The Streets Echoed with Chants: The Urban Experience of Post-War West Berlin by Laura Bowie (review)

Abstract

newcomers. Documents can certainly be mined to find enough evidence to make some of her arguments plausible—for example that the “relative autonomy of the Indigenous producers was a primary factor in the merger” of the Hudson’s Bay Company and North West Company (p. 182). However, even though she recognizes Indigenous agency, Indigenous people are nonetheless reduced to bit players in the service of a grand theory that the history of Red River was “a microcosm of the larger transition to capitalism that occurred in the settler colonial context of Canada” (p. 185). The typical historian’s attention to the thoughts and intentions of the historical actors (Indigenous or non-Indigenous) is rarely evident. Brophy interprets historical events and developments superficially, emphasizing the evidence that can support her interpretation, but neglecting other evidence. The treatment of the so-called Selkirk Treaty of 1817 speaks to this. The treaty is important to the book because the final chapter culminates with Brophy’s roughly five-page analysis of the agreement. Historical documents contain much evidence about the complex circumstances surrounding the negotiations, and the motivations and understandings of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous signatories to the agreement. However, Brophy discusses these complexities only superficially, and appears to have been alert only to the evidence that the treaty was more the product of process than people, concluding that “understood in relation to the changes that came before it and those that occurred in the decades that followed, the Treaty of 1817 is an invaluable cipher for comprehending the scope of transformations wrought by the processes of dispossession” (p. 178). In the end, Brophy’s arguments are more about her modifications to Marxist theory than they are about the Red River Colony. She explains that “this book is a historical, critical, and theoretical study, but above all—as a commentary on exploitation and autonomy—it is a political intervention” (p. 187). Readers should approach the book with that in mind. They are likely to find it convincing as a historical work only if they subscribe to similar political and ideological perspectives.