ABSTRACT
In mid-nineteenth-century Nova Scotia, dense historical chronicles were mobilized and produced in order to resist Canadian confederation and the assumed attenuation of imperial ties that would ensue. Nova Scotian authors of firsting and lasting histories argued not so much for the consolidation of a nationally unifying structure, but instead for the creation of an Anglo-Saxon sensibility that legitimized the colony’s status as a freestanding imperial polity. They witnessed a noticeable increase in local histories and public lectures that deployed narrative firsting strategies to depict Nova Scotia as independent and modern, yet British. Thus, the colony’s independence, progress, and historicity were emphasized while potentially disruptive Indigenous and Acadian French inhabitants, and their histories, were simultaneously relegated to the premodern and prehistoric realm. Examining the politically motivated work of Thomas Akins will complicate the assumed relationship between the narrative construction of local colonial modernity and the desire for a federally governed nation-state. By illuminating the literary production of a distinctly British liberal modernity in Nova Scotia, the intertwined processes that disconnected both Indigenous and Acadian peoples from the constructed narrative history that framed Nova Scotia’s opposition to confederation will be unraveled.
