BOOK REVIEW: He Did Not Conquer. Benjamin Franklin’s Failure to Annex Canada
By Madelaine Drohan/ Dundurn Press, Toronto, Ontario, Canada,
Reviewed by: Jean-Thomas Nicole
The Reviewer: Jean-Thomas Nicole is a Policy Advisor with Public Safety Canada. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of Public Safety Canada or the Canadian government.
Review – Madelaine Drohan is an award-winning author, journalist, and policy thinker with over three decades of experience covering business and politics across Canada, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
She was the Canada correspondent for the London-based The Economist from 2006 to 2020 and previously the European correspondent for Toronto-based The Globe and Mail from 1991 to 1999. She is a senior fellow at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa. She lives in Ottawa.
In He Did Not Conquer, the veteran journalist turns her sights to the United States and offers a bold and timely reassessment of one of the most revered figures in American history—Founding Father Benjamin Franklin—through the lens of his long-standing but ultimately failed ambition to annex Canada.
The book is a sharp, well-researched narrative that challenges the myth of Franklin’s unblemished legacy and reframes a pivotal chapter in North American history since, throughout his long and illustrious career, Benjamin Franklin indeed nursed a not-so-secret desire to annex Canada and make it American.
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Accordingly, Drohan convincingly argues that over the course of his long career, Franklin made multiple attempts to make Canada American, sometimes by force and sometimes by guile.
At times he was part of a chorus calling for it to be joined to the thirteen colonies. At other times, such as when he made a play for Canada while conducting preliminary negotiations in Paris to end the American Revolution, he worked alone. Yet each of his efforts was stymied, often because those with the power to support him had other priorities. Illness, incompetence, and bad timing also played a part.
This book is not a biography of Franklin; Drohan takes great care to underlines that point. Rather, it is an account of the times when his thoughts turned to Canada, an analysis of what drove his actions, and the results.
What Franklin thought of the failure of his Canada project remains a mystery. His later correspondence offers only glimpses of his thinking. How did it happen that the most famous American of his time, a man thought to have superpowers and who at one point held the fate of Canada in his hand, was unable to satisfy his desire? This book tells that story.
Drohan writes that much of the research for this book happened during the Covid-19 pandemic, when travel and physical access to libraries were limited. It would have been impossible without the Internet Archive, a digital library, and its immense collection of books and documents.
Thus, Drohan looks at those attempts but also why they had faded into obscurity, until the 47th U.S. President started uttering his expansionist threats towards Canada, home of the one true North, strong and free. It shed, therefore, a rare, curious, and insightful light on a little-known Canadian aspect of the American revolution and war; an aspect also not previously explored in any meaningful way in Franklin's past biographies.
Before turning her attention to Benjamin Franklin’s failed Canadian ambitions, Madelaine Drohan made a significant mark with her groundbreaking book Making a Killing: How and Why Corporations Use Armed Force to Do Business (2003). This investigative work explored the disturbing intersection of corporate interests and militarized violence, particularly in conflict zones across Africa.
The book reads like a geopolitical thriller, but its implications are deeply serious. It challenges readers to confront the ethical and legal gray zones in which powerful corporations operate—zones where accountability is often elusive, and violence is outsourced.
Making a Killing was widely praised for its investigative depth and narrative clarity. It won the Ottawa Book Award and was shortlisted for the National Business Book Award, cementing Drohan’s reputation as a journalist who could bridge the worlds of business, ethics, and international affairs.
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With respect to He Did Not Conquer, Drohan’s central thesis is clear: Franklin’s repeated efforts to bring Canada into the American fold—through diplomacy, propaganda, and even military intervention—were not just footnotes in his career, but a defining and persistent objective. From his 1776 mission to Montreal to his role in the 1782 Paris peace negotiations, Franklin saw Canada as a natural extension of the American project. Yet, as Drohan shows, his failure to achieve this goal had lasting consequences for the continent.
The book is particularly effective in showing how Franklin’s ambitions were not merely theoretical. “These were not solely intellectual efforts,” Drohan writes. “He went to Montreal in 1776 to try to turn around the faltering occupation by American forces.” However, “ill health and other American priorities then forced him to abandon his decades-long campaign to possess Canada.” His failure, she argues, was not just personal but strategic, shaping the future of U.S.-Canada relations for centuries to come.
Drohan’s writing is crisp and accessible, blending archival research with journalistic clarity. Her background as a foreign correspondent for The Globe and Mail and The Economist lends the book to a global perspective, situating Franklin’s ambitions within the broader currents of empire, revolution, and diplomacy. She also brings a distinctly Canadian voice to the narrative, one that resists the gravitational pull of American exceptionalism.
The maps in this book are based on original maps from the period. The old maps often contained errors in geography and scale. Transposing the originals on to more precise modern maps involved some guesswork, writes Drohan, especially in drawing the borders. The borders in this book should be regarded as estimates.
Of important note, a short but useful appendix concludes the book; it contains all the wars and treaties mentioned in it from Queen Anne’s War in North America (1702–1713), which was part of the larger War of the Spanish Succession in Europe (1701–1714), to the American Revolution, also known as the War of Independence (1775–1783), to finally the War of 1812 (1812–1815). This clear political and military timeline increases the reader’s historical grasp and allows them to situate Franklin’s action and influence better within the ever-shifting context of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien captures the spirit of the book in his endorsement: “Canadians said ‘non merci’ (that is curt French for no, thank you, for our unilingual, English-speaking, American readers, friends and dear neighbors…) to Benjamin Franklin in 1776. And we continue saying it — loud and clear — to those who threaten our independence 250 years later!”.
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