King George III is remembered very differently in Canada, the United States and Britain. In the regions of British North America that became Canada, George III was a nation builder. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 served as the foundation for an enduring relationship between the Crown and Canada’s First Nations and the Quebec Act of 1774 guaranteed free practice of Roman Catholicism and use of French Civil Law for private disputes.

These acts were were not well received in the Thirteen Colonies that became the United States as the Royal Proclamation designated land west of the Appalachian Mountains as “Indian Territory,” restricting the colonists from the settling there. The American Revolution transformed George III’s image into that of a tyrant, whose government imposed taxation without representation. In Britain, George III was neither nation builder nor oppressor. Instead, he began his reign as “Farmer George,” the first Hanoverian King to be born and raised in England and ended his reign as “Mad King George,” suffering from what was most likely porphyria under the regency of his son, the future George IV.

The reign of King George III, and the monarchy itself, is far from the only issue to be viewed differently in Canada and the United States, two countries with a shared history of British settlement and governance. In Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada,  which will be published in September 2015, Robert Bothwell, the Gluskin Professor of Canadian History at the University of Toronto and author of The Penguin History of Canada and Canada and Quebec: One Country, Two Histories provides an accessible and engaging account of how Canada and the United States have related to one another since European settlement began in North America.

The American Revolution brought thousands of British, European African-American and First Nations loyalists to what is now Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.The promise of free land in British North America brought a second wave of “late loyalists” to Upper Canada who made clear during the War of 1812 that they were content with British rule. Bothwell details how generation after generation of American politicians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries assumed that British North America would become part of the United States and were mystified when Canada continued to assert its independence and loyalty to the Crown and parliamentary system of government.

Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada is primarily a political and diplomatic history of Canada and the United States. There are references to common cultural influences from Charles Dickens novels in the 19th century to American television in the 1950s but it would have been interesting to read more about how literary and artistic ideas circulated around North America and beyond. American author Mark Twain admired the work of Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery and drew parallels between his most famous book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and her Anne Of Green Gables series.  Both authors achieved an international following that transcended their national origins.

Canada and the United States also developed very different attitudes toward the role of the government in national culture and discussion of this aspect of each country’s policy would fit in well amidst the comparison of Canadian and American attitudes toward health care and foreign policy. While the role of the Crown in Canada is discussed throughout the early chapters of the book, the monarchy is last mentioned in the context of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. Analysis of this key difference between Canada and the United States could have been extended to the present day.

At the beginning of his book, Bothwell states “If there were ever a prize for the most futile academic study, Canadian-American relations would be an earnest contender” observing how little known Canadian history and politics is in the United States. Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada demonstrates that the histories of Canada and the United States illuminate each other, revealing the different paths that were taken on the same continent.

Next Week: Katharine of Aragon by Patrick Williams