The image on the cover suggests many of the most prominent themes in Ontario's history: the landscape, natural resources, commercial activity, the railways that played such a central part in Confederation, the border that represents both separation from and links to the United States. What isnot visible in the image is the human diversity that today may well be the province's most distinctive feature. In 1870, of course, such diversity would have been unimaginable to Ontarians, the majority of whom traced their roots to the British Isles. Nevertheless, as Peter Baskerville points out,Ontario was never the homogeneous entity that many Canadians have imagined. Thousands of years before the creation of the political unit that we know as Ontario, the land itself was sharply divided between north and south. That division was reflected in the complex relations that existed between the Iroquoian peoples of the south and the Algonkian peoples of thenorth--relations that in many ways prefigured the patterns of social and economic interaction that evolved following the arrival of the first European settlers. Ontario: Image, Identity, and Power is generously illustrated with roughly 150 paintings, drawings, and photographs that shed their own light on Ontario's social, economic, and political evolution.

Peter A. Baskerville's profile page

A specialist in pre-Confederation and nineteenth-century Canadian history. He teaches in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. He is the co-author of A Concise History of Business in Canada.