For Peter Russell, what drives the Canadian story—its successes, challenges, failures, and its main protagonists—is the dynamic within and between what he calls the “nations within”: the English majority, on the one hand, and on the other, the Québécois and Indigenous nations pre-existing Britain's imperial presence and which are the subjects of “incomplete conquests.” This crucial fact, Russell contends, explains Canada's founding and the role that each of these “nations within” play as distinct foundational pillars in Canadian politics. Also significant are the early institutional seeds of British government that over time “glued” together a dominant civic culture and embedded the practices of parliamentary government, monarchy and constitutionalism. It's this imperial past that defines the Canadian odyssey—and what has suited the stable development and origins of our country is once more, as in Russell's other works, the incrementalism of Edmund Burke, not the mega constitutional politics of John Locke.

But might we not ask, then, if Canada is indeed shaped by the politics of these nations within, can one write the shared political history of these pillars? If there is no single sovereign people, can there be a single voice determining what this shared past is and what it means? If languages of the past (that is, stories or histoire or oral Indigenous traditions) generate and structure our experience in space and time, Quebeckers and Indigenous peoples might have their own stories to tell, emphasizing different practices and principles. The question then becomes: Can there be a Canadian heterocentric history, one that succeeds in weaving in and out the right strands from within and between these inner nations, and is Russell's three-pillar approach the model for it?

The intellectual horizons required for such a model would be immersive, and Russell's certainly are. The book is ambitious, and his prose is admirably elegant; one immediately thinks of Donald Creighton's The Road to Confederation. The work is exquisitely detailed and judiciously refers to Indigenous scholarship, historical biographies and detailed quotations from treaties and pre-Confederation legislation. One gets a sense of what is contained in these sources, and of what key actors were doing at various historical moments. The book is not a history of Canada, but it is knee-deep in it. The exposition will be quite heavy for anyone just getting initiated into this kind of writing and political history, but it covers all the basics for the student and an abundance of detail for the expert. For instance, one might be surprised to learn of the existence of orders-in-council creating Indian reserves in Atlantic Canada and the private reserves in Prince Edward Island (84–85). But additional details are wanting. The geographical jurisdiction of the Indian Department between its creation in 1755 and Confederation in 1867 is unclear. We know much about its management and it was, it seems, only operational inside the continent (northwest of and inside the Province of Canada). One wonders if this institutional structure played a part in why the Imperial authorities were generally more sensitive to Indigenous peoples’ than were settler colonists in the West but seemed to have sanctioned different policies in the Atlantic (84). The Indian Department, along with the continental presence of Americans, seems to explain why policies differed in these two parts of the northern continent.

But is Russell's approach genuinely what I've called a heterocentric history? Possibly. His book gives us compelling outlines of events and moments (from the Second World War to the mega constitutional politics of the 1980s and 1990s) that explain why an autocentric or a nationalistic history is not possible, and it also captures the practices, the “glue,” that has held these inner nations concretely together. But does it succeed? And if so, what impact does telling this history, as opposed to another kind, have on Canadian politics?

The historiography of “incomplete conquests” captures two distinct features: First, it resituates the past, showing why the concrete practice of government and the developmental paths of sovereignty are necessarily messy and complex in the Canadian case and have been dependent on a policy of incomplete conquests. It reproblematizes sovereignty and does so more concretely. Second, it resituates the classic moments in the “histories within” differently. The consequences of an incomplete conquest, for Russell, are not just successive failed attempts to pursue or complete a subjugation or full assimilation but a problematization of sovereignty in far-reaching ways. It's no longer possible to conceive of the historiography in autocentric or Lockean terms. Here, the French pillar is familiar but reinvigorated. And the Indigenous one is finally given a place at the table.

If telling historical narratives are constitutive of a people and themselves the act of a sovereign, we might forgive Canada for not having a simple history of its political development but instead a more incrementalist one that deals with the country's messy and necessarily fractious multilayeredness.