The regional character of Canada and the crucial role of metropolitan development in its history have been recurring themes in the work of J.M.S. Careless. In these essays he returns to those themes, discussing how national and regional identity in Canada show vital links with metropolitan-hinterland relationship across time and space.

The first essay presents an overall appraisal of the historic connections between metropolitan centres and frontiers or regions in Canada. These connections might be manifested in economic structures, political fabrics, or social networks, and also in modes of opinion and popular images and traditions. The second part of the book inquires into some major conceptual treatments given to frontier and metropolis in history. The third seeks to evaluate the impact of metropolitanism on distinctive features of identity that are revealed in Canadian historical experience. A fourth essays rounds out the volume by discussing the influence of external metropolanism in Canada.

Careless endows his subject with the combined fornce of his own continuing research, his sensitivity to the new historical scholarship, and the lively and penetrating mind that have made him one of Canada's leading historians for more than thirty years.