Canada's Bastions of Empire: Halifax, Victoria and the Royal Navy 1749-1918

This book offers a fresh perspective on North American history, and the key role played by Halifax and Victoria in ensuring Canada's emergence as an independent country.

Bryan Elson shows how the British presence in Halifax, and later in Victoria, stood in the way of US designs on Canada. American leaders knew that the British Navy, with its bases on both coasts, had the power to cut them off from the rest of the world with a naval blockade. The American threat to Canada was effectively countered by the British presence in these two cities.

The two bastions played their most important role in the early years of the First World War. As Bryan Elson explains, in 1914 the United States stood aside while the British Empire, including Canada, took on Germany.

Meanwhile, on the west coast the Equimault naval base was buttressed by the extraordinary action of the B.C. provincial government – which at the start of the war bought two new submarines from a shipyard in Seattle for the fledgling Canadian navy.