A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North
by Tina Adcock
Winner of the Canadian Historical Association's 2026 Clio Prize (The North)
Exploration has long been pivotal to southern engagements with northern Canada, but it is most often associated with the nineteenth century or earlier. A Cold Colonialism offers the first extended examination of twentieth-century exploration in the Canadian North. Modern exploration helped southerners establish and maintain distinctive kinds of colonial and settler colonial power over northern Indigenous homelands.
Who explored the North between 1918 and 1965? What forms did exploration take? What did it mean to explorers and others affected by it? Tina Adcock focuses on four representative explorers with richly documented careers: mining engineer George Douglas, surveyor Guy Blanchet, ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and filmmaker Richard Finnie. Each used exploration to grapple with key, often discomfiting aspects of modernity, including industrialization, urbanization, and the specialization of knowledge.
Despite limited experience in and knowledge of the Canadian North, these explorers helped southern militaries, industries, and governments exert control over northern peoples and lands. Each also claimed belonging in and authority over the North, speaking over people who had long resided there and better understood the region. The ways that explorers felt about, thought about, and moved through the North still resonate among southern settlers in Canada today.
Click Here to Purchase: Canada or U.S.
by Tina Adcock
Winner of the Canadian Historical Association's 2026 Clio Prize (The North)
Exploration has long been pivotal to southern engagements with northern Canada, but it is most often associated with the nineteenth century or earlier. A Cold Colonialism offers the first extended examination of twentieth-century exploration in the Canadian North. Modern exploration helped southerners establish and maintain distinctive kinds of colonial and settler colonial power over northern Indigenous homelands.
Who explored the North between 1918 and 1965? What forms did exploration take? What did it mean to explorers and others affected by it? Tina Adcock focuses on four representative explorers with richly documented careers: mining engineer George Douglas, surveyor Guy Blanchet, ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and filmmaker Richard Finnie. Each used exploration to grapple with key, often discomfiting aspects of modernity, including industrialization, urbanization, and the specialization of knowledge.
Despite limited experience in and knowledge of the Canadian North, these explorers helped southern militaries, industries, and governments exert control over northern peoples and lands. Each also claimed belonging in and authority over the North, speaking over people who had long resided there and better understood the region. The ways that explorers felt about, thought about, and moved through the North still resonate among southern settlers in Canada today.
Click Here to Purchase: Canada or U.S.
Reviews
"Adcock rejects the notion that exploration activities were benign acts of intellectual curiosity and physical rigour. Her conclusion challenges readers to think anew about exploration – making visible its ties to settler colonialism and the harms it has done and can do in the future. " -Lianne Leddy, Wilfrid Laurier University
"A Cold Colonialism is essential reading for scholars of the North, tourism history, science and knowledge production, exploration, and settler colonial studies."
-Heather Green, St. Mary's University
"Tina Adcock’s A Cold Colonialism offers a pioneering reinterpretation of twentieth-century Canadian settler colonialism through the framework of “cold” bureaucratic power, deliberately shifting the analytical focus away from spectacular dispossession and violent confrontation to the quiet mechanisms of state control, technical expertise, and administrative routine." -Hongzhe Sun, Peking University
"Adcock’s study invites a rethinking of how exploration continues to shape national narratives and collective memory. By examining the entangled lives and networks of explorers and their circles, she exposes the cultural and political work that underpinned their ventures. A Cold Colonialism stands as a significant intervention in reassessing northern history beyond mythic imaginaries of endurance and discovery." -Cristina-Georgiana Voicu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași
"Adcock rejects the notion that exploration activities were benign acts of intellectual curiosity and physical rigour. Her conclusion challenges readers to think anew about exploration – making visible its ties to settler colonialism and the harms it has done and can do in the future. " -Lianne Leddy, Wilfrid Laurier University
"A Cold Colonialism is essential reading for scholars of the North, tourism history, science and knowledge production, exploration, and settler colonial studies."
-Heather Green, St. Mary's University
"Tina Adcock’s A Cold Colonialism offers a pioneering reinterpretation of twentieth-century Canadian settler colonialism through the framework of “cold” bureaucratic power, deliberately shifting the analytical focus away from spectacular dispossession and violent confrontation to the quiet mechanisms of state control, technical expertise, and administrative routine." -Hongzhe Sun, Peking University
"Adcock’s study invites a rethinking of how exploration continues to shape national narratives and collective memory. By examining the entangled lives and networks of explorers and their circles, she exposes the cultural and political work that underpinned their ventures. A Cold Colonialism stands as a significant intervention in reassessing northern history beyond mythic imaginaries of endurance and discovery." -Cristina-Georgiana Voicu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași
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Author Bio
Tina Adcock is an associate professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. She is a cultural and environmental historian of twentieth-century Canada, especially its North and West. Her first monograph, A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North (UBC Press, 2025) received the 2026 Clio Prize (The North) from the Canadian Historical Association and was shortlisted for that organization’s 2026 Best (English-Language) Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize. Tina is also the editor of two volumes: Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History (UBC Press, 2018, co-edited with Edward Jones-Imhotep) and Landscapes of Science (NiCHE, 2019). Her present research focuses on the scientific and environmental histories of Alberta’s oil sands prior to their commercial development (c. 1913–1951), and on the lives of queer women couples in western Canada. Currently, Tina serves as one of the editors of H-Environment Roundtable Reviews. |
Additional Resources:
- Podcast interview with Sean Kheraj on Nature’s Past podcast
- Book talk: The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities
- Book précis on NiCHE-canada.org
