Tina Adcock

Tina Adcock, A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North. UBC Press, 2025.

Tina Adcock’s A Cold Colonialism is a highly innovative historical study which reassesses northern exploration during the first half of the 20^th century as framing a modern North for audiences outside the region and aiding industrial resource developments but also entrenching colonialism. Focusing on four individuals, George Douglas, Guy Blanchet, Richard Finnie, and Vilhjalmur Stefansson, whom Adcock considers explorers in a very broad sense and studies as members of a “community of northern interest,” she uncovers new stories of knowledge collaboration and old stories of exploration steeped in a culture of colonialism. She examines these explorers through pairing them with each other, which is one of the most commendable analytical achievements of the book. By bringing these four men together in ever changing constellations, Adcock skillfully draws the reader into the many complicated intersections between science, government and corporate interests in the Canadian arctic and subarctic and the construction of the region as modern and industrial. At the same time, Adcock shows how knowledge claims about the region became increasingly contested while they were legitimized through first-hand embodied or relational experiences which excluded Indigenous or female expertise. Adcock engages commendably with a broad range of historical approaches and consulted a diversity of archival material. Her book provides a new lens on northern exploration, one that reminds us of the controlling construction of the region from the outside.