This project examines Newfoundland's ambiguous position from 1933 to 1949, a crucial time period in its formation as a region and province. In 1933, following the Great Depression's catastrophic effects and Newfoundland's own impending bankruptcy, representative government in Newfoundland was suspended, as the Dominions Office in London concluded that Newfoundland needed large-scale social, economic, and political reform. In response, a six-man Commission of Government and governor was installed and remained in power until Newfoundland's Confederation with Canada in 1949. This period of Commission rule, although often overlooked, is key to wider debates in Canada over federal-provincial transfers and resource access, as well as broader controversies over Newfoundland's 'culture' and nationalist sentiment. It is also central to Newfoundland's current political, cultural, and economic situation within and beyond Canada. This project will investigate the Commission's role in transforming Newfoundland socially and economically. Through an analysis of Commission archives in Newfoundland and the Dominions Office in London, it will investigate how economic and social restructuring policies in Newfoundland were framed and understood by Commission officials, how such policies were applied and fought over across Newfoundland, and how they were linked to wider theories of development, ethnicity, and empire circulating in this time period. The analysis will focus on places in the archive where contest and protest over the Commission's legitimacy and actions are especially clear, seeking to understand why such challenges to Commission reform efforts were socially and geographically uneven across Newfoundland. In identifying these moments of contest and conflict in the archival record of Newfoundland's Commission government, the project will document and further investigate direct attempts by the Commission and those opposed to them to transform daily material life in Newfoundland.
This research will provide new insight into Newfoundland's 'place' within and beyond Canada. By historically examining questions of economic modernization, cultural identity, sovereignty, and 'development' in Newfoundland, it will advance understandings of how and why the region has been framed as a traditional and backward place. Understanding these historical framings of Newfoundland matters even now, as despite rising standards of living and a greater measure of economic prosperity, Newfoundland continues to be seen as distinct within both a Canadian and North-American context. More broadly, this research will show how particular historical geographies are used to justify and legitimate certain paths of economic success, 'modernity,' and 'development'. The framings of Newfoundland produced during the Commission government and examined in this project endure into the present, with clear political, economic, and policy implications. Thus understanding the period of Commission rule sheds light on contemporary circumstances in this province at the margins of Canada but central to wider colonial and modernizing practices of the early twentieth century. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
My Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant funded research in Newfoundland, Canada. This historical-geographical study of 1930s Newfoundland investigated the material consequences of how the island was seen and imagined by the outside world in the early-twentieth century. In particular, it explored the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Newfoundland in the 1930s by a British-led, six-man Commission of Government, most of whom had experience in administrating other British colonies. Beginning just after the island’s bankruptcy in 1933, the Commission’s reconstruction efforts ended in 1949 with Newfoundland’s transition from a British colony to a Canadian province and its fuller integration into Canada and the North-American economy. The Commission was central to these transformations in Newfoundland; but, as my research shows, confederation with Canada and Newfoundland’s stunted post-war economic development were not the only paths: there were other possibilities. My study addressed three primary questions. First, in what ways did the Commissioners’ work in other British colonies affect their work in and approach to Newfoundland in the 1930s? Second, how did the Commission’s framing of ‘the problem of Newfoundland’ affect which policies and techniques of reform they saw as appropriate for Newfoundland? Third, how did these reform efforts affect Newfoundlanders’ daily lives? To answer these questions, I examined the Commission’s archives in Newfoundland’s capital, St. John’s, and in London, England. I found that the Commissioners sought to transfer and apply knowledge developed through their previous colonial service to the task of modernizing Newfoundland. Difficulties emerged, however, as the Commission’s view of which other colonial holdings Newfoundland resembled – and, subsequently, what should be done with it – failed to match up with the realities they found on the ground in Newfoundland. There was confusion, for example, about where Newfoundland fit in the wider British empire. Was like other colonies such as India, Ceylon, or Jamaica or more comparable to its North-Atlantic counterparts of Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, and Norway? This confusion over how to place Newfoundland vis-à-vis elsewhere in the British empire resulted in much inaction and the failure of many commission policies – failures that were routinely blamed on Newfoundland’s geography or the nature of Newfoundlanders themselves, rather than on the Commission’s approach to Newfoundland. Several findings from my study have broader implications for future work on Newfoundland and other "peripheral" areas around the world. First, paying more attention to Newfoundland’s complex politics and transformations in the 1930s allows us to rethink modernization policies in similarly peripheral places, policies whose roots can be found in the period under study here and whose origins this study helped explicate. Second, my work shed light on how places such as Newfoundland become peripheral in the first place. Understanding Newfoundland’s story as simply a colony’s failed attempt to extract the most it could from its natural resources – the approach most work on Newfoundland takes – not only overlooks the complexity of the Commission’s attempted reconstruction of the island but also forecloses certain possibilities of what could have been done in Newfoundland. As the Commission tried to figure out what to do with Newfoundland in the 1930s, the island’s place in the British Empire shifted economically, constitutionally, and racially. Newfoundland’s changing place in these networks had material effects on Newfoundlanders’ daily lives, even their ability to live from day to day. Other effects of these shifts were more intangible, such as the Commission’s failure to develop a comprehensive plan to solve Newfoundland’s social and economic problems. My findings concerning these trends can contribute to wider understandings of how development and modernization have been framed and acted upon in peripheral places like Newfoundland and how subsequent work on both themes can proceed.
