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Sean Carleton defends Sarah Carter, Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016).
This year’s shortlist for the CHA book prize is impressive and features five excellent titles. While each book is worthy of recognition for different reasons, I have been asked to speak to the strengths of Sarah Carter’s latest book, Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies. The book is “a project of unravelling the profound entanglement of colonial and metropolitan histories, and of discovering how the colonial culture of prairie Canada was constituted through a complex interplay of the local, the region across borders, the national, and the imperial” (19). The book at once grapples with the global and local and displays an incredible breadth of focus without sacrificing detailed precision. Imperial Plots, in short, showcases the skill of Carter’s historical storytelling in spades.