Fonds F0635 - John F. Bosher fonds

John Francis Bosher (1929-2020), historian and educator, was born in Sidney, British Columbia. He graduated from the University of British Columbia with first class honours in 1950 and a Canadian Government Andison scholarship from the French Department. He received a teacher’s training diploma in 1951 from the provincial Education Department, but took an administrative position with the Canadian Civil Service Commission while continuing his studies in French. In 1952, he travelled to London, England, where he met Professor Alfred Cobban of University College and discussed Bosher’s interest in the French foundations of Canada. Cobbon put Bosher in contact with professors at the Sorbonne, where he wrote his MA thesis on the attitude of the Physiocrats toward Great Britain and received his degree in June 1954. He returned to London to study under Cobban’s supervision, leading to a PhD in March 1957 for the dissertation, The Single Duty Project: A Study of the Movement for a French Customs Union, which was published in 1964. He taught as an assistant lecturer at King’s College, London, from 1956 to 1959, when he joined UBC’s History Department as an assistant professor. He taught at Cornell University in from 1967 to 1969, which was followed by his appointment as a professor in York University’s Department of History where he was appointed Distinguished Research Professor in 1989. Bosher was a prolific scholar whose work included: a series of lectures on CBC Radio that dealt with the French in the Fifth Republic and the controversial remarks of French President Charles de Gaulle; French Finances 1770-1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge, 1970); French Government and Society 1500-1850: Essays in Memory of Alfred Cobban (Athlone, 1973); The Canada Merchants, 1713 -1763 (Oxford, 1987); The French Revolution (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989); Men and Ships in the Canada Trade, 1660-1760: A Biographical Dictionary (Canadian Parks Service, 1992); Business and Religion in the Age of New France, 1600-1760: Twenty-two Studies (Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1994); The Gaullist Attack on Canada 1967-1997 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998); Imperial Vancouver Island: Who was Who, 1850-1950 (Xlibris, 2010); and Vancouver Island in the Empire (Llumina Press, 2012). Bosher was invited to join the Royal Society of Canada in 1976 and he was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford in 1991-1992.