Since its publication in fall 2016, Sarah Carter’s Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies has received a number of accolades.
First off, Carter’s fourth monograph — after Lost Harvests (1990), Capturing Women (1997), Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada (1999), and
The Importance of Being Monogamous (2008) — got a starred review in Publishers Weekly : “Carter shows how history can be well documented, provocative, and entertaining.”
Next came reviews in The Winnipeg Free Press and Canada’s History by Doug Smith and Penni Mitchell, which were soon followed by emails notifying us that Imperial Plots had been shortlisted for prizes.
As of this writing, Imperial Plots has been shortlisted or won the following awards: the Sir John A. Macdonald and Clio (Prairie) Prizes / Canadian Historical Association, the Wilson Book Prize / Wilson Institute, the Gita Chaudhuri Prize / Western Association of Women Historians, and the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize / Center for Great Plains Studies.
The judging committee for the Gita Chaudhuri Prize made the following comments:
“Sarah Carter’s ambitious study of British women’s empire building on the Canadian plains takes a truly multi-national approach to questions of women’s place on the land, dealing as it does with policies and ideologies in Britain, Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere. It does an impressive job of examining the concept of ‘whiteness,’ and it appropriately fits the spirit of the Chaudhuri award, focusing as it does specifically on ‘WOMEN in rural environments.’”
