A cold colonialism: Modern exploration and the Canadian North By TinaAdcock, Vancouver: UBC Press. 2025. pp. 402. pages. $110 (hardback). ISBN 9780774870122

In A cold colonialism: Modern exploration and the Canadian North, Tina Adcock casts a critical eye on the explorers who mapped, measured, and narrated Arctic Canada from the early 20th century into the postwar years. Adcock situates exploration within networks of personal ambition and industrial expansion, tracing how mining engineers, ethnologists, surveyors, and filmmakers asserted expertise over landscapes and peoples they barely understood. In many ways, A cold colonialism reads as an extension—and updating—of Felix Driver's Geography militant (Driver 2000). Like Driver, Adcock foregrounds the social worlds of exploration: the relations through which expertise was fashioned, the importance of fieldwork, the entanglements of science and sensationalism, and the institutional infrastructures that sustained exploratory practice. Shifting the stage to the Canadian North, she shows how the dynamics that Driver documented in the British exploration of Africa during the age of empire have persisted well into the 20th century, even as the purposes and stakes of exploration changed. Across a set of seven tightly woven chapters, Adcock traces the accrual of exploratory expertise within networks of Southern sojourners. Although the book centres on four key figures—mining engineer George Douglas (1875–1963), ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879–1962), surveyor Guy Blanchet (1884–1966), and filmmaker Richard Finnie (1906–1987)—Adcock uses the story of John Hornby (1880–1927) as a counterpoint that bookends the text. Hornby's notoriety, earned through leading an ill-fated expedition to their deaths, serves as a foil for the quieter, steadier labour of the others, who worked to render the North legible as a space that could not only be survived but also industrialized. The first part of the book develops the thematic core: personal networks, embodied encounters with the North, and the debunking of popular geographical knowledge. Chapter 1 traces how Douglas, Finnie, Stefansson, and Blanchet—men normally resident in the South—forged a community of interest around shared affective and intellectual investments in the Arctic and Subarctic. Chapter 2 examines Blanchet and Douglas's expeditions, showing how their sojourns served as therapeutic escape from urban modernity, even as they gathered information crucial to industrial development that would remake the North. Chapter 3 turns to Stefansson and Finnie's efforts to educate the public, debunking familiar tropes of Arctic desolation and reframing the region as fertile ground for ambitious projects of settler-colonial expansion. The middle chapters explore how wartime transformed the practice and uses of exploration. Chapter 4 follows Stefansson and Finnie into the military-intelligence apparatus, tracing their work for the United States Army Air Forces and Office of the Coordinator of Information (percussor to the CIA). Chapter 5 focuses on Canol, the short-lived pipeline linking Norman Wells to Whitehorse. Though a failure on its own terms, Canol becomes, in Adcock's reading, a revealing site where explorers, Blanchet as route surveyor and Finnie as project filmmaker, helped articulate an emerging vision of the North as an industrial frontier. The final section tracks the postwar struggle to shape the memory and historiography of Northern exploration. Chapter 6 documents Stefansson's attempt to merge his military and popular education work through the Encyclopedia Arctica, a major undertaking funded by the Office of Naval Research. Adcock highlights how the encyclopedia relied upon shared emotional and epistemic investments within the North-hearted and North-minded community. She also centres the unacknowledged labour of women in the Stefansson Library, before it was ultimately undone by McCarthy-era suspicion of Steffansson's interest in and affiliations with Russian Arctic scientists. Chapter 7 turns to Blanchet and Douglas's own retrospective efforts to narrate the history of Northern exploration, culminating in Douglas's reluctant contributions to George Whalley's The legend of John Hornby (Whalley 1962)—a return to the tragic figure who shadows the book's central narrative and foils its view of exploration. While canonical accounts of Arctic exploration tend to focus on 17th- and 18th-century figures, such as Samuel Hearne or John Franklin, Adcock demonstrates how exploratory practice persisted, evolved, and deepened in the 20th century. These later explorers had better odds of survival and produced new genres of knowledge—more detailed, more instrumental, and more tightly bound to resource extraction. Their work also remained distinct from the increasingly abstracted forms of disciplinary knowledge taking shape in universities. Exploration still hinged on proximate, embodied experience; it still braided together fields that academic specialization was pulling apart. As Adcock insists throughout, this knowledge was never neutral: 20th-century exploration helped military, industrial, and state actors in the South extend their reach across Indigenous homelands. It depended on, and reproduced, the systematic devaluation of Indigenous knowledge systems. In the end, A cold colonialism shows that exploration did not simply open the North—it remade it as a space for Southern power, asserting new colonial geographies whose cold, durable lines continue to shape the present.