Canadian book culture has served, in both domestic and international contexts, to underpin a moralizing rhetoric of enlightened liberal tolerance for difference. Between 1945 and the end of the 1970s the book – as object, as symbol, as idea – was used within the context of the development paradigm to express solidarity with newly decolonized nations, to argue for the importance of Canadian leadership in the new international order, and to secure settler liberal rule at home.

The confluence of books and a national brand was shaped during the postwar decades by a liberal internationalism that privileged the book, and the associated skill of literacy, as a tool of development. Jody Mason analyzes how governmental and non-governmental actors deployed books as instruments of development in various parts of the Third World, how African decolonization movements shaped the nationalisms of Canadian writers who travelled to Africa as part of the burgeoning NGO movement, how late twentieth-century developmentalist ideologies shaped book-centric initiatives aimed at Indigenous communities in Canada, and how Indigenous activists and writers responded to, reframed, and sometimes rejected outright the premises of book development.

This rich interdisciplinary study brings the work of Canadian historians into conversation with book history, literary studies, and settler-colonial studies to encourage a critical assessment of the values that supported developmentalist thinking, and the goals of development itself, at home and abroad.