Lecture Series
As part of its commitment to fostering public policy debate, the Donner Canadian Foundation hosts a periodic public lecture series featuring some of the world’s most prominent intellectuals.
Most Recent Lecture
“Global Britain”?
Sir David Cannadine
April 13, 2023 | Toronto
The coronation of King Charles III later this spring, after the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II, has Canadians reflecting on the role of the Crown in this country, and indeed, on the role of Britain itself.
Sir David Cannadine, the distinguished British historian and author will explore and explain Britain’s course changes over the past six decades. He notes that early in the 1960s, Dean Acheson remarked that Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a new role in the world. Joining the Common Market (later the EU) was presented as the solution, but in the aftermath of Brexit, it has been rejected in favour of something called “Global Britain”.
Cannadine is currently the Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University and a visiting professor of history at Oxford University. His scholarly interests range across the economic, social, political, and cultural history of modern Britain and its empire, capitalism, collecting, and philanthropy in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. He is widely known as a commentator on current events, and he often contributes to contemporary discussions on the present-day British monarchy.
A prolific author, his books include The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy; Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire; Mellon: An American Life; The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond our Differences and, recently, biographies of King George V and Margaret Thatcher. He is a member of a large number of learned societies and academies.
Past Speakers
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