Transatlantic Figures in The Imperialist: Public Sentiment, Private Appetite

Abstract

This essay revisits Duncan's 1904 novel The Imperialist to discuss the implications of the rarely noted antecedents of Mother Beggarlegs in the African diaspora of slavery. Mother Beggarlegs’ presence points to a history of free trade debates in transatlantic slavery and puts into question a nationalist pedagogy of Canada's moral superiority over the United States on its record of racism against Black people. Embedded in the novel’s election debates on British-Canadian-US economic relations, in its account of Canada’s shift from mercantile to industrial capitalism, and in the temporality of narration of the Murchison family’s rise into middle-class stability, the figurative language tied to the diaspora of slavery in North America provides a new understanding of the novel's much-studied irony and ambivalence.