Elsbeth Heaman
professor
History and Classical Studies
McGill University
Canada
Biography
Elsbeth Heaman works broadly on topics of social, political, and medical history. Recent and forthcoming books are A Short History of the State in Canada (UTP 2015) and Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History, 1867-1917 (MQUP 2017). Both books write state formation, political economy, and social history more squarely into classic Canadian political history. TOGG explores tensions around the government of wealth and poverty from Confederation to the wartime income tax of 1917. Successive chapters explore the politics of fairness in successive debates around the meaning of region (in Nova Scotia), race (in British Columbia), poverty (in Montreal), wealth (in Toronto), land ownership (coast to coast), and the federal construction of citizenship more broadly. The book analyzes an episode of liberal, plutocratic rule, from its deep, constitutional causes in 1867 to its bitterly polarizing consequences in 1917. She is beginning new work on consent and civilization.
Research Interest
Canadian history, modern medical history.
