Nineteenth-century Newfoundland was an archetypal borderland — a space where changes in the authority of imperial, national and Indigenous territorial claims shaped the opportunities and identities of a socially diverse population.

Conflicted Colony: Critical Episodes in Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland and Labrador elucidates processes of state information in Newfoundland through a reassessment of key moments in the country’s history.

Five conflicts

Dr. Kurt Korneski, associate professor of history at Memorial, closely examines five conflicts from the late 19th century — the Fortune Bay Dispute of 1878, the St. George’s Bay Dispute of 1889-92, the 1890s Lobster Controversy, the Battle of Foxtrap and disputes over salmon grounds in Hamilton Inlet, Labrador — to explain how local regimes received, challenged and reworked formal and informal diplomatic and commercial arrangements, as well as policies set out by the colonial and imperial government.

The chapters examine antagonisms and divisions that grew out of clashes between the distinct commercial and social identities of regions in the borderlands and the sensibilities of merchants, politicians and working people on the Avalon Peninsula.

Integrated dominion

Providing new insight into the social history of Newfoundland and Labrador, these disputes illuminate contending perspectives driven by informal systems of governance, political movements and local economic, social, demographic and ecological circumstances.

Conflicted Colony broadens, deepens and clarifies our understanding of how Newfoundlanders became an integrated dominion in the British Empire.

It is published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.