Iron Dominion

Railway iron built the country, but it also hardened it.The Iron Dominion is Volume II of Canada's Long Century, an eight-volume narrative history of Canada from the Confederation decade to the end of Jean Chrétien's Canada.After the Pacific Scandal shattered John A. Macdonald's first government, Canada had to decide whether its young national project could survive its first great breach of trust. The country existed on paper, but paper alone could not bind the Atlantic to the Pacific, satisfy British Columbia's railway bargain, answer western grievances, or make the Dominion feel real in ordinary lives.This volume follows Canada from 1873 to 1896, through Alexander Mackenzie's reform government, Macdonald's return, the National Policy, the Canadian Pacific Railway, Chinese railway labour and legalized exclusion, treaty pressure, reserve administration, the Indian Act state, Métis petitions, the North-West Resistance, Louis Riel's trial and execution, industrial growth, reform campaigns, and the Manitoba Schools Crisis.This is not a marble-statue version of Canadian history. It is the story of a country becoming more connected, more ambitious, more industrial, and more powerful, while also becoming more willing to exclude, confine, and punish those who stood outside its preferred future.From Ottawa's party rooms to railway camps, reserve offices, factory floors, prairie settlements, courtrooms, and classrooms, The Iron Dominion shows how state-building entered daily life through prices, wages, school language, railway timetables, land papers, police authority, head taxes, church campaigns, and the fear of not being heard.Canada's railway age was not only a triumph of steel. It was a machinery of power.