Few historians are as qualified as C.P. Stacey to address the questions underlying Canada and the Age of Conflict. This volume begins his authoritative and magisterial general history of Canada's relations with the outside world.
The basic theme of the work is that foreign policy, like charity, begins at home. To this end Professor Stacey emphasizes how changing social, economic, and political conditions within Canada have dictated her reactions to external problems.
Volume I begins at Confederation in 1867. It describes how an isolated self-governing colony whose external relations were controlled by the British Foreign Office was broken in upon by the menaces of the modern age of world conflict and under these pressures found itself assuming the status and powers of a nation state. The dramatic years of the First World War and the peace settlement are dealt with in detail, and Volume I ends with the advent of Mackenzie King as Prime Minister in 1921.
The men who made Canadian policy are strongly depicted. There are pen portraits of Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Sir Robert Borden, Arthur Meighen, the influential civil servant Loring Christie, the young Mackenzie King, and many other Canadians, and of the statesmen abroad with whom they had to deal.