et me start by ASKiNG You the prototypical question historically asked of Black people in Canada: Where are you from? That is, where are you from biographically and intellectually? Can you tell us something about your personal origins and give us a sense of the intellectual trajec tories, detours, or routes that led you to questions of geography, space, and place? I was born outside of Toronto, Ontario, and grew up in small Ontario towns-on Georgian Bay and near the Grand River and in and around the borders of the Niagara Escarpment. It wasn't until I moved to Toronto that I came to read these places as black. This is to say that while most of the areas and regions I grew up in were predominantly demographically white-I often proclaim that Michael Jackson and Prince brought black to me, musically, while I lived these places-when I began to study black diaspora cultures I realized that these very locations were also inflected with all sorts of mean ingful racialized archives: Negro Creek Road, the Sheffield Museum, the black slaves owned by Mohawk leader Joseph Brant/Thayendanegea. This was coupled with ongoing, but often unacknowledged, racialized labour: the migrant workers, mostly Jamaican men at the time I lived in these re gions, who fueled the local economies. So my biographical story has always been one that is in tension with blacklessness-a blacklessness that is and was always black, of course. My intellectual narratives emerge from these kinds of tensions. I have always been interested in the ways in which narra tives of the past-fictional, archival, historical, poetic, musical-emerge in,
Canada’s role in international affairs is generally cast in a favourable light, especially in contrast with the United States. Yet at the beginning of the twentieth century there was a brief period of imperialist rhetoric among the Canadian business elite, the bankers of Toronto and Montreal in particular, who argued the benefits of an annexationist policy for the British West Indies to complement their deepening financial links to the Caribbean region. Focusing on the Royal Bank of Canada, this essay examines this episode in Canadian foreign policy by recounting the history of Canadian banking expansion in the Caribbean while demonstrating the connections between economic and trade policy and the ideologies of Canadian Anglo-Saxonism that shaped the Canadian financial elite’s vision of its role in maintaining the integrity of the British empire. It argues that, rather than being mere ‘surrogates’ to American empire, as Canadian business historians have argued, Canadian bankers were aggressive, active and independent players in the conquest of foreign markets.
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