10.1177/0741713603257090 ADULT EDUCATION QUARTERLY / November 2003 Walter / CONSTRUCTION OF BRITISH CANADA LITERACY , IMAGINED NATIONS, AND IMPERIALISM: FRONTIER COLLEGE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF BRITISH CANADA, 1899-1933 1 PIERRE WALTER University of British Columbia Print capitalism, languages-of-power, and the development of widespread literacy have been understood to be key historical forces in the construction of imagined national communities (Anderson). In Canada, the convergence of the newspaper publishing industry, English as a language-of-power, and literacy set the stage in the late 19th century for the emergence of an imagined Canadian nation, embedded both in Anglo-Protestant ideals of identity and British imperialist aspirations. Frontier College, in providing literacy and citizenship education to laboring immigrant men on the resource frontier, was the quintessential embodiment of the grand project of Anglo-Canadian nation building. Based on research in the Frontier College fonds of the Canadian National Archives, this article discusses the nature of the imagined commu- nity constructed in the literacy programs of Frontier College from 1899 to 1933, the means by which this image was promoted, and the particular conceptions of race, class, and gender that shaped it. Keywords: history of adult education; citizenship education; immigrant education; literacy education; nation building; Frontier College Benedict Anderson (1991), in his classic work Imagined Communities, argued that literacy in national print languages was crucial to the historic process of nation building. In Europe, by the 16th century, the emergence of capitalist, secular soci- ety together with advances in the technology of printing made possible a new age of “print-capitalism” and thus the creation of “imagined communities” of shared national identity among citizens. Mass-produced books, newspapers, circulars, and other materials in vernacular (as opposed to sacred) languages were now available to an ever-widening community of readers, tied together in a “unified field of 42 PIERRE WALTER is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbiain Vancouver, Canada. His research focuses on literacy and the historic construction of nation states and comparative studies of the decline of state power, reforms in educational policy, and gendered effects under globalization. ADULT EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Vol. 54 No. 1, November 2003 42-58 DOI: 10.1177/0741713603257090 © 2003 American Association for Adult and Continuing Education