Carleton University

Graduate Student, History

Awaiting Defence

Thesis Title: The Nile Voyageurs: Recognizing Canada's Role in the Empire, 1884-1885

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Here is the abstract for my recently submitted dissertation:

In the summer of 1884, General Garnet Wolseley requested several hundred "voyageurs" from Canada to join the Khartoum Relief Expedition for the rescue of General Charles Gordon, who was besieged in Khartoum by the forces of The Mahdi. Almost 400 men were recruited in a matter of weeks from Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. The civilian contingent was regionally diverse; it was mostly but not exclusively working-class; it was approximately one fifth aboriginal and one quarter francophone.  A small group of militia officers accompanied the men, including Col. Frederick Denison from Toronto and Col. William Kennedy from Winnipeg.

The "Nile Voyageurs," as they were popularly known, attracted a great deal of public attention in Canada in1884-1885 and yet, despite the fact that they were Canada's first contribution to an international imperial campaign, they never figured prominently in popular national narratives and have been marginalized in the historiography. There is a great deal of documentary evidence, including administrative documents, newspaper editorials, rapportage, and correspondence which was written by the boatmen, most of which has never been collected and analyzed. The public followed their progress, as they left Canada, crossed the ocean to Egypt and worked on the cataracts of the Upper Nile. The novelty of the event catalyzed public discussion about the empire, about Canadian identity, the status of "Indians" and the social value of a worker vs. a soldier. Many observers thought the expedition was evidence of Canada's rising imperial role, but others articulated an ambivalence towards these men as representatives of the country to empire. This previously unexamined body of Nile Voyageur texts gives voice to a range of individuals from Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec, living in the dawn of the imperial federation movement and on the eve of the Northwest rebellion.

Methodologically, in the wake of post-colonial and post-modern approaches, this study explores the possibility of an alternative approach to discourse analysis constructed on the basis of Axel Honneth's Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict.  Honneth has inspired much debate amongst social philosophers around his theories of recognition and disrespect which build upon many sources including the social psychology of George H. Mead and Jurgen Habermas' work on communicative action and intersubjectivity. To date, however, Honneth has had relatively little influence on the work of cultural historians. In this study, the texts written by aboriginals and settlers, anglophones and francophones and subjects who articulate strong regional identities, all form a rich data set from which we can build a thick chronology which reveals the complex dynamics of mutual recognition. Such an analysis illumines the subjects' competing cultural norms and the multiple, overlapping, contested narratives that they deployed.

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