardy character of the stronger races, but that it also constituted, in Darwinian terms, ‘a persistent process of natural selection.'”
The passage is evidence, not endorsement. Prof. Berger was documenting the intellectual architecture of a previous century, and the essay is a useful demonstration of how far the convictions of one era can sit from those of the next.
“If Canadian nationalism is to be understood,” he wrote, “its meaning must be sought and appreciated in myths, legend and symbols.” Comparing French- and English-Canadian intellectual traditions, he observed: “For both the French-Canadian nationalists and the English-Canadian imperialists, history had ordained a special avocation and nationalism was consecrated by the hand of God.”
From The Pas to Toronto
He was born on 25 February 1939 in The Pas, Manitoba, the son of a millworker.
An undergraduate at the University of Manitoba, he took the university’s gold medal, then moved to Toronto on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, completing a master’s degree in 1961. He stayed to begin doctoral work under J.M.S. Careless, among the leading historians of English Canada.
The timing was extraordinary. Prof. Berger arrived as a graduate student and joined the history department just as advanced Canadian historical study — long a neglected corner of the academy — began expanding rapidly, with much of the momentum centred on Toronto. His chosen field, the Victorian period in Canada, and the framework he had built for his early writing, were among the principal reasons students came to the programme. He would spend nearly four decades there, and he brought others along with him.
A particular gift set his work apart. Prof. Berger could take a small, quiet, often elite organisation and use it to illuminate what an entire country was saying and thinking. It is a treacherous manoeuvre; as Prof. Owram and Prof. Friesen noted, a great deal of intellectual history has guttered out like a snuffed candle because the group under examination turned out to reveal nothing larger. His did not. Both The Sense of Power and its 1976 successor, *The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing, 1900-1970*, wrestle successfully with how private associations tried to make sense of Canada.
That second book, the first substantial study of Canadian historiography, was critically acclaimed and won the Governor-General’s Award for non-fiction. Prof. Berger was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Read together, the two volumes trace a country’s tilt from British North American to North American, from one century into the next, and were regarded by academic historians as close to a complete education in the political mechanics and intellectual imagery of how Canada worked.
The Ironic Man
Colleagues described a modest, private man with a wicked sense of humour, whose historical writing rested on a deep vein of irony. His close friend Ramsay Cook, the late York University historian, titled his own essay for Thinkers and Dreamers “Carl Berger: Ironic Man as Historian,” observing that irony dripped from nearly every page.
Prof. Berger offered his own explanation, of sorts. “All written history is in a sense a form of autobiography and an essay of self-knowledge,” he once wrote.
He is survived by his wife, Laurel Sefton MacDowell; his younger sister, Eileen; his daughters, Rachel Berger and Clare Barnett; his stepchildren, Jen MacDowell and Lawrence MacDowell; five grandchildren; and two stepgrandchildren.
Why it Matters
Prof. Berger’s central insight — that a nation’s myths are worth studying precisely because they are myths — has aged into a working method for anyone trying to understand how settler societies explain themselves to themselves. The racial certainties he excavated from Victorian Canada were not incidental decoration on that story; they were its scaffolding, and they underwrote dispossession, assimilation policy and the conviction that one people was fit to govern others. By insisting that such ideas be read seriously, in their own context and on their own terms, he handed later generations of historians, including Indigenous scholars and those writing the history of settler colonialism, a disciplined way to trace how those convictions were formed, circulated and eventually discredited. That his own field was, in his student years, a neglected backwater makes the reach of his influence the more remarkable. Canada has spent recent decades arguing, often painfully, about the gap between the country it believes itself to be and the record of what it has done. Carl Berger taught a discipline how to look at that gap without flinching, and without pretending the people on either side of it were simple.
