The C.P. Stacey Award Committee and the Laurier Centre for the Study of Canada (LCSC) have awarded historian David A. Wilson of the University of Toronto the 2022 C.P. Stacey Award for scholarly work in Canadian military history.

Canadian Spy Story: Irish Revolutionaries and the Secret Police (McGill-Queen’s University Press) examines the 19th century Irish revolutionary Fenian movement and its efforts to confront British imperialism in Ireland with armed invasion and insurrection in British North America. In the years just before and after Canadian Confederation, the Fenians were seen as a significant security and military threat. In Wilson’s expert hands, the story of clandestine efforts by Canadian secret police and British authorities to infiltrate and assess Fenian networks in the U.S. and British North America make great history and great reading.

 “This exceptionally well-researched book has plumbed the depths of Canadian, American and British archives, as well as dozens of 19th century newspapers and other publications, thoroughly reconstructing how authorities responded to a revolutionary threat that aimed to strike first at Britain’s North American colonies and then a newly independent Canada,” the C.P. Stacey Award Committee noted. “The Fenian invasions of the 1860s and 1870s are widely recognized as a key factor that led to Canadian Confederation in 1867, and now the secretive efforts to gather the intelligence that gave Canadian and British governments the information needed to appreciate the defence threat posed by the Fenians have been definitively addressed.”

Wilson is a professor in the Celtic Studies program at St. Michael’s College and the Department of History at the University of Toronto, as well as general editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. The recipient of many awards and prizes for research and teaching, Wilson is also known for his two-volume biography of Thomas D’Arcy McGee.

Historian C.P. Stacey was brilliant in his ability to contextualize and frame military history in its contemporary political contexts. The award committee collectively found Wilson’s work mirrored this approach, remarking “Canadian Spy Story is a highly readable example of why military history has meaning and relevance for all Canadians. In these pages we can see the origin story of how governments would come to understand Canadian defence requirements in North America and their relationship to the British Empire. The inherent and trilateral Canadian, British, and American dimensions to defence and security are clear. From the political and social persecution faced by Irish Canadian Catholics in the nineteenth century, there are lessons to be learned about civil liberties and how they can be undermined by efforts to ensure state security. Covert surveillance of Fenians in Canada and the United States sometimes led to insightful assessments of military and domestic security threats, and at other times it failed miserably. From Wilson’s extensive research and riveting account, we see how Canadian spies, variously motivated by ideology, religion, and self-interest, often found themselves in incredibly dangerous situations. It is gripping history.”

The award committee was struck by the considerable depth of choice when working to choose the winning book. There are two honorable mentions for the 2022 C.P. Stacey Award:

Terry Copp with Alexander Maavara, produced a richly nuanced view of the First World War as experienced in one of Canada’s most diverse and complex cities in Montreal at War, 1914-1918 (University of Toronto Press). The book is grounded in a deep knowledge and research on the city and on Canada’s military history, combined with a massive dive into English and French newspapers and journals. Their investigation of the words Montrealers used to express their wide-ranging wartime views is weighed alongside government records and military personnel files of the city’s volunteers for overseas service. Their findings deepen, and frequently trouble, the understanding of Montreal’s place in Quebec and Canada during the war and beyond.

Matthew Barrett, in Scandalous Conduct: Canadian Officer Courts Martial, 1915-1945 (UBC Press), provides a detailed study of Canadian officer courts martial and demonstrates how dismissal from the services had an influence on officers’ conduct, while allowing for redemption through service as other ranks.  Including an innovative analysis of class and gentlemanly conduct in his discussion of the treatment of misbehaving officers over a thirty-year period, including the First and Second World Wars, Barrett has brilliantly filled a gap in the historiography.